Character Building 201 with Chuck and Scarlet · 12:33am Oct 23rd, 2016
My better half, Scarlet, wrote a piece on character creation -- or more specifically, character integration, because characters don’t exist in a vacuum, and characters feel stronger when they fit correctly in their fictional world. This isn’t just a literary Chubb Illusion where a character feels more real when you see them in their setting; working out the ways that your setting influences your OC will make that character stronger in isolation compared to a character created ex-nihlo.
Scarlet wrote seven questions to develop your OC:
1. What relationships does your character have?
2. How does your character make their living?
3. Where does your character come from?
4. What does your character like to eat?
5. What’s your character’s religious background?
6. Who does your character look up to?
7. What everyday experiences does your character despise?
Scarlet thoroughly explains the reasoning behind these questions in her blog post, and after chatting with her, we came up with some more thoughts. I agreed with the content of the list, but I’d have ordered it differently. Say I’ve got the most basic ideas for a new OC for a story, let’s call her Olena Carpenter, but I don’t know enough about her to confidently stick her in a scene. My thoughts would go:
4. What does your character like to eat?
6. Who does your character look up to?
7. What everyday experiences does your character despise?
2. How does your character make their living?
3. Where does your character come from?
5. What’s your character’s religious background?
1. What relationships does your character have?
The theme of the second list is rising specificity. Relationships, religion, background, these are all vast areas that contain reams of information about a character. You could write a dissertation on say, an Albus Dumbledore’s or a Malcolm Tucker’s relationships alone. Alternately, you could write a few hundred words about their culinary tastes. If I’m staring at a blank page, the latter is a simple task, and the former a daunting monstrosity.
Also, the first three items have something else in common: they’re about visceral, powerful emotions. Likes and dislikes, taste and distaste, admiration and loathing. My mind can dither back and forth for hours on the creeds of Olena Carpenter’s religion, but if I know that she harbors a deep crush on her philosophy tutor and dry heaves at the smell of vodka, I know these things. They are so personal that they do not need to be carefully fitted around detail and circumstance, and once you have the vague outlines of your OC in place, you probably know these details long before you’ve articulated them.
Crucially, I would also start with these details because they are relatively disconnected from the setting. This seems bonkers since the whole point of the list is ‘Build A Better OC By Integrating With Your Setting’ but hear me out: there’s an asymmetry of influence with the emotional items. The Olena who loathes spirits, hates the cold, loves studying and forms crippling crushes on her mentor figures can fit into fantasy, science-fiction or contemporary fiction with equal ease. It wouldn’t be a stretch to ponify her, even. If you modify your setting as it develops - for instance, setting a fantasy story in the same world and country, but a different city - these emotional items would only need small, cosmetic changes.
If you’ve worked on a big-ticket item like religion, and you decide to move the story from not!Catholic to not!Protestant territory, that’s a whole bunch of rejiggling you’ve gotta go through. Set Breaking Bad in Canada, and it would be a show where a nebbish teacher goes through chemotherapy. Relationships are the trickiest of all because of the mutualism and recursion: each character affects and changes the other characters in their story through their presence alone. Imagine an Ankh-Morpork City Watch with no Captain Carrot, or a still-alive Ned Coates, or Hogwarts where Wormtail got caught or where Snape saw a fucking shrink at some point. These changes would ripple through the whole story and change just about every character they touched, dropping further ripples.
When you’ve built your setting, watching these changes happen is awesome. When you’ve barely got a foundation to build on, it’s like playing jenga on a gym ball.
But wait! If the point of these questions is building the setting into the character to make both setting and character stronger, what’s the point of questions that barely affect the setting? If Olena Carpenter’s favorite foods, pet peeves and hero figures could stay consistent between settings as different as space opera and sword and sorcery, then surely they don’t affect the setting at all...
That is central to my point. You don’t notice how these things affect the setting - but your brain does. Once Olena has an emotional core, your brain starts filling in the little details around it based on what you know. It becomes a literary yeast starter, growing differently depending on the mix you drop it into. Once you have the core roughly sketched, you can fiddle at the backdrops of religion, culture and relationships to your heart’s content, because you’ll always have the core to fall back to. Once you have a rough caricature of Olena, you can start working out her relationships with others, because you know how one side - Olena’s side - of the conversation will work. You’ll know how her religion informed her values, and how her hometown created her personality.
Scarlet works differently, for a different reason.
