This page is a sort of… living document. I’ve written it, completely trashed it, and rewritten it completely over before. It sort of grows as my understanding as a writer grows, grows with me sort to say. And since this is git - the fun part is that, for those of you who are tech savy enough, you can look back through the change log and read those prior versions as well. The past version isn’t wrong per se, but I think this version is more correct.
Characters are everything when it comes to a story. In fact, in my First Drafts - Essentials of a Story blog post, I argue characters should essentially be your first building block, and certainly the first topic you deep dive when constructing a story. Your plot can suck, but if your characters rock, you’ll still have readers. That being said, characters and plot are different sides of the same coin, and we’ll get to that too. But for now, let’s discuss the basics.
All of my rambling aside, however much of this advice you decide to take, whatever you do, your goal with all of this is to understand what it means to be them. To be in their perspective. To be in their head. To instinctively understand, when they look at a cookie, do they see a tasty treat, a potentially ruined diet, a luxury beyond their means to purchase, a chance to stave off starvation, etc. Not just to answer questions, but to really be able to live in their heads.
People use dossiers, method acting, POV journaling, background research, 'pantsing'/exploration writing - all that and more. You pick. At this current time, I use all of those. I build dossiers. I walk around town thinking about what it’d be like to be them, to interact with my present world from their perspective (ignoring what would probably be a shock from a different time and history). I write example chapters, see where they take me, throw them out afterwards. All of it. But at the end of the day - my real test is that I hold myself accountable. I gut check if I feel sufficiently submerged, sufficiently them. And this is something I’m still working on, I’d argue the hardest part of writing. This takes time.
That being said, the following is my ‘character system’. The dossiers I build that informs the rest of that ‘playing around’ I mentioned. In no particular order:
What is your character like? Cold? Arrogant? Hopeful? If I was on a long car ride with friends on my way to a wedding and they asked what they were like, what to expect, what would I say? This is the first thing I consider. What is it like to be around your character, what is it like to be them? Do they remind me of someone I know? A character I know? This is a lot of word vomit, usually as a big list. So for example, “vicious”, “how do you have time to do all that?”, and “now it’s my turn on the Xbox,” can all be in the same list.
What is their world view? And perhaps worth a magnifying glass, what is their world view as it pertains to the story? Bigger picture, what is their perspective on the world? Things like: “society and their rules are dumb,” “the world is in crisis/chaos”, “people are good at heart”, etc. If a character is defined by cruelty, what belief underpins their actions? If it’s a political thriller and they’re a particularly vicious character, what belief fuels that and lets them sleep at night? ‘Belief and Misbelief’ are very commonly discussed topics that I absolutely recommend to look up videos or blogs on for more examples.
Most good characters undergo growth in a story (positive, negative, or making a point of cmoing out net neutral). For there to be room for growth, they must have something fundamentally wrong from the story’s outset. And since readers only tend to care about things that are directly impacting their character and story, it must be emphatically relevant to what’s unfolding on the page. Shrek thinks the whole world hates him and he is incapable of love and friendship (his belief), so his misbelief is that he will live his best life by shutting all others out and hiding away in a swamp. This is emphatically relevant when all of the fairytale creatures are dumped right on his property, and when donkey tries to coax him out of his shell to be friends.
The misbelief is core to the story. This is what the whole character arc and growth revolves around. Watching a character stuck in their ways, be challenged, fail to learn, be challenged again, half learn, be challenged again, and finally learn - and holding out their major plot success until they’ve only finally learned. That’s what readers are here for!
What do they want? What do they concretely want? ‘World peace’ is rarely an acceptable answer. Especially as a novice author, you want ‘what your character wants’ to be something tangible that they can hold or envision: a simple life retired by a cottage by the river, the giga-stone, a lover, to look badass, etc. Subconsciously, when readers read through your book, they will be paying attention to how a current scene, and a character's actions and perceptions relating to that scene, work towards (or push them further from) this goal. If at anytime content on paper is not in direct relation to this goal, they will get very bored very fast.
Why do they want what they want? It’s not enough to have a goal. Real people want things for reasons. This is especially fun to massage in when an evil antagonist is monologueing, or when an MC is having a ‘dark shadow of the soul’ reflection moment when all may be for loss before the climax.
