Character Building

When I said I wanted to delve into characters on the last post, I apparently meant 'immediately.'

After quite a few discussions with my screenplay-writing genius friend Antonio, I think it was becoming inevitable. In one of our many discussions, how a character is built came up and it became clear I'm a bit of an odd one out in that I don't go into my stories knowing exactly what my characters are going to be. UnNamed was started with the vague idea of a mercenary who never tells people his name and usually ignores other people's names, giving them nicknames that are more akin to mnemonic devices. He's kind of an asshole, but more along the lines of a practical survivalist. Magic and the unknown makes him nervous, but he handles his fears with a combination of questionable comedy or the equivalent of tearing off the bandaid and getting things done.

I didn't give him an eye color or hair color (I think any mention of them is just 'dark') but he has distinct scars because they became an arc of the story. I'm not a plotter, at least, not at first. However, I find the many ways writers DO use to create characters can be fun and interesting. They don't particularly guarantee the writing skill is there, but it certainly doesn't show a lack of imagination. Personally, I did character dossiers to death as a teenager. I spent gobs of time making up characters for stories I never wrote. I studied psychology (and still do) with something akin to obsession (okay, the obsession part tapered off). However, over time, it's become clear that many readers don't want to be inundated with a writer's need to control so tightly what the reader might be seeing.

Let's make this post a little 'listy' while I go through some of the many ways people undergo a character creation process.

• Character Dossiers (aka Profiles)

 Might as well start with the one already mentioned. Dossiers are a collection of many things-- pictures or drawings of a characters, a physical list of features and descriptions, information such as hometown, friends, family, motivations, fears. It's the equivalent of a biography. This can either be extremely useful or extremely limiting. In many cases, I find the full measure of a character to sometimes impede them from organic growth and the maintenance of a dossier to reflect those changes to be distracting. At some point the maintenance between the story and the dossier can cause conflict if not meticulous. However, it's fun as hell. To visualize your characters, to get into their head, often starts with understanding them on a basic level then throwing them into situations that test what they think they know about themselves. As a writer, you are not just burdened with the task of getting into your character, but in making the world around them organic. It's certainly another branch topic, but certainly even the environment can be deliberate or passive in those trials. There are a ton of apps and templates on the internet these days, but my roots included sketchbooks full of pictures and collages and... not a whole lot of writing outside of that. Dossiers can be just that-- fun in and of themselves, but if you're using it to supplement a story, it may be a better idea to keep it a focused tool for that purpose.

• Character Interviews

While this is not my thing, I'm not unfamiliar. My best friend Liz and I used to assign a pen color to each of our 'characters' and write out conversations between them. On a more formal level, some people like to 'interview' their characters or someone else's as if they are sitting down and asking them face to face. You can do this in many ways-- either plotting the questions as an interviewer would in advance or again, go more organic and let the questions evolve as the answers become more inspirational. For instance, you might ask the character if they themselves have a favorite genre in media. Now the next question might be if they like animals, but if this usually stodgy character has a secret love for romance novels, then you might go into lines of questioning about their love life or attitudes on romance rather than the next generic thing on the list. It goes for real life interviews, but the minute you can get an interview to delve into serious introspection, you're tapping into a genuine source of knowledge on character. James Lipton is notorious for his 'silly' questions that often lead to actors shedding their persona once he taps in on one that triggers a genuine response. While you are essentially burdened with tapping into the facets of a character that is sharing headspace with you, you are getting to utilize what you know about others to develop them independently as well. If you are often worried about whether all of your characters are essentially you, then you can use interviews both to delve deeper AND create the separation from that temptation to just create an army of characters that all sound like you.

• Jungian Types (also known as Myers-Briggs)

While Carl Jung founded the principles of personality types, nowadays we are more familiar with the Myers-Brigg system of type casting. Jung believed that most people fell into one of 12 basic archetypes that are still popularly used in character building, while the M-B system uses the letter combinations to explore the possibilities of the archetype system. The basic M-B system is a four letter result based on each of the following possibilities:

I/E: Introvert/extrovert  This is basically your level of social enthusiasm. From the outgoing life of the party to the shy loner and everything in between.

N/S: iNtuition/sensing  This is one of the trickier ones, in my opinion, because it deals with perception. You are either a person that trust your physical senses or you 'feel' things on a deeper level that persuades them. Again, there are shades to this.

F/T: Feeling/Thinking The most interesting one for me because I waver on this one in tests and it has to do with judgement. Are you someone who judges on an emotional or logical level?

P/J: Perceiving/Judging This was added later as a supplement to the F/T mark. This actually adds the shade that some people passively perceive what they experience, while some are quicker to judge what they are experiencing. This doesn't mean either one is incapable of flexibility-- it more or less just points to the speed at which we are comfortable with assessing it. Perception people are more likely to withhold their opinion until they feel they have enough facts, judging people weigh in quicker but are also open to changing it later.

The original three were the factors in Jungian archetype results so the M-B addition only added more nuance to them. Use typing/archetyping can be extremely helpful, but again, this tends to be something I do after I get to know my characters in the story. If I'm particularly lost on some aspect of their character, I might use this system to guide me, but it's very philosophical in nature rather than scientific. No one really fits neatly into boxes with the more extreme events in life.

I recommend going to the Similar Minds site to take the test for yourself or your characters. I know it isn't a flashy site, but the results include determining which 'chaotic' factors are likely including mental illness, which can be really interesting for a deeper character build so screw web design aesthetics. It really just looks more like a database style page, so it's clean of clutter at least.

