Writing: Ramblings about Developing Characters · 3:14am Jun 20th, 2018
I've been told that I do original characters well,* so I thought I'd share some of my secrets with y'all.
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*Actually, I don't think that anyone's actually specifically said that to me, but it's been implied.
As far as I know, there are two methods to developing a character. One's what I'm going to call the character sheet method. That's where you, the author, make up a list of your character's features and benefits statistics, like you would in a role playing game. I'm most familiar with Dungeons and Dragons [old-school enough to have the red box, yo], so that's the example I'll use.
You've got your six major stats: Intelligence, Strength, Wisdom, Charisma, Dexterity, and Constiution. Those should all be fairly self-evident. Beyond that, you can flesh out your character with a physical description (which I would hope that anyone writing a character for a story would do), and then there are other stats as well. D&D has skills, which are typically non-combat things. Does the character have a profession, like basket-weaving? Can they pick pockets? Track animals? Make potions? Etc. Points are allocated and modified based on the character's base talents (i.e., a character with better dexterity is going to automatically be better at skills involving balance; a character with higher intelligence is automatically going to be able to learn more languages, etc.).
Back in the day when I played regularly, that was a good stepping off point for the actual character. The sheet itself gave a general description, but a lot of times I'd think about why the character was the way that he was. Why would my gnome have so many ranks in cartography? Well, he's interested in the world. He found a map when he was a gnomling and that was a turning point in his life. He likes to explore. He likes the artistry of maps—there are all sorts of ways that you can go on this.
Such a character is, in many ways, pre-determined. Your experienced D&D character is going to try to max the stats to make the character the most playable in the context of the game. If he's going to be a rogue, the initial dice rolls will be allocated to the stats that give him the best advantage as a rogue (Dexterity, typically), and skills will also be chosen in that manner. Maybe a couple of odd skills out to fit into the campaign; maybe the party isn't going to have a cleric, so picking a couple ranks in healing will benefit the party at large.
Story characters can be made in the same way. Let's say that you're writing a story that needs a space ship pilot. Obviously, the character you choose is going to be skilled as a pilot (unless, of course, the plot requires that he isn't skilled), and other things might take a secondary place.
If he's more of a main character, you obviously want to flesh him out more than that. He needs to have a personality when he's not a pilot. He needs hopes and dreams; he needs a back story. And there's a lot of stuff that you can work with if you go the route of a full character sheet for development. The hows and whys of his skills is an obvious one. Was he trained in the Space Marines, or did he build his own space ship? Did he enlist? Was he drafted in some sort of war?
He might have little personality quirks. Maybe he likes playing with plastic dinosaurs.
Some of my more memorable characters in D&D have really shone not because of their character sheets, but because of what they did in the campaign . . . and that's the kind of thing that everyone remembers. I can't remember the name of the character I played in the last campaign (and I doubt that anyone else in the group would, either), but what I bet everyone who played will remember is that he was obsessed with making his horse smart. He paid to have a spell cast on the horse so that it could read a book that we got as a treasure that would increase a character's intelligence, and when we got a Helm of Intellect after defeating some monster, that went on the horse. Had the campaign continued, I was bound and determined that by the end of it, my horse was going to be able to talk and read.
I don't know why I thought of doing that in the campaign. It wasn't something that my character should have though of, but as the game went on, other players—and the DM—made sure to make it possible. Difficult, but doable.
And that leads me into my second method, the one I use more often these days.
One of my stories has very minimal character notes at the beginning (and it's one y'all haven't seen yet). Notes like 'Mom' and 'Heavy' and 'Likes video games.' Little hooks, minor insights into the character—into their personality. Not a whole lot, really. That doesn't actually touch on what they do in the story, whether they're competent or not. It says nothing about their skills, nor does it cover how well they get along with each other or not.
In this particular story, I then matched them up with mostly G1 ponies who seemed to match that basic trait.
Then I did what I do best [my opinion]. I threw them into situations with another character to see how they'd do. I found a scene where two or three of them would be together and just started writing.