Their backstory. Stories are a moment in time, but characters have lived, and (if they’re lucky) will continue to live, full lives. Generally speaking, you want to tie your character to what I call ‘fiddly bits’ here. Parts of your world you’d like to showcase. Perhaps that’s a religious institution, or a guild, or a magic system. Likewise you can tie them into secondary characters (or even MCs) here too. Readers primarily care about what’s relevant to your character, so if there’s a culture or an institution or a place that you want to show off in your story, I strongly recommend massaging it into one of your character's backgrounds (this is also like, great Dungeons and Dragons 101 advice for character creation, but you usually want to do this in lockstep with you DM so they can work with you).
People have memories, and while they're weird imperfect things, they usually have (at least) a few strong ones in particular. Failing to get into that college program, a funeral, proposing to an SO, buying a house, when the Fire Nation attacked, etc, Have you ever had a friend that tells the same story every time you hang out? Think that, but maybe tone down the annoyingness.
Preferably, some of these are related to their history and their motivation/goal. These points serve as cheap easy wins for an author to bring up as concrete way the character can interact with all of the rest of their dossier. “I think every day about that night my parents were murdered, the mask the murderer wore, that writing he left on the wall. That was the first time I’d ever talked to a police officer, first time I realized how useless they truly are, that this city needed something greater.” Things like that say a lot not just about a character, but everything! I usually have at least a few of these in my pocket for a character, and I will bend over backwards to create a scene where it’s relevant that it’s brought up.
What does your character do outside of the main character arc / plot thrust? If their job and story is about being a monster hunter, then this is about hobbies. If it’s an inner city romance novel, then what is their job? There’s a lot of hours in the day, and readers expect your characters to fill them (even if as real people we just spend our free time vegetating in front of a screen and waiting for our employers to have squeezed their last drop of worth and energy out of us).
To be human is to live in contradiction. Often times this can be related to our non-aligned goals, other times this is more simple. The classic example is a pulmonologist that smokes behind the dumpster in between patients. We are flawed people living in a flawed world, and lets face it, that’s fucking messy. A nutritionist drunk at McDonald’s at 3am on a Saturday, a school history teacher that rejects previous atrocities, a well meaning politician who looks the other way when his prodigal son is involved. We live in this every day. Contradictions, contradictions, contradictions!
Whether your writing is set in our real world and time, or a fantasy world where everyone has a third eyeball, all worlds have their beliefs – all worlds have their Overton Windows. How left or right of center is your character of their context and society? This can create some really interesting dialogue (in particular on world building aspects) that, as an author, you’d have little reason to discuss otherwise. Does one character revile dragon riders wearing red as it’s the royal color, while another thinks it’s a show of strength of the might of their nation’s economy since it sends a clear message that it is now quite affordable? There’s cool debates to be had there.
If you’re of the very small subsect of people that not only cares about writing, but then also thought it worth giving my opinions a glancing over (a dangerous decision indeed!), then you're almost certainly deep enough into the craft of writing to know that characters are defined by their goals and motivations. They're do'ers, etc. But what you might not have considered is that real people have multiple goals. Not only do they have multiple goals, they have multiple non-aligned goals. People want different things, simultaneously, and cannot pursue them all at once.
For example, at the time of writing this, I have at least two goals:
1.) Get bloody damned rich
2.) Be an author
And as anyone who's ever written can tell you – never have two goals been farther apart.
It is in this conflict of motivations, that we are at our most human. When I drag myself into my boring day job on a Monday morning, contributing yet another infinitesimally small amount to my retirement fund, perpetuating my misery, and committing myself to making precisely zero progress on my goals as an author for the next 8-9 hours to come. Or vice versa, when I call out hooky from work just so I can grind out a new chapter idea that popped into my head that morning. That is the human experience, that feels real. That is a conflict of non-aligned goals.
Characters NEED this. I repeat: NEED. Is their conflict between patriotism and family? A dedicated patriot who also cares for a family member that's less committed or downright subversive. Is it between romance and a career? A lover who’s oh so close to obtaining their dream job but has never been lonelier. Is it between revenge and happiness? A dad with a family to die for that just can’t quite shake that urge to sneak out at night and snap necks on his crusade.
