A Study in Building Characters People Will Believe
By D. Elizabeth Ayers
Have you ever looked at one of your characters and thought, ‘What a tool!’
I frequently struggle with this when creating my villains. They are my least favorite type of character to write because I can never understand how they can be so dang mean! I know, I know, if I give them a frightening enough back story, it will make sense. But I and many of my friends have suffered worse things than some villains I know, and we don’t snatch our estranged brother’s body so we can make another go of it with the wife we scorned our whole lives.
Sometimes I even feel like my leads are just standing around like a sad bunch of extras waiting to be herded onto the next set.
But then, there are those magic moments when you sit down to write a well plotted scene. You go in knowing ultimately what’s going go down. Suddenly, one character, be they big or small, sort of jumps off the page and says, “Follow me!” Like any great hero, you might hesitate, reluctant to take the call. But eventually you go and have one heck of an adventure!
I guess it comes down to making a completely 3-D character, which is easy, right? All you have to know is what they look like and some backstory. But I bet we all find it a little more difficult than that most days. Not only is each individual character like a real person with preferences and history, they also, for the purpose of your story, have to meet some kind of archetypal criteria without seeming like, well, A TOOL!
I have collected some very valuable gear to deal with these little heartaches and I want to spend the next several weeks sharing those ideas with you all.
For next time, I’m going to need you all to at least have a look at the basics of Tami Cowden’s character archetypes on her webpage: http://http://www.tamicowden.com/archetypes.htm.
I will walk you through what I know about a hero and a heroine archetype using a few of my characters as examples.
Until next time!
D
