Guest Post by Josh Morrey.

We’ve read in several articles this month that characters are what drive a story. Characters are why we read fiction. Very few people want to read a fictitious science or economics textbook. (Though I’m sure they exist, and someone reads them). For the most part readers require plot and conflict, neither of which we can have without characters to overcome those conflicts or drive that plot.

But a good story requires more than just a warm body to go through the motions. Characters have to be interesting, intriguing. We don’t want just some Joe Schmoe cardboard cutout to destroy the One Ring and defeat Sauron; we want terrified, tender, Frodo Baggins, smallest of all the heroes, to show his incredible bravery as he faces down an enemy that entire armies couldn’t stop. We want Neo, who absolutely knows he’s not “The One”, to stop running and face down Smith and the other Agents and be The One.

So how do we create interesting characters? This is something I’ve spent a lot of time on recently. See, I’m in the process of developing a space opera web comic in the vein of Howard Taylor’s Schlock Mercenary. It’s about a small, intergalactic shipping company. Part of the developmental process is creating an interesting cast of characters to crew my ship.

One thing I like to see in characters, that I think makes them vastly more interesting, is contradictory traits. Actions or personalities that belie their outer appearance, or challenge their stereotype. For example, one of my main characters is an 8’ tall living rock with the strength and toughness of ten men. So, what’s the stereotype of a character like this? Muscle, enforcer, tough guy, brute.

This character, Argnik, is the best friend and confidant of my main character, Dax, and by all appearances is absolutely Dax’s brawn, like Chewbacca for Han Solo, Little John for Robin Hood, or Fezzik for Inigo Montoya. And these are all great characters. But if I merely make Argnik Dax’s brute force, he loses a little originality and is thereby little less interesting. So how do I change that? First, I made Argnik an accountant. And then I made him a pacifist. Argnik wouldn’t hurt the proverbial fly, and wants nothing more than to lose himself in the endless calculations of shipping manifests and invoices. Now, Dax’s enemies don’t know that, so they, like everyone else, just assume that Argnik is nothing but dumb muscle. An illusion Dax is in no hurry to contradict.

Another way to create interesting characters is internal conflict. As Jace pointed out at the beginning of the month, no character should be all good, or all bad. The world isn’t black and white. It’s full of grays and a myriad colors. Just because someone is makes good choices, doesn’t mean they won’t be tempted to make bad ones, and vice versa. We all make mistakes, some more often, or much larger, than others.

People are complex creatures. Your characters should be as well. Don’t make them the sentient being equivalent of Star Wars planets. Planets in Star Wars tend to have only one biome; the forest moon of Endor, the ice planet of Hoth, the desert planet of Tattooine. Earth, on the other hand, has no fewer than five biomes, and as many as fourteen, depending on who you ask and how they’re classified. And many of those biomes are completely opposite to each other; desert vs jungle, tropic vs arctic. Your characters should have just as many biomes in the form of personality and physical traits, and many of those should be at odds with each other. Those create conflict, which, in turn, makes for more interesting characters.

Think about some of your favorite conflicted or contradictory characters. What deep desires does their exterior façade hide? What inner conflicts do they struggle with? Like the ruffians from the movie Tangled, does your hook-handed thug yearn to be concert pianist?

Maybe he should.

Guest Writer Bio: Josh Morrey is a writer, artist, gamer, husband, and father, Josh has been writing fiction for nearly ten years. He is a member of the Word Vomit Writers Group, which group blogs at The Writer’s Ramble. Josh has one story published in Issue 2 of Promptly and has earned three Honorable Mentions and a Semi-Finalist in the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contest. He is currently developing a space opera webcomic based on a short story he wrote for NaNoWriMo 2012. It will eventually be seen at www.lostintransitcomic.com. Josh lives in Utah with his amazing wife, two beautiful kids, and two tiny dogs.

Petting the Dog

January 23, 2015

Jace Killan

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A few months ago I took one of David Farland’s workshops where he introduced me to a concept known as “Petting the Dog.” He explained that in Hollywood, writers would introduce a scene to sell a character’s likability to the audience by petting a dog or kissing a baby or something of that sort. Since the class I have taken note of those scenes in film and in writing.

In past Disney films, many of the characters were all good or all bad and of course their actions reflected this. From Cinderella and the mice, Aurora and the fairies, Snow White and the Dwarves, Mary Poppins and the blue jay and Ariel and the crustacean band, these characters gained likability by showing that they treated other critters and creatures well and by doing charitable and kind acts.

In later years, characters have not been so “traditional” and one-dimensional. Aladdin for example was a thief but he shared his bread with the street orphans, in essence “petting the dog.” That’s how Disney sold Aladdin’s likability in spite of him being in an unlikable profession.

Shrek was another that didn’t follow tradition. They even took the “petting the dog scene” of Mary Poppins and Snow White, singing with a Blue Jay. I never laughed so hard at a movie when the bird exploded; it was completely unexpected and yet endearing.

Maleficent had to go through some rebranding in the recent Disney film. How did they take a terrible witch sorceress that threatened to kill Prince Charming and make her likable? They showed her as a child and a guardian of the woods, kind to its critters and creatures and as an adult, kind and caring to Aurora.

