Sunday, January 14, 2007
Writing Question
Mr. Hudnall,
Please accept my thanks for the Secrets of Writing series. I’ve noticed
that there are few if any comments for these pearls of wisdom and I wanted
to let you know personally that I greatly appreciate them.
Now for a writing question; I’m working on my first novel and of course became
stymied. Your series has illuminated several problems with my ms and I’m
wondering what process you use to get the story done.
Do you develop ‘dossiers’ on every character, plot points etc. and then fill in
everything else? Or do you grab an idea and fill in the characters as you go?
I think I am struggling with the balance of telling vs. showing.
Thanks again for a great series,
Bill Bolton
It’s good to write down little dossiers on each major character. Because writing stuff down will help you put your impressions of the character in order and help you put them in perspective. You will need to give the reader a true account of who they are.
Your characters aren’t you, even when you are creating an avatar of yourself. And you need to understand what makes them tick and what makes them different than you. You also need to understand why react differently to each character they meet. We all treat people differently based on who they are and that also tells us soming about the character in question.
As far as plot the most important thing to understand first is what the characters want. The hero and villain. Every person alive is motivated by desire. We all want something. Why does what the hero want conflict with the villain and how can you make that stronger in your story?
To work on the plot you need to map out the key points and you need to know what the ending is and why that impacts the major characters. It should have some kind of impact that makes us care what happens. I will be getting into that shortly on the blog.
As far as showing and telling. You want to show things as much as possible. Figure out how you can do that. When characters explain everything, 99% of the time it slows things down an makes it boring. It’s always better to have the characters learn things and discover things on their own whenever possible. And that discovery should have some sort of impact on the story.
Good luck!
Secrets of Writing: Act Structure
ACT STRUCTURE
We’ve been discussing various elements of story construction such as the world, the plot, the premise and the characters. Now we get down to the nitty gritty.
Act Structure is the most classic form of story construction. It’s a system that has worked incredibly well for thousands of years. I’m going to give you the basics so you can apply these principals you see fit.
Most of us are familiar with the structure known as the three act play. In a nutshell, the three act structure is: The Beginning, the Middle, and the End of the story.
In comic books, this structure has become rare as writers tend to leave their audiences hanging with unresolved climaxes at the end of every issue. Most comics are serialized fiction after all. But there is a right way and a wrong way to handle cliffhangers.
For now let’s deal with the acts.
What is an Act?
Acts are blocks of scenes in a story, separated by act climaxes (“Turning Points”). A comics story is built up from this form: Panel>Scene>Sequence>Acts>Story. Every other medium employs the same form except for the panels. Panels are unique to comics.
The act serves to show a major change taking place in the story. It’s composed of sequences which build to that change, which is the turning point. The sequences are composed of scenes and the scenes are made up of the individual story panels.
The act serves to create a sense of closure for one part of the story. The audience can’t take everything at the same level of energy. We control the energy of the story through these compartmental devices. An act is the sum total of all its parts and it propels us into the next act until the climax and resolution.
Despite what many people think, the three act structure is not the most effective way to tell a story. Shakespeare preferred to do his plays in five acts. A story can be told in one act or seven depending on the objectives of the plot. Acts build the story’s emotional charge. If it takes more than three acts to build up the proper charge, then so be it.
Let’s focus on one and two act stories for a second. These kinds of stories are by nature, brief. The longer the story, the more complexity and reversals are needed, and thus more acts.
One act stories are usually very short. They have the “twist” or “surprise” ending. These stories are created in service of the ending. Everything leads up to a big surprise. The old E.C. Comics stories were written using this principle. Bill Gaines would come up with some twist ending idea and bounce it off his collaborator Al Feldstien. They would often write the story backwards from the ending. This is not a bad idea, actually, and it worked well for them. The ending is one of the most important components of a story. But we’ll deal with that later. One act stories are pretty much reserved for short fiction because you don’t want to take too long getting to the punchline. The comic gag strip, such as “Garfield”, uses the one act story structure. The structure of a three panel strip is: Setup, Beat, Punchline. The beat being a pause of some kind before you hit them with the joke.