Not all of that can or will make it into the final story, of course, becuase I was proceeding without a plan at all. Sometimes they wanted to derail the story, to go their own route. Other times, as I got more experience with them, I found that an earlier scene was wrong.
Little bits and pieces of the characters come through in dialogue, and they develop into more complete characters, even without having full stat sheets for them. For instance, in the upcoming FNFE arc, I didn't know anything about Lignite when I started writing, but now she's my favorite character in that arc.
Silver Glow started off like that, too. I had a few basics for her character in mind, and I just started writing and let her take the story where she wanted to.*
In terms of plotting out a tight narrative, this can be a problem. I've had more than one story go off in a direction that I didn't expect. The Circle of Life turned from a stupid random comedy into something more philosophical (how philosophical depends on how you feel about poop). Diamond Tiara Dies Alone was planned as a dark comedy but didn't end up as one.
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*Since it was a daily, there are some continuity problems in the beginning because I didn't know her well enough—had the story been written a different way, I would have fixed them before publishing. I could have retroactively fixed them, but I think that that's unfair to all the readers who went along with me for the whole ride.
There are surely other methods for developing a character, and I'm not going to be the one to say that my way is the best way. I think it has its advantages for loosely plotted slice-of-life stories, especially for people who are fast writers and aren't going to be terribly upset about having to either ultimately delete hundreds or thousands or words, or are content to let a story go wherever the characters want to take it, regardless of what the author originally planned.
I also think that myu perferred method—throw the characters together and see what happens—comes with its pitfalls, and maybe isn't the best technique for a beginning writer. There's a lot of 'gut feelings' involved, and intellectually I know that gut feelings are my brain making connections of things that it's learned and knows that might not be fully apparent to me, but do have a source somewhere. While I'd like to think that there's some parallel universe of ponies who are communicating with me telephaticallly and making me write what I do, that's probably not actually so.
But . . .
There's something magical about just knowing at the beginning of a chapter that there's going to be a character named Lignite, and then having her turn into something special, something that I didn't know when I first picked her name out of a (proverbial) hat.
There's something satisfying about suddenly knowing something about a character that I didn't know before . . . I guess in a way, it's like I'm reading the story myself for the first time.
“When Mom comes back, she's gonna yell at you,” Feathermay remarked, looking up from the computer.
“She's not my Mom,” Splish Splash said, and picked the game controller back up.
“She's still gonna yell at you, 'cause you should be getting ready for tomorrow and not playing video games.”
“I am getting ready.” She fluffed out her wings. “I'm relaxing my mind so that I'm ready.”
“Uh-huh.” Feathermay looked back down at the computer.
“I am.”
“How come there isn't a game where you're supposed to rescue people?” Heavy hooked the pull-tab on the can with his teeth and opened the root beer.
“I dunno. There is a game called Choplifter, but it's kinda dumb.” Splish Splash stuck a straw in the root beer and took a sip, then focused her attention back on the game.
And let's be honest, doesn't this look like a pony who would like playing video games?
Ah good, now I don’t have to hold this gun to your head to get the information.
I'll have to try to remember to say that to you next time we meet, lol.
Good advice.
But what other methods would there be? Live action role playing?
When I first played Baldur's Gate, I was a bit confused what the point was in just clicking the reroll button over and over until you got the attributes you wanted. It was a vestige of old D&D versions. Previously, my biggest experience with WRPGs was Castle of the Winds where you assigned points out of a pool. (Of course, that game had a nasty glitch where you could set your CON points to the lowest, give the surplus points to everything else, then keep casting Magic Arrow. Once your mp was drained, you'd keep casting it and it would drain your health and constitution rating, but due to programming oversight, it wouldn't kill you. Eventually, it would underflow and you'd suddenly have maximum CON points as well as higher-than normal everything else since you gave them the original CON points.)
This was long before CHAR being useless became a rule of thumb.
Or you could look at certain characters having certain ability scores, because if they had different abilities from the beginning of their life, they would have grown up diffrently mostly, with far fewer fighting against their scores as that already biases them even further against the game of cheat, sorry, life?