Villain protagonists or hero antagonists are becoming more popular in film and literature. Entire television series are based on the dichotomy present in such characters doing bad things for righteous reasons, like The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Dexter, House of Cards, The Sopranos, Almost Human, Deadwood, Justified, Revenge and so many more. Each of these relies heavily on “petting the dog” scenes.

In Sons of Anarchy, Tig a member of the MC and up until a certain point was one of my most favorite characters, mistakenly killed another member’s wife. I hated him for it. I hated the writers for it. I resented going to that place that they took me, but I went all the same. I expected that the writers didn’t care about the character as much as I did and were going to kill him off. But in following episodes there were many scenes that showed a tender side to Tig. In one, he walked into a dogfight and rescues a pit bull about to be put down because it lost. This reminded me that Tig was human and not a monster. The writers brought him back by “petting the dog.”

House of Cards opened with a “petting the dog” scene. The villain protagonist, Frank Underwood tends to a dog is hit by a car. He pets the dog then kills it, supposedly for a righteous reason, but the scene gives us tremendous insight into this Underwood’s character.

Of course, these scenes do not always involve a dog. As David Heyman pointed out in an earlier post, NASA was able to endear the public to a couple of machines through their twitter feeds.

In the Shield, the series opens with a dirty cop, Vic Mackey, killing a righteous officer. The writers needed to sell the viewer that Vic was worth investing into with enduring emotion, even though he did something so heinous. I’m not sure they ever really pulled it off, but the “petting the dog” scenes involved a prostitute with a small child. Vic went out of his way multiple times to help this woman and her son.

Good storytellers endear us to characters, not by showing them doing what everyone else would do, but by showing us the exception. By allowing our characters to “pet the dog” we can offer great insights to their moral codes and personal thoughts, even if they are a psycho killer.

What other examples of “petting the dog” have you seen?

Boxes, Holes, and Plugs, Oh My!

January 22, 2015

fictorians

Character Guest Posts 1 Comment

Guest post by Jo Ann Schneider:

If popular opinion is to be believed, then characters are the reason people love stories. I know readers who will, if they do not find a character that they like in the first twenty pages of a book, toss the volume aside and send a prayer of thanks to whatever deity they worship that they got the book from the library. Or watched the show on Netflix.

Why jump in and make the commitment to a story if you’re not sure you care about what happens? We’re all busy, right? I, personally, have better things to do with my emotions.

However, just as soon as the victim, er, reader, gets caught up in some aspect of the characters, they’re hooked. They’re in. They’ll dredge through bad dialogue, horrible action scenes or a love interest that doesn’t deserve the character to get to the end. To see what happens. Does the hero overcome the bad guys? More importantly, does he figure out that he needs his friends to get through this mess, because he can’t do it alone?

I once heard an analogy that went something like this:

There are two kinds of obstacles in life, the boxes and the holes.

Boxes are those unexpected curve balls that life throws at us. Things like a break up, the death of a

loved one, the loss of a job, finding out your best friend is sleeping with your boyfriend, the furnace dying or your car catching fire on the freeway.

We’re in a crazed version of Tetris where the sole purpose of the game is for our author to surround us with more boxes than we can deal with. They get dropped in front of us, behind us, to the sides. Sometimes you have to dodge them as they come down. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

Go ahead, shake your fist, it won’t help, but it might make you feel better.

Holes are an entirely different matter. Holes are our own issues. Those problems that we have a hard time seeing in ourselves, and if we happen to catch a glimpse, we look away and pretend it was the dog or perhaps the wind.

Kind of like cookies.

I love cookies. I can, sometimes, consider them boxes. This especially works when they appear at home or at the office. I have to do something about them, right? Can’t just leave them sitting around.

But then there are the times that I walk through the bakery at the store. Or past the gigantic display of Oreos (seriously, those things are out of control). I know that if I see a cookie I will more than likely buy and then eat a cookie. Avoidance is the key here.

But I kind of love cookies.

At some point in my life I noticed this problem. Probably when I looked down and found an entire row of Oreos had disappeared, and I was home alone. Oops. My bad. Maybe I have a problem. Or I just had a bad day. That’s it, a bad day. There’s nothing wrong with cookies, right?

No, cookies are fine, for other people. For me they are a huge hole that I try to ignore but often fall into. More often then I want to admit

A character in a story needs holes in their life. A flaw that is somewhat obvious to the audience, but not so much to the character. Or if the character knows it is a problem, they’ve “got it under control.” The character needs to fall into the hole a few times. If they don’t then they’ll never change. A good story should be the account of the character finding the hole and figuring out how to plug it up so it won’t be a problem anymore.

Have you ever had to do something you really didn’t want to? Say shovel the walks? How many times can you talk yourself out of it? How may excuses can you come up with to delay in the hopes that someone else will do it? And how do you feel when you finally have to bite the bullet? There might be some grumbling. Crying. Tossing offending gloves around in the closet before you find yours. There will probably be stomping as you take the longest route to the garage—past as many people as possible—punctuated by a nice, solid, door slam as you finally go out to face the snow.

