Welcome tto the 3rd Column, now improved and complete thanks to the useful collaboration of Dana (Ninque Elen) who is helping me now with this job.
This time we bring, the 3rd topic of the list: Character Formation, Creation and Development. In our opinion one of the most important themes along the process of writing a fan fiction. This is a little bit extensive, even when we tried to make a resume and probably we'll have a second part of this in further columns, making clear the details of the character depending of the genre and type of fiction.
We hope this is of your liking, we receive comments, suggestions, ideas, anything about these columns here via PM. Also if you have a wonderful example of a good character formation of development, we'd like to hear from it!
Dana and Adrienne
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Character Formation, Creation and Development
No doubt that the characters are the fundamental part of a story after the plot. There is no plot without characters, there are no good characters without plot.
When you have thought up a story and a plot the next thing you need are characters who are going to experience everything you have thought up. Usually when you have a story in mind you also have a basic idea for a character. But a basic idea is just good as a start. You have to realise you will have to stick with this character for a long time and you must be sure she or he is the right person for what you want.
Since characters are such an important part of a story, they deserve dedication, attention, effort and investigation if the writer wants an accurate and proper personality without the usual contradiction of personalities that is getting too common by these days.
Your character has to have the right skills, personality and problems in him/herself to get in the situation you planned for them. A character needs an background, has she had a happy childhood or an unhappy one. Someone with an unhappy childhood will feel differently about for example: parenting, than someone with a happy childhood.
A character needs a social and economical status, poor or rich, accepted or outcast. Also the society in which you grow up makes a big difference, someone who lives in China will encounter different social problems than someone who lives in America. Think about age, someone who is 30 is at the beginning of a career, someone who is 40 is probably starting to doubt his career choices. A woman of 70 years old has other issues and possibilities than a girl who is 15.
A perfect example of how background effects the personality:
1) “Lennon used to kid her, defining her as a bulldozer but she didn’t get offended by it. In a way it was part of her primal instinctive need to always excel at whatever she would do, and although she had never analysed this tendency attentively, she knew it was related to the loss of her father and her difficult relationship with her mother that inexplicably pushed her to always be the best, even if this could mean disadvantaging her private life”
This are all very important issues you have to think about. If you chose wrong than sooner or later you will get stuck. My advise would be: think up as many things as you can about your character.
Childhood incidents: when, what, how, influence.
Parents: does he/she knows them, how is their relation, who where they, how did they treat your lead character.
Friends: are there friends, who are they, are they important, how do they influence your character.
Social background: handicaps, advantages, shame, money, treated.
Race: problems, advantages, how is the culture, what fits, what is accepted, what not.
Schooling: how much, importance, job chances
As you can see there are many things you have to consider, the more you think up, the more you get to know your character. The more you get to know your character how better you can write about him/ her and the more lifelike it gets. Off course you don’t have to use all these things. Some things you will probably never need for your story but it is good to have thought it up. Then if you get stuck you can always look this over and think about what the most possible and logic way your character is going to develop in, is going to react.
One thing I haven’t mentioned is personality. Something very important of course. You probably know yourself what kind of personality you need your character to have. I mean a shy person won’t end up easily on a heavy metal party. A computer freak not on a safari. So that is not the point. My point is that you have to give your character some bad personality traits to. Nobody is all good and sweet, everyone has a dark side. Someone who always accepts everything gets pretty boring, maybe you need someone who accepts a lot but try to let them be surprising from time to time. Let them get angry from time to time it makes them a lot more human.
How to make the reader fall in love with your lead character?
Try to make him or her want something from the beginning, even if it is something small, like a drink. Wanting something is an important part of the plot. It is simple something to keep the reader reading. It is an easy trick and will make it easier for your reader to identify with your character. Let’s look at the next example:
2) “Chapter 1
"C’mon don’t be so stubborn! Come here!"
Orlando pulls me towards him, his hands on my waist.
"Oh please Orlando! Don’t do this to me" I complain "you know I hate pictures!"
"Shut up and smile!"
A simple beginning that reveals nothing else than the fact that someone wants something: not to be put on a picture. It is something very recognisable. Everyone knows that feeling of being forced to let your picture taken while you don’t it. Wanting something recognisable makes it easier to identify with a character. And identification is the key word to make your characters believable, recognisable and sympathised with. You must seduce your reader to start feeling something for the lead character.
Identification doesn’t start with: “because of his disease coeliakie he wasn’t allowed to eat bread”. This fact about your lead character could better be introduced later, when your readers think they know and understand him. In the beginning it goes about what the character has in common with us all. After they can be weird, as weird as you think is required.
Compare also the active position from the first person who wants something and the passive position from the second person who isn’t allowed something. Your story gets into motion immediately if your character wants something. More importantly however is even frustration. This means that there is something or someone who prevents this person from getting what he/ she wants. In the mentioned example it is Orlando, who drags the person in question to the photographers.
