Character Creation: Day 19

[B] Step by step (19,412 / 1,000,000)

Welcome back to your regularly scheduled programming! I hope you enjoyed your weekend break from the fountain of random bullshit that is this blog. Where were we…

Right, characters.

Yesterday’s story was a result of my desire to write a repugnant character. Not necessarily repugnant in any physical way (although to an extent, that was true as well), but repugnant in their personality, behavior, and mannerisms. Hopefully I achieved that, and you all hated that creepy dude. You could like him I suppose, sometimes the worst characters can make for an interesting read. Either way, we’re practicing character development - go us!

I’ve found that I have a hard time translating the scenes that I imagine in my head into words on the page. Is that just… the entire struggle of writing, though? Sometimes I have a scene in my head, and I know how it looks, but don’t know what words to use to convey that scene. How many sentences is enough to capture the essence of the scene, and convey the important bits of information? Yeah, I guess that’s just the struggle of writing. Stunning insight, Michael.

Let’s do an exercise, I’m going to write out the steps that I took to create the character from yesterday, and hopefully after that I will have gleaned some important bit of wisdom that will enable to me to go forth and conquer creative writing forever. There’s no way that’s an overestimation of what this is about to be. No way.

Like I mentioned before, I began with the intention to create a wholly unlikable character. I asked myself, “what character traits make someone unlikable?”. Being cruel, impatient, and capricious could be a good start. How about we throw deceptive, petty, and violent in there as well? That should make for a good jerk. After I accumulated this assortment of asshole-ish attributes, I then tried to develop an origin for them. Why was this dude such a stick in the mud? What made him the way he is? So, of course, the logical thing to do is make him a politician. Or just someone with power and influence. When normal people are shitty, people tend to avoid them. On the other hand, when powerful people are giant heaps of manure, they usually still attract a buzzing cloud of sycophantic dung flies. That’s where the group of attendants came in. Behind every great villain is an enclave of enablers and yes-men.

So, we have a character with some ‘fun’ character traits, we have a bit of his background - a role for him to fill, and on top of that we have a secondary group of minions to write about. Such fun! Then, all it took was a few wrong turns in the unintelligible labyrinth of disconnected ideas in my head, and bam - we have a setting to top it all off.

So, what important bit of wisdom did I glean from this exercise? Hold on give it a minute, I’m sure it’s going to strike me like a bolt of lightning any second now.

In the meantime…

Maybe I’ll write a really likable character tomorrow. For some reason, that seems more intimidating to me. If I write a self-proclaimed ‘unlikable’ character, there’s really no way for me to lose. If a reader says they don’t like it, then I can say I succeeded in writing an unlikable character. If however, if they do like it, then I can say, “Aha! I wrote a good, bad character”, or some other such totally-not-a-copout response. But if I try and write a self-proclaimed ‘good’ character, it’s a 50/50 shot. If I write a character that people like, good for me. But if not, I have no cop-out response. Can you imagine the horror of someone not liking something that you write, and you have no excuse prepared? I shudder at the thought.

Oh! The lightning bolt struck - all it took was one paragraph. The characters actually help develop the story much more than anything else that I’ve noticed so far. Looking back at my previous stories, I think I’ve generally had an easier time creating stories when I started with a character idea. The character’s traits and behaviors reflect a certain type of setting. Developing the character’s background develops the background of the story as a whole. The character exists in some kind of larger setting which encompasses them and their background, after all.

I would never claim to know the minds of great authors, but I would definitely conjecture about them. I would bet that a large portion of the worldbuilding in Steven King’s It could be built out as a side-effect of developing the character Pennywise. When a character is built out, there are questions that need to be answered in the story at large to satisfy the verisimilitude of that character. At least that’s what I think. I could be wrong. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if our entire reality exists simply as a single firing synapse in Steven King’s head. Wait, do synapses fire singly or in pairs? Someone with knowledge of botany or whatever will hopefully correct me.

You know what is absolutely bonkers about writing? Sometimes you have to really understand stuff, and understanding stuff can be really hard. (Eloquent, I know). If you want to write a Sci-Fi book featuring ‘realistic’ science, you might have to go learn some real science. For example, If I wanted to write a story about a group of astronauts exploring Mars, I would want the trip to Mars to be a semi-realistic representation of that journey. How much time would it take? How much fuel would the craft need? How much food and supplies would the crew need to take? How much weight would all of that be? You get my point. If you want your world to be flush with realistic details, you would have to go figure out what is realistic in our world, then translate that to your fabricated one.

Oh, this is my stop. Have a good week, and as always…

Totally nailed it,
Michael