How to make characters more than the words on the page?
At the time of writing this question there are 5337 Harry Potter questions on SciFi and a further 165 on Movies. Many of these questions drill right into the character's motivations and emotions such as Why would Snape set his office password to 'Dumbledore'?, Why did the Minister of Magic execute Dumbledore's will?, and Why did Dumbledore hire Lockhart?.
I don't mean to suggest that JKR isn't a talented author. Literary critiques aside she's made millions of pounds from her writing. But I cannot believe that she anticipated every single thought, motivation, and emotion each of her characters felt during the seven books and associated works. Not to the level of detail to stand up to the scrutiny of millions of readers!
SciFi has thousands of questions which which ask about character motivation and why characters did particular things and people (with a LOT of reputation) can create plausible, reasonable, arguments to justify their actions.
There seems to be some kind of physiological trick here which allows readers to interpolate the missing information from what's there...
Remembering that at the end of the day Dumbledore, Picard, Gandalf, and Yoda are fictional characters and assuming that their creators cannot possibly delve into every single permutation and action how do authors create characters which can stand up to this sort of scrutiny?
In short, how does an author shift a character in the reader's perception from being a creation to a person in their own right?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37235. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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I agree with Galastel; to the point I almost did not answer!
What I can add is that my main characters, perhaps like Harry Potter, have something special about them, a rare talent or natural ability. They are crazy good at something, which may be anything from card tricks to seduction, math to athletics, whatever.
For me, the talent comes first. Harry Potter is "The Boy Who Lived," marked as special for all to see by his lightning bolt scar and his special, natural, magical ability.
But I don't start writing my character until I imagine how her rare talent would have influenced her life. With that ingredient, where was the drama and trauma, growing up? How was it trained and nurtured, if it was at all? Who knows about it? What enemies resent it or hate it or covet it, and want to possess and control it, and therefore possess and control her?
How did she discover it? When was the first time she used it? When was the first serious time she used it; i.e. not for play or some fun, but to save herself, or make money, or punish somebody, or make a real difference in some outcome?
That rare talent will define much of the character, and present me (the author) with some arbitrary choices to make, the milestones of life that may or may not depend on the talent. I must decide upon an inciting incident that triggers the story, thus her age and relationships at that time.
As Galastel says, your decisions must be consistent, but I don't bother with cheat sheets to plan the character, I want her to grow up with this talent defining her life.
Being consistent, and showing the reader how the character makes their decisions, provides enough clues for readers to fill in the blanks. If my hero takes a lover, it will make sense with all the rest of her life growing up, and the reader will see that, and know if this is a lover that makes sense for our character. They get in her head and know, not just the specifics of what she wants in a lover, but the type of person she would even consider for a lover. The same goes for her other choices and actions in life, we give the reader a template they can use to reason about our character and her life and decisions. How and why she acts, gets angry, gets happy, and navigates her way through whatever conflicts or trials we put her through. From an authorial point of view, those are there and chosen to define some aspects of her.
We need to use the specific concrete choices we write about as clues to her inner character and belief system, so the reader can predict what she will do, and knows her well enough to predict in different situations what she will do or why she would have done what she did.
Think of it as a predictive model. All you truly have, for real people in real life, are a finite number of experiences with them, of what they have done and said. Even your lifelong friends. From that finite list, you have constructed a fairly accurate predictive mental model of them, what they will say and do in various situations, even if you have never seen them in such situations.
In fiction, we have an advantage over real life: I can show you the actual thoughts and actual feelings of my characters. Those are something you can only intuit from another person. This gives me a way to shortcut you into truly knowing them, a way to build that mental predictive model faster, so you feel like you know them as well as a real person: As long as I don't do anything so incongruent with your previous perceptions of their character that your immersion in the story gets shattered.
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In my mind's eye, the characters I write about are "real people": I do not ask myself what I want them to do. I ask myself what they would do in the given situation. I know their fears and their desires and their quirks, I know how they would respond to events, what they would want to say in a situation and what they would actually say. I can recognise when they are acting "out of character", and when they are being stilted puppets, and I rewrite both.
I like playing a little game with myself: when I go to the theatre or the cinema, or I read a book, I ask myself "what this character of mine would say about this play/movie/story? What would be their experience of it if they were sitting right beside me?"
I do not know every single thing about my characters, but then I do not know every single thing about my real-life friends either. I still know what they would enjoy, how they would respond to things. In fact, if you think about it, you should know your characters better than your friends, since you can get into your characters' thoughts.
How do you reach that level of character development? How do you make your characters "take a life of their own"? You ask all those questions: why they're doing this, how, what they want to achieve, what are their misconceptions, what are their little quirks, how they would respond to situation X. You can think of it as dating your character, getting to know them, exploring, finding out what kind of people they are.
To clarify, you needn't sit and fill in the sheets of trivia you can find on the web, with questions like "what is this character's favourite colour". But when you write, ask yourself all the "why"s and the "how"s, and when you're doing day-to-day things, put your character in that situation. Very quickly things fall into place, you get the "feel" of the character, you know them.
Once you know your character that well, questions about "why character X would do A,B,C" answer themselves.
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Characters are ideas. First, you invent the concept. Then you dive in the concept. You do not need to know everything about it to be able to answer any question if you want to. Sometimes, you need to invent more about your character, but most of the time, what you need are just corollaries.
Think as in math. You know what a square is. You have a idea of it, you do not even need a definition. You can answer many questions about squares without thinking about them ahead. Some questions may be more tricky and required more thoughts, but, in the current life, tricky questions happen rarely.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37238. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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