Carol Rose
Basic
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
This is a long post. I debated whether to cut this in two, but it’s such important stuff, and I believe it is the backbone of everything else you write in your story. So I decided to make it one long post. Unfortunately, it's too long for the server! LOL! I can only post 20,000 characters in one post, so this one is continued in the first comment. Hang in there with me.
In the previous CRAFT CHAT post on Backstory, we touched on character development when we discussed how an author will always know way more about their character’s past than the reader. Several of the links I posted in that thread gave suggestions of how much backstory should make it into the novel. The actual percentage isn’t important.
What’s important is that you understand and know your characters as well as you know close friends and family members in real life. As well as you know yourself. How else can you expect to write a three-dimensional person if you don’t understand who they are, what shaped them, and what they want out of life? You can’t. You’ll end up with the author’s worst nightmare – a Mary Sue.
Why is it important to develop my characters before I write them?
Because no one wants to read a two-dimensional character who thinks and acts like everyone else in the book. Even more vital is that if readers aren’t invested in that character, and care what happens to him, they have no reason to keep reading your book.
You want your readers completely immersed in this character’s life, needing to know what happens next, and how this person will get out of the mess you’ve written him into. If they can’t feel the emotion or sense the conflict, why on earth would they keep reading? Would you?
So how do you accomplish this all-important task? How do you develop your character into a real person on the page?
You start by writing a character profile, at least for each of the main players in your story. And I’d strongly suggest the prominent secondary ones as well. You may even find yourself needing to do this for certain tertiary ones. Certainly if you plan a series, with books that focus on any of the secondary or tertiary characters in your current novel, you will want to do their character profiles up front. This will avoid detail inconsistencies in future books, and will give you more well-rounded secondary and tertiary characters in your current novel. You do that, and readers will beg you to write that character’s story next.
Trust me on this one. I’ve had readers tell me they want so-and-so’s book next, when I didn’t even realize they grew that invested in a secondary or tertiary character. I’ve also read books where I thought the author did a much better job at writing a secondary or tertiary character than she did writing her main characters. You can tell when an author gave more than a passing thought to a secondary or tertiary character. It makes for a more interesting story.
Just as we discussed in the Backstory Craft Chat post, people come to the page with a past. They have lived a life for years or decades already when you drop them into the present day. That’s why you need to know them before you write. A lot of that (most of it) will never make it onto the page, but you will know it as you write that character’s story. You’ll never be sitting there for hours, days, weeks asking what would this character do or think in this situation? You will already know it.
I know authors who love to resist this idea. They like to see where their character leads them. While I do understand their thinking, and I’ve had my characters lead me down trails I never thought of for them in plenty of books, the main difference is that I first had done their profiles, so I knew them as people. I went along with the unplanned changes because I knew it would work. I knew it would make the book better.
But to trust in that, to be able to change an outline like that and know it will work, you first need to understand how your characters will react in any given situation. You need to know how they speak to others. If you watch people in a group, you’ll see what I’m talking about. No two people in any group will react verbally or non-verbally to the same thing in the exact same way. Watch carefully, and you will see small differences. Nuances of body language, expressions, and spoken reactions.
We’re individuals.Your characters need to be as well, otherwise they all end up reading the exact same way. Same speech patterns, same reactions, same thoughts, same actions. Boring!! Two-dimensional!! That’s not what you want.
Okay. I get it now. But how do I write a character profile? It sounds like too much work!
It is, but it’s also the most important work you will do for your story. There are many ways to accomplish it. It doesn’t matter which one you choose, as long as you’re comfortable with it and can use it to your full advantage. You may even choose a different way when you write a different book. Not all of them are applicable to all types of novels.
Start by Googling “Character Profile” and have fun browsing. As I said, there are many ways to do this. Explore them all and choose one that you like best, and that you feel best suits the book you’re writing. Also, Scrivener and other apps that help you organize notes, backstory, and characters are great for this.
And now I’ll tell you my secret.
I’ve written well over one hundred books and have ninety-five published titles, and the only thing I ever used to write my character profiles were Word documents, and THIS BOOK. Unfortunately, you can no longer get the printed edition directly from the publisher’s website, but there is a Kindle version on Amazon which isn’t ridiculously expensive.
Plenty of people have blogged and written their own craft books based on Deb Dixon’s GMC – Goal, Motivation, and Conflict. And with good reason. It’s the building block of any character profile. Doing their GMC will help you fill in every detail for the rest of that profile that you will ever need. It will give you a guide or a roadmap for the entire book. It will keep you on track with each scene so your story doesn’t wander off down paths you can’t even follow, and which you can’t write your way out of.
