Character Tips
How to Create Great Characters!
by Melanie Anne Phillips
Creator StoryWeaver, Co-creator Dramatica
Strangely enough, what makes a character “Great” has little to do with what
makes a character dramatically sound. This is easy enough to see if you consider the
differences between the characters Austin Powers and James Bond. Both could be seen as
Protagonists, and both could even be seen as heroes, and yet their personalities,
mannerisms, interests, and attitudes are quite dissimilar. What makes them the same is
their dramatic function; what makes them different are their personalities.
Dramatic function is part of a story’s logistic structure. Without a function, a
character is little more than window dressing. Yet, even the most strongly drawn
structural character is quite forgettable without a charismatic personality. Stucturalist
writers tend to start with the function (Antagonist, Protagonist, etc.) then build a
personality on that foundation. Intuitive writers usually want to get to know their
characters first as individuals, then determine what function they should play in the
structure.
No matter which kind of writer you are, you will eventually need to develop your
characters’ personalities. So, here’s a great trick to brainstorm your
characters and perhaps even learn something about your plot along the way.
I call this method, “Mix and Match.”
More than likely, you remember a childhood toy that was a book with pictures of faces,
each cut into three pieces: top, middle, and bottom. The top section of each face had the
hair, the middle section covered the eyes and nose, and the bottom section displayed the
mouth. By flipping parts of each page, you could create all kinds of different people,
swapping the hair of one with the eyes of another and the mouth of a third.
We can apply a similar concept to character attributes and physical traits to create
dynamic personalities.
As an example, lets start with two ordinary, forgettable characters with only three
traits each (Gender, Age, and Role) and mix and match to create more memorable characters
Character #1: Male, 38, Mercenary
Character #2: Female, 9, Shoplifter
Pretty forgettable, right? Okay, let’s mix and match:
Character #1: Female, 38, Mercenary
Charcter #2: Male, 9, Shoplifter
Now think about how these characters changed their personalities, just by swapping a
single attribute from one to the other. A Male Mercenary, age 38 simply has a different
“feel” than a Female Mercenary, age 38. Why? Due to our cultural
indoctrination., we expect certain things of men and certain things of women. We therefore
expect a Male Mercenary to have a different personality than a Female Mercenary. In other
words, it would require a different personality of woman than a man to become a Mercenary
in our society. So, we (as creative authors) tend to subconsciously assign those
personality traits to the character, even though we have really only spelled out the
character’s role and gender.
Let’s try another swap:
Character #1: Female, 9, Mercenary
Character #2: Male, 38, Shoplifter
Again, we impose our own subconscious expectations of each character’s personality
upon him or her so that we have a completely different feel for each than we did before.
Let’s try one more:
Character #1: Male, 9, Mercenary
Character #2: Female, 38, Shoplifter
Once again, the personalities change.
We might find that one of these characters strikes our fancy as being interesting to
develop and put into play. But more than likely, we haven’t found the
“Great” character we are looking for. What we need are more traits and
attributes, and more characters to swap them among.
What I usually do is list various traits and attributes on 3x5 cards, cut them up into
individual items and then assemble them like the Face Book to create potential characters
for my story.
For example, I might have a group off different traits/attributes in each of the
following categories:
Name Age Sex Height Weight I.Q. Hair Color Hair Style Mannerisms (graceful, clumsy,
abrupt, etc.) Physical Impairments Physical Enhancements (keen eyesight, etc.) Physical
Quirks (i.e. twitch) Religious Affiliations Religious Beliefs (not necessarily the same as
affiliations) Hobbies Skills Talents Accent Speed of Speech Place of Birth Marital Status
Previous Marriages Special powers Job or Role Pets Siblings (alive and dead) Personality
Traits (sourpuss, practical joker, deadpan serious, etc.) Sound of Voice (deep, high,
breathy)
Well, I could go on an on with this list, but you get the idea. The best way to compile
a list of categories like this is to read the newspaper, watch television, or sit in a
coffee shop and look out the window.
Now, in each category, you need to come up with as many different items as you can.
For example, in the first category, Name, we might have the usual Joe, and Sally, but
also Zippo, Teaser, Tweezer, and Mulch. The weirder, the better.
Let’s take our Female, 9 year old Mercenary and name her Sally. Now how does her
personality change if we name her Tweezer, or Mulch instead?
In tangible reality, there is no indicated difference between Sally, the 9 year old
Female Mercenary and Tweezer, the 9 year old Female Mercenary. And yet, we cannot help but
feel they are different because of our cultural indoctrination.
As a brainstorming technique for creating “Great” characters, the mix and
match method is the best way I’ve found to break away from the same old forgettable
stereotypes.
Now most of this you’ll need to do this manually, but in fact there is a place in
the Dramatica Pro software that can help take some of the drudgery out of it. From the
main Dramatica Desktop, click on the Brainstorming tile. Then, select the Character
Generator Tile. Here you can automatically generate characters by arbitrarily assigning
them names, genders, and structural functions as archetypes or complex characters.
And speaking of structural functions, have you noticed that none of the attributes we
assigned to our characters above gave any indication as to their status as a Protagonist,
Antagonist, other archetype or complex functional character?
If you are a structuralist writer, you’ll first start with your Protagonist (or
whatever structural function you wish to begin with) and THEN play the mix and match game
on that foundation. If you are an intuitive writer, you’ll start with mix and match
and then pick one character and determine what function he, she, or it should play.
Take Tweezer, our nine-year-old Mercenary. Would she be a better Protagonist or
Antagonist? When you pick a structural function, it ties the character to the plot and
further defines the foundation of its personality. And, because you have likely chosen a
role for your character, such as Mercenary, the combination of roles among your characters
can actually start to suggest the outlines of a plot!
Of course, some things will likely have to be changed to make the characters and plot
more consistent. But, this refining process is just part of the ongoing development of
your story. The real trick is to break free of the stodgy, ordinary character we create by
falling into our well-worn mental patterns, and mixing and matching to create arbitrarily
intriguing characters.
Copyright © Melanie Anne Phillips