The dynamics is a story exist because of the clash of forces with an uncertain ending. That the knight wants the grale is one thing but his quest also must give him a lot of problems and difficulties. A fiction that fails usually misses the basic ingredient a.k.a. confrontation and anti-forces. They are simply not there or introduced to late. Inexperienced writers usually fail to see the difference between a story and a theme and that a story needs friction. A theme is: live is pointless. A story is: look how pointless live is. The characters in a story represent the theme, they show it without mentioning it. Through their interaction they show it. A theme has no dramatic tension, a story has. A theme is static a story is dynamic. An inexperienced writer who starts with a theme and not a story never gets anywhere. A theme lacks the force of fiction, there is no collision. And collision is what moves your story. Who begins with: live is pointless usually ends with life is pointless. You can prevent this from happening through focussing on the characters. What do they want, and do they get it. Starting with the motivation from your character makes your story more likely to succeed.
** Some rules and advices while creating a character **
In fiction there exists only one thing and that is the conflict. Every fiction has this rule: someone wants something but he cannot get it or with great difficulty. The impossibility for the character to reach his goal is what keeps us interested, but not every obstacle is equally interesting. Let’s imagine that I want to write story about a man who always has the circumstances against him, everything he does fails and nothing ever goes right. Would that be interesting, would you like a person like that? I think that, if it isn’t a comedy in which this principle might work, fairly soon everyone would start to think what a horrible story, what a whine this man is. A person becomes more interesting if he has an intern struggle. If h8is conflict also comes from within. If there own imperfections stop them from being who they want to be.
Write: “he loved her so much that he brought her breakfast on bed every morning,” and you probably think well whatever.
Write: “damn, he thought, why wasn’t I able to not cheat on her,” and the reader is with the character in the middle of a dilemma.
3) Think about Shakespeare’s Othello. He is a man who loves his Desdemona dearly, he believes in their love and his only goal seems to be, being happy with her. Until Iago begins whispering that she is unfaithful. Would things have turned out so badly if Othello in essence wasn’t a man who felt insecure. Who had trouble in fighting of his own demons? Probably not. But his demons are very understandable and makes us able to sympathise with him even if we see that he is making mistake after mistake.
A reader sympathises with a character, thinks about him/her, has opinions about him/her if he gets the chance to feel with him/her. Nobody expects you to be the next Shakespeare but try to be as good as you can. Live, eat and breath with your characters. It will make them come alive.
It doesn’t have to be true, it only has to be possible to be true
How to do this?
Make sure your character has recognisable sides. A character that is so bad that he only resembles the devil isn’t believable. Let’s have a look at the next fragment and see how it works:
4) “Dan was heading towards her and grinning as she got nearer to Elijah's door. He could see she was smashed as hell and of course, this was a great advantage. She'd be too smashed to hit or punch him for starters!
“Do you think there might be another cottage on the premises? Maybe we have the wrong place?” Dan asked, sounding slightly nervous, not to mention a lot like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo”
We see here the same character displayed, named Dan. The incredibly sleezebal out of the story Trust. He is despicable and tries to take advantage from a girl when she is smashed but he isn’t above all feelings. When girls start to disappear he to gets scared and nervous. It makes him sound more human and believable. It shows exactly that people can be horrible but that they are still human and not the devil in disguise.
5) “Elijah mentally shook himself, swallowing down all these ridiculous musings. He felt almost disgusted with himself. He was a vampire, she was a human. The Slayer even. It was pitiful this weakness he was showing. A lesser vampire would have crumbled under the pressure of such vile emotions. No, the only true emotions he had towards this woman were lust, hunger and anger.”
Also this character, a vampire non the less shows that though he is evil he still has human sides. He is believable and you can partly identify with him.
An other thing what helps make your character be more realistic, is being specific. Someone can drink a coke but why not a Pepsi? A character can walk in a big city but why not Amsterdam? Elijah can be walking in a forest but what kind of forest? Is it dark or light, stuffy or cheerful. Are there oaks or fir trees? Is someone wearing a dress or a long velvet gown?
However reality can be a tricky thing. In a story every action has a reaction, this is not so in reality, but this order in story mustn’t appear to neat. In a bad fiction you often see that the writers has tried to bring every character to life by telling by everything they do their motif.
He writes: “on the morning of their wedding day Sylvia realised that she was going to make the worst mistake of her life with Robert” Better is to write: “on the morning of their wedding day Sylvia realised she hadn’t returned her library books on time”.
Sylvia 1 shall never surprise you again. Sylvia 2 is a lot more intriguing, she isn’t an open book.
A certain way of unpredictability makes a character more lifelike. A character also doesn’t have to be always the same, act always the same. In many books you encounter this always the same characters, they are portrayed as ill-tempered and that is then the only thing they can do for the rest of the story. Characters who always act the same are lifeless. Let them be inconsequent from time to time, let them doubt themselves and not understand everything they do themselves. It will improve them incredibly.
We know... Bloody boredom to make up a character's sheet, bloody hell to start creating one by one... we know, sometimes we are lazy, but take in account that if you do that you'll have points in favour when your story is read and published, more reasons? Okay:
- You'll get to know your characters more than anyone and it is useful while writing the story by being an unlimited source of situations and additional facts for your plot.
