Characters must have a motivation (even if it’s not always obvious to the reader). There has to be a compelling reason for your characters to see a plot through. To ensure they won’t walk away from a death-defying situation, even if they have every reason to.
In an interview, J. K. Rowling put forth a good question to ask characters: “Why fight?” (Why should Harry kill Voldemort? What does he have to gain?)
This “fight” question is a really good one to ask—not only will it help determine your character’s motivations, but it’s also a good element to include in a query pitch.
And it doesn’t always have to do with actual fighting. A character might be compelled to help someone because of love.
A good example of character motivation is found in Janice Hardy’s The Shifter. In the very first chapter, Nya is put into a dangerous situation because she’s hungry. While battling guards, she reveals a unique set of magical abilities.
If Nya hadn’t been motivated to steal food, she wouldn’t have used her powers to get out of danger, and the plot would have been more stagnant at the beginning. In this way, character motivation drives plot (not the other way around).
Let’s say your plot is already mapped out. No problem, just think about why your characters go places, how they interact with what happens to them, and what their motivations are.
Characters must have unique mannerisms/tics that make them who they are. When developing characters, it’s often best to avoid stereotypes. Detective-type descriptions are a surefire way to leave your characters dead in the water. (And I’ll bet readers won’t care if your protagonist is five-foot-eight with size-seven shoes, unless these characteristics are necessary to the plot.)
When writing out scenes, study the actions of your character, whether he or she is tying a shoe or baking a cake. Does your character complete these actions differently than someone else would?
Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, does this best. In his book Wyrd Sisters, he uses unique description to make an otherwise ordinary duke different than usual: “The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.”
A final note of caution when creating memorable characters: Beware of too much backstory in the narrative. Background is appropriate when creating character sketches, but by the time the final draft of your manuscript is done, the character’s childhood, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies shouldn’t be so overbearing that they bog down the rest of the story.
EXERCISE
Take a character from one of your completed novels or works-in-progress and pretend that he or she is sitting down to an interview. Ask this character the following questions:
What makes you happy?
What do you consider your biggest flaws? Why?
What are you fighting? Why?
What annoys you more than anything?
Who do you hate? Why?
Who do you love? Why?
What are your hopes and dreams? What will you do if you don’t achieve them?
ERIC EDSON
How We Feel a Story
ERIC EDSON is a professor of screenwriting and author of the book The Story Solution: 23 Actions All Great Heroes Must Take. He has written seventeen feature screenplays on assignment for companies including Sony, Warner Bros., Disney, CBS, and Showtime. He is director of the Graduate Program in Screenwriting at California State University, Northridge.
Writers create fiction so they can touch people’s hearts.
Blurting it out that way may sound a bit cornball. But compressed to its essence, human truth often comes out sounding sentimental. Doesn’t mean it isn’t true. We don’t write just to preach high-toned themes about saving the planet or how we should all treat each other with a good deal more kindness. No, we seek to construct an emotional experience that leads readers to discover for themselves the real merit of our unspoken themes. In order to be effective, all stories—whether written to be read only or to be read and then filmed—must impart emotion.
One of the big challenges for writers in the “what if?” genres of horror, fantasy, or sci-fi is keeping stories focused from the start on what the lead character is experiencing emotionally, and not let the tale get too lost in the dazzle of the special world going on in the background. Because the very first step for all storytellers is to create a bond of sympathy between the reader and the hero or heroine. Readers need to care deeply about the central character before they can be brought to feel deeply in the story.
To connect with any hero a reader must first, on one level or another, like him. So the most crucial job when beginning your story is to introduce the hero in a way that fosters immediate character sympathy. This remains true no matter if your lead is a classic good-guy type or some moody, morally questionable anti-hero.
Constructing a lead character we care about does not mean inventing a flawless person. We see more of ourselves in people who are eccentric or defensive, who say the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment. But writers must always remember to balance character flaws with strengths. For a reader to connect emotionally, the heroine’s strengths must outnumber her failings.
An actual recipe exists, a list of nine ingredients that elicit sympathetic responses when connecting readers to your hero. The more of these nine character attributes you include, the more emotionally effective your story becomes. Using six is good. Seven is even better. So here are the personality traits and plot circumstances that have been creating sympathetic heroes for more than two thousand years:
1. Courageous. Not optional. Your lead has got to have guts. We identify more readily with flawed people, yes, but those flaws cannot include a lack of courage because only brave people take action, and only action can drive a story forward.
2. Unfairly Injured. After courage, the second quickest way to bond a reader to your heroine is to place her at the outset in a situation where blatant injustice is being inflicted upon her. Few things stir our passions like injustice. Being unfairly injured also demands that the heroine do something in response—an excellent place to start any story.
3. Skilled. We admire people who possess the grace, expertise, and mental acumen required to become masters of their chosen work. Doesn’t matter what your hero’s field of endeavor might be—tinker, tailor, CEO—as long as he’s expert at it.
4. Funny. We warm to people who make us smile. We’re naturally drawn to folks with a humorous view of the passing parade. So if you can possibly bestow upon your hero a robust and playful sense of humor, do it.
