Designing a Character

In general, all the tips in this course hold true for all characters of your story. But characters have different levels of importance. Your main characters should be most fleshed-out and adhere to most of the advice. But lesser side characters? Well, they’re less important and get less time, so writers usually pick only one element that a “good character” needs and define them through that.

I mention this now to prevent a common pitfall for beginning writers. When I learned about developing characters, I started creating intricate backgrounds and lists of facts about all my characters! Even when I wrote a simple short story, there’d be ten characters who all received a document full of information. Even if a character was only in one scene, I thought and thought until I had a deep purpose and empathy for this character.

This is obviously a waste of time. Focus your greatest character development on the characters that need it most. Make those characters the most realistic, nuanced, fleshed-out. Characters of lesser importance are fine as more of a “stereotype”, based on one or two general characteristics. You simply don’t have time to properly add nuance to them, and if you did use that time, they have to stop being an unimportant side character!

Example

Your main character receives many scenes in which they showcase different traits. You slowly learn their backstory, their clothing is described in detail, they have unique dialogue, etcetera.

Then there’s a merchant whose only purpose is to sell the hero an important magical sword. One sentence to describe clothing and way of speaking. A few sentences to give another trait—perhaps they seem nervous or keep rearranging the objects in their cart—and that’s it.

It’s fine to keep them as simple as that: “nervous merchant in colorful clothes”. It’s tempting to give them more personality, which I’ve done numerous times in my earliest stories, but it just doesn’t work. It grinds the story to a halt, just for a character that is of very little importance in the grand scheme of things.

Where to find characters?

Well, anywhere!

Ask a generator to create random properties for you. (You can use my writing tool for that. It appears regularly in all writing courses, and also below this list.)
Base them on real-life. (More on that in the chapter Should I base characters on real people?.)
Seek reference images (or perhaps books) and stitch together the most interesting parts
Fantasize about what traits or abilities you’d like to have, then make them “real” in your story.

These tips, however, are mostly for when you’re stuck. When you really don’t know what to do and need fresh energy from some outside source.

Now that you know characters are just PURPOSE + EMPATHY, it seems most useful to start there.

PURPOSE: Once you have an idea for your plot or setting, invent characters that serve a purpose inside them. (Your story is about breaking into a prison? Invent a character with the tools and skills needed to do so.)
EMPATHY: Give characters a goal or motivation. Invent personality traits that will be challenged by the plot. (If readers understand why your hero wants to break into that prison, they can feel empathy.)
Once you have your main characters, design the others to be variations or opposites. (Your hero strongly believes in something? Make a side character strongly despise it and challenge him.)

Here we see, again, how tightly connected character, plot and setting are. If you’ve already learned about plot, you know that most people define a good story by two things.

Your hero wants something and goes to get it. (This leads to actual plot and action.)
But as they do so, they learn they actually need something else. (This leads to character growth.)

These two directly correspond with PURPOSE (want) and EMPATHY (need)!

That’s why I don’t recommend starting characters by just picking random properties, basing them on real life, or picking any random personality. Instead, design them for purpose and empathy within your plot and setting.

Example

Say I want to end my story in an epic battle. Then I need to invent my characters to lead to that situation naturally.

One character I surely need is a soldier or fighter. Their purpose is to train, get good, and fight that final battle. But I also need the empathy. We need to answer why they are training so hard and fighting.

So I invent a motivation. This fighter saw his family killed by an enemy raid, powerless to stop it. Maybe he saw even more monstrosities, powerless to stop it. He vows never to be powerless again.

Notice how our fighter can still be “evil” or “the bad guy”. But now that we’ve given purpose and empathy, they are an interesting character that can fill the story.

The four elements

Okay, this is a very general definition. You can see it in my example above: my fighter character is off to a good start, but this is obviously not enough detail and meat to sustain a whole story.

Let’s dive deeper. Let’s break each of our two elements (purpose and empathy) into two.

Empathy (empathy I): as discussed. A magic system is only as interesting as the people using it. A fight scene is only worthwhile if the reader cares about those fighting. (Discussed further in the Empathy chapter.)
Audience Interest (empathy II): the character wants something, that’s a given. But there’s a second step: show the audience that what the character wants is interesting to them. A kid’s story about some grown-up who wants to earn more money to save for retirement is unlikely to work. To prevent the story being over immediately, also present a clear reason why they can’t have what they want. (This leads into Flaws, Handicaps and Limitations, a later chapter.)
Plot Connection (purpose I): impose the plot on the character in such a way that they cannot ignore it. They must act, and they will collide with other characters, and they want something so bad that the plot cannot help but happen. (Discussed further in the Purpose chapter.)
Progress (purpose II): how is the character going to change and develop? Dangle a flaw or possible journey in front of the reader. (Discussed further in the Arcs & Growth chapter.)

The next four chapters will discuss each of these. (After that, the practical challenges start and you can start writing stories!)

Why this order? As I’ve written (and consumed) more stories, I’ve realized that EMPATHY is actually the most important. I’ve watched so many movies with cool scenes, cool concepts, great animation or acting … and I just felt nothing. Because they had done no work to establish empathy for the heroes, or, more often than not, they actively destroyed that empathy.

Example

You can see this in the many reboots of old franchises, like Indiana Jones or Star Wars. Fans are often disappointed, or outright outraged, by the newer films. Yes, their writing is absolutely terrible, but I think the reason for such an emotional response, is because they killed empathy. They destroyed legacy characters (by making them grumpy, unhelpful, unsympathetic), while adding new characters that only served a PURPOSE and nothing else (which usually manifests in a Mary Sue-type character; only skill, no personality).

So let’s dive into that.

Continue with this course