Is this the key to writing great characterization?

[The Big Peat]

So, I've been thinking about this one for half a day. And my gut feeling is still kind of about my initial reaction of

"Nothing so big can have a single key".

Although I guess everyone's got their own particular angle that'll let them in into that big problem, and this might be the way for some.

That said - while I get the angle of looking at "What do they want" and believe its big and believe I should ask myself that more often...

... how am I meant to know exactly how far they're willing to go and what they're willing to lose? Or maybe the advice is to show those things to the readers, not to know that at the outset.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I get into their head and try to be them - which means understanding what they want, how they’ll react etc etc. I only know what any of them look like because people want me to come up with something. Ditto personality - they’re them, eg, Sonly - not a ‘confident lady who takes no prisoners.’

This mostly (although I tend to know exactly what mine look like I've just given up expecting the readers to know that)

I couldn't answer many of the questions in the initial post. For me it's revealed as I tell the story.

Even with my current work which I have a plan of sorts for I don't know what Maggie is prepared to lose or what she wants or how far she is prepared to go. That I'll find out.

 

[Karn's Return]

So, I've been thinking about this one for half a day. And my gut feeling is still kind of about my initial reaction of

"Nothing so big can have a single key".

Although I guess everyone's got their own particular angle that'll let them in into that big problem, and this might be the way for some.

That said - while I get the angle of looking at "What do they want" and believe its big and believe I should ask myself that more often...

... how am I meant to know exactly how far they're willing to go and what they're willing to lose? Or maybe the advice is to show those things to the readers, not to know that at the outset.

Exactly this. It's like I said; you don't imagine your characters so much as you channel them. Real life experience, it is said, is a vital ingredient in improving the quality of one's writing, and that is because on the basest level, it is an outlet for our emotions, repressed and expressed, dark and light, etc., and so, those are the qualities that are built into each character you build in such varying degrees as to make them come alive. Then you can simply see where they take you; after all, how many times have each of you, in the middle of a piece, start to realize that the story may not be going the way you initially planned, and that the involved characters may not be behaving the way you intended?

One example I have of this is of identical twin sisters of mine, Rena and Lana Maeshalanadae. (Don't ask about the family name; it's meant to be a jibe at classic D&D style fantasy, in the vein of Forgotten Realms and such.) Initially, Lana was the one I wanted to be a little more forward, rebellious, etc., the one more intended to be putting herself out there, while Rena was meant to be the one to be shy, withdrawn, classic bookworm type, but ultimately I discovered right off that I had switched their roles, so I simply went with it and I think it's worked out. Rena is a technomancer who is the classic cybernerd, but she's also popular, outgoing, and athletic, participating in various physical activities, namely running. Lana is the shy loner who doesn't have many friends and tends to get manipulated by her sister into going into things.


Ultimately, there's various ways things can go, simply by changing names and pronouns at key points. And who knows? Maybe it'll be made more interesting if you make those tiny little subconscious mistakes. The characters are those emotions taking over in a medium where you have absolute control and where nobody can be physically harmed by any form of violence or mature content within. (Psychological perhaps withstanding, considering age or mental state.)

Just let things go, and it's up to you in the second and third and fortieth drafts what you really want to happen, and what you might take a second look and go, "Hey, that's very interesting..." as you proofread, even if it isn't what the initial idea truly was.

 

[Steve Harrison]

Interesting! I begin with a vague plot and challenge, design the characters, then let them loose.

All these different writerly ways are very interesting. I construct the plot then see who turns up!

It's all about the finished work and no one cares how we get there.

 

[Phyrebrat]

My characters don't do anything on their own. I recognize this happens with other writers, but characters no more surprise me than does a mountain suddenly spring up in the middle of a desert. It's all the product of my imagination.

Couldn't agree more. All this wide-eyed my characters do what they want is so fatuous. If that's the case then you're not in control of your story.

But one needn't think that far into it; anything that gets onto paper (or screen) in your story comes from you, not your characters. Unless you're made of magic, or are able to channel, I don't think it's possible to do otherwise. (I'm grumping out here because there's someone on Twitter I follow who's always banging on about how her/his characters 'refused' to do what she wanted and oh, isn't it just so deligthful . Really it's just a load of grandstanding bandwidth-generation for her/his latest project.)