Maybe he likes being speared through the chest by a large spar, then dying. :V
When I started writing The Donutier, I had no idea who that red-and-black aspiring alicorn was, and only the vaguest notions that Sprinkle was cynical and snarky.
I had a lot of fun meeting both of them.
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Role playing can really help you develop a character! If, for example, you have a canon character and an OC in your story, have someone else roleplay the characters they already know, and you roleplay the new one.
Man, it's been over a year since Silver Glow's Journal ended. Wonder what she's been up to, hmmmm?
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Seriously, though, if you want to know something about my process, just ask. As a warning, though, sometimes the answer is disappointing.
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Thanks!
Well, if you type 'how to develop a character' into Google, you get 221 million hits. Here's a link to the wikihow article:
Develop a Character for a Story
I kinda skimmed it (like really skimmed it [like mostly looked at the pictures]) but one thing that stuck out was their first step was to give your character a name, whereas in multiple stories I've written, the character's final name doesn't come until late in the process. For instance, in Marathon, the stallion was named Star Gazer (yes, after the pony in that one episode) right up until the end--that wasn't the name I wanted, but that was kind of the mannerisms I was going for. Other stories have names like [MARE 1] up until a second draft or so. The one that's got a quote section in the article, I think two of the characters have been renamed since the initial draft.
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My favorite method for balanced characters is to do the 4d6, discard the lowest, and then assign. It lets you (generally) have a better than average character, and lets you pick and choose where you're putting your stats, but also gives you the possibility of one or two somewhat low scores.
Using game mechanics exploits is always fun. Works better in video games, though--I recall many a pen and paper campaign where the DM fudged a few die rolls or just said that that wouldn't happen--or would, as the case may be. I figure if the player can make a convincing case for why something might work, the DM can allow it. You don't get that kind of flexibility in a computer game.
True story, one of my rogue characters once hid in his own shadow. I ran down an open street with two guards chasing me, and the DM asked me what I was going to do.
"Hide."
"Where?"
"Um . . . in my own shadow?"
<long-suffering sigh> Roll for it.
I roll a natural twenty on hide. Both guards roll single-digits (I think one rolled a 1). "Um . . . they don't see you."
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That's true, but for both role-playing and story purposes, we're often writing characters who need to fill a pre-determined role. If I'm writing a story about Sea Swirl diving, for example, I presume from the very beginning that she knows what she's doing and has all the appropriate skills, so randomly assigning her abilities isn't terribly useful from a story standpoint.
Having said that, of course you can absolutely write a compelling story where the main character is completely out of their depth, or utterly incompetent, or whatever. Likewise in a role playing game, you can play somebody who has no business doing what he's doing. Heck, I played one campaign where my attack scores were so low with the weapon I was actually trained with, I had a better chance of hitting using an improvised weapon.
For most of my stories, I usually have an idea how things are going to go before I even start really developing the characters for it.
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Meeting your characters is the best part of writing, IMHO. For me, anyway, they often surprise me, too. Mine generally aren't terribly well-behaved; they like to do things that I wasn't anticipating.
Assuming that you don't spend most of your time in a lonely writer's garret.
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Well, by now she would have graduated and she's probably working as a weather manager of some sort. Maybe as an assistant, and maybe she doesn't like it too much. She'd stick with it for a while, but she'd wind up going back to the coast, even if it's sort of a demotion. She's probably also finished her guidebook by now.
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Mr. Biscuit, that is a paragraph, the minimum length for this assignment is 35 pages. Now, I am willing to give you an extension but I expect exceptional work. I remind you this is 25% of your final grade.
I would say that those two method are not mutually exclusive, taking note does not prevent you from trying to let your character live, it just prevent you from forgetting your ideas.
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One day there will be another story in the Silver Glow 'verse. When, I can't say for sure, but it will happen.
And odds are good it will be over 35 pages.
