Before we continue our exciting trip through the byways and highways of plotting, with scenic stops scheduled for plotting the mystery, sf novel, the fantasy and, oh, yes, the romance as well as additional excursions to “plot that is just good” let’s talk character.
The reason for this exciting side trip is that as you know – or possibly not – character is inextricably linked to plot. The type of plot you have depends to an extent on the type of character you have. Or vice versa. At any rate, you can’t have one without the other, and so you need to know the basics of character before we go into the details of plot.
I could spend hours – or days – writing about character and what a character means to your books. I could talk about people who have great characters but don’t know what to do with them, so that by the middle of the novel you want to take the book and shove it where the sun don’t shine on the character. I could talk of characters that break your heart and are capable, by themselves, of carrying a so-so novel. I could talk of characters that start out interesting and then turn out repulsive. I MIGHT talk about all or most of these, later, if you ask me to.
For now, let’s stick with the basics. I’m probably not giving you any news when I say that if you want to write a novel – or a series <G> ESPECIALLY a series – you need to have an interesting character.
Some time ago a friend asked me if I would write a character of a specific type and I said “Well, I could in a short story. But since I have no personal knowledge or interest in this type of character, I could never write it in a short story. I’m not interested enough.”
THAT is your first cut. If you’re going to spend however long it takes you to write a novel with this person, he/she has to be someone you have minimal interest in. For a short story, where the time to write ranges from an afternoon to a few days, you don’t need to have a character that’s riveting. (Not that it hurts to.) An interesting situation will do.
So, #1 – have a character that interests you.
Now you have a character that interests you. Does this mean he/she will interest other people?
Possibly. It all depends on how you sell him/her.
Part of what attracts others in a character is determined by the others you want to attract. I’m not suggesting in any way shape or form that you let the audience dictate your character. HOWEVER please keep in mind that you have to give the right cues for the audience to pick up on who your hero is, and to be attracted to him/her.
Your military sf will have a distinctly different character from your YA fantasy. Or at LEAST you’ll present them differently.
#2 Present the character in a genre adequate manner. For instance, in an SF you’ll describe the male hero’s physical appearance in FAR less detail than in a romance. It doesn’t matter as much.
However, there are some rules that apply to all books, with the possible exception of literary, and there… well, I can’t help you.
At any rate, let’s say you have an “innocent” type character, a young girl just out in the world, who doesn’t know anything. She’s moving through a raging war zone and someone is always picking up and doing stuff for her. How long do you think this will be interesting? Unless you have one person who picks her up and stays with her for the whole novel (and then the novel is about that person, really) how long do you think before your readers start rolling their eyes?
At the opposite extreme, let’s suppose your character is a magical being with unlimited power. He can transform matter. He can stop hearts with a look. He can make rivers flow or stop. More importantly, he can command time, so he can go back and win any battles he’d lost before. If you’re thinking “oh, what’s the point?” you are correct. I could see doing a short story where this person comes to grips with the fact that this power makes him both more and less than human. But a novel? It would be Godzilla versus Bambi. Over and over and over again.
So… You want to be somewhere in the middle, right? Just like you want to both reward and punish your character? Well… yes. Though for a good character – I never understood the appeal of reading about an anti-hero as the main character, so I refuse to explain how to write one. Not because it’s not a valid choice, but because I plain don’t GET it – you usually have a character that’s great but has ONE fatal flaw. This, if you go back in time, is the way of the great heros of myth. Like… Achilles, of course, though there are others. In fact, that is the tried and true way to build a fascinating character. You take an almost perfect being and you use your plot to push at his one imperfection.
Consider superman. Knowing how capable he is, doesn’t it bring you to attention and full emotional involvement to see him under the effects of kryptonite? Would it have the same effect if he were joe schmo with no special powers? Of course not. There’s something tragic and grand in the perfect being brought low. We immediately want to see if he’ll get out of it, and we empathize with his plight. (Not sure why, but I’d guess in our minds we’re all great {G})
So if you have the innocent girl above, have her either have extraordinary cunning so she understands what she needs to do and is ready to face challenges, or have her already have all these abilities for some reason. (“Oh, my dad taught me sword fighting,” she said.) Then use her innocence as her fatal flaw which, despite her other qualities, imperils her.
