Writing decent, original characters

[defanatic]

I'm not entirely sure where this should go. Writing is an art, I guess, but I'm not really sure.

Anyway, I would like some tips or possibly links to articles about writing decent characters. I wouldn't call myself competent when it comes to writing, or understanding people, so anything, no matter how simple or apparently obvious, is appreciated.

The universe is science-fiction, if that is at all relevant, of my own making.

[salm]

I´ve never developed a fiction character but i´d do it like i´d design everything else. Form follows function. Just think of what kind of character you require for you story and then go on from there.

I´d probably assign a couple of adjectives to the character i want, for example, passionate, strong, stupid, aggressive and so on and then write short biography about this characters life and appearance. This biography would contain facts about the character that might not even appear in the story later on and would function as a guide for writing the story later on.

Also, while writing the story the biography would probably have to be revised.

[Simplicius]

This is a better topic for Fanfics, I think - it's the closest we've got to a catch-all writing forum. However, you should be sure to use a search engine besides asking the board's resident writers for help.

[Lagmonster]

In my mind a good sci-fi character may have to interact with absurd technology. The hardest part of that is writing a guy who responds to all situations mindful of the technology at his disposal. If you've at one point described how a recoil-less laser pistol can drill a hole through a meter-thick block of steel, don't turn your guys into retards by writing a gunfight wherein everybody is taking cover behind fences. Don't hand them incredible technology and then fail to consider how to apply it in unique ways, because someone in your audience will say, "why don't they use X technology to do Y, like they did Z?" and your guys will look like they sleep in amnesia-pods between chapters.

When I write stories, there are two types of character: The ones whose job it is to convey or prompt emotions, and the ones whose job it is to convey information and descriptions of things neither the main characters nor the audience are witnesses of. The first is someone who is engaged in the experience and trying to bring the audience into what is happening without sounding like a narrator. I always hate it when a writer has two characters who are supposed to be knowledgeable in their field talk to each other about what they 'have to do' or say things which should be obvious to both if we're to take them for competent professionals or even human beings with functioning eyeballs. For example; say you have two supposedly veteran guys in a tense situation defusing a bomb. If one of them says, "Come on, we only have a few seconds to defuse that bomb!" my brain immediately says, "He *knows* that. It's why you guys are *there*. You're *staring* at it". Those characters' job should be to convey fear, confusion, anxiety, or bravery, or whatever it is you're going for, not recap the situation for the audience by treating each other character they meet like they have the attention span of a goldfish.

[Lagmonster]

As an aside, I will suggest that there are ways to tell a story without developed characters; you can simply describe the events as though observed from an incorporeal and omniscient third party, describing events which happen on a much larger scale than simply between two people. In the case of huge galactic wars, sure, people love it when The Fate Of Everything boils down to the actions of a hero or a group of heroes, but you could write a story from a wider perspective if you don't mind the detachment that comes with it.

I'll also remind everyone that we have a private writer's guild forum that doesn't get nearly as much traffic as it deserves.

[Razor One]

Science fiction encompasses so much of the writing experience... whether you've written Mystery or Romance or War, Science Fiction tends to revolve around a harrowing tale of the human condition. Science fiction is merely the setting, the background, the palette from which you can choose from.

Whenever I write something, I prefer the character driven narrative. Focus on your characters. Imagine them as real people. The context may be science fiction but the human condition has barely changed in the last ten thousand years. There are issues of family, friends, tribe, war, peace, pain, suffering, love and hate.

Ask yourself these questions.

What is your characters name?
Where did they grow up?
What do they like?
What do they dislike?
Do they have fears?
Secret desires?
How far would they go to attain them?
What line would they not cross to attain them?
Do they have flaws?
Do they have friends?
Family?
Are they relaxed? Uptight?
Do they have a blazing hatred of dangling participles?

And so on. Keep asking yourself these questions, even mundane ones like "Favourite colour" and "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood" may yield valuable insight into the character you're trying to weave.

Okay, so you have a character. You're not sure if they're original, good, or bad.

Take your character. Imagine him or her at a happy time. A friends wedding? A mother's birthday? A fun night out with friends?

Now take them to a bad place. Throw them into the middle of a war. Drop them into a den of thieves. Have all that they love stripped away from them.

Do they rally? Do they break? Do they break because they rally? Or do they rally because they've broke? A character that rallies in the face of adversity is as interesting as interesting as a character that breaks in the face of adversity.

