Character Creation Rules

ALIVE ON THE PAGE

Remember a couple of posts ago when I said I’m a pantser, and then proceeded to plan my entire story just to see if it would work better?

Well, when it comes to creating characters, it’s going to be almost as painful.

I’ve tried writing character outlines in the past, because I really like the idea of them. When I was bored in my high school science classes, I would create elaborate character outlines for fun—if I didn’t have a short story brewing. But I always got bored and ran out of ideas once I finished the basic fill-in-the-blank checklist.

Deep breath. It seems that character outlining is a relatively new concept, but I wanted to try it for the same reason I wanted to try outlining my plot—to see if The Book will turn out better if I go through all the motions.

CHARACTER CREATION RULE #1: PROFILE YOUR MAIN CHARACTERS

I couldn’t find a character profile template that included everything I wanted and excluded everything I didn’t, so I combined parts of different lists, so as not to blame them on anyone in particular. Here’s what I ended up with:

NAME:

AGE:

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: (eyes, hair, defining features)

ROLE:

GOAL: (Act 1, Act 2, Act 3)

FLAW:

FEAR:

SECRET:

I completed this list for six of my plot-driving characters.

Let’s break it down.

The first three are pretty self-explanatory, I hope.

The Role refers to what generic purpose the character serves in The Book. Protagonist, Antagonist, Mentor, Foil, etc.

I think the Goal section will be most helpful in creating character arcs as I continue writing. This is where I put the driving desires of the character, broken down by act, so I can make sure that her actions are motivated by whatever she wants. Consistency will create a smooth arc.

The Flaw is whatever is preventing the character from reaching her Goal. It can be a personality flaw, or a skill she hasn’t learned yet.

The Fear is—you guessed it—whatever the character is afraid of. It can be physical or abstract. It drives her actions at times of high stress, maybe to disastrous consequences.

The Secret is perhaps the most interesting part of the character outline, because I won’t necessarily reveal all my characters’ secrets over the course of The Book. However, each character’s secret is motivating their actions and interactions with other characters. This is the sort of thing that makes a flat character into a deep one, and a good story includes a lot of deep characters.

CHARACTER CREATION RULE #2: REFER BACK TO PROFILES WHILE WRITING

I didn’t want to make my character profiles too long, because I wanted to leave room for them to grow as I wrote The Book. Plus, filling them out took away precious minutes that I could use for actual writing.

Last week, we started writing the first chapter. I’ve kept my character profiles open during my writing sessions, and I suppose they’ve been helpful. I outlined six characters so far, and maybe I’ll add more as I continue writing.

I’ve mostly referred back to my character profiles to keep the names of my characters straight. As the story progresses and the stakes are raised, I think it will be helpful to have a list of the different things that motivate them for the sake of consistency. But I don’t think creating a longer, more complex outline for each of them would have helped me much. I was struggling to fill in the blanks as it was. As a reference tool, the short list I compiled was plenty long, and I think adding much more would have been a waste of time.

I’m not saying it’s not a good occasional exercise to really dive deep into the motivations of your protagonist or antagonist or any character you’re struggling with. I just think that putting too much time into an outline is taking away from the time you could spend actually writing.

Characters don’t become real unless you stick them into a timeline and write them alive.

What do you think? What else do you include in your character outlines? Comment below.