One of the most important and, in my opinion difficult and rewarding, parts of writing is creating characters to populate your world. The way you go about this will vary from writer to writer and genre to genre, but as with all aspects of writing, some things will be universal. To do it well, you'll need to use every bit of your ability. Everything in Stephen King's toolbox, so to speak.
Characters are, let's face it, real people. If you don't feel that way, you're in the wrong business. You don't need to be friends with them, hell you don't even need to like them for all I care (I certainly have a few I'm no fan of, for various reasons) but you have to know them. How they think, how they feel, how they act. You need to know their deepest secrets and the ways they go about hiding those secrets. Know them as intimately as you know yourself (more intimately for those of you plagued with self-amnesia).
I think drafts come in very handy with characters. I know I'm guilty of, in the first draft, writing things that are just awesome in my head just because they're fucking awesome in my head. Unfortunately, something awesome may also be completely out of the question for my characters. In fact, I've had this problem about ten thousand times in my revision of Eve of the Dragonspeaker with just about all of my characters. Know what I found? If I cut that shit out, or change it so that the scene works with the characters, the story improves. Seriously.
Here's an example:
Rythe Halences (which some of you may remember from my college days, having read some parts of this story) is the central protagonist in a cast of roughly a quarter of a billion characters (it is Fantasy, after all). He's young, he's reckless, he's cocky. He's a mercenary. But he's also the good guy. There's supposed to be this sort of sense of honor in him that gradually forces him, over the course of the novel, to face what he's destined to become and save the world or whatever. The problem is that I wrote him as this sort of boyish knight, all honor and glory and all that trite, boring shit. Rythe isn't those things. It's why I love him so much. He's an asshole. He's a thief and a sell-sword. He was raised that way, that's all he knows. So while he can have some soft spots (gruff, grunting protagonists aren't my thing) and be compassionate he can fucking not be a knight in gleaming silver. No way.
The other characters in the story, at least in this first draft, seem equally paper thin. Lanir Bladeslinger (I like the cliche name, and you can piss off) is the required muscle-bound warrior-type, Cerana is the pretty elf love-interest, Syncra Vyrminaard is the spindly mage, Kiara Hethiam is the twat of a princess that's more burden than blessing, Kain Talinseth is an asshole, and so-on.
But they aren't those things at all. Not really. Syncra is a womanizer. He isn't spindly at all, he's one of the most capable characters I've ever met. He's young, he's no Gandalf. He's not even Raistlin Majere. He's exactly what you or I would be as an attractive twenty-something with magical powers. He uses it to get laid. And he's got a hell of a temper. Like, slaps cops around for giving him a parking ticket temper.
Lanir is a half-god monster of a man who cares frighteningly little for human life. He's fond of his friends, but that's about the limit of his empathy for other people. He's like two steps from being a sociopath.
Kain Talinseth is, of course, an asshole.
My job as a writer is to communicate these things to you. To open up these characters and let you, as the reader, get to know them as I have. All the Worldbuilding I've done, all these fabulous places I've created and these engaging stories I've spun aren't worth a shit in a sewer if I can't make you want to know these characters.
So how, in the name of the gods, do we do that?
Well, that's the challenge. I think the most important way we can get to know characters in through their actions. One of the cardinal rules I've learned, through classes and reading and my own writing, is that a story is way more fun to read if the writer shows you what you're meant to know, rather than telling. So, I could tell you that Rythe is a man that has no real qualms about killing someone in a fight, but I'd rather craft a scene where he runs into some guards and, rather than running or talking or surrendering, elects to seize the opportunity and kill them in the street. There's no enjoyment in it. He isn't a murderer or a sadist or a psychopath, but he solves his problems by fighting them. He's reckless that way. It may make him less savory (although thirty years of Stallone-Van Damme-Schwarzenegger films seem to indicate otherwise) but it is honest. And he does grow.
By the end of Rythe's story he's older, wiser, and more mature. While he still doesn't shy away from fighting, it isn't his first impulse. This happens over a long period of time, and it happens very gradually. The key isn't to write a character's actions in such a way that you like him, as a writer. The key is to write them honestly.
Then there's dialogue. Dialogue is one of the most fun (and occasionally frustrating) parts of writing good fiction. Weak narration can (but should not) be carried by great dialogue. Hemingway is my favorite example of this, because reading things like For Whom the Bell Tolls require a great deal of imagination on the reader's part because Hemingway excels at dialogue and leaves the rest up to us. He writes it so magnificently that when he doesn't attribute the words to a character (and he frequently does not) you can tell who is speaking just by their tone, their phrasing, their dialogue. It's pure fun, for me.
Varth Elaron, one of Skyborn's major protagonists is the sort of lovable dick that makes writing dialogue so great. He's a lecherous bard (so, me). He loves to drink and sing and tell stories (so, me) and he's always commenting on the things people say. He's this sort of meta-character in a way because he says these things about writing and story-telling and speech that are both a comment on what another character has said and a comment on these things in our world. He's great fun, and most of it is dialogue. It's my story, so there's all sorts of fighting and sex and mysteries and horrible things happening, but Varth is there through all of it cracking jokes and spinning yarns and making sly (and overt) passes at the women he meets.
Varth, I think, also came about because I want to challenge myself. As I've related before, my dialogue was once very poor and while I think I was successful in other parts of my writing, I wanted to strengthen that weak spot. So Varth is a big mouth bard (he's also based loosely on a Dungeons and Dragons character I created several years ago, because I'm a geek).
Lastly there's internal monologue. I may actually write something in the future about this topic, simply because I've only recently started playing with it. Internal monologue is, essentially, things the character thinks in the privacy of his or her own mind. It allows the writer to communicate things about the character that don't fit into dialogue or action. These things are usually smaller aspects of the personality. At least, that's my ideal.
I don't trust internal monologue because it's a balancing act. Too much of it and the writer seems lazy and the story suffers. Too little and the story seems incomplete. It's a difficult feat to do well (and there are writers who do it very well and those who do it spectacularly bad).
The only real example from my own work I can give you, without much explanation, is from Varth. Varth remarks on multiple occasions that "Sarcasm is a fool's art." However, in his own head, he's constantly making sarcastic remarks about other characters, about the gods, about the situation he finds himself in, about the world. So, as a benefit, internal monologue can work with dialogue to give a real idea of a character and make them come to life. Varth, for instance, frequently says things he doesn't mean whether as a means of keeping the attention on himself or for comedic effect or because it sprang to mind and he has no filter (so, me).
Use your skills. Your characters are crucial to your story and your story is crucial to your characters. For your readers to be interested, both of those things need to be important. Otherwise, your story is just a big, fat, boring paperweight. I can't tell you what kind of characters to create, because trying would only stifle your creativity, but then I probably don't have to. They're already there, aren't they? Get to know them and you'll be surprised at how readily they tell you everything you need to know.
Adverbially Yours,
-S.R.
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