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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48035
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

# Tone and intonation can matter a lot

Personality can set a tone for a character. A hero and an antihero might do the exact same things: they dress up as guards, infiltrate the Evil Overlord's base with their comedy-relief sidekick, square off against the Overlord, nearly die, discover the flaw in the Overlord's power source, dangle him off of a cliff, get persuaded to bring the Overlord back up off the precipice of death, get double-crossed but saved by an unexpected strength-of-will of said comedy-relief sidekick, kick the Overlord off the cliff for once and for all.

What made one the hero and the other the antihero is the tone that they brought to each of these. The antihero probably killed guards to infiltrate the base and stole their uniforms. She probably sneak-attacked the Evil Overlord and ran into his personal energy shield, foiling her. The flaw in his power source might have been a human being, a scientist who maintains the system, who she just straight-up murders to disable the power source. She was probably coaxed to save the Overlord by some promise of power or bringing some deceased loved one back, or something else essentially personal. And when she kicked him off the cliff he was begging for mercy.

Contrast with the hero. She probably got the guard uniforms by sneaking into a locker room. She probably infiltrated the keep via the loving kindness of some disaffected soldier who she befriended. She squared off one-on-one in the open with the Overlord and lost in a fair fight. The flaw in the power source was probably exploited by a simple act of industrial sabotage or pulling a cable or so. She probably saved him because he seemed to repent of his evil; she probably killed him because he had reconnected his power source and was about to Press The Button putting his final plan into immediate motion and There Was No Other Way.

### Personality as a first approximation of tone

A weak resource to set tone, but still very good when you are starting out and have nowhere else to go, are the various personality systems that you can find online that give you a long description of the sort of Personality Archetype that someone has.

So: this “neutral good” person is ‘choleric’ and will argue for what she believes in; that “neutral good” person is ‘melancholic’ and he mostly broods and mopes about how things are not the way they should be. This ideologue is ‘intuitive introverted’ and she wants to just go her own way and trusts her hunches, one of which is her destructive ideology about How It Should Be; that ideologue is ‘sensing extraverted’ and he talks to everybody about his destructive ideology but only trusts what he can see, and this is based on extensive documented observation of What Works even though it flaunts how most people think it Should Be. Or he is a ‘classic Libra’, whereas she is ‘such a Taurus.’ Pick your favorite.

But that is small potatoes, a first approximation. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t have _some_ Myers-Briggs axis where they say “all the quizzes say that I’m squarely 50/50 between Perceiving and Judging and I just don’t feel like either really applies to me.” Good for brainstorming, not great for fleshing out.

### Journal, to create a much deeper appreciation

Your biggest resource for setting the tone of a character involves storytelling. We are each an amalgam of stories. You should consider writing those stories down first in a skeleton form of “things that happened to her” and then flesh those out.

Journaling from each of your characters’ perspectives, digging into their history and how those significant moments affected them, is only one approach. You can also write letters from those characters back to their younger selves about what they wish their younger selves knew. Or letters to each other: maybe what they would be saying if they could talk to each other during your plots, maybe what they have said in the past.

You want each character to have had pains and made choices and had successes and triumphs in their past. As those sorts of things come back into the story, you start to see your characters make _rational_ decisions to seize the things they think they need or want. You also start to see them make _irrational_ decisions because that is just “what she would do.” That is what this person would decide. Both change that tone and they change how that person intones what they do.

### The logical risk of having more personality

At that point you are in a considerable deal of danger; every author is. An entropic force wants to make every story longer than it has to be. It is making this answer longer than it has to be. It wants to pull you towards digression and it wants your characters to choose to dither and draw out the book longer and longer. I like the example of Richard in Terry Goodkind’s _Wizard’s First Rule_, he spends like half the plot of the book wasting time with the Mud People even though they cannot possibly get him where he is going. Your characters will decide to stay with the Mud People as long as possible, that is what is familiar and safe and “what they would do.”

So you need to have these strong ideas of who the characters are and then come at the problem backwards, “Sally is timid and unheroic and has safely escaped the Evil House at the cost of leaving Jake behind, but Jake hurt her and she hates him and she probably considers it Justice that he is stuck there. OK. But I have loved writing these scenes where they start to understand each other and he wins her heart and proposes to her twice and she says yes the second time. So what the _heck_ do I need to engineer so that Sally _has_ to go back to the House and face her demons so that she can rescue Jake from the unspeakable horrors inside?”

You need to know what Sally needs and wants and is irrationally afraid of, so that you can plausibly railroad her back to the plot when entropy wants to scatter her away. OK, so Sally doesn’t care about Jake. He is dead to her. But because of her childhood trauma that you have journaled, she only has this one locket with this one photo of her mother and it is Unspeakably Important to her. Maybe that’s the key: when they were still on good terms Jake was holding onto it and now Jake still has it. OK, now we’ve got legs, she still hates Jake but she needs to save him to get that locket back, I can rewrite a little of the earlier stuff to set this seed in place so that we can get Sally into Round Two, Fight with that Evil House.

Original score: 1