Building Character(s)

Basic (romance) Characters

No GMC today.  Instead, we'll take a look at characters before getting into the goals, motivation and conflict of our characters.

Let's face it, characters are what make a book. If you don't have strong characters---and I don't mean the kind that lift weights---your characters and your story will fall flat.  And so will you.

Characters can have many traits.

• Physical: hair color, eye color, height, body type, etc.
• Overall physical: Handsome, beautiful, plain, scarred, etc.
• Occupation: Doctor, nurse, cowboy, spy, mother, secretary, CEO, business owner, cowgirl...

All of the above make up our basic idea of a character.  But a character isn't only what s/he looks like and does for a living.  A well-rounded character will have other character traits, just as we real people do.  These are what we call personality traits.

If you've ever taken a psychology course in school, you've learned about personality traits, those thing that make us who we are.  The term "strong characters" refers to the strong personality traits of a character.  No one wants to read about a one-dimensional character.  Even a walk-on character often has certain personality traits.  Sometimes that's why one book will branch off into a second book, a third book, or even a multi-book series.  In some books, a secondary character already has a story within the story, written as a subplot to the main plot.

Building a character means knowing a character even better than you know yourself.  Many times writers find a bit of themselves in their characters or perhaps the opposite of themselves.

If you're a new writer and don't understand about characters, there are tons of websites where you can learn about characters and personality traits.  If you're beyond the new writer stage and are struggling with creating a new character, those same websites and others can help you can jump-start your character.

• The Myers & Briggs test can teach you about basic personalities and how they affect each of us.  In addition to the Myers & Brigss website, there are other websites you can visit for more information on it.  TVtropes.com is a good one, and there are many more.
• The Enneagram Institute uses 9 different personalities.  You can take a test to try it out.
• Books for writers, such as the one I mentioned last week by Tami D. Cowden, Caro LaFever, Sue Vider.  The Complete Writer's Guide to Heros & Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes has an interesting take on characters for an even different take on personalities.
• Still a little confused?  You can download character sheets to get a handle on who and why your character is.
• Don't stop there.  More information is available by doing a search online for fictional personality traits or character description in fiction.  Or think up your own!

The above could keep you busy for quite a long time.  Learn what you can, then think about it when you're working on your current or next story.  You don't have to be exact with your characters. You don't have to give your readers every, single detail about your character.  Be careful to show and not always tell who and why your character is who s/he is.  Sometimes a little pre-writing can help you get a grasp on your characters.  What does your character say?  What is your character thinking?  Is body language involved?  An excellent source for that is The Emotion Thesaurus (The Bookshelf Muse Descriptive Thesaurus Collection).  While that blog has moved to a new location, Writers Helping Writers, there is still a propensity of information about characters, especially how to show, not tell.  If you find either of these helpful, I advice getting the book at Amazon or B&N.

Choosing characters wisely is a huge part of what creates their goals, helps with understanding their motivations and builds their conflict.  And you thought writing was easy!  Most of the time it isn't difficult, but knowing the things that will help will put you on the road to stunning and memorable characters and their stories.

I'll be moving my topics to different days next week, so look for Writing Wednesday on...Wednesday next week.  Do opposites attract?  And just how opposite do they need to be?  Sort of a prerequisite to GMC. :)

The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character. ~ Nora Roberts

Creating Your Characters

WHITE RABBIT SYNDROME

Not only am I late, but I was busy with things I'd left unfinished, while racing toward a deadline.  I actually did write Wednesday's blog...late Wednesday night, then forgot to post it.  Earlier today, I worked on a blog post for Bits & Bytes, my writers group's blog.  In fact, while doing that I remembered it's Friday.  Duh!  The topic of our blog this month is "Your book is a movie!  Who’s in your dream cast?", so it was natural of me to think of characters as a topic for today.

Characters and Story

Characters can make or break your story.

Creating characters can be done in two ways:

Create the right characters for your story.
Create the right story for your characters.

One of the biggest mistakes writers make is not to make their characters real.  Or put another way, making our characters unreal.  By that, I mean they aren't believable.  Unbelievable characters may be too perfect, too imperfect, or they may be cardboard characters with no flaws.

Let's face it, we all have flaws.  Therefore, our characters should also have them.  They don't have to be huge, but they do affect the characters and how they live their lives and relate with others.  Those flaws can change by improving the flaws or can also grow more serious.  Whatever happens, character growth--changes in how the character perceives him or herself and others and reacts to those--are vitally important to them and to the story.

Characters often fall into categories known as archetypes.  You aren't sure what archetypes are?  The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes and Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes by Tami D. Cowden, Caro LaFever and Sue Viders might be a good place to start.  If you like getting several different opinions or presentations on archetypes, simple do an online search for *character archetypes,* and there will be enough results to keep you busy for quite a while.  If you're more into suspense or mystery, Tami also wrote Fallen Heroes: Sixteen Master Archetypes of Villains (same link as above).

I don't always think of characters as archetypes, when creating them.  That doesn't mean the characters I write aren't some kind of archetypes.  They'll usually fall into one or two for each character at some time during the process.  After all, we all are archetypes of one kind or another, or we're a mix, just as our characters often are.

The Whys, Whats and Whos

Once you decide on which archetypes your characters fall under, back story takes a front row seat.

• Ask yourself (or your character) WHY he or she is a Warrior or a Seductress, or any of the other archetypes.  From the moment we're born and until we pass on, we experience millions of things in our lives.  Good or bad, those experiences mold us to become who we are at a point in time.  For characters, that point in time is the beginning of the story.
• WHAT happened in the character's life that made a difference, good or bad?  Was it loss or gain?  Raised in a big family or an orphan?  Did a death or a birth affect the character in some way?
• WHO was involved in the above WHAT?  A friend, a parent, a sibling?  Or was it a stranger?

The more we write about a character, the more we learn about him or her.  I've often discovered that even though I think I know my character, I often learn there's something I missed.  If that happens to you, don't worry about it.  A little editing later will not only fix it, but make the character more well-rounded and real.

Keep one thing in mind:  The WHAT doesn't have to be a bad thing.  Good things work just as well.  It all depends on your character.

Back story not only helps answer the WHY, WHAT and WHO, but it can also be the catalyst that will force a change in the character, making that character grow.  Without character growth, without a change, either throughout the story or caused during and after the Black Moment, a story falls flat.  Knowing your character when you sit down to write the story can make a big difference in your writing.  The more you know, the easier your writing will go.

Once you've learn your character's archetype and the WHY, WHAT and WHO, you have a lot of  the information you need to work on the character's GMC (Goal, Motivation & Conflict).  Because GMC is very important to the character's story, we'll take a look at it next week and see how to use archetypes and the 3Ws to work with GMC.

Have a wonderous weekend and get ready to welcome in Spring!

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. ~ Ernest Hemingway