5. Just Plain Nice. We can easily care about kind, decent, helpful, honest people, and we admire those who treat others well, relate with respect to people in humble walks of life, and who defend the weak or stand up for the helpless.
6. In Danger. If when we first meet the heroine she’s already in a situation of real danger, it grabs our attention immediately. Danger means the imminent threat of personal harm or loss. What represents danger in any particular story depends on the scope of your tale. In fantasy, horror, and sci-fi, it’s almost always the life-or-death kind.
7. Loved by Friends and Family. If we’re shown right off that the hero is already loved by other people, it gives us immediate permission to care about him too. How many movies have you seen that begin with a surprise party thrown for the hero by a room full of adoring friends, or some other get-together taking place where affection gushes from a doting mom, dad, sibling, mate, child, or best friend?
8. Hardworking. The heroines and heroes we care about have an enormous capacity for work. People who work hard create the energy needed to drive a story forward.
9. Obsessed. Obsession keeps brave, skilled, hardworking heroes focused on a goal, which is enormously important for any story. Driving obsession creates an active plot.
There are other qualities of character that can help create a hero we want to root
for, but these are the never-to-be-ignored basic nine. Use them liberally.
At the start of the sci-fi/horror film I AM LEGEND, hero Robert Neville (Will Smith) is portrayed as a Courageous man who is In Danger, Unfairly Injured, and Hardworking, while he is Loved by Friends and Family, Nice, Funny, highly Skilled as a medical researcher, and Obsessed with achieving victory over an epidemic of vampires. Nine out of nine. And the movie was a huge hit.
Early on in the mega-budget sci-fi film GREEN LANTERN, hero Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is portrayed as a childish, irresponsible man often lacking in real courage, who constantly messes up and displays little genuine skill, is lazy and unreliable, thoughtless and unkind, a test pilot who uses his wing-woman as a decoy during a combat exercise then thinks it funny when he gets her “shot down,” who crashes his own fighter jet unnecessarily with no thought about its half-billion-dollar cost to the nation, a man whose humor is mean and snarky, and whom few people really like or trust. That’s zero out of nine. And this movie was a mega-bomb at the box office.
Invite your readers to care. Then they will eagerly climb aboard for your story ride.
EXERCISE
Get the DVD of any commercially successful American movie with one hero or heroine in it. You can check for the level of box office success at BoxOfficeMojo.com. Commercial success here just means the story worked emotionally for lots of people. Picking a one-hero film simply keeps this exercise focused and clear.
From the point where the hero first enters the story, study the next twelve to fifteen minutes of the movie. Write down both character strengths and weaknesses demonstrated by the hero. Then answer the following questions:
1. How many of the nine sympathy tools are used to establish the hero?
2. How are the hero’s weaknesses presented so as not to harm sympathy?
3. Are any sympathy tools used besides the nine listed here?
4. After spending these opening minutes with the hero, are you drawn to keep watching the film or not? Why?
5. If the hero is portrayed by a movie star, what personal characteristics of the star him- or herself help bond you to the hero?
BRUCE MCALLISTER
The Black Unicorn
BRUCE MCALLISTER published his first science fiction story at age sixteen. He is the author of two science fiction novels, Humanity Prime (Wildside Press) and genre classic Dream Baby (Tor Books), a literary fantasy, and a career-spanning short-story collection. He’s served on top genre fiction award juries. His short fiction has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and received a National Endowment for the Arts award.
One of the traits of a successful fantasy, science fiction, or horror writer is an awareness of what’s come before, and that means what’s become clichéd.
What’s wrong with a cliché? Don’t people want the familiar—don’t they want the things they know and already love? Yes, but they want them fresh, not stale. Stale is death; stale is the reader’s boredom and disappointment, and the writer’s failure to tell a story that carries the reader away.
How did I learn to make clichés new when I was starting out—fourteen years old, child of the Cold War and a peripatetic Navy family—determined to move from being a wide-eyed reader to capturing on the page the same magic my favorite authors made me feel?
I did it early on by “love,” that is, by immersing myself—addicted as I was to speculative fiction—in the stories and novels I loved, rereading them, copying them out, outlining them (as writers always do, though they often won’t tell you). But I was also lucky enough in college to meet a mentor, a wise old writer who’d learned all the magic tricks I wanted to learn years before I was born. That wonderful soul, my Yoda and Obi-Wan—who wasn’t in the science fiction and fantasy field but was open to the “fantastic” in life, because he’d lived such a fantastic one himself—was the one who gave me the exercise I want to share with you. It transformed my fiction forever.
In writing, clichés can be deadly. Written clichés are expressions, characters, mythological creatures, settings, situations, and even ideas that are so familiar to us that they no longer have the power to move us, to make us feel or think what the writer wants us to feel or think. If you’re bored reading a vampire novel, it may be because the vampires in it—and the story’s situations—are clichéd; that is, because they’re so familiar and predictable to you that they don’t make you feel anything other than boredom. If you can’t stand the typical happy ending in a Hollywood movie, that’s because the happy ending, at least the way it’s handled in most Hollywood movies, is a cliché. It’s imposed on the movie like a formula; it’s predictable; and once again you’re bored and probably ready to scream by the time it arrives. If you want to scream every time a Mafia hit man who loves opera appears in a movie, that’s because he’s a cliché that refuses to be fresh and interesting. Clichés are very disappointing.
