by Sacha Black
Strengths as weaknesses
An easy method of giving your hero a weakness is to make them so passionate about their strength that it becomes oppressive or leads them to make bad decisions. For example, loyalty can be positioned as a weakness if it prevents a someone from realizing the person they’re loyal to is actually immoral or villainous.
Eddard (Ned) Stark from Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin is an excellent example of conflicting strengths evolving into weaknesses. Ned is Lord of Winterfell, and longtime friend to King Robert Baratheon. Ned's two dominant traits are loyalty and wisdom. When he's asked to return to Westeros and serve as Baratheon's right-hand man, he's conflicted. His wisdom tells him it's a bad idea — serving Baratheon will likely lead to his death — and yet his loyalty forces him to do it anyway.
Values can often be a character’s strength. Like Ned’s example, a character’s positive value can become a weakness. For example, a typical negative embodiment of a value would be justice, and this is often the case for superheroes, anti-heroes and vigilantes. James Bond will subvert the law by doing whatever he can to capture or kill the villain to seek his own form of justice.
Characters as mirrors
Victor Vale and Eli Ever are characters from V.E. Schwab's Vicious novel. Both characters develop superpowers, earning them the title of Extra Ordinarys (EO). Victor has the ability to control pain, Eli has regenerative powers meaning he can't die. Multiple themes run through Vicious, but one of the most prominent is life and death and who deserves to live.
Victor's ability to control pain means he has the ability to kill others (representing death). Eli's regenerative abilities and his inability to die represent life. Yet, the characters are an inverse of each other. Eli decides that anyone with an EO ability is an atrocity and should die (representing death), and sets about killing them. Victor, on the other hand, fights for EOs and to stop Eli, (representing life).
There are other characters in the novel that mirror the theme in other ways, too. For example, Victor, at times, is the embodiment of the book title — vicious. But his number two, Mitch Turner, despite being a giant tattooed giganta-tank, is a total pacifist.
“The two had been in each other’s company for a long time. They knew when the other wanted to talk, and when they wanted to think. The only problem was that more often than not, Victor wanted to think, and more often than not, Mitch wanted to talk.” Vicious by V.E Schwab p.74.
Sydney is another EO in the story aligned with Victor's team. She can bring dead things back to life — yet another twist on the theme of life and death.
The line thou shalt not cross
Everyone has a line, the point they can’t be pushed over like the lip of the saucepan just as the water boils over. Your hero needs one of those lines.
I like to think of your hero's line as intrinsically linked to his or her values. We all have darkness inside us, we all fuck up and do stupid things, but we also have a line we won't cross, and our values determine the position of that line. That line is one of the key differences between a hero and a villain.
Depending on the structure you're going to use, the hero reaches that line once or twice in a story. The first time is usually right before the point of no return — he's had the call to action and either rejected it or failed to take it immediately. The second time is deeper into the novel. The villain will often attempt to push the hero over the line while trying to defeat him. It's in the hero's darkest moment, the flickers of hesitation and self-doubt that true heroes find their strength. The act of being taken to the line, seeing the darkness on the other side, demonstrates to the hero why he doesn't want to cross it.
The need for consistency
Whatever traits you choose, you need to show it (or them) consistently before pushing your hero through his character arc. Consistency breeds believability. After all, we humans aren't creatures of habit for nothing. When you world build in those first few chapters, you also need to build the hero’s basic personality, showing his traits consistently enough the reader could predict his behavior, effectively establishing the ‘ordinary' world and ‘ordinary’ hero. You do this so that you create a platform for the change in the hero to occur. It also makes the change in the character arc starker.
Depth from Realism
Writers throw the word ‘depth’ around like candy at Halloween. But how do you create depth when all you’re working with is ink and paper? Realism, that’s how. It’s the same for a villain. Stop it Sacha *backs away from the villains.*
Sorry. Where was I?
Realism.
Right.
In the previous chapter, I said that a hero must be simultaneously unique and universally relatable. Two seemingly conflicting elements. How can your hero be unique and yet so relatable that his story is universally understood?
You already know the answer: by making your hero as reflective of a real person as possible. Having multi-dimensional traits and a metric-fudgeton of conflict also goes a zillion miles towards helping to create that depth. What separates us from apes (apart from a smidge of DNA and our linguistic abilities) is the complexity of our emotions. We have this wondrous ability to twist ourselves into emotional knots and to simultaneously experience extreme juxtaposed emotions like love and hate, or revenge and mercy, or even fear and bravery. Traits aren't interesting; traits just lay the groundwork for the conflicting emotions your characters will feel. Think of traits as the blank canvas, and the conflicting emotions as the daubs of paint. Mix them together and you get a work of art. Alone, they're no more tools than your keyboard or Scrivener file.