For Scarlet, each question creates more questions, and the answers are general and subject to change. What’s the local climate? Desert oasis, fishing town, jungle city? Who are the people that live there? What are the different faiths? How does everyone sustain themselves?
She sketches out the setting, going for the big picture, and happily erases or changes anything that doesn’t suit her purposes. Once she’s happy with the rough outlines, she fills in more detail. She drills down on bits that interest her more. Nothing is set in stone, until it is.
In doing this, she ends up creating a setting and a character, but also a setting which very quickly lends itself to creating more characters. After a few pages of scribbles, she could easily fill her setting with a dozen possible characters. My bottom-up approach doesn’t lend itself to that until I’ve basically dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on my OC, because the meat of the setting is the very last thing I approach.
Scarlet’s method comes from her background in collaborative storytelling, D&D, various RP stuff, where allowing others to build on your contributions is as important as the contributions themselves.. Mine comes from ADHD, because if I let myself get bogged down in big, interconnected things, my brain will give up and I’ll never get anything written. Take from that what you will.
Not satisfied with merely outlining how we create characters, Scarlet also had some thoughts on what stories satisfy her:
1) The story is about a person who I sympathize with and possibly admire.
2) It takes place in a defined, vibrant setting that acts on the characters and is appropriately effected by their actions. (cough oblivion cough)
3) It works in the service of an emotional or intellectual message that the writer both understands and deliberately conveys. (cough bioshock cough)
I basically agree with all of this*. In 90% of settings, these rules work perfectly because they create ease of emotional investment, something we’ll talk about in a later blog. Not this one tho, because my keyboard is being stolen--
Hey, this is Scarlet interrupting your regularly scheduled Chuck Finley to slip a few extra points in here!
Chuck mentions my background in collaborative storytelling as the reason I worldbuild the way I do, which is true - but a bigger part of that is that most of my work as a writer has been working on little bits and details for other people’s stories. I tend to create big picture because I’m often asked to evaluate big picture. I’m also just generally interested in settings and histories both big and small picture, so there’s that.
Oh and it would be remiss of me to not mention the other other reason I work from the setting first and Chuck doesn’t - Chuck is a god-damned monster. But in a good way! When I was helping him with Bitterwine, the story collection that actually inspired me to make my post in the first place even if I didn’t credit it right away, one of the first things that impressed me was how he went from a single lead character to a larger, detailed city with a number of defined ethnic groups with unique food cultures, religions, and even neighborhoods. Building from the bottom up like that is a skill you have to work at and even if he claims it’s a coping mechanism, it’s also a demonstration of how gosh-darned good my boyfriend is at storytelling. The biggest reason I build from top-down is I have a very hard time emulating that style. If you’re like me, a top-down, D&D game master style might work better for you.
*Exceptions for stories built around antiheroes and other kinds of unsympathetic protagonists.
Let the record show that when I interrupt Chuck's blogs, I give him compliments.
When he makes material for mine, occasionally he just links me Kudzuhaiku fics.
Take of that what you will. ^^
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She's too good for me, everyone.
See, weird as it sounds, I actually write like Chuck in here. Which should sound weird, because literally everything else we do tends to be the total opposite.
Thing is, I can never get what the character likes or hates at first; I always need some kind of minor grasp on the general idea of the character as an archetype before I even start designing anything. It can be something as simple as "weird" or "annoying", and from there I build up.
I also always ask myself the same question -- "The characterwalks down the street and a little girl comes crying to them. Asks if the character can help her rescue her kitty from a tree. What does the character do?" -- and then I start doing what Chuck describes in here. I don't think I'm able to go into so much detail, though. I lack the MENTAL CAPACITY.
Scarlet's method sounds better for people like MrNumbers, who can build extremely complex worlds without really trying. It's about juggling a bunch of different details, creating a system, and letting it mash together into different characters that work perfectly with the setting, but I am absolutely unable to do that. It really sounds like something a DM would be super good about.
4267103 One other thing we didn't even bring up, actually? And in retrospect I should've? My approach is also more useful if you're writing with the deliberate intent of using a stock character, or transplanting a character across multiple settings.
Since the core idea is already set with a stock character you're moving around, what you're doing is mostly building the world and then going back to your core template to change the things that are out of step with the new setting, or tweaking elements of the setting to not clash as much with the concept. Which is, again, a common RP/collab storytelling thing. If I like playing a specific type of character a lot (or writing them), I'll probably end up using that archetype in multiple settings. So in some ways, the where-do-you-live, what-do-you-do, etc., become more important from that point.