As far as the Babylon 5 quote is concerned, I think it's a good watermark. For those writers who have years and years of experience, (published or not) however, I doubt they need to run this through their mind when they pen a new masterpiece. My basic-er version of it is 'what does that character want?' because the following things usually spring from that.

As a discovery writer, I'm always finding inconsistencies in my characters compared to how I've expected to write them, or how I expected their narrative go a specific way. It's helpful to remind myself what they're after, and check I'm still creating a character who would act the way I want him to.

Pretty much everyone is agreeing here about the importance of characters, which is what I suck at (character-writing, not agreeing )

pH

 

[sknox]

>All this wide-eyed my characters do what they want is so fatuous.
I hesitate to go that far, mainly because I've heard so many writers say one variant or another of this. Writers I respect. In any art form there are many different ways of achieving the finished product. Michelangelo famously claimed that he didn't so much carve marble as he removed marble from the statue that was inside. Srsly, dude? That's my first reaction. Damn silly thing to say. But there it is, and it's pretty hard to argue with David and the Pieta. Impressionist painters claimed they painted what they saw, but I never in my life saw anything remotely close to those paintings.

Something goes on in the act of creation--the process of creation. I'm pretty sure it's as varied as are humans themselves. Nor are we artists so special as we sometimes think we are. I'd be willing to be cash money that different scientists do science in different ways, too.

 

[Steve Harrison]

I take the 'my characters do what they want to' claims to be cases of the characters seeming to have a better idea of what to do than the writer, and the writer agreeing. It's an attempt to make sense of the unconscious choices writers make.

And as fatuous as it sounds, it's easier than saying, I was writing the character one way and it didn't quite work and I had a nagging feeling he should do something else, so I relaxed and took a different approach and ended up with something I didn't expect which was better than I had initially planned.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I just see it as having good trust in my subconscious mind working well.

 

[Plucky Novice]

I just see it as having good trust in my subconscious mind working well.

I just wish it would tell me what it was up to sometimes...

 

[L.L.Lotte]

The "characters do what they want" is just an exaggerated way to say that the writer comes up with ideas as they write and ends up going off book because they like those ideas better than the outline. It is the very definition of an organic writer.

It is more of a joke and not intended to be taken literal. It is more that the writer hasn't really fully fleshed out the character as much as they thought they had, and while writing they develop that character more and things change.

 

[William Delman]

I would generally agree with this statement. While I tend to work from an idea toward a character or set of characters, I've done the opposite as well, and in both cases I've found my "stories" are almost always defined by a character arc (or arcs). The core of this concept (the arc) largely boils down to what Straczynski says in his quote, though I might add that no good arc is complete without a resolution--who is the character after they've made their sacrifice and achieved, or failed to achieve their goal?

It's also probably worth mentioning that I work primarily in flash fiction, and Straczynski was writing for television. Both formats tend to sharply curtail the amount of time you can spend running around inside a character's head--in flash the word count is always a limiting factor, while screenwriters are forced to contend with the lack of a narrator. Once upon a time, I was luck enough to study with Derek Walcott, and he likened the limitations of screen/play writing to the limitations imposed by poetry (which was the medium I was studying at the time). Honestly, I came away thinking the job of the playwright was even more difficult because the story is dependent on the dialog/actions/reactions of your characters.

The novelist obviously has a lot more room to work with, but even in the novel... I think this idea largely holds true (especially in genre fiction).

 

[Robert Zwilling]

One mechanical aspect of developing a character's "life" is used extensively on the HBO detective series Harry Bosch. If I hadn't read some of the books I would never have noticed the deliberate construction of the character's lives. There are around 2 dozen books, some have have the Bosch character, some don't. That makes for plenty of characters in the text version. The TV version has a lot less characters. The writers have condensed the characteristics, personal and job situations of multiple characters into a much smaller number of mostly regular characters for the TV series. This packs the "personal" content of each character creating a character that is much busier than they are portrayed in the text version.

I once thought about cutting down on the number characters by simply letting one character appear more often in a story by doing what was being done by a different character, thereby eliminating the different character from the story. Basically change the name of the different character to the name of the first character wherever it appears in the story. A simple mechanical process. I thought the characters would appear to be too busy by appearing more often in the story than originally cast. What happens in the TV series are characters running into far more situations than in the written stories. For example one detective is actually composed of three characters, not all of them detectives. An interesting side effect of this remanufacturing of characters is that one can read the books or watch the series and be guaranteed that they will never be able to guess who is doing what, even though the actions might be known in advance. You can read the books and watch the series and have no fear of one story interfering with the other. Maybe it is just a business decision to keep the books just as interesting as the TV series.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

For me writing is fun, and I intend it to stay that way. When I analyse what I am doing and why too much then it loses its ability to be play and becomes work. It's much easier to find time to play than it is to work. I've no intention of pursuing a craft or becoming a "serious" writer (unless the degree changes me).

