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A friend of mine just asked me to write an article for a writing site (based on role-playing, mostly) about building characters you, as a player, are able to commune with and remain interested in. As a topic, I think this poses a considerable amount of food for thought, and I was wondering if anyone here has any input about character development–not just any character development, but the sort that makes a character start out interesting and remain so for the rest of its lifetime.
What I’m going to focus on, I think, is why or why not any given character becomes important to you as its creator. Writers need to be able to “talk” with their characters, so to speak, in order to fully understand them. What I want to know is what qualities a character and his/her/its author need to have in common in order for them to be compatible. Writers who either role-play textually or write with a deadline (like during NaNoWriMo) will be the sort to understand this most, I think, but anyone who has people inside his/her head should be able to relate.
What makes a character interesting to the writer who created it, and what KEEPS a writer interested in that character? And what mindset makes a writer capable of writing about a character regardless of the mood said writer is in at the time?
Discuss!
I can’t tell you what makes a character interesting as a writer, but I could discuss what makes them interesting from a reader’s point of view. Let me know if you’d be interested in that angle.
Kyrin
Sure, that works too. I suspect many of the same things that interest readers will interest writers as well. Thanks for your help!
For me… well, a lot of things, really.
The big one is weaknesses though. Which sounds funny, I know, but it’s true! A lot of my early characters were “Mary Sue” sorts of characters, that were the All Powerful Chosen One kind of thing, and honestly that gets old and boring very fast. The first character who really did start moving into my head was a character who was a scruffy thief, who kind of wanted to reform, but had serious kleptomania, and couldn’t quite bring himself to give that up. So he has this one major challenge, and then of course the whole vampire thing turns up, and he gets a second challenge added to it, now he not only has to try and keep from stealing, he has to try and fight the blood craving, and try and deal with his depression, and a whole slew of other problems. That’s the point at which I really started liking him as a character. Watching him develop, and fight against himself to try and be a better person was really interesting. (This would be Aidan Rhiannon, for anybody familiar with my writing. He started out as a role playing character, and then I started telling stories about him outside of the game play, and now I’ve written hundreds of pages about him and his family.)
He has a lot of strengths, but it’s his flaws that made him really worth exploring as a character, and developing him so that his weaknesses gradually became strengths through hard experience has been a really fun thing for me.
I mean… I originally invented the character of his wife, Flame, first, and she was going to be “my” character, but she’s honestly too perfect. She has a few warts, I know better than to make somebody completely perfect, but she’s a good person who’s never had any serious personal failings, and she just… got boring. Her husband was ever so much more interesting, so even though he was originally meant as a kind of side kick, he became the star of the story.
I tend to like characters with a touch of sarcasm to them, and ones that have to show integrity and honor when it’s difficult to do so. 🙂
hmmm… looking back at those many years I’m writing on my thing I find various reasons that keep me interested more in some of my figures and characters.
One of them is the concept of evil, the so called “bad guy”. Letting someone die is almost half as hard to me than “accusing someone of being downright evil”. Maybe its just my habit of trying to grasp the reason why people can be like that or because I very much am against the concept of good and bad. every person is good and bad.The other interesting figures are those who make a great personal sacrifice throughout the story itself. Especially if they apply bad and brutal things for the greater good. I often call them twilight figures. They are very hard to write and tame into words as I know how they really are.
Then there’s those I’ve already mentioned: those who die through my feather. “Then when you start to like them they die” is something one of my early Beta reader said.
They are of a personal challenge to me, not in their character but because of the concept of death. I’ve often been asked why I am writing. Aside of the fun I wish to communicate things I saw and think.And I also wish to write about things that bother me, one of those is death, watching someone die, being helpless and the holes they leave afterwards.And last but not least, figures who have the “bad things happen but I will always stand up again and fight”. This doesnt apply on your classical fight where someone seems immortal in combat but more in the actual will they show between the lines.
And to answer the question of talking to my figures, yes I do that a lot. Now add the fact that they were “born” in 1993.
Occasionally I dream of them asking me why they are this and that and why I “made” them like that.
I’ve also made lifesize puppets of them. hmmm… am I crazy enough for your essay? yes?My characters have always spoken to me. They have their story to tell, and I’m just the conduit for that. I’ve never been able to make a plotline and wrestle my characters onto that path – they will always (and quickly!) find their own way along the journey.
As for remaining interested…there is always more for me to tell. For me, when I put a story away for a while, it’s because of the effort required to write, rather than having nothing to say. Even if I’m not sure where the story will go next, the characters will let me know.
