Writers Corner is an attempt by me to create some kind of aid or assistance for people who want to write. I am by no means a great writer, I barely qualify as a good one. I am simply trying to give people the chance to not make the same mistakes that I have, and hopefully help someone at least in some small manner. While I write erotica, much of the information posted will help people who are writing non-erotic works as well. I cannot be held responsible if my advice has an adverse effect on your writing, or if it improves it either.
Characters, How to Create Characters, and Characterization
Hey folks, back for perhaps the last writer’s corner of the year. This one will be about characters, how to create a character, and characterization; or how to best describe characters in a story.
Characters
The first and most important rule of a character is to avoid the most obvious of clichés. While I realize that there aren’t a whole heck of a lot of unique characters left to write, it’s best to not focus on essentially recreating a character. Something like the badass martial arts expert, the sexy female ninja, African-American inner city young gangster, shy studious bookworm schoolgirl, or effeminate homosexual male are all examples not just from literature, but from real life(some at least), of cliché characters. While I won’t try to pretend they don’t exist in literature, television, and movies, copying them is generally a poor idea.
Why is it a poor idea, you might ask? Well there are a number of reasons. First off, the chance that you’re interested in creating a character from one of these, or other, stocks, is that you’ve seen it elsewhere. So you think, ‘Hey, what if I take Naruto and put him in the 21st century?’ or something else. But since Naruto might not fit exactly in the 21st century you copy much of the established character’s style and nuances, and change some details such as clothes, gender, height, hair color, etc, and essentially do the same idea.
This means you have in essence copied a character. This copying of a character is something that will hurt your story on a number of levels. If someone isn’t familiar with the base story, and is reading your story, they won’t understand the motivation of the character. I’ll go more into that later. But if it’s something Naruto would do because he’s Naruto, then it’s explained in his back-story, and you might not do enough of an adequate job in relaying an equal or satisfactory back-story, because you may feel that it’s already there.
Aside from that, creating a stock character gets rather boring. It’s something that the audience has seen and done. A ‘ZOMG I’m the toughest guy ever!’ character is lousy. Superman isn’t interesting because of his powers. He is in essence undefeatable except by a choice few, and finding a villain for him is usually uninteresting and pointless. Batman is interesting because he doesn’t have powers. He’s just a normal man without special skills. Yeah he has tools and a nice car, but he’s still bones and skin. It makes him human and understandable. Batman wouldn’t be nearly as interesting of a character if he had flight, super strength, and invulnerability. It would fix all of his problems in moments and leave little left for interest, or doubt.
There are of course two exceptions to this idea. The first is if you are gifted, and willing to make the character truly unique. Sure some kids study just because it’s what they want to do, but maybe there’s a back-story to it? Perhaps the character has come from a working class family, and loathes his father and wants to grow up and become the best that he can be with his mind, instead of his muscle. Go into their story in depth, and don’t allow for small and easily understandable things. This is very hard to accomplish, and usually best done as an anti-stereotype.
The second is if you’re creating a character to explore that character, either to insult them or to explain your own feelings on them. The character of the stage director in Club Vanilla is one example of my disgust for homosexual males that that go out of their way to act as flaming as possible. I have no problems with homosexuals or homosexuality, but those that act as flaming as possible annoy me to no end, not because of their life choice, but because of their choice to become a stereotype. I didn’t have anything bad happen to him, I didn’t insult him with any anti-homosexual slander, I simply had a character share my disgust for him.
How to Create a Character
There are more ways to create a character than there are characters, it seems. There’s a few prevailing ideas.
The first idea is to create a character sheet, and list the physical attributes. This method is can be done when you are unsure of the plot yet, and creating a character is a starting off point to how they can evolve, and how the world can as well. This can also work when you have the idea of a plot, but need to create a character that’s suitable for it. You start by making notes of things such as height, weight, age, hair/eye color, and so on. After you have the idea of what they look like, you can build up the back-story of what has led the character to have certain abilities, skills, etc. This follows up with things like a history, or simply likes/dislikes, preferences, hobbies, interests, and so on. This is often done with people who role-play, as they generally have to not just explain their characters to others but they have to explain their characters to others. Especially those who don’t have the time to really read a long an in depth piece just to understand that their character likes dogs, or is afraid of the dark because there was a fire when they were a child. While you can’t just simply state these things, you can see what your character is made of, and how you need to describe it.
The second idea is to create a list of attributes for that character. This is usually done when you are going to center the story on the plot, or that is to say that the character development is secondary to the development of the plot. This is similar to the first idea, and can be a possible step two, but it is slightly different. One of the key differences is that this is largely setting a series of lists for a character, and then attempting to find a way to insert that into a story. For example, instead of outright saying that your character needs to wear glasses or has asthma, show that they can’t read something without their glasses, or have them worried about running because they don’t have their inhaler.