Myers Briggs types might be better in this case. If you haven't run across it, it's a type of personality test that attempts to break down personality into 4 key areas. Then it looks at how different values in these areas interact with each other and builds personality archetypes (here's an example). A decent amount of people think it's a load of shit. I think they can be accurate but should be taken with a large grain of salt. I had to manually score my test (psych GE) and my experience is that it works better in the extremes and not as well in the middle. Regardless I think it can be a pretty powerful tool for character development.
Honestly I'm not sure I can do this, and that may be a big drawback if I ever write. I'm not sure my characters could ever surprise me, they're more like puppets for me. They exist in my head and can't do anything without me.
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That's a little bit finer a detail, probably along the line of skills or abilities. Certainly worth considering for a character (if that's the way you want to develop them), but IMHO doesn't paint as complete a sketch as the six main stats in D&D (for example, the Meyers Briggs test says nothing about physical strength or dexterity).
It takes a while. I think I was in my third novel when it happened for the first time, when I discovered that a werefox had agoraphobia.
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It'd be features and traits.
Overall Meyers Briggs type (MBTI) and D&D cover different things. MBTI is solely mental where D&D is mostly physical, pretty much any set of D&D stats can be any archetype. But I think MBTI paints a better picture, it really lets you get into their head and what see what makes them tick rather than describing basic attributes. And I think that's a lot more valuable than what the D&D stats describe.
They both are inadequate on their own though.
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I was just thinking a bit more on the subject today, and realized that a lot of times when I start developing OCs--especially in PoE settings--I often tend to think of one thing that they like--not so much a major thing like Silver Glow likes flying, but a little thing like Silver Glow likes Taco Bell.
That doesn't really play into anything that Meyers-Briggs or D&D stats cover, but for me at least it's a way to get a grasp on the person beyond the stats.
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Both are templates to help flesh out characters. Lots of details and personality development is still needed. And idiosyncrasies and contradictions are good for Myer's Briggs.
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True, true. I just feel that the Myers-Briggs might be too limited for people who want to develop a character that way.
Then again, for an upcoming story, the extent of notes for one particular character is "likes video games," so that's not exactly saying much about her.
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Personally, I don't find it to limiting. One of the reasons is that Myer's Briggs expresses tendencies not facts. As an example, peple with an MBTI with -J on the end tend to be more organized. That doesn't mean that people with -P can't be organized and people with -J have to be disorganized. It also doesn't say anything about how organized. Twilight is a -J and she's borderline OCD. I'm a -J as well. I can be organized in some areas, but I'm a massive slob as well (I moved into my new apartment about 3 weeks ago and never bothered to finish unpacking).
But limitations aren't inherently bad. Let's say i'm designing a car and I decide to make an SUV. I now have limitations on how narrow I can make the wheelbase. But this limitation is to ensure that the vehicle remains stable.
Personally, I find these limitations really useful. Like I mentioned earlier, for me, the characters can't make their own decisions. I have to explicitly tell them what to do and I'm worried about to much of me bleeding into my characters (especially for characters that are pretty far away from me, like Pinkie). I find Myer's Briggs types useful for putting myself in my characters shoes. I can get a feeling for how they see the world and how they'll behave. The limitations can help prevent characters from being out of character.
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If it works for you, it’s not wrong. I just sat through a panel at Trotcon that was sort of a ‘basics of writing a story,’ and there was a lot of stuff that the panelist said was good practice and it’s stuff that I generally don’t do. Like, I know people that do outlines and I generally don’t bother with that at all. Occasionally I need to, but for the most part I don’t.
I can see the advantage of using it to keep their personality separate from yours. I can generally do that with just really basic stuff, or at least I think I can. Nobody’s ever said that all my characters are basically the same, anyway.
I guess in some ways it’s like arguing keyboard layout. I’ve had a few people explain to me the benefits of Dvorak, and who knows, it might be a better layout overall, but with a few million words of ponyfic under my belt on a qwerty keyboard, I’m not willing to put in the time to get back up to speed on a new key arrangement.
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to each their own.
I had a friend who was big into devorak. I told him that any advantage was negated by having to install drivers on any computer that wasn't his.
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