Characters go through this too. They need to see the hole, acknowledge the hole, stare it down—they

don’t have to be happy about it—before they finally pull the plug out of their, uh, you know, and shove it in place so they won’t fall in again. Ever.

This moment is why the reader didn’t put the book down after twenty pages. This is when the character pulls his head out and gets smart.

Bad things have happened, the character has reached the finale of the tale, his posse is close, the bad guys have pulled out all of their stops, which have in fact stopped the character in his or her tracks. The bad guy chuckles. The posse holds their collective breath and turn their eyes to the hero.

Will he be able to do it?

If every scene before this hasn’t led the audience to the conflict, then the story is missing something. If the author only gives the character a 2 x 4 to dance across the hole on like a wobbling balance beam instead a a nice, fat, plug, then the story is missing something. If the audience doesn’t both cringe and cheer the moment the hero hammers that plug in place, then the story is missing something.

Characters must have problems. What do they want? To save the world. What do they need? Well, now that’s the important bit.

David Farland’s Kick in the Pants—Building Characters

January 21, 2015

fictorians

Character Craft & Skills Guest Posts 3 Comments

There are dozens of books on how to create characters. One that I like is BUILDING BELIEVABLE CHARACTERS by Marc McCutcheon. In it, he will guide you through the process of creating characters that have multiple dimensions–dealing with external traits, personality disorders, the kinds of clothes that they wear, habits and opinions, medical histories, and so on. If you’re a new author, I highly recommend such a book simply because most authors have one or two blind spots in their characterization. For example, when I was young, I wrote my first novel, and my editor called up and asked, “What is your heroine wearing on page 186?” I thought a moment and answered, “Clothes.”

As a new writer, I didn’t care much about what my characters were wearing. Frankly, as those who have observed my closet first-hand can tell you, I don’t care much about what I am wearing.

I’ve seen new authors who create a cast of characters, and not one of them seems to have a personal relationship. I’ve seen authors who write all characters with the same voice. I once read a story by an author who described the love interest as “the woman with the big tits” for the first five pages. (I quit reading after that, though there a morbid sense of curiosity makes me wonder to this day if she ever got a name, a hair color, or any hint of a personality. Only the absurdity of the author’s approach got me five pages into the story in the first place.)

But I have to admit that all of this cataloguing of traits might be fairly worthless. I can’t see spending eighty pages to create a character’s background for a normal novel. It’s overkill.

An approach that I have found to be far more valuable is one that I haven’t seen in any book. The basic idea is this: stories aren’t about characters so much as they are about growth. In other words, your characters will change and grow throughout a novel, and it isn’t necessarily the character herself that is interesting, but that process of change.

So when I’m generating characters, I often find that I can kick-start a whole story by composing a character who is going to go through a change. Here are a couple of samples:

Sister Mary Teresa had never wanted to make love to a man until she met Father McFarland, and in that instant she repented of her vow of chastity and silently began to plan an affair.

It had only been three days since last I’d seen Sir Fader, yet immediately I knew that something was terribly wrong, for in that time his hair had turned from burnished red to snowy white, and there was a haunted look in his eyes that made me stumble away in fear when he glanced at me.

You can of course think of your own. If you’re writing a story, consider the growth or changes that your character will be required to go through, and then compose a sentence or two describing that moment when your character changes from what he was to what he will be. Eventually, that moment will become a pivotal scene.

For example, in heroic fiction, there is an archetypal moment that occurs when a young man or woman sets aside their fears and decides to risk everything to become a hero. Often, that moment follows the death of a loved one–a father or wife. At the very least, it will usually involve the hero witnessing some terrible injustice.

In the same way, you’ll find that villains need to grow. Many writers make the mistake of trying to create villains who are stagnant. They are bad simply because they are evil. But a far more interesting villain is one who is faced with moral choices, who struggles with them, and does not always do what is evil. He sometimes shows mercy. He sometimes is benevolent. But in the end, when faced with his biggest challenge of all, he falls. In other words, your story should not start with a villain, but should grow a villain.

You’ll find that when you enjoy a story immensely, there is almost always some character growth. One of my favorite movies in recent years was “As Good as it Gets,” with Jack Nicholson. In it, Jack is a horrible man–a smug novelist who is so neurotic that he can hardly step out of his own apartment. He’s both a homophobe and misogynist, and so he is a terribly lonely man. But during the course of the film, he grows tremendously, winning the love of a good woman and finally taking in the gay man next door as a roommate. In the film, each character experiences a life-altering moment that makes them more accepting of others, more loving, and ultimately more human than they had been before.

For each of your characters, you would be wise to look at them and not worry so much about how many nose hairs they have or what their social security number is, but to consider what kind of growth that character might experience in your tales.

Guest Writer Bio:
David Farland is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author who has penned nearly fifty science fiction and fantasy novels for both adults and children. Along the way, he has also worked as the head judge for one of the world’s largest writing contests, as a creative writing instructor, as a videogame designer, as a screenwriter, and as a movie producer. You can find out more about him at his homepage at http://www.davidfarland.net/. Also check out more great advice in his book Million Dollar Outlines. And take some of his online workshops at http://mystorydoctor.com.