Agency – The Will
Purpose – The Mind
Nothing is more important to a story than its characters. Storytelling, in any culture and in any time period, is at its core about human events. Even if the story tells the deeds of great nations, ideologies or universal truths, the pillars it rests on will always be the characters that move the narrative. A story without great characters is like a house without the people that call it a home.
Writing characters, however, presents one of the greatest challenges in storytelling. And that is due to the peculiar fact that characters are among both the easiest and hardest things to write. What I mean by this is the use of tropes to create characters. There exists an extraordinary amount of character tropes, ranging from the ditzy professor to the strong, silent anti-hero. Assembling a character out of tropes is no great feat, you simply choose the tropes you like and try to cram them all into one person.
But good character-writing is beyond what the buffet line of tropes can offer. A good character is… well, they’re real people. Sure, they can be a mouthpiece for the author’s current crusade, a vehicle in which the human elements of the story is delivered, or simply a mesh of popular tropes designed from the feet up to appeal to the broadest audience. But that alone doesn’t make a good character. A good character need to answer three things, and these things are very simple: who they were, who they are, and who they wish to become.
Who they were
No one lacks a past (unless you actually do, but that’s a past in itself). We are all shaped by previous experiences, and none more than our upbringing. It is in this period that we form our moral compass and our internal judgements that shape our perspective of the world. A street urchin from Tarbean will have a different perspective than a highborn dwarf, born and despised in his father’s keep, or from a boy found still alive underneath his mother’s hanging corpse and forged in war.
Here I reference three characters (Kvothe from The Kingkiller Saga, Tyrion from A Song of Ice and Fire, and Guts from Berserk) with wildly different narratives. However, they all share a few things. Firstly, they are well-written, fleshed-out characters. Secondly, they struggle. They struggle against their past, they struggle against the obstacles in their way, but most of all, they struggle against their own flaws. Who characters were is my way of saying, how their flaws came to be. Flaws are often defensive mechanisms that don’t work. For example, with Kvothe, his arrogance and self-confidence is a defense against his crippling loss as a child. Tyrion, similarly, turns to liquor and women to hide from his failed first marriage and abusive family. Guts is so unused to the feeling of belonging that he turns it away, and then later on, when he is unable to cope with his grief, he devolves in animalistic rage.
It doesn’t matter if a character has had a perfect childhood with loving, affluent parents and nothing bad ever happened to them, they’ll still struggle against an aspect of their past. Who they were sets the basis for why characters feel, believe and behave the way they do. Perhaps more simply, it explains what they are struggling against.
Who they are
This is the aspect of the character that moves beyond their past to their current day. Despite how it sounds, I believe this part of a character is actually the most mundane. After all, you’re not looking at the character’s past or their motivations for the future. Who they are is my way of saying, who they are without plot. Who is the character in a vacuum? What kind of cereal do they like? What movies do they enjoy? What does downtime look like for them? Too many times writers want to focus on what they consider interesting: the epic motivations and flaws of a character. However, we forget that humans are not simply engines to drive the narrative forward. They want to have time to relax, reflect, and as horrible as it may sound, enjoy themselves.
So, divorced from their quest to save the universe, who are your characters? If you went on a date with them, what would they talk about? Kvothe would probably talk about how great he is, Tyrion about how awful his family is, and Guts… Guts probably wouldn’t say all that much.
Who they wish to become
There is a saying, and I’m afraid I can’t seem to find who it is attributed to, but it goes something like this:
“Hell is when you die and you meet the person you could have become.”
Most of us fear this, if not all of us. Writers especially fear this for their characters. Layer upon layer, each portion of a character’s past fuels their motivations and desires for the future. Every character wants something, and that want is often the driving force for their character arc. The wanting is the simple part, what’s difficult is what happens when they either succeed or fail.
When they do so, characters need to change. The larger the motivation or goal, the larger the change – and this change is not only reflected at the highest peaks or deepest valleys, but at every step in the journey. Every incremental step forward to achieving (or failing) a character’s prime motivations need to reflect change. This is the definition of character development: after 100,000 steps you are not the same person you were when you first started walking.
Okay, okay, that’s character writing 101, what’s the takeaway here? Well, I suppose it is that writers should always ask themselves two things regarding character development:
- Is it realistic?
- Does it serve the plot?
Aha, so that is the surprise: in the end your characters are nothing more than machines to further the plot after all! Well, yes and no. No, because characters should still be interesting and well-defined outside of their narratives. Take Kvothe, Tyrion or Guts and transplant them into another narrative and they will just be as interesting. However, plot and characters shouldn’t be seperated in character-driven narratives. The plot is the story of the characters. With that in mind, character development that derails the plot makes no sense because the narrative is one that supports the character, not the other way around.
I hope this helps. I also hope that I can walk the talk in my upcoming game Singularity: Tactics Arena. My original intent for the game was to build a quick, arena-based RPG where players can tinker around with character building and other RPG elements. However, as I am prone to do, scope creep sunk in and it’s turning into something of a full-fledged game with what I’m hoping is a powerful narrative regarding mental illness, nature vs nurture, and the impact of technology as a tool for escapism.
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