Down and dirty character tricks
I don’t talk about craft much, but I’ve written over 40 novels, plus produced over 1,000 pages of comics, so I do understand a lot about story.
Hi,
I don’t talk about craft much, but I’ve written over 40 novels, plus produced over 1,000 pages of comics, and regularly work with publishing companies on either their books or mine, so I do understand a lot about story.
I have a few down and dirty methods I use to design characters in my own books, and these are also the ones I usually end up telling newer authors. Paid members also have access to my Write A Great Novel course, which has a lot more of my best tricks.
Before we get started, I wanted to mention that I mostly write fantasy, so these tips and tricks are specifically geared toward my experience writing action and adventure stories. However, I’ve used similar methods to write romance and other genres, too.
This was also designed for somebody writing western style stories and specifically from my experience as a screenwriter early in my career.
Home, work, and play
There is one thing I learned as a screenwriter that I don’t ever see mentioned in writing prose.
If you want to get empathy for your main character, or yourself if you’re writing memoir, then you need to show them in three places.
Home, work, and play.
Three scenes as early in your piece as possible where they interact with people in those three ways and you’ll magically have empathy for any character.
If you want to go deeper, then these scenes should additionally show how the protagonist and antagonist are mirror images of each other. We do this by showing the protagonist “save the cat” and the antagonist “kick the puppy”.
Very early in your piece, readers need to see your protagonist risk themselves to save somebody less fortunate than themselves, thus “saving the cat” if we want the audience to bond with them quickly.
Conversely, we need to watch the antagonist, given the same choice, “kick the puppy”, or add unnecessary cruelty in a similar situation if we want them to root against them.
You might not have the ability to show the antagonist in these three scenes, and that’s okay, but you should certainly consider giving your protagonist a “save the cat” moment in your opening pages.
Characters cannot stay neutral in these situations because conflict unveils characters. If you can show a character at work, at play, and at home, then layer on having them “save the cat” you’re readers will fall in love with your protagonist.
Heroic inclination
The best way I have found to design a hero is to start with their biggest flaw. Since character is defined by conflict, forcing a character to confront their biggest flaw and grow from it is an “easy” path to creating a story. Once I have a character in my head, only then do I say “What is the thing this character would hate most” and then make them do it.
You can do this the other way, too, by picking a story and then designing the character who would hate it the most to run through it. Once of my favorite narrative devices is called “pushing the character off the path”.
Imagine walking down a path beset on all sides with obstacles with your main character. Your job is to push them off the path with increasingly more powerfully shoves until by the end you are throwing them with all your strength into the unknown.
Then, you watch them slowly work their way back onto the path, more beaten and bruised with every challenge, but also changed through the process.
There is an old parable about a dragon and a door I think about often.
Walking through the door is easy. It is as simple as turning the knob and putting one foot in front of the other.
However, that door sits at the tip of a mountain, guarded by unknowable terrors, booby traps, and magic.
It will take all your cunning to navigate the path. You will need armor and weapons. Even then, the odds you will survive are minuscule.
You will face obstacles that work to break you, and ones that would surely destroy the person you are today…
…but if you defeat the dragon at the top of the mountain, they will drop a key, and then walking through the door is easy.
I think about this every time I have success doing something, because every single time, it felt impossible. I had to remold myself into a different human than I was and fight like the dickens in order to gain an inch.
I faced things I thought would break me, and frankly, they did break me. They wretched me apart more times than I can count, and I had to reforge myself with every rending of my soul into something new.
Some of those things I abandoned. They weren’t worth the fight. I accepted, for instance, that I will likely never direct any more movies. That mountain was not worth the sacrifice to me, but it might be for you.
Others, like writing books and making comics, I worked and worked and worked at for years. I fought every battle, and it molded me into something different than I was before; a better version of myself; one that could easily summit that mountain.
Eventually, I did reach the summit and walked through the door a success. Every time I thought to myself “wow, that was easy. What was I so worried about all this time?”
But it wasn’t easy. It’s just that I had defeated every obstacle to get there.
Of course, when I walked through that door, all I found was another mountain to climb, but that’s a parable for another day.
Villainous intent
How do you make a compelling villain?
Ideally, a villain mirrors the hero, save for one thing that “saves” the hero.
