How to Build Awesome Characters

In this week's lesson, presented by Chrysanne, we discussed how to pack your characters full of awesome.

• Is there something you're interested in, that you know a lot about? Chances are, other people will find it interesting too. Make your character interested in that same thing, and use their knowledge and interest in your story.
• Give your character an interesting, unusual, and best of all, painful backstory.
• Personality quirks are always fun.
• Readers love a character with awesome skills.
• Interesting supernatural powers can also lend awesomeness to a character.
• Characters need weaknesses and fears too. Use a little imagination and come up with something interesting. Is your character afraid of peacocks? Maybe they always fall asleep during movies.
• Possessing an awesome object or weapon also adds awesome to your character.
• Interesting characters deserve interesting names. We'll have a lesson on naming characters alter in the year.
• What's your character's favorite animal? Food? Sport? Activity? Choose something unusual, interesting, and awesome. Sure, you could go with dog, pizza, soccer, and playing video games, but how about sea scorpions, tom kha gai, ski jumping, and kite surfing? Which character would you rather spend a whole story with?
• Give your character a unique response to situations. What does your character do under stress? When angry? When sad? Don't be afraid to make it something totally unique.
• When building a character, keep in mind that most people have a gap between the way they perceive themselves and the way that others see them. This discrepancy between internal self and external behavior can be the source of all sorts of awesome.

Now that you've built an awesome character, make their awesomeness important to your plot! Use their traits, skills, knowledge, and interests to move the story.

Next week's lesson: Irony

How to Not Make Your Characters All Sound the Same

Unique character voices is the topic for today. Here are some ideas we came up with for giving each character a distinct way of expressing themselves:

• Give them a strong personality trait. But don't overdo this, unless you want a cast of caricatures instead of a cast of characters.
• Know your character's age. Adults, teens, and kids all have different ways of talking.
• Think of someone you know and try to have your character say things the way they would say them.
• Listen to a lot of people. Get to know lots of different patterns of speech from different regions, cultures, professions, and backgrounds. Pick the best one for your character.
• Voice comes from who your character is, so know your character!
• Have imaginary conversations with your characters until you know their voices.

To practice distinct voices, we did a writing exercise. Everyone in the room filled in the blanks to the following sentence:

Three ___________ walked into a room and saw ____________.

I collected the papers, shuffled them, and handed them back out. Everyone had to write the first thing each character said in reaction to what they had seen, doing their best to give everyone a unique voice.

My sixteen-year-old son figured out a way to defeat my writing exercise. He wrote "Three vampires walked into a room and saw Medusa's face." Apparently they can't say anything. They're statues. So instead of writing, I captured their final, permanent, stony expressions.

So... why DO you want to rule the world?

Of course we all know the answer to this one. Characters do stuff because the writer makes them. But we don't want the audience to know that. No, we have to preserve the illusion that the characters are doing things because they want to. Because they have to. Because they're driven by their inmost desires, their deepest hopes, their darkest fears.

How do you do that?

Number one, you have to understand your character's motivations. Think about it for a while. Dig deep. One of our club members gave an example from one of her stories of a young apprentice wizard whose master is accused of betraying the other wizards in his order. The apprentice thinks her master must be innocent and wants to go rescue him. This is a fantastic premise for a story, but what would make it even better is a really good reason behind the apprentice's noble actions. WHY is the apprentice so sure that her master is innocent? Why does the apprentice risk everything, including being accused of being a traitor herself, to go and save this guy?

Once the writer knows the answer to this kind of question, the writer knows more about the character. Not only the motivations, but about important pieces of the character's life history and personality. Delving deep into character motivations makes for richer characters.

A few more hints. Don't go with obvious motivations. Brainstorm. Come up with several ideas and pick your favorite. If you can, plant motivations in your characters that work against each other. That way you can keep the reader guessing as to what your character will do next.

To learn more about motivations it might help to read some books on behavior and psychology. Sources of motivation include basic human needs like love and acceptance, survival, a sense of control, sleep (this is a serious motivator for me), and purpose in life. Other motivations come from life experience. What has rewarded or punished your character in the past? Build up more specific motivations out of these basic ones. Does your character have an irrepressible drive to acquire money? Why? Does it give her a sense of control? Does she do it to gain acceptance from wealthy friends? Has it become her purpose in life? Maybe some of each. The motivations behind the motivation will affect her choices and reactions throughout the story.

A word of warning. Even though you don't have to explain every motivation for every character in your story, readers can tell when a character is being motivated by plot expediency or writer whim, and they will immediately cease to believe in that character. Keep it real. Motivate your characters.

The Name Game

What can you learn from a person's name?

There's a whole lot of information packed into those two or three (or more) words that mean YOU. Your first name was chosen by your parents, so it tells us something about them. It usually hints at their education level, where they're from, and their socio-economic status. Certain names can indicate political leanings and religious affiliations. The last name, something handed down to you through the generations, can tell us something about the nationality of your ancestors on at least one side of the family, and if you've hyphenated it with your mother's last name then we get a double-dose of information.

Your first name can also tell us your approximate age. Go to the Social Security Administration's baby names database to find out the most popular baby names in any given year. If you go to an elementary school classroom today, you're probably not going to find a student named Donald or Shirley (popular in the 1930's).

