Making Your Fictional Characters Real.

Cuchulainn: Hero of Ireland.

I have been a writer of one sort or another since my middle elementary years. My first memorable character, if only for his utter ridiculousness, was the hero of a comic book I wrote and drew (if drew means I traced the same muscle guy pose over and over) called Super Max. 

Super Max was an unappreciated elementary school janitor who unexpectedly got super powers when some bullies (in elementary school?) doused him in an odd assortment of school cleaning supplies that included radium (we had just learned about Madame Curie and it seemed a logical element to include in an elementary janitor’s repertoire) and voila a champion of the meek over the mean was born. 

While Super Max was short lived, the inevitable victim of my 10 year old boredom, the lessons I learned in his creation have served me ever since. In my naïve and blissfully ignorant creation of Super Max I unwittingly stumbled upon the means of creating a character with a real soul. 

Don’t get me wrong, Super Max was no Raskolnikov or Lear or even Harry Potter. He was in no way a character that was memorable beyond the fact that, for me, he was real. And making a character seem real is, in my opinion, the primary job of any writer, be they Dostoyevsky, Stan Lee or You.

So how does one make a character real? Many a writing guru who will tell you that you need to write down a character description with hair color, height, blah, blah, blah. While this exercise can be helpful in some small ways, to me it has always been a tedious delaying technique. 

Let’s face it creating a real character can be painful. We writers often use our creations as cheap methods of therapy to try and tackle some need, obsession or fault in our own being.  We often shove our own neurosis onto these characters and then let our imaginations play out their lives to see what happens to them as a way to better understand ourselves and the futures we all fear.

While this pop psychology may or may not be of any real use, and I’m sure trained psychological professionals will find many a fault with this method of self-psychoanalysis, it can be of huge use for a writer. After all every character in any book, script, story, comic book, song, infomercial etc. that we create is at least partially us. If we understand and accept this we will almost instantly create characters with more soul.

So how do we create the oxymoronical icons that are “real fictional characters?”

To help us all do this a bit better I’ve come up with a list of steps that have helped me over the years. Hopefully they will also help you. They are simple jumping off points to help spark the brains mental gymnastics. Use them and you will be forced to see your character as less of a caricature that is slave to plot and more of a living, breathing, feeling person.

1. Where Does Your Character Come From?

By this I do not mean, what city or town. When I say where does he come from I am asking that before the Fade In or Page 1 where was he mentally. What is her state of mind? What events in his past have led to the crisis he is about to face, because let’s face it folks without an imminent crisis no character is worth reading.

Did he recently learn his mother and father were wizards who were murdered (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)?  Did he discover he is a clone of his mob boss “father” and he was only “born” to be an organ farm for this criminal (The House of the Scorpion)? Is she a mother forced by Nazis to choose which of her children will live (Sophie’s Choice)?

Knowing where your character is coming from on an emotional and mental level will not only help you to create a more interesting character, it will tie the conflict of the story to him. If you can do this and do this well then ninety percent of the plot over character issues will fix themselves.

It is fine to begin with a plot idea for your story, but you must discover the character whose actions and choices will move the story forward. Knowing where your character comes from will help you to understand their want and their deeper rooted need. This is the essential first step in creating a memorable character for any genre or medium.

2. Discover Your Character’s Need.

Now that you know where your character comes from the need of your character will likely present itself. However do not be tricked into thinking the character’s want is her need. Harry Potter may want to discover what happened to his parents and how to use magic and how to defeat Voldemort, but what he needs is to find a new family. Once he has this new family and is willing to sacrifice all for them, he no longer has any needs or wants. That is until the next one pops up.

The track of any good story can be described as what happens while a character pursues her want that exposes her need.  If you can find a way to meld this pursuit of self-discovery with the large and exciting plot elements that will make it into movie trailers and onto book covers then you are well on your way to creating a memorable story. 

But how do you discover what your character’s need is? Often times you have completed a first, and usually unsatisfactory, draft before the need exposes itself. Many a time you have written your story believing that his want is his need, only to discover that you have brought a one dimensional clone of characters past to life.

Do not fret. This happens to everyone. Your chances for getting it all right the first pass are slim. As the saying goes writing is rewriting.  And once you understand your character’s need you are well on your way to creating something great.

3. Create Your Character’s Want.

Note I said Create and not Discover. Understand this and your story will sing on the page. While you must discover your character’s need you must create his want.

This is where a bit of story engineering comes into play. Once you know your character’s need, you will design her want to service that need.  When Harry Potter discovers that Voldemort, the wizard who killed his parents, has returned he is not made whole, in fact he is made weaker, more damaged and more afraid and alone. Only when he realizes that his need for a family (acceptance and love) has been fulfilled in Ron and Hermione and the rest of his Hogwarts family is he capable of defeating Voldemort whose own need for a family was sacrificed for his lust of power.

