I ran across one of those character-creation sheets the other day, the ones with 200 questions that are supposed to create your unique and wonderful protagonist. As usual, my immediate reaction was severely negative, which got me thinking about why.
The first problem I have with these lists is that they all seem to start from the assumption that a character is a collection of bits and pieces of specific information, and that if you know the information, you then will have a character. To me, this is like saying that a house is a collection of bricks, and if you have a huge pile of bricks, you then have a house. Obviously, this doesn’t happen; you have to do something to your pile of bricks before it becomes a house, to wit, you have to put them together.
Furthermore, that pile of bricks can be put together in a lot of different ways. You can build a large great room with a loft, or a two-bedroom split-level, or a Victorian house with all sorts of oddly shaped rooms. You can have lots of little windows, or a few large ones. All with the same pile of bricks.
For some of the configurations, you may not use all the bricks. A three-story Victorian mansion will use a lot more bricks than a one-level starter home. A character may have a morbid fear of penguins because of a bad experience at the zoo when he/she was seven, but if they star in a story that takes place in the middle of the Sahara desert where there are no penguins, the writer probably doesn’t need to know that particular phobia or its background.
That got me thinking about what I most need to know about my main character to write a story about them. An awful lot of the questions on that character sheet turn out to be, at best, nice-to-know rather than must-have items. “Where did your character go to college?” is completely irrelevant for my current main character as she is fourteen and not a genius. It’s not even an extra brick. “Who does she consider family?” on the other hand, is right at the heart of the current book.
At the very top of my need-to-know list is how and why my main character makes decisions, and which of their decisions are likely to be good ones and which will be bad ones. Does she make good decisions about people, but bad ones about money? Does he automatically follow (or reject) his family’s traditional career path? Do they give in readily to social pressure, or reject all advice even if it’s quite good?
The reason this is at the top of my list is that the one thing all main characters have to do in any story is make decisions. That’s what stories are about, really – the series of decisions, large and small, that the main character is presented with and the consequences that play out because the character kept a secret or revealed it, killed the dragon or snuck by it, went to the concert or stayed home, filled the gas tank or didn’t, befriended the misfit or didn’t.
Of course, how and why a character makes decisions depends in an extremely fundamental way on what kind of person they are and what they value. A kind, shy, trusting, inexperienced character, faced with an obvious con man’s proposed poker game, is going to react very differently from an unscrupulous, suspicious, experienced character. But is the kind, inexperienced character smart enough to spot the con job, and if so, will they quietly attempt to avoid the situation, or would they play innocent and neglect to mention that they grew up playing cutthroat poker with their aunts and uncles? Is the unscrupulous, suspicious character more likely to turn the con around (and if so, are they more or less likely to pull it off than the inexperienced character), or would they just punch the con man? It depends on the person.
Unfortunately, we don’t really have a set of succinct descriptive terms for personality that work the way terms like “blonde” and “auburn” work for hair color. What we have are a set of character types: the Ingénue, the Hero, the Misfit, the Plucky Comic Relief, the Evil Minion, the Bad Boy, the Mean Girls, the Evil Overlord. They’re part story role and part pre-set personality, and one can’t turn them into realistic, well-rounded characters by slapping a few specific flaws, fears, quirks, and passions on top of the basic template. People are more complicated and less orderly than that, which means that characters have to be, too, if one wants them to be realistic. (Not all stories require realistic characters…and those that don’t are even less likely to find a character-creation questionnaire useful.)
This may be a problem of execution, however. I suspect that a lot of the questions like “What is his/her favorite food?” and “What do they have in their wallet/handbag/pockets?” are meant as triggers, to get the writer thinking about what their particular character is like, rather than as a run-down of possible idiosyncrasies and traits that can be added to the basic templates in order to turn them into Real People. For those who have characters walk into their heads more-or-less fully formed, a question list may be useful as a reminder of things to look at, rather like a set of interview questions for a prospective job applicant. (“George, I see that you are applying for the position of Evil Minion. What are your qualifications?”)
For those who have to write their way into the character, I doubt that a list of canned questions will be much help. The decision that the writer makes in advance about what the character is like seldom holds up (in my experience) when one reaches the point in the story where the character is the one making decisions.
Something I’ve come across recently that I found usefully thought-provoking: “What are the typical reasons why this character makes bad decisions?”
I kind of like the idea of interviewing for the Evil Minion position. Hm. I don’t have any of those in my current WIPs, but the job interview for, say, Reluctant Saviour might prove useful! Or the “oops, I didn’t mean to hit so hard” character.
Eek! Those sound daunting and un-fun to me, but I suppose that’s because I currently feel fairly satisfied with my own character generation process. It’s not terribly formal.
Usually the setting/story problem gives me some basic information about my protagonist. Then I’ll free-write about the character and his/her circumstances, and that will tell me more. And then I’ll start writing the story, and I’ll learn yet more as I go along.
I guess I’m one of those writers who writes my way into the character.
I’m particularly struck by the observation that stories are about the main characters’ decisions. (Which explains why I’m not fond of stories that rely on mind control or other devices that prevent the characters from making decisions.)
The pile-of-bricks analogy is the perfect way of illuminating how I felt about those character questionnaires but did not know how to explain.
Any (every) time I’ve tried to “create” a character, they’ve come out flat, two-dimensional, and wholly uninteresting. My usual method (if you can call it that) is to just start writing and let the characters reveal themselves to me as they wish (or not). It’s more like channeling a personality than creating—the characters come to me as sprung from the brow of Zeus, fully formed. It then becomes my job to learn about them.
The way I put this in the more general context is that world building feels more like discovery than invention.
That sort of thing works for some people. It’s analogous to the (in)famous world-building questionnaire.
Something that would be useful to me is a questionnaire and description-language for character appearance: What the character looks like, both in snapshots and in motion, and also what the character sounds like.
the middle of the Sahara desert where there are no penguins
giggle That depends on your world-building. 0:)
LOL!
Have you heard of Atlanta Nights? A truly ghastly novel written to sting a scam publisher.
It features Sahara-dwelling penguins.
Speaking as one who generally has characters walk into her head fully formed, I find character sheets not only useless, but annoyingly so. The stuff they ask about is hardly ever the stuff that matters, IMO. I’ve written upwards of 100,000 words about one character, and I still don’t know her favorite color. Nor do I need to, or care. But I do know how she reacts if someone she loves is in danger, or what her taste in music is like (which is also irrelevant, except that it says something about what she was like as a teenager), or what happens if a friend tries to discuss a sensitive subject during a racquetball game. 😉
I’ve always thought that the canned questions must be more use to someone who has to design their characters on a conscious level, but that approach is far enough from my own mind-set that I don’t claim any insight into it.
“Characters walk into her head fully formed.” I love those! I’ve had a few, most of whom never saw print.
I had one guy who fit the D&D definition of “chaotic neutral.” He kept busting into scenes where he had not been expected, to be driven out again by the actions of characters who had never even met him before.
I finally (as it were) sat him down and said to him, “Look, Saradoc, you are a bad hat and I’ve got to get rid of you before story’s end. Will you settle for riding in out of left field and tipping the course of the battle and dying a spectacular death?” and he said, “Yeah, that’ll do,” and did.
I love characters who do my work for me; I wish I had more of them.