I’m fortunate to have two printed copies of her book, one of which is signed. I met Deb when she came to speak at our local RWA chapter meeting, very early in my writing career. Once she explained GMC, I finally understood what I’d been missing in my own characters.
She’s not a romance writer, so don’t be thinking this only applies to the romance novel. In fact, in the book she uses popular movies to explain GMC. It applies to any work of fiction. Any genre, any type of character, any plot.
So what is GMC?
Without conflict, you don’t have a story. Without some change in your main characters, you don’t have growth. Without growth, you have at best a memoir or a vignette, but you do not have a story. Readers want to see the people they’ve invested in get something out of the story at the end. They want to see them grown and learn, just like we do in real life when face with a conflict. That’s why we read. It’s the journey we enjoy.
GMC is Goal, Motivation, and Conflict.
I’m going to borrow Deb’s example of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz to explain this.
Goal: Characters can have more than one goal per story, but the main goal is the one that drives each scene, each reaction, each action. In the movie, Dorothy’s first goal is to get the heck off that farm in Kansas and see something outside her narrow world. Then, once she’s transported to Oz, she wants to get to Emerald City to see the wizard, so she can get back home.
Every scene in the movie revolves around Dorothy’s goals. The people she meets along the way, and who end up sharing her journey have goals of their own, but they all in some way relate to Dorothy’s goal of getting to the wizard, so he can help her get home.
Without Dorothy’s goal, and the driving force that makes her react, act, and speak in the ways she does toward the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, the Wicked Witch of the West, Glinda, and the Wizard himself, the story would make little sense. It would be about a teenager’s bizarre dream and her meanderings through that dream. But because each scene leads us further toward Dorothy accomplishing her goal, we feel on track with that common thread.
This is an important point. I’ve seen this so many times. Some writers don’t understand the need to have scenes fulfill a purpose, so the story wanders off down tangents and side roads, with no real tie to prior scenes. It’s disjointed. The reader can’t work out why this scene is here, and the story falls apart for them.
When we read, we suspend our disbelief to enter the world the author created for us. We become invested in the character’s journey. It’s the reason we turn the page. What will happen next? How will she overcome this next obstacle? How will he get out of this mess?
The reason we care about what happens to Dorothy is two-fold. We can all identify with our mundane life and wanting to see other places. Wanting to see what’s on the other side of that rainbow. We can also identify with wanting to go back home when we find ourselves in a terrifying, unfamiliar place. Especially one we appear to be trapped in. She certainly wasn’t going back the way she came to Oz. That point was made clear early on.
As the movie progresses, we want Dorothy to get home because she’s scared and homesick. We also come to love her three friends, and wonder what will happen to them. But there are no wasted scenes in this story. Every one drives Dorothy closer to her goal, and has a reason for being there.
Motivation: Your character’s goal should be one that has high stakes, like Dorothy’s did, or the motivation for accomplishing that goal will seem trivial or forced. Like you’re trying to make a problem out of something inconsequential.
Dorothy’s motivation was clear cut, and it made sense to her goals. Unless she found a way back to Kansas, she was trapped and would never see her family again. And unless she did it before the witch got her, she’d die.
Your character needs a goal that is not easily reached, or is truly life and death, like Dorothy’s was. Otherwise, the motivation to seek it falls flat. If it’s a goal someone can easily reach, you’ll have a tough time building a story around it, or making the reader believe in the motivation for it. A goal that no one really has to work hard for is boring to read about. No one will turn the pages to find out if she accomplishes it.
Conflict: As we said, it shouldn’t be too easy for your character to reach her goal. Otherwise, why is a reader going to trudge through tens of thousands of words to see if he gets there? Would you? At the same time, you don’t want to get ridiculous and toss in roadblocks simply for the sake of them. They should make sense to the story, otherwise your readers will see right through your ruse.
Dorothy’s conflicts made sense to the story. The witch was after her because Dorothy’s house killed the witch’s sister. She wanted to punish Dorothy, even though it wasn’t her fault. The witch didn’t care about fault. She wanted revenge. That need to hurt Dorothy is consistent with her character. That’s another important point. Any conflict brought on by another person should be consistent with that person’s character.
That’s why you need to make sure you understand your secondary and tertiary characters. Make sure you understand your antagonist, too. Villain is not synonymous with inconsistent, clichéd character. Don’t be tempted to use your antagonist in a way that makes it easy for you to invent conflict. And by that I mean, their character should be as three-dimensional as all the other main or secondary characters in that story. Otherwise they come across as clownish, or as a plot device.