OTOH it works equally well to have a character who is almost completely despicable, but has ONE redeeming feature. This last will give you not only a spectacular villain, but a great main character, if redemption is your goal. You push on that “flaw” in perfect badness, and that’s where your testing begins.
So – #3 Make your character better or worse than the common run of mortals. Then give him/her a flaw.
Now, you’ve made your character just so, and wrote your first three chapters. You show them to your wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend/corner store operator/stranger you kidnaped off the street to force to read your stuff. And they all tell you “I hate so and so. So and so sucks.” And you think “Ah, curse Sarah. She failed me.”
This is entirely possible, but the other part of it is that you might have presented the character wrong. Let me explain. Suppose you have the superman with ONE fatal flaw. Okay. So you start with the hero in the grip of the one force that will kill him.
Zorg was in the grip of the xron ray. He was weak, weak, weak. His arms were weak. His legs were weak. All he wanted to do was sit there and cry.
Riveting? Well, no. we have no idea who Zorg is, or why in heck we should care. You can – sort of. It occurs to me I JUST did this in novel I’m finishing. {G} – get away with it if this is a short section in the beginning, to indicate that your seeming superman is vulnerable. After half a page, he breaks free, lays waste to his enemies and… shazam! You have an interesting hero. OTOH I’d not have him meditate on how weak he is, but rather trying to break away. The grip of the force is shown against his efforts to escape.
So 4# Present character in a way we care about.
In this there are other caveats – in general, don’t show your character bored, despondent or defeated to start with. You can show all of that, but not right up front. We don’t know this person, and we don’t want to put up with his angst right up front. It doesn’t mean you can’t start with him/her in a problem. It’s QUITE all right to show him/her furious, vengeful, upset, as long as it’s an active sort of emotion. “I’m going to get that girl back if it’s the last thing I do,” as opposed to “Oh, she left me. I’ll sit here and cry my eyes out. Poor me.”
Also, your characters – even if you base them on your best friend, your wife, or your dog – cannot be “realistic.” Why not? Well, real characters are, in general, quite boring. If you don’t believe me, go and read your favorite book. Chances are the character there, with his/her hangups, interests or powers should he/she exist in real life, would either be locked up, in a madhouse, or dead. INTERESTING characters are exaggerated. The good are better than us. The bad are worse than us. The neurotic could not cross the street unattended in real life. And as for the hero of a romance… Well, if he existed in real life, we’d all flock to him. ALL of us. Even straight males.
(It is very important to remember you’re not writing real life. You’re writing fiction. Fiction needs to be interesting, have internal logic and be believable. Real life? Not so much.)
With that in mind, pay attention to how you describe the character too. For instance, let’s suppose that your character is ugly. For some reason, we are programmed to equate ugly with evil. We know this isn’t true – not in real life – but nine out of ten readers will perceive it that way. So if your character is ugly, make sure you describe ONE good feature right up front. “His face was ugly, craggy and scar-covered, but his eyes had a soft light that showed his caring disposition.”
#5 – Make sure your character is larger than life, and then present him/her in a way people will find appealing. Remember people in general like pretty, smart, strong people. It’s just a thing.
Am I done with the character? Oh, no, heck no. Unfortunately, though I could go in much more detail, it will only serve to confuse you right now. So let me go on with plotting, and then we’ll return to character later on. Meanwhile, go and study what others have done. Go read a few books and analyze your favorite characters. See if you can figure out how to steal the one feature that makes them appealing.
A caveat on this. I have ruined MORE novels – before I was ever published – trying to steal one particular character trick. This trick is to make the character seem despicable up front and then redeem him/her slowly so that by the time your reader likes the character he feels guilty for having misjudged him/her. Think Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. This tends to create an unforgettable character. So, why did I ruin novels? Because it took me forever to figure out I needed to foreshadow his eventual transformation early enough and also that he couldn’t be the sole pov character or the main one till the transformation is accomplished.
