How Do You Write – Characters

Apr 22, 2010 | 1 Comment | @andrewmarcec

When many of us get ideas in our heads for a story it’s largely based around a cool event we imagined, or the climactic end confrontation between a hero and villain.  Then we almost build backward, or at least I do with a lot of my stories.  The ideas are so easy to have, especially when walking down a sunny city block with the breeze from Lake Michigan while I listen to Murray Gold’s Doomsday from the Doctor Who soundtrack.

Though the ideas seem amazing in our mind, a writer is usually hard pressed to develop a story around that intense moment by developing real characters.  This seemingly simple task is actually a lot more work than many want to assume.  For example, let’s take just about everyone’s favorite character from a galaxy far, far away…Han Solo.

Han always shoots first…

Yes, he’s a smug man with a wookie for a best friend and an attitude that gets him nowhere but trouble, but Han didn’t just pop out as the Han we know and love to this day.  Building a character like this takes time, thought, and a pretty in depth history.  That’s where character bios are key to your story depth.

For years I shrugged this off as something that would form itself over the course of the story, but as I grew as a writer I realized this was probably the most inefficient way to build up a healthy character base.  One of the main reasons for that is because your character’s attitude will change as your story develops.  This is a good outcome of course, but it will also put double the work in for you when you do rewrites, something none of us like, but all have to do.

So what makes an effective character bio?  What info do you cover?  How much depth do you want to go into?  Here are some tips that I use when I write up my characters.

Names are important, but not as important as events.

I know that many people toil over having just the right name for all their characters.  They want something cool, something unique, something that packs a punch.  I hate to be the one to break this to you, but if you focus all your efforts on just the name, you’ll have a Hudson Hawk repeat on your hands.

Watching this movie is physically painful

So for when you start, don’t even worry about that.  Just make sure you have a sex figured out, because let’s face it that’s important.  When I start character bios, I normally just start about calling my main character MC.  I then know who I’m referring to, and I don’t get caught up in trivialities.  From there I start from the idea I had and work backward.  In my glimpse of inspiration for this story, how was my character?  Angry? Sad? Abandoned?  That’s the first thing you should ask yourself.  Then work backward.  How did this character become this way?

Now you are building depth to you character.  If they were abandoned, in life, what got them there?  A drug addled mother?  The grandparents that were raising them died?  Here is a quick shot of one of my character bios I’ve been working on for a new story that might help shed a little more light on this process.

Dante wasn’t his real name.  It was the name he had given himself upon selling his first painting.  He had actually signed it right there in front of the buyers as he had left his name off of it for this very reason.  He felt that he wasn’t truly an artist until he sold his first picture, and therefore wasn’t worthy of a name.  Now however, he had something to base himself off of.  He chose Dante because it was something that his mother had always called him as a child in reference to how he lived his life, like a divine comedy.  His mother was a literary teacher at the local high school in the small town she lived in, the town that she raised him in.  It took him years before he realized what she was referring to when she called him that.  She meant it in reference for how he learned.  He would always take the hardest way on the path to enlightenment, making all the wrong choices before realizing the right.  He felt in many ways that this applied in so many other aspects of his life as well.

Now, I had a clear set name in mind, and motivation behind that name when that was written.  But look at all the information that we learned about this character.  He’s an artist, and was struggling for quite a while.  He was passionate about his work, so passionate he refused to deem himself worthy of a name before he sold one.  We also learned bits about his home life and personality.

Now this character has meat, we have something to pull from when he reacts to situations, and how he interacts with situations.

All major characters need a back story, even the minor ones.

This is something that is a major oversight for most writers, supporting characters.  Peppering in supporting characters like a mother or a brother is a great idea for character interaction and further plot and conflict development.  These characters need that depth as well, we need to know why they interact the way they do with characters.  This will also make more effective reveals if one of these characters dies or betrays another.

Who will live? Who will die? Who cares?

That is one thing I have nothing but beef with in films and books now.  There are loads of supporting characters, and when something happens to them that is supposed to be the trigger that motivates our character to go from milquetoast guy to hero, I just don’t care.  I don’t feel the connection between the two, this is a result of poorly written characters.

Here is an example of one of my supporting character bios:

That’s when everything in her life changed.  Her parents kicked her out, disowning her for good.  She knew they were serious because when Dante was five she came back home to see if they could work things out, and they had moved without telling her.  She was devastated, tired, and confused, but thankfully she had done well in school, and was able to land a job teaching English at the local high school several months after Dante had been born and the small stockpile of cash her folks deposited into her account had dried up.  She was living in a rundown apartment on the more dangerous side of town, and made sure she kept a close eye on all the babysitters she hired, and kept a close inventory of her personal belongings.
As Dante grew older, things got much easier in her life, and on her checkbook.  She noticed that Dante showed an interest in art and painting, and decided to encourage this to the fullest extent that she could.  He got very good, and she was always so proud and amazed by his work that she hung every piece on the fridge.  When that space ran out, she hung it up on the walls, when that space ran out she would find creative ways to display Dante’s talent.

How long do bios need to be?

That is a tricky question, because there really is no right answer.  I try to make mine anywhere between three to fives pages in length.  If I don’t hit that, but I still feel like the characters are developed, I’m happy.  However I’ve found three to five pages to be the perfect amount of back story to give that will lead up right to where you story begins.

Quirky characters vs interesting characters…

One last thing I think needs to be mentioned with characters is something that just bothers me to no end really. Interesting characters vs quirky characters.

No, these are not one in the same thing.  In my opinion quirky characters make you seem pretentious.  What do I mean by that?  I mean that you can make a character deep, you can make a character have interesting interests and traits, but if you put too many in all at once it screams, “Hey look at me, I’m different.”

I don’t want to discredit anyone’s work here, because let’s face reality, anyone who can get published or get a movie made deserves loads, this is a tough process.  However, I have to throw Garden State under the bus here.

Hey look at me, I’m different!

It’s one of my favorite films, but the slew of quirky characters makes me cringe at points.  The gravedigger friend who focuses on get rich quick schemes and pointless collections, the animal obsessed love interest that feels the need to do something original for one second in a new place just to feel real, the pot smoking mother and her love affair with her fast food knight.  These work so well in this film, but it’s just too much all at once.

That’s when you have to spread those things thin.  Just give a sprinkle of quirk, for example, say you had a character in love with classic cinema, and at night one thing he does is stares at himself in a mirror, surrounded by photos of Lon Chaney contorting his face to try and imitate the Man of 1000 Faces.  That is a quirk, but could work very well on a normal character, especially given the plot.

Feel overwhelmed?  Don’t be, you know who your characters are, you know how you want them to be and act in your story.  I just want you to make them excellent, well developed characters so you achieve the impact you want!

What are some common troubles you run into when you develop characters?  What characters do you idolize in film or literature?

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1 Comment to “How Do You Write – Characters”

  1. forex robot

    May 14th, 2010

    Keep posting stuff like this i really like it

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