Let's set the scene; you're sitting on your couch, watching a show or reading a book, and there's this one character. You don't know what it is about this character, but they just feel pasted onto the story—like it was just an afterthought. They feel flat.
This is more common than I'd like to believe. It's even worse when a story has nothing but flat and uninteresting characters. When a character feels this way, it's almost always due to the character being underdeveloped.
So what makes a character properly developed or well-written? Many writers have wondered this, and some have come to grasp it in their own way. I'm here to share with you what I believe a well-written character needs: personality, comprehensibility, uniqueness, connections, versatility, motivation, and ambition.
This week's article will focus on the first of these:
Personality
So how do you make a character with a well-written personality? Appropriate and consistent reactions to similar situations. That's it!
Let me explain. A personality is (in the most basic of terms) the way someone reacts to the world around them. If they are an optimist, they'll look at the world with a more positive outlook. Whereas a nihilist would have a negative outlook.
But what do I mean by "appropriate and consistent reactions to similar situations?" To start, a character needs to always react appropriately to a situation. Even if how he/she reacts is weird and doesn't make sense, as long as it's appropriate to the story, it's okay.
There is one exception to this rule. That's when a character becomes inconsistent. If a character takes vanilla instead of chocolate on one day, then has chocolate the next day for no apparent reason, it's not "edgy" or "mysterious", it's poorly written!
There is one other thing I'd like to write about regarding personalities, and that's stereotypes. It seems like stereotypes get a bad rap for being "unprofessional" or "amatuer" or "just used as a joke." Let me make something clear.
Stereotypes are made for a reason.
Why are high school bully's portrayed as either fat snobs or football jockey's? It's because at some point this was true for a lot of people. People need to realize that stereotypes are not a bad thing and should not be avoided for use in writing. In fact, stereotypes are actually a great tool for writing a story. Instead of having a character whom you don't understand for a long time, then understanding and liking a whole lot. Why not use a stereotype to reel in the audience, then surprise them and have them stay when you show that this character is not just another stereotype. A high school bully with an uknown illness to the main character is a lot more interesting than just a mean person with an illness.
So, to summarize. A good personality needs to start with a stereotype to reel in the audience. Then it needs to have appropriate, yet consistent reactions to each situation, and especially similar ones. Finally...actually that was it.
Come back next week when I talk about the next aspect to a well-written character: comprehensibility.