Another means of creating a character is to create a world for them to live in. This can be done if you have the idea for a new kind of world, and want to create a character that lives in the world to explain it. If you can imagine it this way, something like my Terraverse. A post limited nuclear war Earth and a fully colonized Mars in 507 years in the future, has the notion of nanobots introduced into society. Thus, Terra is my character for this world. She’s not indicative of the world, in fact very much the opposite. But you get to see and understand the world through her naivety, as the reader is uninitiated to the world at large, even if they understand things like pizza, or sex.
These are just 3 ways of doing it, where there are more ways than can be counted. From my experience and opinion, these are the most frequently used ones, and some of the best ones to work with, particularly if you don’t have much experience writing. But as always, find something for you, and if it works, stick to it, at least until it stops working.
Characterization
Characterization is probably one of the most important things in creating a character. It’s relating that character to the audience. This is naturally done through a number of ways, but essentially it boils down to information directly given to the reader, or information that the reader infers or determines through the narrative.
To explain that point a little bit, much of the direct information is generally physical. This is of course natural, because we see people and can determine such things easily. I can tell you that a girl is a blond, redhead, what have you, even use poetic language to describe it. But it boils down to the fact that you can determine it easily enough via sensory descriptors.
When it comes to determining information through the narrative, this is best done through giving the reader something to consider. Say that a man is an assassin, but he’s thoughtful enough to not kill innocents, to feed a stray cat, or let a dog caught in a trap loose. You see that he’s not as cold blooded as the job makes him seem. Sure I can tell you that someone is kind, but then you absorb it like a plain fact, the same as if I told you that a person’s hair is blond. The audience doesn’t connect with that, not really, it’s just a fact. They absorb the notion of someone sparing an innocent, or kindness to animals. That tugs on the audience’s heartstrings and their own sensibilities. But more importantly, they understand that.
The important thing about characters is to create a character that the audience is able to understand and empathize with. THIS is what I meant earlier about creating stock or stereotypical characters. They are as plain and as boring as they seem to be. And the audience doesn’t have sympathy for them because they are a stereotype, because they’ve been in a hundred other stories, and because they aren’t interesting. If you create a different kind of character, you make it much more interesting, and accordingly, the audience will be more interested.
The key to creating that interest is to create empathy, or sympathy, in the audience. But how does one accomplish this? The best means of doing it is to let the reader into the rational behind the character’s actions via his emotions. If the reader understands why the character is feeling something, then the reader can understand the course of actions undertaken by the character to resolve those feelings. Whether it’s remorse over killing, scorn after being dumped, a desire for love, feeling underappreciated, the reader will either understand the emotions from having felt them firsthand, or hopefully you will be able to paint enough of a picture to describe how it is that they are feeling adequately enough to move them.
Now that the audience understands why it is that a character feels a way or another, move it to the next subject, the action that they take, due to the feelings that they have.
No Motion Without Emotion
That statement means that the characters can’t do something unless the audience understands the reasoning behind their emotional situation. This is true of both heroes and villains. Heroes are often given cliché reasons to fight for good and decency, which is boring. Villains are even worse, they’re just there to be evil, as if every person comes out of a dozen or so Disney stock characters. (Smart, evil, good, fat, comic relief, etc)
You need to let your reader understand why it is that the character is doing something. Why are they wooing this individual? Why are they going to this place? Why are they fighting some grand evil? What was the motivation behind giving them some mystical power?
Create interesting characters, and the audience will be interested. Create interesting characters, and let their emotions pour onto the page, and the audience won’t just be interested, they’ll understand and want to know more about the character.
Conclusion
Know what you’re trying to do, and how to create the character. When you find a means of creating that character, don’t make it cliché. Know what is a stereotype, and avoid it. When you get down to writing it, make sure that you’re able to discern what the audience should be told directly, and what they should infer or determine through reading. Make sure that the audience understands what the characters feel, and why the character is going to act.
An Aside About Characters
The funny thing about characters is that the more that you create them, the better that you get at creating unique characters, but the harder it can be to stop creating them. Yeah, you might need a small part for a character, but you find yourself building up a back-story for them when it’s wholly unneeded.
Not just that, but the characters that you do a good job of, you find yourself slipping into easily. In my example, some characters, such as Terra, David, Nadia, Yoshi, and especially right now because I’m working on Club Vanilla, Julie, they stick with you. I can jump into one of their voices easily, and start writing in their mindset. I’m not crazy. It’s just a writing thing. Characters are sort of a part of you. You create them from a different piece of your own mindset. I could do a whole WC on just that, but perhaps another time.
Still no timetable for updating on WC, most likely even less with the aforementioned reasons in the last post of the blog. Stay tooned.
Peace
SomeRandomBastard
http://www.asstr.org/~srb/
http://somerandombastard.blogspot.com/
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