If you're really stuck for ideas and have a lot (read: A LOT) of reading time on your hands, take a look at the Characters Page on TVTropes.org. It can often be enlightening and give you a good set of ideas workhorse into a story or character idea.

[mr friendly guy]

http://hollylisle.com/fm/Articles/wc2-2.html

Holly Lisle is an author I particularly enjoy. Recently I discovered she also publishes online material on what works for her when writing. Naturally if you want the full stuff you have to pay, but hopefully this is a nice introduction.

[Rye]

I personally try to keep it as simple as possible.

I think of characters as stereotypes first then ask how they contradict that stereotype, then throw in some quirks of character/look that tend, at least in my case, to just appear over the course of writing.

Don't think in terms of "worldbuilding" or "plot", think in terms of asking what will make them interesting to read about? Especially interacting with other characters you've got (e.g. if you have a selfless socialist healer character, what will he do when he has the chance to get back at the selfish douchebag that took his leg away? Or If you have a nietzschean antihero, what will he do when he owes the one-legged healer his life? etc).

Then come up with their background, their secrets, their strengths, goals and vulnerabilities. Run through a few moral quandaries with them in your head.

In plot terms, give them injustices; doling out or receiving, because this motivates people in the story and the reader. Give them motive, opportunity and consequence, the rest hopefully writes itself as a matter of necessity.

As for names, I usually just take the name of a character I like or person I know and combine it with the name of someone who's on TV at that moment. Seems to work.

[Samuel]

The hardest part of that is writing a guy who responds to all situations mindful of the technology at his disposal. If you've at one point described how a recoil-less laser pistol can drill a hole through a meter-thick block of steel, don't turn your guys into retards by writing a gunfight wherein everybody is taking cover behind fences.

This goes for fantasy/superheroes as well. If you can fly, the character will probably try to figure out how fast they can go, how high they can fly, how much they can carry, etc. If they can carry large enough loads and their flight powers aren't dependant upon air, they are going to get a space suit and start lugging satillittes into space.

Characters should be smart enough to think over their capabilities or have them pointed out to them, although it is reasonable enough to have individuals who are stupid and don't make the connections. Unless they are really stupid, they should try to fix what they are doing when people start to die.

[Agent Sorchus]

I find that it is helpful to consider both the tone of your narrative and the voice that you are giving the character. Do not carefully craft the character only to find out that you cannot make the way that he expresses himself match what you actually can write. If you can make a character that has that distinctive voice and matches your perception of how he should be, congratulations you have a good original character to work with.

The characters voice is the medium with which their uniqueness is made apparent.

[Dark Hellion]

I will preface this by saying I am a mediocre writer at best, but I do enjoy good writing for the most part.

Before you even think about the fluff (name, descriptions, etc.) you need to decide how the characters in general and any individual character in specific interacts with the plot and the story of your narrative. Since plot and story have rather wide definitions in literary senses I will define what I personally mean and discuss each separately.

Plot: By plot I am referring to the general sense of what happens in the story. This is who goes/is where, when and what they do it. Don't mistake the complexity of a work for the complexity of the plot, any idiot with a tackboard and some string can make an obscenely complex plot and still end up with a work that is depressingly simple, while a work like To Kill a Mockingbird has a plot a grade schooler can follow but is a brilliantly complex work.

In deciding how your characters interact with the plot I would personally use the analogy of the plot being a flowing body of water and the characters objects within it. Do your characters flow with the plot, do they fight upstream, or do they divert it? If the characters flow with it, they are usually caught up in something much bigger than them; the "universe" of the work will pull them along despite their choices. If they can fight upstream for extended periods of time then the characters are about the same "strength" as the plot (although the plot tends to have an inevitability they lack) and so a character may be able to avoid going to where the plot says they should but probably cannot prevent wherever the finality of that flow leads. Finally, if the character can divert the flow they are 'stronger' than the plot, the plot will have to flow to where the characters actions and choices lead it. To best maintain suspension of disbelief the plot should flow along paths of least resistance, a 'strong' character will divert its normal flow because it is harder to make the plot get around his actions/choices (a brilliant plan, a heroic stand, etc.) than to explain how what the character was trying to accomplish goes unaccomplished. 'Weak' characters have a great deal of trouble do anything about the flow, but may be able to get stuck in just the right place to dam it up. Thus 'weak' characters can become 'strong' and vice versa depending on the "width" and "speed" the plot is flowing at. For an example in LoTR, Frodo and Sam spend most of the time very 'weak' compared to the plot; they are just two little Hobbits who are fighting against an immortal fallen angel and the object which holds vast stores of his power and malevolence. However, by fighting "upstream" at certain times they manage to divert themselves just enough to get to Mount Doom. Now the story kicks in for a bit and does some stuff, but Frodo and Sam have gotten themselves to this special place where they are the pebble that dams the entire river, sending it off-course and leading to Sauron's downfall.

