Your Characters Will Be Boring If You Skip These 10 Steps

so here's how this is going to work I am going to give you the 10 absolute best pieces of advice you have ever heard on creating characters you're going to love them it's going to revolutionize your book and you're going to remember these for the rest of your writing life you ready buckle up let's go one character doubling edwi danikat is a Haitian writer and the author of books like the do Breer and she coined this term character doubling to describe characters who do contradictory things kind of like they're two characters smashed into one and

here's an example a dictator Slaughters thousands of people before breakfast and then in the afternoon plays with his kids on the playground it's the shocking contrast between those two things that makes us believe that they are a real human being because we see those contradictory elements really in ourselves and in people that we know and it also exposes the psychology of that villain even truly evil people want to believe that they're good oh I'm doing it for my family sort of justification now obviously you can use this for antagonists or villains but I think you

can reverse it and use it for your main character as well have your main character be doing lots and lots of good things and then suddenly they do something which is remarkably evil or at least very morally gray the second way you should be building your characters is by using something called the expertise effect what this means is to give your characters deep knowledge about seemingly irrelevant topics now what does this do for your character building one well it adds an element of unpredictability I'm thinking about Stephen King's The Shaw Shank Redemption where you have

Andy dufrain who in addition to being a very knowledge knowable and talented Banker also has a deep knowledge of geology and that knowledge of geology certainly helps him when he is tunneling slowly but surely his way out of prison this expertise can also suggest a deeper history because the reader is wondering how exactly did this character develop all this knowledge it gives them this implied backstory for instance let's take a look at Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander series we see a character Stephan maturan always know a ton about Anatomy because he is always is dissecting

all sorts of animals from monkeys to toads to gosh all sorts of things horses even and we're fascinated by his Fascination and his sort of widespread knowledge of the anatomy of all sorts of different animals that kind of expertise just makes him into a much more interesting character and lastly expertise can create a cognitive dissonance that feels very true to real life Thomas Harris wrote Silence of the Lambs which gave us the wonderful character of Hannibal lecor but what's great about Hannibal lecor is he's not just a cannibal right which you would think a cannibal

would be sort of this low rent person who doesn't know much at all but he has incredible knowledge of renissance artwork and Florentine architecture his expertise is directly in contrast with what you think a cannibal would be the third step in creating a full blooded human on the page is to give them the tragic flaw for this one we're going back way back all the way to Aristotle because in his Poetics he talked about giving characters H Martia this is is a Greek word it is often translated as something like tragic flaw and what this

does is it makes characters feel very relatable to the reader they're not perfect they're just like us and this can be a character who's good in almost every single category of their lives but there's one thing that trips them up and that ruins them let's look at an example from Jr toan's Lord of the Rings specifically the character Boromir this guy is brave he is an excellent Warrior but he has a tragic flaw in that he has a desire for power he dreams of what power the ring could give him and that desire for power

ends up making him commit a terrible mistake with Frodo in trying to get the ring but I think it's equally important to note that a really good character trait can also be a fatal flaw there's a German book called Michael kohos written by a guy named Henrik Von K now Michael kohos is the most upstanding guy he has a farm which he works on very Faithfully he's an excellent father who is Raising really good and moral children and every single one of his neighbors absolutely loves him but but his sense of justice this is his

fatal flaw turns him into a robber and a murderer I love that something you would normally think of as being a really positive thing a sense of justice can in some circumstances lead your character or your protagonist to do awful things the fourth step in creating an amazing character is the wrong memory technique this technique is about characters misremembering their past and then what that wrong memory says about them as a character so I did my MFA at the University of Southern California and we once had a speaker come who had written an anti Memoir

and he gave an example where in his Memoir he goes to this person's house and he's like hey I lived here when I was younger I grew up in this house I spent 20 years in my life here can I look around so they spend an hour showing him all around the house and like he's really reliving all these memories and then at the end he looks in a closet and where there should have been a hole cut in the ground there was no hole and he realized this was not his childhood home and 5

minutes later he realizes he looks down the road and sees oh that that's my actual childhood home I tell that story because you want to come up with something that your character misremembers and then find an opportunity for someone else to correct their errant memory but what I think is really key is you need a why why would they misremember that thing what does it say about them that they're remembering something badly there can be a tendency to just make your characters too perfect they remember everything exactly how it happened and instead I think it's

more true to life if you showcase some faulty memories some scattered Memories the fif step in creating characters for your book is the technique of the indirect self-portrait how your character describes others often says a lot more about them than it does about the person that they're describing and you can use this because sometimes it's difficult for a narrator to do a lot of work describing themselves you know that old cliche technique of like the character looks in a mirror and then describes what what they see you don't want to do that right I think

it's so much smarter to have that character look at others and by the way that they describe others we learn a lot about them let's look at Humbert Humbert and Lolita for an example of this when he's describing Charlotte Hayes who is Lolita's mother he describes her in quite like an ugly vicious way a shiny forehead a weak solution of another woman so what does this tell us about him well it tells us that he's much more attracted to the daughter than he is to characters of his own age and when he's describing quilty who

was kind of like a rival for Lolita's attention he describes them as being arrogant and cunning and having a monstrous nature and as he keeps on describing this man we start to recognize as readers you're kind of describing your own traits right this is who you are but you're projecting it on someone else because you can't bear to admit to yourself like that's actually who you are so one you need to have your character describe others in very strong terms and then two you need to find ways to make the reader suspect perhaps that is

not an accurate depiction of that person but it says a lot about the character who is doing the describing the sixth step in developing your characters is the spiritual side feel like the spiritual component of characters is often completely ignored or passed over but I think it's a very essential part of who so many people are like their very core beliefs about God and the world and like what are purposes when I read a book like Gilead by Marilyn Robinson it is impossible to think about John Ames apart from his deep spirituality it influences the

