In this article ❧ I explain how to apply psychology, narrative art, and sociology to make up characters that do their job (entertain and get money for you).
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You create a character, a protagonist. Why should the reader want her to succeed or fail? In contemporary fiction, if readers desire the hero to wane, it means the character construction went wrong. The average reader expects that the hero is worthy enough to deserve poetic justice> by the end of the story.
How To Write Characters That Keep Readers Turning Pages Without Neglecting Your Mental Health
Now, what are the traits that typically make readers admire the central character of a story? First of all, he must be predominantly good. This nature should make her able to cope with dilemmas and be the one that carries responsibilities: an anticipated leader.
He should not be perfect. There is, in fact, a recipe. For every six positive traits, there could be three negative traits. To be likable, the hero must have flaws.
However, at the very definitive moment in each leap, the heroine's nature reveals essentially good. Otherwise, she's not worthy of the destiny of glory.
One of the most wanted features is resilience. Let the hero be in trouble. But don't let him limb on and on down to a disgraceful climax. Remember Superman --or even Kickass. The hero falls in a vast sequence of trouble tossed over him, to fall and stand up over and over.
Resilience -a concept that writing manuals pay little attention- is to overcome constant challenges and traumas. As psychology explains, this skill demands learning and creativity. The hero is a Lateral Thinker. No matter the size of the boulder before, the hero can deconstruct the problem, whether it is ethical, logical, or, in the most traditional settings, moral.
Even better, the increasing difficulty demands consistency and character.
In other words, the readership likes the protagonist because he acts like a usual hero (not in style: in the fundamentals). Period.
By the Way: What is Character?
Character is the armor the protagonist wears in daily life: her identity, conscious choices, and manifest values. We should reveal character in onion layers. How and where each layer appears should be unpredictable. Once a character aspect shows up, the story must explain: through dialog and action, the text explains why the new characteristic is what it is.
Character makes your protagonist believable. The more you uncover, the closer the reader is to personality, the latent attributes.
We can picture the distinction between character and personality with an example. A boy is bold, but he learns to control that (self-regulation). The first is a personality trait; the second is a character skill. Assume you're a new teacher at the school the boy attends, and nobody told you about him (some have been glancing at you with pity). You meet the child and see he's kind, takes turns, and plays alone or with others in a suitable fashion for his age. You are figuring out his character. One day, the same kid dares to climb up too high through a tree in front of the school. You feel surprised. You didn't know. Many weeks passed before you realized this trait of his personality.
Your hero come to be fully believable as readers spend more time with the story. They start to loom into his nature. I don't think this is the hero's "true nature". Rather, it's his personality, the traits whose origin is genetics. Character is more shallow or obvious than but as real as personality.
The reader spends more time with your star and notices things. These natural traits are difficult to change. Sociable, extroverted, the life of the party, self-conscious, shy, unadventurous, timid. Chances are, the story is going to make him change. If not, the hero becomes flat. The reader should know how and why each change took place. Change shows that the experience throughout the story was meaningful and made an adventurer blossom into a hero.
When I'm writing down my hero's traits, I think of a full name. It provides several ways in which other characters can name her. So, with his full name, I begin to build the others' jargon and the specific relationships with the protagonist.
After that, I may make a list of positive and negative traits. The ratio could be 6:3 for the hero and the opposite for the villain. At that point, I'm ready to determine her:
- mood
- sidekicks
- trusts
- The most important thing and person
- attractive features
- problems
- Power
- fears
- doubts
- secrets
- guilts
How do the values of these attributes affect the story? A hero with no problems is dull because he has nothing to solve; the same applies to heroes with easy or few problems.
The next problem is narrative identity. This complex core is the base for developing expression: how does the character act? It should make sense in the plot and differentiate one character from another. Narrative identity is the way the writer provides identity to characters with literature tools.
We have two dimensions here:
- “I am...” What would the character say?
- System of Gestures
The first one expresses the tension between what the character believes of himself and what other observers discover (chiefly the reader). Ideally, the response to that question should evolve into self-awareness, along with the character arc (the process through which changes occur in behavior and self-perception.)
Gestures materialize the style of life. Each big name in the story needs distinctive manners, automatic behaviors (like lifting the chin before stating something to the antagonist), and acting methods that make her body, the figure gesture, his hands, and his facial expressions seem unique. I speak of a System of Gestures instead of gestures to get past mere skimming on the Internet. I approach this by drawing.
We're ready to plunge into the mind. In fiction, the following psychological assets are helpful:
- Self-concepts
- Self-esteem
- Motivation
- A crucial event in Childhood
- The most relevant person in Childhood
- One familiar tragedy
- Meaningful objects (toys, books) and places.
Self-concepts are ideas the character has about his performance in a specific realm. They are subjective but sensible to others' reactions (so you can play to generate conflicts among personages). For example, a character may think she's a chess genius and have poor self-esteem.
Self-esteem is how much the character is happy with herself in the present. It's like I worth nothing, little, much. Do I feel well about myself as a person?
Childhood has two phases. What happened between 0 to 3 years helps us understand the quality of the attachment in the character's relationships, especially the loved ones and friends. The most important bond is mom. Between 3 and 7 years old, the character learns about ethics and morality: norms. This period helps to explain emotional strengths, flaws, choices, and dilemmas. Childhood highlights contribute to coherency in the setting of the relationships with school, teachers, other authorities, and peers.
Knowing these things helps the writer construct a believable and vibrant character, far from clichés and predictability.
(Motivation is so big that I preferred to dedicate one essay to it.)
With this information, you are elegible to respond to questions like:
- When thwarted, how the character reacts?
- What are the actions that typically disclose her latent traits?
- How and how often will these indicators be exposed to readers?
- What does he do or say under stress?
- Belief system (i) as observed by others and ii) as stated by the character in her own words.
- What would the villain say is the hero's problem?
- Storyline or subplot: goal, antagonist, a climax of its own (yet subsidiary to the main plot and star protagonist)
- Method for introduction in the First Act.
When the character's surface and his inner self match, readers will guess what he will do or say, dull. Superman masks himself all the time. Danger? he jumped into his suit (unmasks) and after that he put the mask back (Clark again). As the story goes on, it becomes harder and harder to retreat behind the mask. By the end of the second act, the latent nature of the protagonist begins to face harder choices. In the climax, those decisions make her change.
My final word is for the relationship between the writer's biography and character traits. Some writers think that the writer's life is a source for creating this architecture. I feel this is unhealthy and unprofessional. Being a writer doesn't qualify people to disclose their conflicts and hurl them onto the readers: they deserve professional fiction. Moreover, research about the external reality is the ideal piece to fulfill all the flesh your story needs.
Research. Do your best as a professional and care for your mental health. If the character conflicts are yours, aren't you mulling over something that better stays at home? You deserve a nice place to work. Furnish it with fresh materials, ideas that respond to others' wants, and relevant problems (and stay at the office when you return home and rest).
The End :)