GeekLit: Developing Characters, and Character Development
Welcome to the third edition of GeekLit. I’m starting to get the hang of this— pick a topic, ramble about my opinions, provide relevant links with commentary, wrap up.
Bad characters can ruin a good story, and good characters can (usually) redeem a bad/generic story. Therefore, characters and character development are as, if not more, important than plot. What’s a “good” character, you ask? In the simplest terms, it’s someone your audience can relate to— heroes and villains included. By “relate,” I don’t mean that you sympathize with their every action, but rather that you can understand their motivations for acting the way they do.
So, developing characters and character development. I’m splitting it into two issues because that’s really what it is. You have to have a character to work with before you can develop that character. The first part is generally considered to be the easier of the two, but creating a character usually comes secondary to having an idea for a story…and that’s where the troubles start.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with working plot first/characters second, but it does pose some problems. When you’re writing with an end (or even just a series of plot points) in mind, there’s a tendency to force your characters to conform to the story as needed, with little thought for what the character would actually do in a given situation.
You’ve seen it happen — that point in a story when the main character suddenly gets inexplicably gung-ho about a certain course of action — and you’re left wondering “why?” It can be especially frustrating when you’ve invested emotional effort into caring about the character.
How can you avoid these moments in your own work? For one, get to know your characters. Keep your plot in mind, but at last in the pre-writing stages, let it take a backseat to them, what they want and need.
The NACAE has some decent resources if you need a jumping off point for the “getting to know you” phase. The 20 Questions for Characters sheet has made the rounds of the internet in various incarnations. While it’s useful, it contains a lot of questions that may not be relevant to your particular character, so don’t feel obliged to answer every one (“First love?” never proves very useful to me). If nothing else, this particular questionnaire might be good for making you think about character history issues you might never have considered.
A better one from the NACAE is the Character Exploration Initial Writing Exercise, which focuses around writing short scenes for your characters in a limited amount of time. Don’t worry about whether or not these scenes will ultimately be “canon”— you’re writing them to get a feel for your character.
Still stuck? The one piece of advice writers are plagued by is the classic “write what you know.” Now, you may say, “but I’ve never been a street urchin growing up in Victorian London,” etc. True — but you still have a wealth of life experience to draw from. You’ve known fear, loss, longing, countless other emotions…and even if the character you’re working with would react in a completely opposite manner, it’s still something to draw on. Trust your experience.
Once you get inside your character’s head, it’s time to finally start thinking about your plot — and therefore, character development. The two go hand in hand. The challenges your story presents your character with will shape them, but don’t be afraid to let your characters shape your plot. Storytelling, at it’s best, is a terribly organic experience, and evolution is a good thing. The story you end up with may be vastly different than the idea you started from, but chances are it will be better for the time spent making sure your characters have have realistic reactions and motivation.
GeekLit is a biweekly column that discusses developing your writing skills and the creative writing process.
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