Two Act stories are often used in half hour TV sitcoms. The first act takes place before the commercial break in the middle. Its purpose is to get the characters into trouble. The second act gets them out again. Hopefully, the climax of the second act will have a slam bang ending with a nice twist. This format isn’t bad for one issue comic book stories. Especially if they’re simple action plots. But the three act structure is probably best.
Three Act Structure
This is the most widely used structure, mainly because it’s the most simple. It’s also the minimum number of acts needed to take the hero through all four of the story values. One and two act stories are mainly gimmick stories aimed at reaching a simple conclusion rather than exploring the depths of a character or their experience. With the three act structure, we can really begin to get down and dirty.
Act one serves to introduce the main characters, define their motivations, show us the Trigger Event, and get the story in motion for the second act. It’s basically an introduction to the story. But it needs to grab our attention and not let us go. It’s usually not that big a section of the over all story. And it ends with a plot twist that turns the story in the direction of the conflict.
Act two is the section where progressive complications threaten to defeat the hero. The villain gains his ascendancy in this act and is winning by the end of it. This is largest act in terms of size. It’s where most of the action takes place, where most of the character development occurs. You need to pace this section well and build it carefully for the big twist that throws us headlong into the climax.
Act three is the climax and resolution of the story. It is the smallest act in size and for good reason. Like its namesake, the climax doesn’t take long, but boy is it powerful! We couldn’t take too much of the climax at once. It would destroy it’s power. Energy in a story is a critical thing to control and the climax is an explosion of all the pent up energy we’ve been building. It’s where the forces of the conflict are at their peak. It’s here where the winner is determined and the outcome is revealed. The resolution is going to have to be short, because a long resolution makes for a dragged out ending. I’m sure you’ve seen them before and know what they feel like. So the third act is where we finish the story with our final body blow to the audience, and then we wrap it up nice and sweet so they don’t lose that warm, glowing feeling the climax gave them.
Constructing the Acts
Now that we have a rough idea what acts are and what purpose they serve, let’s talk about how we put them together.
Every act is composed of sequences. Sequences exist to create the Turning Point/Act Climax. They tell the story of how the Turning Point/Act Climax came about. Every sequence builds energy to create a lesser turning point which throws us into the following sequence. The last sequence in an act ends with a major turning point.
Sequences are composed of scenes. Scenes are events that, when placed together, form the story of the sequence. Scenes end with mini-turning points that are smaller that the ones that end a sequence. Except for the last scene in the last sequence. These turning points can be as subtle as a change of expression on a person’s face, or as powerful as a planet exploding. It all depends on where they are in the sequence.
In comics, panels are used to create the scenes. It’s possible to do a scene in one panel, but generally, a scene is made up of two or more panels. Each panel is a static image showing a snapshot of action taking place. There will be dialog, narration, and possibly sound effects to make this static image come alive in some way. But these devices are not always needed. Panels are the only element of the act structure that does not end with a turning point. Not unless they are the last panel in a scene.
So…how do we construct an act? We start from the first image in panel one. Many people like to start with the “Splash Page”, a single panel page that has a dynamic image to rouse our interest. This first image sets the mood for the story right off the bat.
You can set the mood of the story with the first scene and take it from there. Once you establish the mood, you have to work within its confines. Changing the mood of story once it’s been set can be a difficult and dangerous thing to do. I’m sure you’ve read books or seen films where it was unclear whether it was a comedy or a drama. This is because they set one mood, then changed it, then changed it again.
It’s important to either keep the mood consistent, or build toward a change in mood at the act climax. Don’t try to make a major mood change mid act or you will make it difficult for the audience to decide how to feel about the story.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Stereotypes and Political Correctness
Stereotypes
Needless to say, you should avoid stereotypes when creating characters. But the truth is, there are people who look and act like living clichés. All stereotypes got started somewhere, and certainly there are people who fit the bill. But we need avoid clichéd characters for one simple reason.
It’s been done.