And this is only when we're talking about real people.

Your fictional character's name tells your reader a lot about the story. You, as the author, have chosen that name, so the reader uses it not only to judge you as an author, but to make predictions about the story you are going to tell. An attractive name can be just as an important draw for the reader as your book's title.

Character names should match the setting. Historical fiction is easy - just do your research. For fantasy, you have to ask yourself what branch of the genre are you working in. What mythologies are you drawing on? Go there to find good character names. But please, I don't want to see any more female heroines named Kira, Kia, Kaya or the like. Please.

Fantasy writers do have the option of entirely making up names. But no matter how you try, you can't make up a name that WON'T evoke something in your reader's mind. In fact, why would you want to attach a totally meaningless word to any of your characters anyway? Pack some extra information in your prose. Choose a name that tells me something about the person wearing it.

A few cautions when it comes to naming characters:

1. Avoid names that are difficult to pronounce, and names that could be pronounced multiple ways.
2. For a group of characters in a story, avoid using names that start with the same letter. Readers will get those characters mixed up.
3. In your prose, don't use multiple names for the same character. They may be called different names by different other characters in dialog, but you as the narrator need to pick one name and stick to it. An exception would be when a character's name actually changes in the course of the story, and you make the transition clear and stay consistent with the new name.

I've already mentioned the Social Security Administration website as a good place to go look for names. There are also several name databases on the internet, and even some fantasy character name generators.
Have fun, but remember! Character names are important. In fact, your main character's name may be the most common word in your entire manuscript. Choose it carefully.

Resolving Conflicts

There are two basic ways to resolve a conflict in your story:

1. Character gets what character wants. Hooray! Happy ending.

2. Character doesn't get what character wants. Aw, darn. Sad ending.

Most stories end with number one, but there are a few that end with number two. If you use number one, your readers will be happy, but not surprised. If you use number two, you raise the chances that English teachers will make students read your book.

There is a third alternative.

A complex resolution is usually more satisfying to the reader than a simple win-or-lose outcome. In a complex ending, a character may get what he wants, but then discovers that there are some serious drawbacks, or a very high cost. Or (and this is my favorite), a character may not get what he wants, but then realizes that he has gained something even better.

So, try and resolve your conflicts in a more complex way. Surprise us. Make us think.

Novel-length stories contain multiple conflicts. Your main character should have internal and external conflicts, there should be sub-plots, and minor characters should have their own internal and/or external conflicts. As you weave your story together, see if you can't make these various conflicts work to either intensify or to resolve each other. A scene gains more punch as multiple conflicts are either heightened or resolved in that single scene.

For instance, in the original Star Wars film, as Luke homes in on the fatal exhaust port, he resolves an inner conflict and decides to trust The Force. He switches off his targeting computer. At the same time, Han Solo resolves his internal conflict, am I a mercenary scum or a loyal friend, and decides to help the rebels, thus giving Luke a clear shot. Luke fires, the shot goes in, and the external conflict with the Death Star is resolved in a blinding display of special effects. Both Luke's and Han's internal conflicts come together to facilitate the resolution of the external conflict.

Now let's take Lord of the Rings. Frodo finally reaches the Crack o' Doom, but once he gets there he realizes he doesn't really want to chuck in the One Ring. His internal struggle against the Ring's power seems to have resolved, resulting in a TOTAL LOSS. Middle Earth is doomed. But then along comes the external conflict with Gollum. Gollum attacks Frodo, bites off the ring, and Gollum gets what Gollum wants, but then Gollum accidentally falls into the volcano with the Ring (oops), which resolves Frodo's internal conflict by releasing Frodo from the Ring's evil grip. External conflict resolves internal conflict.

So, in conclusion, resolve your conflicts in a complex way, and interweave the resolution of multiple conflicts to build a complex story.

Keep writing!

Fan Fiction

One of our club members began e-mailing us episodes of an Avengers fan fic this past week, much to everyone's delight. It got me thinking about the benefits and uses of writing in someone else's imaginary universe.

When you write fan fiction, the world and the characters are already there. No need to spend a lot of time developing back-story, building scenery, hammering out a magic system or inventing new technology, anything like that. You can focus on other aspects of the writing process, like pacing, dialog, and character interactions. Get right to the high-level stuff.

And fan fiction is fun! It is fun to write, and your friends will probably have fun reading it since they know and love the characters you're working with.

You may have so much fun writing fan fiction that you never get around to doing your own stuff.

Don't do that.

You can't publish fan fiction. It's illegal, unless you get hired by the owners of the intellectual property to write it. Some people make good money writing novelizations of popular movies, but they've been asked to do it, or else they asked permission to do it by submitting a book proposal and having it approved. If you really want to know more about the process, I know some authors you can talk to.

For most people, writing fan fiction as a career is not an option. I wouldn't even post fan fiction on the internet as a hobby. Some intellectual property owners are cool with it, but others are not. And besides, you don't want to be known as a writer of fan fiction.

You want people to write fan fiction about the characters and worlds YOU create.

Writing fan fiction is GREAT practice. In fact, most artists begin by copying other artists that they admire. The goal is to keep writing and reading and writing and reading until you develop your own style, something unique, something that others will admire and want to emulate.

Today, the fan. Tomorrow, the challenger.