Roleplaying is different for me, though. I’ve MUSHed for about ten years now, and have had several characters ‘fall flat’. Mostly it was because they were too one dimensional. They only had one quirk, or they were too perfect, or too cliche. If I had a character that was slipping away from me that I wanted to keep, I would have to do some serious thought on what I could do to give them more dimension. Some of them were just bad ideas from the start, and you have to let them go.
With roleplaying, also, a lot hinges on being able to play that character with other people – that’s where true depth comes from, for me. It’s that interaction that shows you exactly what your character is made of. Do they get easily angry? Are they moody? Do they giggle too loudly? Those are all things that apply to some of my characters that came up in RP. I did not create them with those characteristics, they just arose through their ‘life’ experiences.
What keeps a writer interested in a character? It takes commitment, sometimes, to work through the patches when you think all your character can do is sit at a table and drink coffee and have meaningless conversations. It takes plots, action, adventure, be it a hunting trip gone wrong, or a new romance. Life is forever changing, and you need to make sure that life changes for your character as well.
As for mood…that takes practice, I think. When I first started roleplaying, whatever mood I was in, that was the mood my character was in. But the more I played, the more I was able to separate IC and OOC (in character and out of character). Also, it helps to not try and RP when you’re in a particularly volitle mood. Before I sit down at my computer to interact with other people (I do live roleplay, as opposed to PBEMs) I make sure I’m in an okay mood. Otherwise you just get irritated, say things you shouldn’t to other players, and generally cause a mess when you should be off the computer, relaxing and taking care of yourself. Mood takes practice. Now, I can just switch off the “me” part of my mind, and switch on the creative part, where my characters live. When I really get into a scene I forget all about my problems, and become completely involved in my character’s life. That’s not to say that I totally zone out, but “me” is pushed gently to one side until the scene is over. It’s a nice escape. 😀
Whew, I wrote a lot. Sorry…MUSHing is, I think, my real passion. I love it, and probably spend too much time doing it. 😀
First off–oh my gosh, I forgot about this project and thread and now that I come back to it… you have all given me so much invaluable input I can hardly believe it.
Thank you, all of you. Not only have you guys given me a lot to think about, I’ve learned a lot just from reading your responses. Also, I’m beginning to wonder what sort of similarities and differences there are between RP characters and characters in an ongoing story or novel. Perhaps this is fodder for another article!
Chessapeaka wrote:Also, I’m beginning to wonder what sort of similarities and differences there are between RP characters and characters in an ongoing story or novel. Perhaps this is fodder for another article!
I seem to remember on one of my favorite author’s web site reading a note that the major character in the series they were writing originally started out as an RPG character. I wish I could remember which one though. 😆
pegasi1978 wrote:Chessapeaka wrote:Also, I’m beginning to wonder what sort of similarities and differences there are between RP characters and characters in an ongoing story or novel. Perhaps this is fodder for another article!
I seem to remember on one of my favorite author’s web site reading a note that the major character in the series they were writing originally started out as an RPG character. I wish I could remember which one though. 😆
Huh… that’s not surprising. I know a few self-published authors who have characters that started out in a RP universe. I know that the entire Dragonlance series was started as a tabletop RPG. And then there’s the Dungeons and Dragons books–pretty obvious where those came from, hehe. But those books are all very clearly RPG based books… All high fantasy. I wonder if anyone has written a regular fiction book with a character based on one they role-played with at some point? Probably not… since most RPs are fantasy-ish, hehe.
hmmmm…. that would indeed be interesting to know.
I’m quite sure there should be at least one second life writing out there, published possibly?
maybe we dont know of them because they are very rare and not that obvious.Chessapeaka wrote:I wonder if anyone has written a regular fiction book with a character based on one they role-played with at some point?
I know this is an old, old topic, but this question interested me. Rusti is actually the moniker of the character I RP the most and her story (and her father’s story) could easily span a novel, and I’d be happy to write it, except that she’s very deeply entrenched in a fandom universe, or at least, a universe that borrows heavily from Knight Rider, even if it’s just a few key characters and company names, and not something I could write in without plenty of that lovely red tape. I suspect that some of the more interesting characters that get played suffer the same predicament as she.
Who knows how many awesome stories there are to tell that don’t get printed? And yeah, I’d bet that even if one of them did, you’d never really know for sure if any of the characters had been RPed before.
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