Forget right or wrong. That’s almost irrelevant. Your first goal as a writer is to be interesting. You can write objectionable fiction and still be entertaining as hell. Robert Crumb made a career out of it. You decide what is right when you set out to tell a story. Fiction is your statement. Your argument. Your goal is not to placate sectors of the public, because no matter what you do, someone will be offended anyway.
But you don’t want to write characters with contempt. Every person is an individual with unique thoughts and feelings. Your goal as a writer is to create characters that are distinct personalities. A stereotype is nothing more than a cartoon. It doesn’t do justice to its subject. It may be used for humorous effect, but it will never be taken seriously in drama. People are bored with clichés.
If you go to write a character from a different race or culture than your own, question the character choices you make. Try to create a real person before you settle on their ethnicity or culture. That way you can avoid creating a stereotype.
“Political Correctness”
In George Orwell’s 1984, the totalitarian government replaced old words with new ones in an attempt to brainwash the public. Political Correctness is an attempt to impose a way of thinking on people by changing terminology. Regardless of the moral intent, Political Correctness is wrong. People aren’t categories. They should not be cataloged into artificial classes of the mind. That’s just a new form of segregation and it doesn’t breed respect.
But more than that, it’s a form of censorship. And writers need to ignore censorship and tell the truth as they see it. Political correctness isn’t about the truth. It’s about avoiding it. It’s about not hurting anyone’s feelings, but also changing the subject. That is antithetical to what a writer needs to do in a story,
By and large, the public hates PC terms. The reason is simple. It’s absurd. When you classify people into some generic mold, you are dehumanizing them. You are robbing them of their individual dignity. Furthermore, the terms keep changing. Calling a black person a Negro is dated, just as the term “African-American” will be in several decades time. These artificial terms are merely buzzwords of the moment, nothing more. And they can date your work as surely as slanguage like “Groovy” and “Hepcat” will.
Stick to terms that have stood the test of time. Better still, don’t even use terms unless it’s necessary for clarification. Your goal is to create people, not classifications.
REMEMBER: “Political Correctness” is wrong. Stereotypes are clichés.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Acting
No motion should be wasted in a story. Nothing a character does should be without a purpose. How people move, talk, breathe, gesture, tells us a lot about them. Body language is important. So is posture. So is the way people hold or manipulate objects.
How people act and dress is a very strong visual indicator for the audience when they assess a character. Our goal should be to minimize the amount of dialog we need to use in a story. So you want to use the appearance and actions of the characters to do some of the work for you.
Comics have an extremely limited amount of space to tell a story in. You have to keep the amount of copy in a story brief. You have to squeeze the maximum impact out of each panel. That doesn’t leave you much room for excess.
Acting can help you save words and show us what kind of character we’re dealing with.
Acting in Comics
Comics is a static visual medium. You don’t have movement. You don’t have sound. We can’t deal with the subtleties of human voices very effectively, or inflection. So we have to rely on tricks like gestures, posture, dress, and certain semiotics which we will discuss later.
When writing a scene with a character, you are writing a series of still pictures of actions, either talking, punching, smoking, thinking, flying, drinking, crying, sleeping, whatever. Each snapshot has the power to tell the audience something about that character.
If they’re sleeping, we can find out if they snore. If they’re thinking, what kind of expression is on their face? If they’re talking, what kind of mannerisms do they use? If someone is talking to them, do they look distracted? Do they show rapt attention? Do they look worried? Everything single shot should reveal something to us, advance the story in some way. Otherwise, it’s just filler.
A comic story is a distillation of the most critical moments that happened to those characters. You have to cut out all the boring stuff. Every panel has to serve a purpose. Every line of dialog needs to crackle with meaning, humor, wit, character, etc. Every gesture, expression, action, needs to have weight.
You do this by creating meaning through acting. It doesn’t hurt to take a few acting classes if they are available in your area. Learn how actors express their inner thoughts through gesture. Read books on body language. Find ways to use props as a form of expression.
You can get a lot of mileage out of ordinary objects.