- An undeniable premise: the reader falls in love with the story mainly by the exact and perfect match between situations (plot) and the characters, they make the reader feel identified -or not- and they wake up the emotions the writer wants to -or doesn't want- to.
- In our case, as fan fiction writers, while writing about, for example, Elijah Wood should take in account the REAL Elijah Wood, or deform the actual Elijah to change him into a dark one, but without losing the essence of the character himself... Elijah Wood will stop being Elijah Wood if you say he has green eyes and blond hair. In both cases (the real and the imaginary) the writer should be careful with the details.
So, basically and to start, we'd like to bring this word (dictionary is the writer's best friend) we found in a similar column (bibliography at the end of the column).
ethology/ ee-thoh-logy (noun): Science of character-formation. From Latin from Greek éthologia (ethos, characteristic spirit of community, people, or system).
That is the base of the character formation.
Now, are certain mistakes we, as writers tend to fall on while we create our characters:
• Exaggerate the features of a character: bad, bad, extremely bad or good, good to the extreme of being naïve.
• Too much idealism making the character unrealistic and again: exaggerated.
• The reflection of the author on the characters that includes: the writer in his/hers worst version, or the writer in his/hers best version. Thing well known as a Mary Sue or Gary Stu. (Exception to this premise below)
• Canon characters with lack of variations or personality: the typical pumpkin blonde, the handsome rich man, the confused youngster trying to figure out his destiny, the cruel, dark and sick killer, etc... (Exception to this premise below)
EXCEPTION 1: Not all the characters that reveal or reflect the writer's personality are bad, It is how the character is written, not who they are based on which is the problem.
EXCEPTION 2: Cliché characters are necessary, but not in the way that there should always be a bad, very bad and rebel guy. The clichéd characters give effects to the atmosphere of the story, they are essential... or what would it be of - for example- a Harry Potter fiction without the fifth year Dark Arts professor?
The problem arises when the author doesn't make the characters a little bit their own in some way. With this we mean: do not change the character completely, but add some gradual and delicate changes. For example, the usual cliché of the self-confident, bitchy and conceited Orlando Bloom with a little bit of softness and kindness would be good... Without stop being Orlando Bloom. (Exception to this exception below)
Exception to the exception: original characters are sometimes needed. Do not be afraid to use a type of character because it will be seen as a cliché. Because it's not the type of character that matters. It's how the character is created and inserted into the story. And that goes for canon characters too.
Exaggerate characters do not exist, there is not a reeeeeally good girl, or an angel, neither the extremely bad and cruel killer. All of them have weaknesses and both sides, good and bad. Need examples?: Frodo Baggins set off to destroy the Ring with all good intentions, but proved susceptible to its power.
TO MAKE CLEAR: We do not mean with this that all characters are bad developed or created. This is not a manual, not the commandments of the Character Formation or something like that. This is just a compendium of ides to get to better characters.
METHODS, TRICKS AND OTHER CHARACTERISATION PARAPHERNALIA
So, you want to create, develop and (sorry for the redundant word) characterise it. These are some simple 8and some other are complicated) ideas, tests and tricks to get to the character you want to get (this can be applied to all the characters in your story, or the main ones -that generally are the most complicated and described ones)
• Character's Sheet
This is a world-wide known trick, most of all by being take from the Role Games (remember those ones where you become a character with his or her abilities and weaknesses). It's easy to do and personal, it means you can fill and put the information you want. Another example could be the trading cards we usually play with (f.e. Yu-Gui-Oh! Trading Card game or LOTR Trading Card game). This all just to give an overview of the character and make it more concrete. A model of the Character's Sheet could be the same information you get in the cast calls:
Name:
Nick Name:
Age:
Sex:
Race:
D.O.B and P.O.B:
Star Sign:
Appearance
Height:
Build:
Hair Colour:
Hair Style:
Eye Colour:
Skin Colour:
Personality
Likes:
Hates:
Qualities:
Flaws:
Background:
Other resources: consult biographies of people similar to your characters, read about the habits of the country or place he or she is, adding to that the languages they may speak, their family.
Credits: Het geheim van de schrijver by Renate Dorrestein (This is a dutch book if I translate the tittle it means: The writers secret)
1: The Warning sign by Bloomiecurse
2: Last chance on the stairway by Bloomiecurse
3: Othello by Shakespeare
4: Trust by Magikal Rhiannon and Hollybaggins
5: Destined by Firestar
* Ethology and refrences to Mary Sues and Gary Stus from fanfiction.com columns (J-K Ashkavan's column: Characterisation)
Yay, I was hoping you'd post a new one soon! That was really great girls, very well laid-out and easy to follow, and lots of great tips and information in there too!
Jaime
Wow, that was mucho texto! :huh:
But wow, it was all very good and detailed and also funny!
Especially this:
| QUOTE |
| I mean a shy person won’t end up easily on a heavy metal party. A computer freak not on a safari. |
:D:D:D
Teeehee!
Anyway, thanks for all the work, gals, cool that you used a Dutch book for this!!