We’ve talked about “saving the cat” and “killing the puppy”, this is something I call “the sliding door moment”.
You see, there once was a movie called Sliding Doors, which showed how Gwyneth Paltrow’s life would change if they simply caught, or missed, a train. I suppose we could also call this “the butterfly effect moment”, but Sliding Doors is the far superior movie.
The sliding door moment is when everything went right for the hero and everything went wrong for the villain. Maybe the hero came from a loving family and the villain was abused in foster care, or the hero found a loving group of friends and the villain fell in with a group of thugs.
The reason the villain resents the hero so much, aside from them standing in their way, is because the villain sees who they could have been if the chips fell differently for them.
The villain generally imprints themselves on the hero, and develops an unhealthy fixation on them, because they see themselves in the hero. They want to prove the hero can fall from grace mostly because they want to know they weren’t born bad.
If you’re a fan of Enneagrams, then the hero and villain should be the same Enneagram, but presented on different ends of the healthy/unhealthy spectrum.
The Enneagram is a system of personality which describes people in terms of nine types, each with their own motivations, fears and internal dynamics.
The Enneagram is an emotionally focused system of understanding people — honing in on one’s core emotional motivations and fears. Each of the nine personality types has its own driving force, which is centered around a particular emotion.
Some Enneagram types experience strong emotions, while other types aim to avoid emotions in one form or another. However, whether running from emotions or diving into them, each type describes some aspect of emotional experience. -The Enneagram Institute
The compelling thing is that in stress the hero presents very similar to the villain, and can even see how acting like the villain could be gratifying. Their moral conundrum is strengthened because they are so similar, like two sides of the same coin.
Once you have the hero, you take everything the hero hates about themselves and that becomes the perfect foil for them. One reason parents and siblings are perfect villains for heroes is because that dynamic already readily exists in families, wherein members mirror each other for better or worse.
The “adventuring party”
Once you have the hero and the villain, it’s time to turn your attention to the rest of the “adventuring party”. While there are many ways to make a good core cast of characters, my down and dirtiest trick is to use your ancillary character to fill in weaknesses in your main character.
Is your main character hot headed? Then somebody in your party should be cool and rational?
Are they skittish about making decisions? Then you need somebody who can run in headlong.
Your adventuring party should be made up of different but complementary Enneagrams, to continue that analogy. I usually recommend at least 2, but no more than 5, additional characters to fill out the main cast. At the beginning it’s best to start small because it will beef out throughout your story.
If you have multiple main characters, then you will need to basically do this for all the main characters in the story, though if they are always together then you can still make one slightly largest party.
There should be a big enough cast that every characters can be paired with at least one other character once the party splits. One of the best tricks I learned from writing movies and TV is that a story is all about bringing characters together and splitting them up in new and interesting ways. I try to never split up characters in the same way twice until they have been split up with at least 1-2 other characters and the dynamic between the original characters has changed.
NPCs
Once you have your adventuring party, now you need your “NPCs”, or quest givers. Every character in your story should have a rich inner life, but they should also serve a purpose to drive the narrative forward. Maybe they are just there to serve beer or give atmosphere, but for those that will have “speaking lines”, you should think about whether they will be quest givers, drive the purpose of a mission, or how your characters will move their story forward through meeting them.
I like to think of video games when I’m designing these characters, and ask which ones will be “shimmering” or highlighted as important enough to speak with, and who will becoming a driving force of the story.
Boss battles
Before the main battle at the end of the book, your character will have to defeat mini-bosses to “level up”. I like to think about Legend of Zelda when I design my boss battles. In each dungeon, Link finds an item that will help them defeat a boss, either that boss or another one.
Link can’t defeat that boss until they find the item. Dark Souls is another good example, wherein you can journey into the darkness and gloom when you’re not prepared, but you will die.
Boss battles are a way to show that the main character(s) have found the “item” or learned a skill that can move them past this obstacle in the story. They are the physical manifestation of conflict. So, each boss battle you put in their story should demonstrate the conflict the character faces (including internal conflict) and that they are ready for the next challenge.
One reason you bring back old bosses as allies is to show the growth of the character, especially if they have leveled up a lot since they met that boss before and are now on an equal footing (or have even leveled up far above that character).
So what did you think?
Does any of this help you figure out your own characters better?
Are you using any of these tricks already?
Let us know in the comments.
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