Character Developement
In writing, one of the hardest things is creating characters are three dimensional.
What makes a character three dimensional? What makes him real? What makes him jump from the page?
A variety of things mostly. Some writers I know deeply analyze a character before they begin to write — they make lists, profiles, etc.
I’ve never really found this technique to be helpful to me.
I write character sketches. These are very short stories about the characters past life. They’ll illustrate, usually, what makes him tick. Why he fears this or that, and it alway provides a motive for what he’s doing in the Story. Sometimes, the motive that I set out to write is a very different from what I had originally imagined.
From my observation of other writers, there appears to be two schools of thought:
1. The writer creates everything — creates the story, creates the world, outlines it all, etc etc etc.
2. The writer who discovers everything.
The difference between the two is this — the first plots it in his head, the second happens upon a plot that will make an interesting story, and attempts to follow it wherever it may lead. The second are a bit crazy sometimes in that they think the story actually exists, and the writer’s task is to discover it — in the way a miner mines for precious ore. You can do it well, or you can do it poorly.
But even within these two schools of thought it is important that the characters become alive.
They must have motives.
They mustn’t be needlessly good or needlessly bad.
Even secondary characters need to be real. It is helpful, for me, to write character sketches even for these. Once you know a character, no matter how minor or major, it is infinitely easier to make them real on the page. You don’t even have to think about doing it — it almost writes itself.
One of the flaws that I’ve noticed in bad writing/story-telling is that the Primary Hero and the Primary Villain are good and bad respectively because they have to be. It’s the secondary characters that are more interesting because most bad writers usually realize they need a reason for them to stick around for the hero or the villain — usually these are also weak just not as weak.
But the fact is people aren’t just good or bad. Most people consider themselves good people — even those who do bad things. Somebody once said to me that “Every Villain is the hero of his own story.” And that is so true, so very true.
A sympathetic villain is more of a villain than a big bad evil one. One is puppet, the other is flesh and blood.
The same goes for heroes.
Also, creating tragedy for your characters so that the reader will sympathize with them doesn’t work. Most people have tragedy in their lives. But they go on and they deal with it. That’s what heroes do — that’s what other people need to do. People who focus on their grief to the exclusion of everything else are laughable. They’re not real, they’re not deep. They’re a painted clown’s mask with a painted tear dripping from their eyes.
Trying to make a hero sympathetic to the reader by such a ploy as that is stacking the cards, trying to force the reader to play along. Readers don’t want to play along. Does a character want sympathy? Well, he has to earn it — just like he has to earn respect.
Also, if you want a character to be liked or disliked, don’t try to force the reader to feel it. Don’t describe over and over again how good or generous a character was or how evil and selfish this villain was.
Show it to us.
And then let the reader come to his own conclusion.
A story-teller’s goal is to tell a story that will stand on its own. It’s not the writer’s place to force the reader to react. How a reader reacts depends on how well the writer told his story.