Freudian Slips
This term is usually reserved for verbal gaffes, but you can also reveal a lot about someone through their body language. Especially if their body language is different than what they’re saying. You can tell the audience a whole lot of things without dialog, through subtext.
For example, a man idly doodles while talking on the phone about some boring business. But their doodles are full of words and images that suggest death and pain. Or maybe a woman is playing hard to get, but she sits with her legs uncrossed and her hands resting suggestively on her thighs.
(Insert Art examples: A man says to a friend: “Hey, I loved what you did the other day!” but he has his arms crossed when he says it.)
The verbal gaffe is one where someone says the wrong word in a sentence, and this suggests what is really on the character’s mind. For example, a man says to his girlfriend: “No, I don’t want to sleep with him…I mean, her.” It could have been shown earlier that a gay friend of his has made a pass at him and he’s not sure how he feels about it.
(Art insert: A woman at a Starbucks coffee joint says to the man behind the counter: “I’d like a decaf cocaine, please.” The man replies: “We only serve caffine here.” Panel 2: The woman looks embarrassed: “I mean a decaf coffee. Sorry!” Panel 3: Close up: She looks embarrassed and thoughtful. thought balloon: “This is getting out of control. I need to watch what I say!”
There are all sorts of methods to inform the audience subtly about what’s going on in your character’s heads without resorting to turgid thought balloons or captions. Keep that in mind when you write a scene. It adds realism and depth.
REMEMBER: Acting can save you from writing dialog.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Characterization part 6
ALIGNMENT
The audience needs to understand more than what kind of persona a character has, or even their backstory. The thing they really want to know is whether the character is good, bad, or neutral.
Terms like good and bad are really meaningless unless you demonstrate what kind of good or bad. There are good people who are useless, there are bad people who are harmless. We need to know the level of good and the level of bad in a practical way. We do that by demonstrating their alignment in a manner that gauges their level. Examples of levels:
GOOD: Helpful, kind, sincere, trustworthy, heroic, generous, complimentary, uplifting
BAD: Cruel, deceitful, violent, lying, depressing, psychotic, a thief, a rapist, a murderer
Good characters provide information, materials, love, anything that helps the hero on his quest. Bad characters have the opposite effect. They take. They work against the hero’s quest. It’s possible for a character to alternate from bad to good in a story, but in the end they should come out on one side of the equation or the other.
Neutral doesn’t mean the same thing here as it does in role playing games. It means neither positive or negative. This is something you don’t really want any character to be in a story unless you are planning to use them in some surprising way. But even then, you want to demonstrate some aspect of their alignment before hand. A neutral character would be like a guy who is standing in the corner and never says anything or does anything.
Neutral characters can be used for the sake of irony, however. They could act as a lighting rod to cancel out the charge of a scene. This would be someone who does bad and good to the hero in equal measures, canceling out their impact on the scene. But this is a dangerous thing to play around with unless you’re really sure of what you’re doing.
As human beings, we like to know where we stand with the people around us. We like to know if that guy over there is safe or dangerous. The audience is going to want to know these things about every character in the story. You tell them what they want to know by demonstrating the character’s alignment. But, the characters in the scene don’t always have to be aware of it. Just the Audience.
These demonstrations will add to the power of the scene or panel, because they create more empathy or antipathy for the characters in question.
When creating your cast of characters, it’s a good idea to create people who are polar opposites, or at odds in some way. This incites conflict which adds to the dramatic tension of your story. Choosing the alignments of the characters will help you decide how effective their presence will be to a scene.
The alignment of a character should be demonstrated in every scene they appear in. Naturally, many characters will not always play the same role. A helpful character can become harmful later. That’s fine. Just make sure you display the nature of their alignment at the proper time.
REMEMBER: Alignment defines on which side characters stand.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Character Construction
Now that we’ve discussed some of the fundamentals of characterization let’s explore the construction of a character. First off, we need to decide what role the character takes in the story. Are they Hero, Villain, Protagonist, Antagonist, or Chorus? Determine how much we need to know about them for the purposes of the story, then answer the following questions. These are questions you must know the answers to. Utterly. If you’re building a supporting character who just has a minor role, it’s still not a bad idea to know as much as possible about them. You may want to expand their role later. Or it may give you insights that could be useful when writing their dialog.