Professional writers—novelists, short story writers, and screenwriters—have, for at least two centuries now, had to make clichés new in order to tell stories that move and hold their readers. A science fiction writer who uses a UFO that looks just like one from a l950s movie is going to bore us. A fantasy writer who uses the same old white unicorn is going to put us to sleep or make us want to do bodily harm to the poor beast. A crime novelist whose characters are straight from all of THE GODFATHER is going to bore us to death too. Because a professional writer’s greatest fear is losing the reader, professional writers have come up with an exercise that turns clichés into fresh, interest-holding stories. They call it “The Black Unicorn Exercise.”
EXERCISE
Take a cliché you really hate from novels or movies. To keep it simple, make it a character cliché or a mythical creature cliché: an elf, troll, pixie, unicorn, centaur, vampire, witch, werewolf, dragon, brawny hero, pretty and delicate princess, angel, demon, wicked stepmother, Mafia hit man, bad CIA operative, redneck sheriff, on and on. The choice is yours.
Once you’ve chosen your detestable cliché, make a list of the traits of your character or mythical creature that make it the cliché it is. Use these three categories of traits:
1. Anatomy/physical appearance (including dress and possessions).
2. Physiology (what it eats, drinks, etc., to stay alive).
3. How does it behave; what does it do? (Feel free to ask others to help you put the list together. Usually we can’t remember everything that makes the cliché what it is!) A unicorn, for example, is white, has a single long horn with magical properties (so everyone in the world wants it and tries to get it), associates only with virgins (only a virgin can touch it), drinks from a pond in the moonlight, and is otherwise (we suppose) like a shy, delicate horse that somehow never manages to get dirty.
A dragon, for example, is reptilian and big. It breathes fire and flies. It is pretty much immortal unless the right hero (or heroine) can kill it. It’s got scales. We’re not exactly sure what it eats (if anything). Maybe it’s nice; maybe it isn’t. In any case, it’s pretty boring if we’re not madly in love with dragons.
A vampire always seems to be an adult. The vampire is immortal but not happy. He feels unloved by God, and has reason to: He does bad things. He needs blood, human blood. He runs around attacking men and women who, when he bites them and sucks their blood, turn into vampires too. He dresses nicely. He’s got a cape probably. He doesn’t like daylight; it burns him or does something otherwise unpleasant to him. The only way to get rid of him is with a stake through the heart. (A silver bullet is for werewolves, not vampires.) Oh, yes, he sleeps in a coffin.
The Mafia hit man is big and neckless and has a raspy voice. He’s Italian. From Southern Italy. He likes good Italian food and opera. (There was never a real hit man, Italian or otherwise, this boring.)
When you’ve got your list of traits, what makes your character or mythical creature what he, she, or it is, start tampering with th
e traits. To make your character or mythical creature fresh and new, change at least one major trait to its “opposite,” or to something that contrasts somehow with the clichéd trait. Make your white unicorn black. Make your Mafia hit man Irish. Make your dragon fireless.
But do more than that; change other traits as well. As you do, you’ll discover what professional writers have discovered for centuries: When you change one or more clichéd traits of a clichéd character or mythical creature, you’ll start to see wonderful fresh story possibilities.
If the unicorn is black, not white, and he’s missing a horn, what’s going to happen? Is he going to start looking for his horn? Is he an outcast among unicorns because he is black? Is he even technically a unicorn? What does a black, hornless unicorn do? He probably doesn’t hang out with virgins. In fact, he may (given low self-esteem) be happier hanging out in the slums of the world. And he’s probably going to set out to get a horn—whether in the end he decides to keep it or not.
If the usual unicorn is a male or neuter (no gender at all), make it a she. Who does a female unicorn hang out with? Geeky virgin guys? Priests? Who? Is she the only female unicorn ever born? What happens if she meets a horse that can fly (Pegasus) and falls in love? Where will they live—heaven or earth? Will he sacrifice his wings for her? Will she bring heaven and earth together with her love?
Change the traits of your Mafia hit man. If the usual, clichéd Mafia hit man likes opera, your Mafia hit man hates opera. Why? Because he associates it with something unpleasant from his childhood. So he likes hip-hop. He’s got a pink smartphone. He wishes he could be a kid again and just tweet all day. He didn’t have much fun as a kid. In fact, he’s so into social media he’s losing his reputation. Maybe a contract has been put out on him because he didn’t kill someone he was supposed to . . . and the only way he can save himself is with the help of his Facebook friends . . . or a LinkedIn associate who makes furniture out of driftwood. (And, by the way, the raspy voice was fake all along; he just thought he needed a voice like that to be taken seriously. His father was Italian, sure, but his mother was Irish. It’s hard to build up a reputation as a Mafia hit man when you’ve got a red-haired mother.)
Now Write! Page 21