These motivations should be non-aligned, but not necessarily opposite either. Opposite can be okay on occasion, but too much of that feels pre-packaged, too dramatic.
In the above examples, the non-aligned goals also prove to be aligned at times. They are shaky things, wobbly. They bend into alignment, then bend apart, then back. What if the patriot’s family member is abducted by an enemy force? Saving the family member now satisfies both the patriotism and family goals. What if the lover realizes their love interest is a wonderfully talented artist without a platform. Featuring them at a corporate gala or an art night suddenly satisfies their professional and romantic motivations. What if the dad’s family goes broke and the person he’s set to get his revenge on is filthy rich. All of the sudden those revenge and happiness goals can align quiet easily. You get the idea.
And for the finale, the cross-roads! This is where your story happens. Boom, done, drop mic.
This is where your character comes to life, where you breath a soul into them. You don't need to have one drop of your story planned out, you can pants or plan the entire thing to your heart's delight, but you need this. You should have this question answered, and in at least some amount of detail, before your pencil even hits the page.
For example, you might not know anything about the world your character lives in, their life, their family. But you should already know that their primary goal is to liberate themselves and their peers from the lower castes of society, and that (at least one of) their secondary goals is to protect and keep safe their loved ones. From this you should know that your story, wherever it may go, will unfold following the cross-road of this character's struggle to balance these two not-so-nice-playing goals. Your story's most visceral moments will be when these two goals either come into direct conflict, or direct alignment.
Here’s some boring singular goal examples. A dude who fights through thick and thin until he’s obtained the magical sword. A king who wants to expand his kingdom. A mother that wants the best for her son. Blah, blah, blah. These are all good, but not on their own! Let’s try again.
A dude who fights through thick and thin until he’s obtained the magical sword, but also strongly believes in a pacifist religion. So he’s either finding very creative solutions, or juggling more guilt than a sane man should. A mother who wants the best for her son and also wants a successful career on the city council. Well, what happens when her son turns out to be a serial killer ruining the town’s reputation, and she must now help him cover it up or report him? A king who’s wants to expand his kingdom while shrinking the political rights and wealth of adversarial nobles beneath him. It’s damned hard to get someone to give you a significant investment while also getting them to agree to be screwed over. Now those sound more interesting!
Not only do those sound more interesting, these cross-roads are where the story happens. Your book’s/campaign’s/game’s most interesting points will be when these motivations are either sharply converging or competing. At the apex of your book, maybe your king realizes how he can expand his kingdom and screw over his nobles in one bold move, and now we have a finale! Or perhaps to kick things off, your character has to make a pain staking choice between reporting her serial killer son to the authorities, or covering up his crime.
A final final note! No - this is not part of YACS, but it’s good enough advice that it needs a call out all it’s own. Remember that characters are proactive. They don’t just do things, they want things, they think about things. Having a motivation and a goal is only half the battle. Constantly keeping characters to account to be going out of their way to pursue what they want is a related, but separate thing entirely. This is as true in Dungeons and Dragons as it is in a book.
What’s the difference you ask? Often times writers fall into the trap of putting their characters into worlds that force decisions upon them. Wherein their characters simply exist, and the world is railroading them towards things they must do. This sucks! A forced decision is okay on occasion, but not as a default. Whether it’s a book or a lazy/over controlling dungeon master, not having proactivity and agency to drive a story where a character naturally needs to take it becomes a real snooze.
A negative example of this in writing is in military settings where characters receive orders. Where they don’t need to have any personal goals or motivations because superiors are constantly brushing them through the plot. We can do better! It’s possible to receive and adhere to orders while also pursuing a goal! In another smattering of bad examples, unfortunately this is the stock standard experience in many Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. So much so that ‘rail roading’ is a common term among nerds. Do not be a rail roader!
This is a ‘follow up’ system, a system to be stacked onto others. Once you've done your dossiers, and your journals, and your drawings and what not – you do this next. YACS is what takes your character from a Wikipedia article to a living, breathing, person.
Enjoy!