Let’s say you want to tell a story—specifically, a dramatic story. To do this, you need engaging, dramatically feasible characters, both antagonists and protagonists. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or even what medium it’s in. If you play RPGs, you should apply this to your PCs and major NPCs. If you’re writing something, you need to get this all sorted out beforehand, a huge cast of characters already primed for conflict with these five things.
Do not start with plot first. Start with character.
Some of the material I’ve cribbed from Lajos Egri’s Art of Dramatic Writing, mostly the material about goal and “orchestration.” For the rest, I’ve riffed off what I’ve read both in Egri and everywhere else and tossed in observations from my own study of fictional structure.
Oh, and, when I say “character,” I mean “protagonist.” Specifically, the main character in your story. However, all other major characters, antagonists and protagonists, should have these as well.
Let’s get to it.
1: CARES
Your character must care about things.
This is not as obvious as it seems. You may not think about this. You know who didn’t think about this?
DANIEL DAVIS <---------
See? I started writing Black without, first thing, asking myself “What does Noah care about?”
As a result, I was (until today) fumbling around with the narrative. See, I had a direction I wanted to take the narrative; I had themes I wanted to explore; I had catharsis in which I wanted to engage. But know what I didn’t have?
A character who cares about something.
Know why? Because I was basing it on myself at a similar time in my life. I didn’t care about anything. I felt like I had nothing to lose.
“Nothing to lose? That sounds great! Awesome dramatic material!”
Wrong.
If you’ve got nothing to lose, you’ve got no reason to act. You’ve got nothing to fight for, violently or otherwise. There’s nothing you want, and there’s nobody who has it, and there’s nobody you have to get it from.
This is lame.
If you start this way, your interest (and your audience’s interest) in the story will wane. There’s nothing there there.
If you’ve already started your narrative without much in the Care department, invent something now, emphasize something that was previously in the background, do whatever you have to do to get the audience to buy that your characters cares for serious about something or someone.
And not care as in “I care about what happens to the Tide this year.”
I mean care as in “You’re the most important thing in the world to me.”
I mean care as in “Keeping this secret is the key to retaining my identity.”
I mean care as in “My job is the only thing keeping me going right now.”
That kind of care. The kind of thing, person, idea, status, or institution that your character will go to the wall for.
And if your character won’t do that for anything, you don’t have a character. You might have a fictional person, but he’s not suited for drama. As Egri says, “Not everyone can be a protagonist.”
BONUS POINTS: Put some of the character’s Cares into conflict with each other. E.g., Roger loves Miriam, and he’s totally committed to philosophical materialism and hardcore social-democratic politics. Miriam, on the other hand, is a pious Baptist libertarian.
LEVEL 2 MOVE: Instead of a Care simply being X, it could be “My memory/image of X.” See the last example below.
EXAMPLES
The Lord of the Rings Frodo: the Shire, Sam.
Superman Clark Kent: Lois Lane.
Spiderman Peter Parker: Mary-Jane, Aunt May
A Doll’s House Nora: Keeping the forgery secret from Helmer
12 Angry Men Henry Fonda’s character: justice for the defendant
Naruto Naruto: I want everyone in the village to acknowledge me!
Shutter Island Edward: My memory of my wife’s death (i.e., I want to remember her as dying in an apartment fire—rather than some other way)
2: GOAL
And that leads me to your character’s Goal.
Stop thinking what you’re thinking about what a goal is. Instead, when it comes time to write a character, just take this sentence and fill in the blank.
You know what? Scratch that. Fill in THIS blank:
That’s what you need. And, if your character doesn’t have anything to put in that blank, you do not have a character.
Now, it’s okay if it turns out that something does stop the character from whatever. That’s great. That means we had a dramatic reversal. What in the world could have done that? The character said that nothing would stop him! Was it something within himself that prevented him from doing whatever he said he would do? Did he choose to sacrifice that Goal for another end?
Man, those are the kind of questions you should be writing toward.
And, if, in the end, your character does achieve his goal, we’re going to want to know what’s in the way of his attaining it. Obviously, something has to interfere, or we don’t have story as such. We’ve got a vignette, an occurrence, a fact.
I’m going to talk about something Egri calls “orchestration.” It refers to the relationships between characters, specifically between their Goals. You need to ensure that one or more of your antagonists has a Goal that directly conflicts with your protagonist’s Goal. That is, your protagonist needs external opposition.
That’s the easy part, though. That’s something we don’t tend to overlook. Ask a twelve year old to tell you about the latest episode of Naruto or whatever. He’ll say something like this:
Dude! Naruto was on top of this mountain, and this totally wicked dude called Pain or something was all like I’m gonna burn down Konoha Village! And Naruto was like No way, dude! So he busted out rasengan, but then Pain was like Bwahahahaaha and totally kicked his butt. Then Naruto got really mad, and the nine-tailed fox demon started coming out of him, and he was like There’s no way I’m going to let you do that. And then …
See? Easy. You know this. The more difficult thing is next.
EXAMPLES
Naruto Naruto: Nothing will stop me from becoming Hokage!
Batman Bruce Wayne: Nothing will stop me from ridding Gotham of criminals!
Romeo and Juliet Romeo: Nothing will stop me from being united with Juliet!