Name
Gender
Age
Height, Weight
Color of Hair, Eyes, Skin
Appearance: Attractive, average, ugly, clean, dirty, athletic, flabby, etc.
Archetypal models
Alignment: Saintly, good, troubled, bad, evil
Race
Class: Aboriginal, Homeless, Lower, Middle, Upper
Occupation, income
Work hours, work ethic
Education
Home life: Married, single, children, lives with parents
Religion
Nationality or Culture
Place in Community: Clubs, sports, lodges, etc.
Amusements: Hobbies, Interests, Pastimes
Politics: Conservative, Liberal, Middle of the Road, Communist, Anarchist
Favorite foods
Sexual Orientation: Hetro, BI, Gay, Transsexual, Pedophile, etc.
Sex Life: Promiscuous, Virgin, Celibate, gets it when he can
Fetishes: Sexual, compulsive, objects that are always kept on him
Morality, Standards
Ambitions, Goals, Dreams
Attitude: Militant, relaxed, resigned, defeatist
Complexes: Obsessions, Inhibitions, superstitions, phobias, hang ups
Illusions (what false beliefs to they hold onto)
Abilities: Languages, Talents
Qualities: Imagination, intellect, judgment, taste, poise
I.Q.
Superpowers, if applicable
Once you’ve answered the main questions, as needed, we then proceed to the second series of important character building questions. Answer all that are pertinent with the story you’re writing. Or if important to the backstory.
Relationships
1. Parents: Alive or dead?
2. Relationship with parents: Good, bad, indifferent, communicative, loving
3. Step parents, relations with
4. Siblings, Relations with siblings
5. Lovers, relations with
6. Ex-Lovers, relations with
7. Other Relations
8. Enemies
9. Employers
10. Who do they trust?
11. Who do they hate?
12. Who do they love?
13. Who do they desire?
14. Who do they fear?
15. Who do they loathe?
16. Who do they need?
For the Hero and Villain, you should know most or all by heart depending on the relevance to your story. The relational questions will help you choose the right characters to present when using relational characterization.
Character Backstory
We can safely assume your characters weren’t born yesterday. They had a life leading up to the first moment they appear in your story. The events that shaped their lives and their psyches is called backstory. It’s the accumulation of their experiences from birth until the time of your tale.
You should know the backstory of all…and I do mean all…of your characters. You may not need to know every little detail, but you should have a clear idea. The above lists of questions are a good way to work it out. Get a notebook and answer every question. When you’re done you’ll feel you know the character a lot better. And when you write them they’ll be more real in your mind. They may even “write themselves”.
Backstory is also important when it involves the story you’re doing. Something in this character’s past may have an impact on the events in your plot. You should think through what those events are and also the time and place they occurred. Something that happened in the 1970s should be looked at from the perspective of that time. Not this time. Each decade has it’s own feel and attitude and looking back on those times should feel appropriate to the audience.
People are also a product of the time and place they were raised in. Study people from the generation your character comes from for clues, if you aren’t of that generation.
Those who were raised prior to the 1960s tend to have a whole different world view than those born later. Baby boomers tend to have a different outlooks, attitudes and expectations than “Generation Xers” do. It’s important to take these things into account.
Although it’s become a trite device in contemporary fiction, the hidden trauma in a character’s past can also contribute to the persona of a character. But it should never be used as an excuse for why someone acts the way they do. A human persona can’t be attributed to one event in the character’s life. People are far more complex than that.
This hasn’t stopped a lot of writers from falling into the trap of using pop psychology to explain away a character’s entire personality based on something like Child Abuse or some other taboo of the week.
But there’s no reason for you to follow in their footsteps, unless you like being lame.
