My Chosen Corner of Crazy

Whats a "Real" character?

Often as writers we hear advice on how to write better. The number one that I hear most often is to write "real" characters. It seems many people take this as meaning to write characters that are like everyday people. In reality this is not what we mean generally.

Think about it, if I was writing a fantasy story and the main character was just like my neighbor, he would probably have little to nothing to say, and would probably run from any danger immediately. On this topic my advice would be to write fully realized characters. That is to say our characters should be well rounded, these characters should be complex and interesting, but also have traits that real people have. The obvious traits that come to mind are things like motivation, weakness, and a fully developed emotional base. Most people don't have a problem with the weakness part, but the motivation and emotional base are difficult to wrap your mind around.

Motivation is meant to be that the character should have a goals, or at least a rational for why they are doing thing, this includes the antagonist. Writing an antagonist who is properly motivated in a realistic sense is hard, short or making them a psychopath, sociopath, or even narcissistic finding realistic reasoning for why someone would do something horrible is difficult.

The second and even more difficult part is creating a proper emotional base. If your character has this trait he/she will be able to "move" in your world organically. What I mean by this is that the character you have created will not need prodding to do something, the character will naturally react and act in this world in a way that fits with his/her overall character. This may seem like an obvious and simple thing, but in reality this is, in my opinion, the most difficult objective when making a character. Stories, especially fantasy, tend to devolve into a plot driven archetypal snore fest. Where the protagonist is pure and unremarkable, and the antagonist is fictitiously evil. This happens because the "move" properly in this world, they are missing a proper emotional base that would make the characters have realistic motivations and reactions. So to get the characters moving the writers of these stories end up using plot devices to force stereotypical responses from their characters to progress the story in the direction that they want.

My advice to new writers would be to spend time with your characters. It sounds silly but have a real dialogue with the character, set it up as a kind of interview. These questions should be answered by the character, and you will quickly run into inconsistencies or contradictory answers. This is where you begin your work unraveling your characters motivations and emotional basis. By the time you are ready to put pen to page you should have such a flushed out idea of the character that they seem almost like a real person. I don't  want to come off as an expert on this or any issue but if you have any questions or need help with these ideas send me an email or post a comment below.