4267119
This'd be the reason why most pulp writers could write the exact same grizzly action hero in a western setting, and then in a futuristic setting, and then in a noir city, and so on, I suppose. And why they made it work.
4267125 Pretty much. But it's also why you can tell it's the same character every time. Building bottom-up each time means every character feels just a bit more distinct, and also can result in the worldbuilding moving in directions you didn't expect at the start of your journey.
Really though, at the end of the day, the lesson is that you can't treat character and world as if they have no impact on each other. Either you have to shape the world around a character, or you have to shape the character to work within a world. Fail, and you end up with a character and world that are at odds with each other.
Just gonna bookmark this post.
4267176 Because if your sentai doesn't have a hero in Red, it isn't a real sentai.
This is a rule.
I wonder if the difference between the bottom-up and top-down approaches reflects a more fundamental difference in worldview. Some people see themselves very much as individuals, whereas others think of themselves as products of their environments. It's the old nature vs nurture debate regarding how we form our personalities (obviously, this is somewhat of a false dichotomy as the real answer falls somewhere in between). However, an individualistic worldview seems conducive to the bottom-up approach, which defines the core of the characters first and then decides how they fit into the setting, while the top-down approach, which grows the characters from the setting, reflects the more collectivist perspective.
4267125
I actually render it more simple again when I build characters, which is to say I use a lot of smaller, broader questions and simplify it in tiers;
First way, for a general overview of the character, is adjective adjective objective. Usually when I'm writing a character I know what role of purpose they need to fill in the story. Which means I'm either going to write;
A) Someone who is absolutely unqualified for that role
B) An archetype absolutely-what-you'd-imagine character to be in that role
C) Someone who is weirdly, strangely a good fit for that role but who you wouldn't think of at first. Like oil drillers being sent to blow up an asteroid. An absolute opposite.
When I've figured out which of the three it's going to be; subversion, straight or inversion, I get a more visual idea for them in my head. That's where adjective adjective objective comes in; two broad descriptors that give you a strong mental image, and an objective that would push them through a scene.
Twilight Sparkle is an awkward nerd who wants to be a good friend. (In some episodes she's a charismatic leader who wants to study, so they can show what others want her to be and what she wants to be conflicting so consistently.)
Hermoine Granger is a proud nerd who wants to make the world a better place
Rainbow Dash is a brash athlete who wants to be the best.
You'll find that the stronger protagonists have simpler and more relatable summaries.
For example; Pinkie doesn't have a consistent adj. adj. obj. largely because she isn't written consistently enough, especially depending on whether she's a foreground or background character. It's why even though I love her, she has such a broad scale of quality in episodes, especially in season 3.
The reason you need an objective is to help answer a more complex question in a scene; Whats their inciting action?
After that, finding specifics and depth to a character becomes a lot easier. And thinking of them as to how their objective relates to your scene or story when you start makes it a lot easier to think about how they'd interact with your world.
And then all that's left is...
How many of this character would it take to screw in a lightbulb?
4267318 With the potential caveat being that at the very least, I don't think I see myself as a collectivist. I certainly don't act like one!
4267375 The only problem I see with adj. adj. obj. is that using it as a strict test for character strength depends on how good you are at coming up with summaries for characters.
Anakin Skywalker is a temperamental, brooding Jedi who wants to save his wife.
Bella Swan is a clumsy, intelligent high-schooler who wants to learn more about the strange boy in her class.
It took me maybe a minute tops to come up with both of those, together. Neither of those characters is particularly strong.
I'd say adj. adj, obj. is a stronger starting premise if you also have a vague idea of your specific plot in mind, and you're constructing a character to meet that first and the world second.
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I don't disagree. I was more saying it as an "Even more basic than the basics" example of character creation. It should be to character creation what a logline is to the broader pitch of a screenplay. Simply stopping there is likely to get you, as you aptly put it, a Luke Skywalker or a Bella Swan: Someone who is purely functional and consistent to the story, nothing more.
Highlighting relevant line from my original comment:
4267611 Yeah, fair. I'm just positing that it's a less useful method if you don't already know that.
ADND vs ADHD.
Very interesting blog post for me. This is one of those aspects of writing that I've always done by feel. I have a black box full of bits and bobs that reject some new bits and demand others, and eventually it turns into a mental model of a character. It's not an especially directable process.
It's very instructive to see these kinds of framework suggestions laid out plainly. Some bits are familiar. Some bits are familiar only after carefully unpacking the black box, as if you've explained my own brain to me.