REMEMBER: Backstory is relevant, but it shouldn’t be used to rob a character of their mystery.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Secrets of Writing: The Seven Basic Needs
Psychologists have identified seven basic needs that human beings want. It’s important to know them to help you understand where your characters are coming from. They are:
1. A sense of safety and structure.
2. A sense of belonging/group membership
3. A sense of self worth and contributing
4. A sense of independence and control over one’s life
5. A sense of closeness/relationships
6. A sense of competence/mastery
7. A sense of self awareness
Few people have all these things in their lives at any given time. We often are missing some of these elements, or are unsatisfied with what we have. Most people are seeking them in some way. A lot of our insecurities stem from our lack, or perceived lack of some of these needs. The less these needs are fulfilled in us, the more unhappy or depressed we can become.
So when you try to understand where a character is coming from, it’s a good idea to check this list. Let’s look at an example.
Let’s say you have a hero who, at the beginning of the story broke up with his girlfriend and lost his job. Those things affect 3, 4, and 5. Your character will have anxiety (unless he’s happy to be free of his girlfriend and his boss, or has new ones already lined up) and this will affect his disposition at the start of the story.
The hero in this case will want some kind of replacement for what he lost, though he may be in denial or too depressed to deal with it at the beginning of the story. But he losses you force on that character will need to be resolved in some way by the end of the story for it to be satisfying. Because instinctually, people will relate to your hero’s dilemma, and in doing so will want to see them succeed in the end (if you’ve done your job of making your readers char about the story).
Understanding people is critical to being able to successfully write about them. And one of the best tools you have at your disposal is this list of seven needs.
Examine your own life and compare it to the seven needs. Are your needs being fulfilled? If not, what’s missing? How does that make you feel?
Apply this to a character you create and write a story to show how your character gets that fulfillment. This is how you can see these principals in action.
Cliche Finder
This useful took sniffs out the cliched phrases in a written piece. I ran it on some of my stuff and no cliches.
You really want to avoid them in your writing because it’s the mark of a hack.
You’ll notice that most journalists are hacks. Run it against stories from major papers and magazines and you’ll be amazed.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Characterization Part 5
Components of a Persona
The human persona can be broken down into three main components. Intellectual, Emotional, and Habitual. Some people are more prone to reason than emotion. Some are the opposite. And many people have unconscious habits which are displayed randomly or most of the time. These habits can indicate certain neuroses or psychological traits that can be used for characterization purposes. When constructing a character’s persona it’s not a bad idea to keep these three things in mind and see how they can be used to your advantage.
Personas, Masks and Facades
It’s important to understand that for many people, their personality is something they constructed as a tool for interacting with society. It’s not who they really are. It’s a mask. The real person is far more complex. If you could read people’s minds, you’d see their true persona hiding behind the facade.
We all know that how people act under normal circumstances is misleading. We can never be sure of a person’s true intentions, even if we know them well. There’s only one way to
really get to see the inside of someone’s head and that’s when they are put under pressure. The cowards run and the heroes let the fists fly when it all hits the fan. When the Audience knows where a character really stands on an issue, they can be more comfortable with them.
In life, this is how you find out who your real friends are. When they are tested by the cruel twists of fate. The term “Fair Weather Friend” is known to us all. We’ve seen who sticks by our side when things get rough and who doesn’t return our calls.
In a story, you need to put a lot of pressure on your characters. They need to be tested, put through the fire. We need to see what kind of person they really are, what they are truly made of. And that’s what the Audiences want to see.
Pressure
Pressure can come in many forms. Through relational characterization, we can show how a normally cool character becomes flustered when his mother is around. By using choice as a tool, we can present the character with problems where the solution they choose determines their moral backbone. We can also cause the character a world of hurt to see how they react to it. The Villain can force them to do something against their will, and we can see how they deal with it.
Pressure is another critical force in storytelling. No pressure, no conflict, no story.
No one cares about people who have an easy time. We might get jealous, but we won’t be impressed. You want your hero to impress us.
There are exceptions, of course. James Bond seems to have an easy time doing certain things. But if you watch the movies, you’ll notice the best ones are the stories where he was under the most pressure to succeed. Ultimately, James Bond’s ability at cards or seducing women isn’t the skills that matter. It’s not how he overcomes the Villain. He does that using his wits and his brawn and usually, they are put to the test.