If you begin writing with a deep understanding of the need of your character you can choose the want that will most successfully expose this need and force your character to acknowledge and fight for that need.

The Want vs. Need battle is the heart of all good conflict. Add as many explosions, vampire love triangles and alien invasions as you feel necessary to move your plot and get butts into movie theater seats and eyes on pages, but to deliver on the “promise of the premise” you must make sure that your character discovers her need and abandons her want (or in the case of a tragedy fails to abandon her want).

One last point on this.  A character’s want is a great device to expose your character’s flaws. Their ability to see these flaws and abandon their Want (selfish desire) for their Need (that which will heal their psyche and help them reach their potential) will make a character a hero. Their inability to do this will create a tragic villain.

4. Supporting Characters Are Alt Mirror Versions of Your Main Character.

Once you have the need and the want and understand the basics of your main characters journey you must create side characters, whether they be friends, mentors, enemies, lovers, amusing sidekicks or tormentors who expose your main characters emotional state.

This is a great way to make your side characters memorable and interesting while also serving the plot and helping your main character abandon her want for her need.  

In Harry Potter, Ron is from a large wizarding family and Hermione is naturally brilliant at magic. Harry is neither of these things, but with their help he earns both. He and Voldemort share a similar past, but Voldemort chose selfishness and anger while Harry chose sacrifice and love.  Would Harry have been able to defeat Voldemort if he had not witnessed and understood Snape’s sacrifice? Or seen that Draco was very like him, only raised by evil and weak versions of Harry’s own parents?

Your side characters do not exist simply to introduce new information or move the plot forward. Their true purpose is to expose the weaknesses and strengths of the hero and to show them a better way to be or the dangers of heading down the wrong path.

Side characters help your hero find her humanity and achieve her destiny by exposing their true selves. They are great tools for pushing forward the battle between want and need.

5. Create Flaws for your Main Character that come into play in the Want vs. Need Battle.

I’m sure you’ve seen this in your reading and writing adventures. A hero in a story who is perfect, who has no flaws, is a goody two shoes is fricking boring. But what if your story goes like this: Guy has a want and a sad past but suddenly fixes his flaws and realizes his need and he lives happily ever after. Good for him, bad for all of us. We’ll be bored to death and ask for our book, movie ticket or cable subscription money back.

A character without flaws is not only unrealistic, she is intensely boring. If you feel the need to write a political or philosophical diatribe then writing stories is not the route for you.  Get into politics instead, where disingenuous blathering is awarded instead of ignored and stay away from our fiction. We take it real seriously.

So how do you create flaws that will reveal your character’s want? Look back and realize that wants are almost always selfish. They do not exist to benefit anyone but the main character and if he is to be a hero then he must shelve those selfish wants for the greater good of his need. His need can be defined as the thing he needs to become the man he is meant to be, the man who will help his family, his community, his city, his world. To do so he must overcome his flaws.

The best way to expose these flaws to the reading and viewing public is through the mirror of the side characters.  In truth, most people think side characters exist to push forward the plot (and they do), but their real purpose is to expose the flaws of the hero, both to us the audience, and to the hero.

Good drama comes when the hero ignores the warnings that we see.

Incidentally this is also a way of showing the hero’s good traits, by contrasting him to the villains, or even the not so great traits of his allies.

6. The Solution to the Hero’s Main Need is Found By Overcoming His Flaw.

This is where the whole character design paradigm comes full circle, like the mythical snake eating its own tail. Without the flaw the hero can never win. Because winning comes when one realizes that the selfish way (want fed by flaws) that they have always approached the world is a road to ruin and that the only way to victory is through sacrifice.

A hero is not one who is stronger, smarter or nicer than the rest of humanity (or animals in many an animated feature), but one who has accepted that they do not know it all. They have chosen to cast aside their selfish desires for the benefit of the community they have always sought and earned more by fulfilling their need then they ever could have by choosing their want.

Harry Potter accepts death, and then a return to life, to defeat Voldemort (whose quest for immortality has led him to splinter his own soul and cost him any kind of afterlife dooming him to oblivion). 

Ultimately this is what any successful character arc, be it a small indie movie, or the grandest of sci fi epics, is all about. 

The hero overcomes his flaws and gives up his selfish wants and chooses to sacrifice himself for his fellows thereby getting everything he always needed. When the need is achieved the want seems silly and the hero has grown from boy to man, from child to mother and from follower to leader.

No matter how big or small the story, the hero is destined to discover and overcome a flaw in his own character so that he can realize his want is not his need and by fulfilling his need he makes the world he exists in a better place. Or he fails, with tragic results.

This was originally a memo written when I oversaw the writer's room at a production company.