Ajami Omar: Nothing will stop me from protecting my family from this Bedouin gang!
The Odyssey Odysseus: Nothing will stop me from getting back to Penelope!
Notice how Goals always feature Cares? That’s why you do Cares first.
3: FLAW
I’m going to flat out state it as an axiom:
Your character’s most interesting opposition is herself.
That’s why, according to the logic of fiction, a character shouldn’t ultimately triumph or fail without first triumphing over or succumbing to his own flaw. And, once the flaw is dealt with, the conclusion of the story, whether comedic or tragic, is determined.
Addiction narratives are perfect examples of this. The opponent is the self. You are the problem with you. You have to overcome you in order to preserve what you Care about. And, in addiction narratives, the Flaw is obvious and structural: the addiction to whatever the character is addicted to.
The Flaw is whatever within the character will prevent her from attaining her Goal and preserving her Cares.
The Flaw doesn’t have to be epic in scope. But it has to be interesting (and ideally personally significant) to you, and you have to be able to sustain it for the length of the narrative, whether that’s an 800 page novel, a 90 minute screenplay, or a single tabletop RPG session.
While I could talk about how to use the Flaw at some length, that’s for another post. The point here is that you’ve got to have one, and you’ve got to know what it is.
For this Thing, as with all the other 4, you need to know it backward and forward. Someone asks you what your character’s like? Rattle off these 5 Things off the top of your head. If you can’t, you don’t know your character well enough yet. Don’t despair; just get to know him better.
For instance, using the three Things we’ve discussed so far, here’s a character profile: “You want to know about Avatar Akhvati? I’ll tell you: her highest Care (being the human manifestation of an ancient evil god) is faithfulness to her god’s will; and nothing will stop her from becoming queen of the desert city-state of Rij [Goal]; but she wants desperately to be loved by the husband of her human host-body [a Flaw, in this case].”
EXAMPLES
The Lord of the Rings Boromir: ruthlessness in his desire to do whatever is necessary to save Gondor (including stealing the Ring)
The Lord of the Rings Frodo: the corruption of the Ring (which is effectively internalized since the Ring is a metaphor anyway; it’s not really external opposition)
Gurren Lagann Simon: doesn’t believe in himself
Romeo and Juliet Romeo: impulsiveness
2001: A Space Odyssey Humanity: has come to rely too heavily on the tools it has created (this is a wacky one; this “character” of Humanity is manifested in Dave, and Hal is the tool in question; only by overcoming this overreliance, as Dave does by disconnecting Hal, can Humanity attain a comic end, i.e., rebirth as the Starchild)
Not every character you can think of has a good Flaw. I don’t think that negates this principle. I think it means that those characters would be better characters if they had a stronger Flaw.
4: POSITION
Your character needs a philosophical statement, a declarative statement of value, with which he identifies. This is his position.
And, as part of the orchestration process before and during your actual narrative construction, you need to bring your character’s position into conflict with the positions of other characters and perhaps with other positions that the character holds.
By assigning a position to your character (which, by the way, he should advocate for strongly, by word and act) you are effectively manifesting a theme in your character. If your main protagonist has a position about duty vs friendship, you can be sure that will be a theme of your narrative, whether you intended it to be so or not. It’s theme-creation on the sly, embedded in psychology.
And, by making sure your characters having conflicting positions, you can play out Materialism vs Theism, Duty vs Friendship, Truth vs Peace, and so forth without having to talk in the abstract.
And the position doesn’t have to be an epic conceptual noun like the ones in the preceding paragraph. Your character’s position could be “A life not spent helping other people is wasted.” See? It’s a value comparison, a low-level philosophical statement. It’s “extreme,” and people might plausibly disagree over it. Gold.
EXAMPLES
The Lord of the Rings Gandalf: People can’t be trusted with power [i.e., the Ring], and no good end can justify seizing power, even for a moment
The Lord of the Rings Boromir: It’s sometimes necessary to seize power [i.e., use the Ring] in order to accomplish a higher good
Catch 22 Milo: what’s good for the syndicate is good for the Allies
1 Samuel 8 Samuel: asking for a king is wrong; only the Lord should rule over you
The Book of Judges Jephthah: I have to keep my oath, even if it means killing my own daughter
5: TRAITS
Traits are easy, easy, easy. They’re personality features.
There are only two things to remember:
ONE Traits should be exaggerated. A character shouldn’t be impulsive like your brother is impulsive. An impulsive character should embody impulsiveness! Look it up in the dictionary, and there’s your character’s impulsive mug.
TWO Orchestrate the traits of your characters. Be sure you have diversity in your cast. A bunch of melancholy mopes will probably create a static mood.
EXAMPLES
Hamlet Hamlet: melancholy
Romeo and Juliet Romeo: impulsive
Gurren Lagann Kamina: hotblooded
The Iliad Achilles: man that dude is pissed
Luther Luther: principled
Goodfellas Tommy: you want to talk about insecure!?
WRAPPING UP
Instead of a boring summary of everything I just said, how about this:
This obviously isn’t all there is to creating effective characters for your narrative. It’s the opposite: the above is the bare minimum for creating effective characters.
The thing is: most people (definitely including myself; see above) don’t even have these down.