The job of a plot is to put pressure on the characters so we can see who they are and what they’re made of. Until that happens, your hero is just another citizen.
REMEMBER: True character is revealed under pressure.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Secrets of Writing: Characterization part 4
PERSONALITY
Personality comes in three basic flavors: Boring, interesting, and scary. You need to determine which version of the latter two you want your characters to have, because boring is the last thing you want a character to be.
Of course, there are times you will want a boring character for the sake of contrast, or to make some kind of point. But even then, you have to make them interesting enough to keep our attention.
Think of a small party of people. Notice how some people seem to always stand out of a crowd. They seem to get all the attention. As a writer, you’ve got to figure out what they’re doing right that makes them interesting to others and use that to your advantage.
Of course, popular people are usually very shallow and superficial to talk to. This is because they’re afraid of their own inner demons and they are on the run from their own neuroses. They don’t want to get into any conversations that might expose this or dredge up thoughts they’re trying to avoid. Your characters can be like that if you want, but they still have to be empathetic.
Popular individuals are favored because they retain mystery about themselves. They don’t reveal their inner pain or their personal problems. At the same time, they uplift the mood of a scene. The “life of the party” is always someone with a sense of humor, a schmoozer who knows how to please. Depressed or angry individuals are a turn off, even if they are mysterious.
Another way people achieve popularity is by stroking another’s ego in a non-obsequious way. They do it by treating the other person as a peer, rather than a superior. But doing it too much is obvious and it comes off insincere. You have to find the right balance.
So creating a personality that is positive and somewhat mysterious should be your main goal. Your hero cannot look like a wimp internally, even if they do externally. You can peel away the layers of mystery as the story unfolds. But never tell us too much about a person right off the bat.
It’s one of the first things a person learns about dating. Never tell the other person everything about yourself. It will inevitably bore them or put them off. The less someone knows, the more they need to find out. That gives them something to work for. It’s like a carrot on a stick. We need motivations in life. Nothing has value unless we struggle for it. So relationships that have the most appeal are always the those involving a chase. We chase after what we think we see and want. The less we know about someone, the more we can project our fantasies and ideals on them.
The great psychologist Carl Jung proposed a theory that we project our inner most desires on people we are attracted to. We make them what we want them to be in our minds. They are never truly what we believe them to be. And if we see that demonstrated in some way it’s very disappointing and hurtful. Character personas are idealized human personalities. We create clear individuals we can understand. So it’s necessary to reveal what we want the reader to know at that point in time, so they will form this idealized model of the character in their minds while reading.
A character’s personality needs to grab our attention. They have to light up every scene. Naturally, the Hero is the main bonfire. We don’t want the supporting cast to get to steal the show, though it can happen. Make sure the Hero and Villain keeps us spellbound. Their personality needs to outshine the other characters in the story.
Scary personalities are the kind crazy people have. They make us worried that it could rub off. Or they remind us of that old adage: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Scary characters are great for spiking the energy of a scene. The Frank Booth character in BLUE VELVET really grabbed our attention every time he was on camera. But you have to be careful with these kind of characters because they can lapse into parody very easily.
Ultimately, if you want to create and interesting and believeable personality in a character, try to think the way they would. And never use clichéd dialog or lines you’ve heard in movies and TV shows. You want the characters to stand out. They need to come from a place that they believe in. They are doing what they think is correct, which may or may not be what you think is correct.
Copyright © 2008 James D. Hudnall. All Rights Reserved
This page has been viewed 3671703 timesPage rendered in 0.5297 seconds
Total Entries: 2440 / Total Comments: 4863 / Total Trackbacks: 0
Most Recent Entry: 11/19/2008 04:58 pm / Most Recent Comment on: 11/20/2008 12:58 am
Total Members: 78 / Total Logged in members: 0 / Total guests: 22 / Total anonymous users: 0
Most Recent Visitor on: 11/20/2008 01:48 am
The most visitors ever was 847 on 11/15/2007 03:28 am