Story: The story is the human element, it is the whys and the hows. While it encompasses the backstory, this is nothing near the entirety of it. A hero's motive might be to get vengeance the sorcerer who killed his parents and slaughtered his village but if this doesn't affect his decision making during the adventure it is basically just a part of the plot. Now, here you have to make a choice about how much the story can change the plot. This is very similar to the "strength" of the character related to plot. Basically, you need to decide how big of a decision it takes from a character to cause the plot to shift. Does it take the character deciding to make a personal sacrifice to stop some plot point from happening or does the tiniest decision like what socks they wear change it? It can obviously be somewhere between here and different plot points will have different resilience to decisions.

In the character's interaction with the story you want to decide upon the psychology of the character. Do they value friendship or the mission? How much will they sacrifice? Are they brave or are they cowardly; and when are they each? What are the quirks and obsessions of the character? Once you have decided things like this you need to look at how this psychology would cause them to react in the situations the plot gives them or that they make out of the plot. You need to answer a question like why does the good-natured but suspicious heroine trust the scoundrel who is helping her sneak around? Perhaps he demonstrated that he is kind-hearted previously or we have established that she is good at reading people because of these suspicions. In many ways this is where the real power of characters can come through. Going back to TKaM, Atticus Finch is one of the manliest men in all of fiction despite losing the court case because he has a dignity and moral integrity that is far more masculine than the ability to swing a sword or shoot a gun (he is in fact embarrassed by his destructive power with firearms). For an obscure but illustrative example we can also look at Killy from the manga BLAME!; he averages less than a word a page and spends most of the plot repetitively walking, getting smashed through concrete walls and shooting things with a BFG. This unstoppability would normally make a character uninteresting but the simple endurance he shows (picking his BFG up from his severed arm, fighting with 40% of his body burned away and the simple fact he has been doing it for 3000 years) allows us to resonate with Cibo's repeated mantra of 'Killy will save me' because the unkillable bastard will.

As you can see there is a good deal of connectivity between the characters, the plot and the story that necessitates that we should plan carefully and revise numerous times to get everything to the correct balance. How you choose to do this is entirely up to what kind of narrative you wish to weave. You can choose to have odd juxtaposition, such as a very powerful hero who can easily throw the plot off the hinges but follows the lead of a weak character who is caught up in the plot but is psychologically far more potent than our big, dumb guy with a sword. Or perhaps we want a more stream of conscious story about Bob who decides to go out for a night on the town in Hive City B of Tau Omega Prime and the situations he gets into. They are your characters so you should feel free to do what you want with them but unless you are only writing for personal amusement you want others to read it and get something from it.

[Zixinus]

There are a lot of ways to write a character: it depends on the character's role, the story's theme, the atmosphere you are aiming for, etc.

Jim Butcher written a bit about this. I recommend that you read it.

Every writer's process is unique. Some create their characters on the go, a bit like I do and purposefully don't leave much in advance to make room. Others write down the general plot's events and then weave a plot around it with the character's inserted in according to the needs of the narrative.

Really, it depends on the style and elements you use, as well as your goals.

The only advice I think I can offer is to go and interview your character if you are confused about him or her, not sure what role you want him or her to play.

[defanatic]

Well, the story exists to teach players gameplay mechanics. So the storyline has escalation, to introduce units and mechanics slowly.

The characters have to facilitate that kind of escalation. So the character I've worked on the most in terms of motivations and personality is the one that causes the escalation. As far as I can tell, she is a relatively interesting character, though a wee bit insane. I'm currently working on the cast of secondary characters, which I should probably write profiles for. The player characters mostly interact with the story through the secondary characters.

Does that mean I can have less developed motivations for those characters, or...?

*reads article*

Very interesting.
I should come up with a definitive list of characters I need.

Thanks guys.