When studying riveting characters and figuring out how to steal them, remember the details. :) Make sure you don’t mess up the formula.
According To Hoyt 
On Superman: I’ve never found him all that interesting. Why? Mainly because the only thing that can touch him is Kryptonite. This means that either every bad guy, every potentially hostile thug on every street in the city, has to have Kryptonite weapons – because if they don’t, they don’t pose a threat. Fighting bad guys unequipped with Kryptonite is, for Superman, about as interesting as fighting paper-mache dolls is for a human. And less dangerous. (Not to mention the fact that in Superman’s case, everyone in his universe *knows* his only vulnerability is Kryptonite. So criminals dumb enough to attack him without it are stupid beyond the bounds of plausibility.)
I’ve always found Batman to be more interesting. Batman is a relatively normal human with intense motivation and effectively unlimited resources. Empathy for him is therefore much higher: “*I* could be like Batman, if I really wanted to be. And if I inherited a billion dollars.”
That and the fact that Batman is human in terms of vulnerability. Disposable Thug #2029901 could in theory kill him with a lucky shot from his Saturday Night Special. Fights actually have some tension, because… OK, so we know he probably won’t die, but he might get captured.
You know both Superman and Batman are going to win; it’s the nature of that kind of story. The difference being that Batman has to break a sweat doing it, making for a considerably more interesting story.
I don’t like superheroes. Empathy is important. It’s hard to have empathy for invulnerable Mary Sues.
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Which is why most superheroes are constrained to comic books and graphic novels. Still, the better Superman stories don’t necessarily deal with villains who have kryptonite but who have set up a situation where Superman has some sort of moral dilemma to deal with…does he do what the villain want or put some innocent in danger by sticking to his morals.
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Hmm, very good point with regard to the moral dilemma issue. Come to think of it, I suppose a character like Superman would also work decently in a murder mystery, where his strength/invulnerability are irrelevant since he has no idea who to use them on in the first place.
Actually, I really really like that idea of taking a character known for being physically invulnerable and giving them a situation that completely sidesteps that fact.
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Er… what?
Did you actually read the whole post? Yes, Batman is more vulnerable than Superman. Is Superman’s one vulnerability the point here? No – it’s just a convenient, presumably well known example of one way to save a character from being completely boring.
At this point, in relation to the writing techniques the post is discussing, Sarah’s at a pretty high level – cartoonish, if you like. Nit-picking because you don’t like her choice of example is bad manners, especially in her sandbox.
Regards,
Kate
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Re: Er… what?
Actually, superman has one overwhelming weakness, which makes him (or at least the story) interesting. It’s a common theme in mil sf — so… it’s not kryptonite.
It is the hostages. Lois Lane etc ARE frail and mortal. It is their fragility that limits the hero, and makes it something other than Godzilla vs bambi. He is one, and the ‘hostages’are many and widespread. It’s a tough trick to pull, but can work
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Re: Er… what?
Agree, Superman can be hurt through his friends.
However, he has other ‘weaknesses’. In theory, Superman could kill most any ‘bad guy’ he faces, but he has chosen to use legal/moral means to stop them.
That was what was fun about the Lex Luthor as corporate head who hated Superman. We knew that Lex was out to kill Superman, Superman knew that Lex was out to kill him but Superman could not legally prove it. Lex was publicly one of the Good Guys.
That’s the key IMO Superman faces many problems that can’t be solved simply by his powers.
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Kryptonite is not Superman’s only weakness. I remember reading that he has four weaknesses, kryptonite, magic, psychic powers, and something I forget about, but I think it was the fact that he runs off of the light of a yellow sun, and a red sun’s light will interfere.
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Thank you for this. I’ve known about the importance of handicapping one’s overpowered species for some time, but I hadn’t put the rest together. Oddly enough, I’d been working on an innocent young girl in a warzone viewpoint character when I first read this. This has helped me to improve things, but some basic flaws remain, among them the fact that I want a happy and optimistic story, and the setting is necessarily unpleasant. I can perceive the world as unpleasant, and still remain happy, so this is not insurmountable.
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