If you want your hero to come across as a fully formed character, you need them to reflect that complexity. Give your hero a cluster of traits and make sure that those traits can evoke conflicting emotions.
Emotion is a golden thread woven through our stories that catches readers at their deepest, most value-driven core. We've all loved and lost, felt the prickle of fear and the sour taste of revenge. Emotions reveal truths and philosophies, evoke memories and feelings but, more than anything, emotion hooks a reader by the danglies and doesn't let go.
The bravery trap
It is a myth that the reason a hero is a hero is because they're brave. I mean, sure, jumping off the top of the building, swishing your Superman cape around your back and flying down to save the dame that’s plummeting to her death is genuinely brave. You wouldn't catch me jumping out a plane with six parachutes, a safety harness, a stunt bag and a plane on standby, let alone off a building — even with superpowers. But bravery isn't what connects the readers to the hero. Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing bravery. The world needs bravery. But there's something else far deeper, far more fundamental that cuts to the core of a reader's squishy bits and yanks out the emotion: sacrifice.
Think about the videos and stories that go viral on social media. It’s always the same. Someone starts out broken, downtrodden and hopeless. Then, after a journey, a battle and multiple sacrifices, things come good and we’re all sobbing because the soldier’s reunited with his family, or the infertile woman holds her newborn baby.
It's not bravery that's emotive; it's how much the hero is willing to give up that evokes the most significant emotions in readers.
Using the same example as earlier, Victor Vale sacrifices everything to capture Eli and protect his friends. He's willing to (and does) die to save Sydney and Mitch and capture Eli. It just so happens that Sydney's able to bring him back to life again. Handy for a sequel. But that doesn’t make the sacrifice any less significant. Especially when there was no guarantee Sydney could bring him back.
When size really matters!
There's an easy trap we writers can fall into if we forget that the size of the sacrifice is more or less directly proportional to how emotive the sacrifice will be to your readers. But the trap is that it isn't the size of the sacrifice that matters: it’s the level of value that’s key. The more value the sacrifice has to the hero, the bette
r the sacrifice is to the reader. For example, if your hero’s girl was kidnapped and the ransom was your hero’s prize Ferrari, you might think that a big sacrifice. But it isn’t if he has three more supercars in his oversized garage. The sacrifice has to be so valuable that losing it for the greater good hurts as bad as simultaneously barefooting it over your kid's Lego and dropping acid in your eye.
In the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling, Harry has to make an enormous sacrifice. Lord Voldemort is the most powerful wizard the wizarding world has ever seen. And so, Harry, and in fact many other key characters choose to make the ultimate sacrifice — their lives — to save those of their friends and loved ones and future generations of wizards. Two deaths in particular capture the audience's heart: Harry's (obviously: he's the protagonist) and Professor Snape's. Snape is cold, manipulative and selfish. More than that, he has a tumultuous relationship with Harry, and yet he still gives up everything to help him defeat Voldemort. Snape's sacrifice is more unexpected than Harry's and also contrary to his normal behavior, which is why it's the most powerful.
Mama told me not to lie…
One of the early lessons we learn as children is not to lie. Don’t lie to your parents, don’t lie to your teacher and don’t lie to your friends. But for some reason we forget to teach kids the most important one: don’t lie to yourself. So we do. We lie to ourselves. A lot. Head burying and denial are common traits for everyone at some point in our lives.
But for a protagonist it's even more critical. Lying to herself is key to the success of her character arc. At the start of your novel, she needs to believe a lie so profoundly that it keeps her in the dark about her true ability or power. Likewise, it should prevent her from being able to beat the villain. It's only through her realization that it's a lie that she can fulfill her character arc and defeat the villain.
And, of course, this lie should be connected to the theme.
Why lie?
Having a lie your protagonist believes is vital because it gives them the opportunity to realize the truth about that lie. The lie should be obvious to your audience. That way, it will drive your readers to root for your hero because they know the truth and want the hero to know it too. Through the character arc, the reader can watch your hero grow and change. But, more than that, readers become part of your character’s change.
The lie is your hero’s dark. The realization pushes her into the light.
When lies are really assumptions
At this point, while I’m insisting you pull on your liar-liar-pants-on-fire knickers, I should probably mention that a lie doesn’t have to be a lie in the purest sense.
It can also be an assumption.
Characters frequently make wild assumptions that lead them into trouble. This is a good thing. The lie your character believes might be as simple as an assumption they made because they only had half the information they needed.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, which lie is the fairest of them all?
The lie you need your character to believe, like most things I discuss, is dependent on your genre. Tropes are tropes for a reason. For those that don't know what a trope is, it's a reoccurring pattern in fiction, like ‘the chosen one' character in a fantasy series, or the handsome billionaire in romance. Tropes lend themselves to character creation as much as plot and theme. The best way to understand the tropes you should adhere to is to read a selection of popular books in your genre. You'll soon spot the patterns.