• Jesus, Take the Wheel

Okay, I'm inserting a clear bias but there's somewhat of an insistence that the author has absolutely no control over their characters and they are simply recording everything verbatim from this source that seems to haunt/plague/stalk/control them. While I steer well clear of anything that smells too strongly of encouraging mental illness, there's also nothing wrong with pretending this is the case. Method actors are often insufferable, but when the results are a clear credit to the work, it's certainly more tolerable. I have said it myself-- that often my endeavors to be organic made me little more than 'a window into a world'. While I might have cringed at some of the things that presented in one of my characters through process, they made it to the page because regardless of my personal feelings, it was true to the story and true to the characters. The process of writing can often leave us feeling uncomfortable, even for the most experienced writers. When you are accessing the deeper parts of your brain, sometimes you run into less than desirable parts of reality. Now, brains are assholes. They often put together two ideas that have no business being together. Sometimes they are perfectly okay together, but you find some moral or personal objection to its presence in your work. While I think it can be beneficial to let your character run through some uncomfortable organic cycles, ultimately, I like to think we control our fingers, our content, our storytelling. Keep in mind-- I can be annoyingly literal when I can't tell if someone is joking or not and if it sounds like bullshit, I'm likely to crack a joke and not play along at all. The idea that you are distressed because your character wants to sabotage your story only tells me you struggle with pronouns and possibly that you think it's quirky to procrastinate or distance yourself from the discipline and struggle of being a storyteller. By the way, I'm an IN(T/F)J. I judge first then adjust my logic if you can prove otherwise. I think that's the Bitch with a Heart of Gold Archetype (no, I made that up).

• Stick to the Basics

It's my experience that human character is actually pretty basic, even when you strip away labels and nuance. There are few aspects that are hardwired in. How many of us are surprised by what we learn about who they were in different stages of their life? How many of us are even who we were ten years ago? When you use generic adjectives to assess each aspect of your self,  you start to hone in on the things that carry over consistently or were just a phase. I still consider myself gullible and naive, but I also learned to eliminate the traits that signaled that weakness to others. This is why kids seem so infuriatingly honest while elders seem so... infuriatingly honest but cautious and even boring. Somewhere in the middle of a life cycle, we are rife with defense mechanisms to mask our flaws but the underlying character leaks out through the chinks in our armor. Just like human bodies are quite simple in our first brush with anatomy, further study doesn't create new body parts, only extends your knowledge of how they work, what they're called, and the range of limits and mutations. Human psychological 'complexity' is still rooted in very basic structure, which is why you CAN create depth in characters without a ton of preparation. 

Let the story be your case study sometimes. You can always go back and adjust the inconsistencies, but keep in mind, some inconsistencies of character ARE organic. Just make sure if your monotone serious character gets oddly bubbly around a certain other character that it's coming from the hidden base of their characters and wasn't just you forgetting who was who. (I used to work service jobs; even I can get oddly bubbly from time to time.) Remember it's also your burden to reveal why at some point too. Some storytelling is successful when you deliberately hang some plots for interpretation, but an attempt at creating a complex character means you got some 'splaining to do or sorry, they're still shallow. You gotta turn that 'oh, he has a crush on her, that's why' into something compelling and meaningful. If you've ever disliked someone on first impression then realized they're pretty damned awesome once you cut through the surface, you already know why. They weren't shallow; your perception was. As a writer, you are attempting to create those connections as they pertain to the overall story. Readers aren't terribly interested in all of the many hours of awkward small talk that are expected in the build-up of natural relationships. Your job is jump-cutting to the good stuff. People want to suffer with your characters, but not suffer in trying to find them worthwhile or interesting.

I suppose I could scratch around and find some more character building goodies, but that's already a lot to consider. Study psychology, philosophy, mythology, anthropology-- if it has an -ology in it, there's a good chance it's useful (that includes an apology, which I often reserve for my tendency to ramble). Make it research, make it serious, make it fun, but remember the purpose in character creation is to attempt the mastery of that character/characters. Different stories have different needs and you'll probably struggle a lot finding how they are meant to move your story. I don't feel like a series makes that easier at all. You might get to know your characters better, but you are also establishing more facts and being accountable to them. And you have to know when to jump ship. Sometimes, writers counter claustrophobia by trying to write through it, but what happens? Rather than the sleek focus of a well-realized story, they kind of end up drifting aimless in an open field-- plenty of room to roam but who gives a fuck? A lot of shows really aren't that good past their second or third seasons, but there's a familiarity and a nostalgia that sometimes lends to us torturing ourselves for far longer than we should. While popular series certainly rake in the money well past the point where they flopped, that's not what I aspire to. For me, a story is done when I can tie up the plots. There are more stories to write and, yes, I could be flexible and prolong it but at this point in my work, there's no temptation to do so. I'm a gamer so I'm certainly no stranger to the idea of subquests, but if at all possible, I try to avoid the oversaturation of an idea. Unless it involves cheese, oversaturation is not a good thing.

What are some ways you like to get into character? Are they successful to your process or is this just another Sims household that you are never actually going to play? How important is that answer to your goals? As a character artist, this is perfectly within the realm of purposeful work, but not when I'm procrastinating on a story.

Whatever you chose to do, I do hope you enjoy the process. I might get lynched for saying this but sometimes characters are second to the interest of the story itself. Characters are still an important element and we all like to fall in love with characters, but I've seen too many stories dissolve into boring puddles of conversation and little movement or purpose. While consider your characters, their relationship to the others, be mindful of the places they'll be breathing life into. Weave all of these elements into something spectacular!