way he struggles with forgiveness with the way he wonders at just the natural world and the way he wrestles with deep theological questions like salvation so here are five steps I want you to go through with your own character to determine their spiritual proclivities first start with their basic religious identity are they a died in the W believer are they only on Christmas and Easter sort of cultural believer two think about their religious history how did they grow up what was their childhood like what were people around them what did they believe three focus on

how they have changed over time how have their spiritual beliefs evolved over decades how has their faith changed from the faith of their childhood for look for pivotal moments in their life that either bolstered their faith perhaps they saw a miracle or something or really challenged their faith say they experienced something really traumatic and five think about socially who do they hang out with do they hang out with people who believe things exactly like they do or they hang out with a wide variety of people withholding a large variety of beliefs the last thing I

will say on this topic is that there are thousands tens of thousands of books where somewhere in the middle there's a moment where the character stops and asks some sort of deep existential theological question of do you believe in god what that does is it gives weight not only to the character because we get to hear what they think about the big questions in life it also gives a type of grvy toss to the book itself because we realize that you are wrestling with the real stuff the stuff that really matters the big questions the

seventh character development is kind of an exercise and it is called the single body part sometimes when you are trying to describe the entirety of a person and you mention seven or eight or 10 things about them the reader gets lost in the details so what I would recommend is to focus on a single part of your character's body take some time and describe it at length now if you can't come up with a singular body part I would recommend as a default is describing the hands hands are wonderful they say so much about a

person you can talk about their size you can talk about their power you can talk about how weathered they are you can talk about what sort of movements they make you want to describe those character hands in a way that gives the reader a broader sense of who that person is in many ways their hands or whatever other body part you've chosen becomes a microcosm of who they are for an example of this look at Herman Melville's Moby Dick where you have Captain Ahab with an ivory leg it is a symbol of what the white

whale has done to him it is a everpresent symbol that he wants to get revenge for that thing and it says so much about him as a character because there is something missing about him some part of him that is missing or take a look at sorrano De Burger's nose her is gargantuan schnaz that nose defines everything about him it is a barrier to love it influen his own self-perception because he feels like he's ugly because of it and it really gives him a huge lack of confidence in his life how many of you have

actually seen that play or at least heard of it sometimes I give examples in these videos and I'm like I don't know whether anybody's getting my examples in general I try to give a very wide range of examples but you tell me whether I'm giving too many that you've never heard of or too popular the eighth step in building Incredible characters is from stereotypes to archetypes stereotypes are the cliche of characterization they're a character that we kind of know already that we've seen a dozen times they don't stand out as being a unique human being

they're more of like a type now an archetype is more of a deep Universal pattern that resonates across many cultures the mentor the trickster the hero but it's a mistake to stop at the archetype Arch types are more like the skeleton of your character and you have to do some work to flesh them out so look at the mentor Arch type a stereotype would be a wise old man sitting in a cave stroking his beard dispensing advice but you take that core element and transform that Mentor character into a fast- talking 23-year-old who's had eight

failed companies but is a successful entrepreneur with his ninth company it's the same art type of role like this is someone who's dispensing advice to your protagonist but now it feels fresh and original or consider a character like the trickster a stereotype would be a smooth talk and con artist in an expensive suit or you could take the trickster Arch type and then transferred into someone you wouldn't expect like an old librarian who ends up being super sneaky and intelligent and working their way around a lot of other people it's enough of a variation that

it feels fresh and new and you're still tapping into all those archetypal power but you're not making it seem as though oh the reader is going to say I've seen this a thousand times before all right we got two more to go the ninth step is the competence Paradox this is when your character's greatest skill actively prevents them from getting what they want in general it is a fantastic idea to have your character's greatest strength also be their greatest weakness look one of Sherlock Holmes greatest strengths is just this obsessive focus on details and yet

that way his mind works leads him to a lot of drug addiction with opium and with morphine and with Heroin yes he's brilliant and can deduce so much stuff but at the same time he has an inability often to connect emotionally with others or look at Ned Stark in Game of Thrones his greatest strength is probably like his unwavering honor and and righteousness the guy is just a really honorable dude and yet this is a world in which integrity and honor often aren't rewarded and his enemies take advantage of that and he isn't able to

navigate the iCal Intrigue so I have two pieces of advice for you one create situational irony put your character into situations where their greatest strength becomes a kind of liability and two a second idea is to show Progressive transformation show how their strength slowly transitions into a kind of weakness or you could reverse it as well and have some sort of weakness of theirs transitioned into a strength the 10th and final way that you're going to work on creating a dynamite character is to contrast with neighbors say your protagonist is not not exactly like the

best person in the world but you want them to appear good because you want the reader to relate to them and identify with them okay I got a trick for you when you want to make your morally gray character seem better what you do is you put them next to morally bankrupt people because when they're next to that person they don't seem nearly as bad Jay mckin Ernie has this book called Bright Lights big city and the narrator isn't exactly a good human being but his best friend Tad Allagash the sky is something else with

the amount of drugs that he is doing and the way he gets around with the ladies you're like well in comparison the narrator's not so bad or look at Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy yes the kid and all the rest of the party are like pretty terrible human beings but compared to the judge who is literally Satan embodied in human form they're like okay maybe they're not like the worst of the bunch this is also a technique used in Breaking bat yes Walter White is not that great of a human being but when you compare

them to guys like crazy8 and Tuka salamona you're like okay I identify a lot more with Walter actually and just remember that the opposite also holds true if you have a character you're trying to make appear much worse position them next to characters who are just decent good moral human beings and they will appear like the true bad guy I hope you enjoyed that and if you need some more help with character building watch one of my other videos on it