This lie can be anything from a twist on who the real villain is to a lie another character has told them. One commonly occurring trope around lies can be found in the romance genre. The leading lady will usually believe a lie about the man of her dreams and that keeps her from being with him.
Example: In Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, Bridget's love interest is Mark Darcy. However, she can't be with him because she believes the lie that another character, Daniel Cleaver, told her – she believes that Mark is a liar and a cheater and Bridget doesn't want to date a cheater.
There’s one type of lie that serves as a useful tool for a) deepening your character and b) enriching the character arc. The lie your hero believes about herself.
Your lie needs to be realistic to be believable. And it must be believable to your hero for your readers to believe it too.
Web of connectivity
That little phrase is back again. Whatever lie you create, should be connected to your theme. Don't flinch; it's not as complicated as it sounds.
Example: Remember the climactic scene we discussed in The Hunger Games? Katniss believes that she must kill (sacrifice) all of the other tributes to survive, including Peeta. She believes this lie right up until the end where the book's theme of sacrifice comes to fruition. By refusing to kill Peeta she realizes she can beat the system by committing suicide, and she closes the loop of connectivity:
Thematic lie (this is the one Katniss believes): Sacrifice everyone else to save herself and win the games
The villain's anti-theme: Sacrifice others for your own good
The theme: Sacrifice
Thematic realization: If you make the ultimate sacrifice you can beat the system and save everyone
I’m coming full circle because on Collins’s plot she deepens the web of connectivity by foreshadowing the ending right at the start of the plot.
Katniss refused to let her sister be a tribute. She sacrificed herself and took her sister's place, something that is tantamount to a death sentence. But if you think about it, even in the very first scene, Katniss beat the tribute system before the real Hunger Games even started. Now that is a sexy web of foreshadowed connectivity.
Lies create conflict
In the Bridget Jones’s Diary example, we saw the lie Bridget believed — that Mark is a liar and a cheater. This lie is special because it drives all the conflict in the book, from misunderstandings between Mark and Bridget to fisticuffs between Mark and Daniel. It fuels the emotional turmoil Bridget is in. If Bridget knew Mark was genuinely the man of her dreams from the beginning, all of the conflict and emotional strife would disappear and they’d be together. Which is why in this story the lie creates the biggest obstacle of them all.
Time the lie
For maximum impact, the lie needs to be woven into your story from the start. Like Katniss in the Hunger Games, the lie is inherent in the explanation of what the games are in the very first few pages of the story.
Resolving the lie, however, should come much, much later. In a typical three-act story structure, it should be the final piece of the puzzle your hero needs to defeat your villain, which makes it the last plot point around 75-85% of the way through your story.
For example, Rose Hathaway, the protagonist from Frostbite, the second Vampire Academy novel by Richelle Mead, has her realization three-quarters of the way through the story.
She spent the first 75% believing that if you love someone, you should be with them no matter what. She’s in love with Dimitri. But an amazing opportunity arises for Dimitri’s career, an opportunity that would take him away from her forever. She realizes that she’s been lying to herself and that if you love someone, you should let them go.
"You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love. The next words that came out of my mouth astonished me, both because they were completely unselfish and because I actually meant them.
"You should take it."
He flinched. "What?"
"Tasha's offer. You should take her up on it. It's a really great chance." Frostbite by Richelle Mead, p.235.
Scars on the soul
Like everyone, a hero’s personality should be a consequence of their personal history. Our history is intricately entwined in our brains, having molded and shaped us until we react instinctively based on those experiences. We've had a lifetime to damage ourselv
es into a fear of public speaking or a phobia of commitment.
Don’t tell me you haven’t got one of those awkwardly embarrassing memories that's scarred you for life. We all have. I may (although will refuse to admit this if you ask me in person) have bent over in the middle of an extremely important meeting full of directors and senior people. As my fingertips brushed the carpet and grabbed the pen I’d dropped, I heard a suspicious (and unnecessarily loud) ripping sound. My trousers had split the entire way down my bottom, revealing my underwear. A piece of me died right there in that meeting room and, should you visit, I’m pretty sure you can still find my dignity dried up and fossilizing quietly in the corner. Heroes don't have that same luxury of a lifetime to traumatize themselves — they're spontaneously magicked to life out of the strangely squashy parts of your grey matter. They have no history, no traumas and no scars to shape the way they react or the decisions they make, which is why you need to create them.
I like to call these significant events soul scars. A soul scar is an event or experience that has such a significant impact on your hero’s life that it shapes the way he behaves and the decisions he makes.
Tip: It’s not just your hero that needs a soul scar. Your villain does, too. You can find out more about that in STEP 4 in 13 Steps To Evil. However, there’s no point putting a mark in your hero’s history unless it’s going to be relevant to the story.