Maybe saying my characters make their own decisions is fatuous but it works for me and that's ultimately what matters. When I force my characters and get real about it then the writing stops.

For me writing is about time in my pjs with great food, maybe a beer and spending time with old friends in imaginary worlds. It's magical and a great way to stay sane.

When I did my BBC stint they said there were three things a character needs but the only one I can ever remember is the trumpet:

Sonia in Eastenders was really disliked by audiences until she was given a trumpet she played badly, and that allowed the audiences to identify with her and see her as real.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

What makes a story, though? Usually a story is when someone takes, or is forced to take, some dramatic action, thus setting off the plot. But sometimes it's off-stage characters who start the plot moving, sometimes it's events that happened long ago. However that is, somehow the main characters have come up against the action of the plot, and if they "want lots of things" or don't know what they want, or are just generally vague and without specific intentions, that leads to inaction, and inaction leads to a stalled plot.

Because although what the character(s) want in general is important for the author to know, what really matters is what they want more than anything else at the moment they collide with the plot. If the situation in which they find themselves is sufficiently compelling, then all the lesser desires that make them who they are begin to take a back seat, at least temporarily, and their most driving desire takes over for the time being. This is the kind of dynamic character who can carry a plot.

Inner conflict can be fascinating to read about, but only up to a point. Because if these inner conflicts lead to too much dithering and waffling (which is what happens in real life when people don't know what they want and what they're willing to do to get it—indecision makes people freeze, not leap into action) then you have a character who, at best, is dragged along by the story despite themselves (and usually not the most interesting sort of character to read about if that sort of thing keeps up too long), at worst someone so useless to the story that there is a good chance they'll be written out completely in the second draft.

Consider, for instance, Hamlet, a character known for his indecision. He's like the poster boy for hesitation and lack of resolution. Except ... he does know what he wants and we know it, too, and throughout the story he takes several actions (some of them rather drastic) toward achieving it.

 

[Val Clark]

I've been reading J. Michael Straczynski's notes on writing Babylon 5, when I came across the following he'd made:

Here is the key to characterization: who is your character, what does he want, how far will he go to get it, and what is he prepared to lose in that process?

I find that interesting, because all too often writers initially think of characters and characterization in terms of physical attributes, interests and personality - I certainly did!

However, as I've repeated across the forums, character development arcs can be a worthwhile consideration in novels, which means thinking less in terms of personal attributes and more about how that character is changed by the story as much as changing it.

Anyway, I thought it might be a worthwhile quote to refer to, in case anyone here discovers any revelations about their own lead characters by think in those terms.

 

[Val Clark]

I've been reading J. Michael Straczynski's notes on writing Babylon 5, when I came across the following he'd made:

Here is the key to characterization: who is your character, what does he want, how far will he go to get it, and what is he prepared to lose in that process?

I find that interesting, because all too often writers initially think of characters and characterization in terms of physical attributes, interests and personality - I certainly did!

However, as I've repeated across the forums, character development arcs can be a worthwhile consideration in novels, which means thinking less in terms of personal attributes and more about how that character is changed by the story as much as changing it.

Anyway, I thought it might be a worthwhile quote to refer to, in case anyone here discovers any revelations about their own lead characters by think in those terms.

I read that Breaking Bad writers constantly as the question, 'Are we in his head.'
I have found that really useful in my own writing.

 

[sknox]

IMO there are many keys to writing great characters, but not all keys fit the same author. It's a matter of finding the right one. It might very well be that it's the same for all, and that the variations are merely the metaphorical ways in which we are forced to express what is working for us. Or the differences may be real and fundamental.

Being in the character's head is one I like. Looking out through his eyes. Her eyes. Its eyes. Also, for me anyway, it's about being in the moment. I tend to race ahead or look behind, be overly aware of the plot. When writing the scene itself, I try hard to stay in the moment and in that POV. It's difficult and slippery.