The witch was ruthless and unforgiving. We were shown that up front. There was no compassion or understanding in her. Her personality stayed consistent throughout the movie. If she’d grown soft or was moved by Dorothy’s tears or pleading, that would have been inconsistent with the character we’d been shown up to that point, and it would have made her no longer believable as a mortal threat.
The people Dorothy met on the way to Emerald City added some conflict as well. She defended them when the flying monkeys came, adding to the witch’s anger. She enlisted their help which made her less vulnerable, and that angered the witch as well. She outed the wizard as a fraud, causing him to leave Oz. He ended up leaving without her, though, and that led to what some writers call the black moment. That point where it seems impossible your hero or heroine will reach their goal.
By that time, we were so invested in Dorothy and her friends, that it was a toss-up between them telling her if she stayed they’d take care of her, or hoping she’d still somehow find a way home. We didn’t want her three new best friends sad, but we also didn’t want her without her family for the rest of her life.
And that brings me to the next point about character development. This is THE BIGGIE. Creating emotion. If you do not do that, none of the GMC stuff you worked so hard on will matter. Why not? Because your readers won’t give a hoot about that person and won’t care what happens to them.
How do I show that emotion? How do I make people care about my characters?
I’ve been asked this question a lot. Because one consistent thing I read in reviews of my books, and that readers were kind enough to tell me on social media, is that they were always invested in my characters. That they ran the gamut of emotions as they read my books. That they cared about what happened to my heroes and heroines.
How did I do this? Well, I started with all the stuff up there I told you about. I worked hard on building that person into a real one. Who are they? What was their childhood like? What are their favorite memories and why? What type of music do they like? What are their artistic pursuits, or if they aren’t artistic, what makes them happy and feel fulfilled? What do they do for a living? Do they like it, and why or why not? What would they do for the rest of their life if they never had to worry about earning money? What do they dream about? Do they dream in color? What do they daydream about? Do they like to be outside, and if not, why not? Do they like big cities or small towns, and why? What kind of car do they drive? Do they have pets? How do they feel about rainy days?
This is only a partial list. And yes, I do that for every single main character in each of my stories. If I start writing and a secondary or tertiary character catches my eye, I stop and do it for them, too. Especially if this is a long series I have planned, and I have a feeling this other character will play a part in it. Or I already know they will.
I have series ranging from three books to fifteen, and all but a couple of them have running themes or threads through them. The same secondary and tertiary characters appear in each of the books. And in more than once instance, those characters ended up with their own book in the series. My readers loved that.
After I build them into a three-dimensional person with a past and a personality, I do their GMC for this story. Deb’s book is next to me when I write. It’s marked up inside with highlighted passages and notes I took when I heard her speak about GMC all those years ago. Because I’m not only using GMC for the person. I’m using it to make sure every single scene in that book relates back to those goals.
As for the emotion, it comes from inside me, and it comes from my understanding that I’m writing real people with real problems. That’s what readers want to read. They have real lives, they live in real places, (and by that I mean even if you make up a town, it needs to be “real”. We’ll talk about that in a moment) and they have all the same crap going on in their lives that we each do.
Well, you write romance so that’s easy, no? Their goal is to fall in love.
Not all the time. It’s not that easy because the romance of today isn’t as simple as the heroine wants a husband, or doesn’t want one, and he wants a wife, or doesn’t want one. Readers today want more substance than that. And as a writer, I’ve never been happy writing a fluffy book with marriage as the only goal. I like to make things complicated.
Creating emotion is a difficult concept to explain. I think for one thing, you have to be fearless when it comes to how much angst you’re willing to write. You have to forget about being cautious and simply let the emotion pour out of your psyche and into your fingertips as you type. Reach down deep. We all have crap in our past that lurks there, dark and angry. It makes us cry and scream. Well, you need to use that as you write. You need to infuse that into your characters.
Am I saying make your characters angry or anguished all the time? No. I’m saying use the emotional reactions of your own past traumas, or truly happy experiences, and let them come out in your characters. Don’t be afraid of the feelings. These are real people you’re writing. At least, to your readers they will be. So you need to give them real emotions, and real reactions to those emotions.
If you can do that, if you can make people laugh, cry, get angry, get sad, smile, whoop with joy as they read your books, you’ve done it. You’ve won their hearts. They will read everything you write.
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