Writing a story: Characters
Hey writers. Let’s craft some characters.
Characters are the most important element of your story and of any story. Long before there were stories of Middle-earth, or Hogwarts, time machines, martians, or creating life, before there were different genres or interesting locations, there were characters. Characters are where stories come from, and without them, or with bad characters, your story will be dead before you begin to write.
The first story ever told by humans was probably something like, “Hey did you hear about that guy with the yellow hair? He ate a berry from that bush by the river and died the next day.”
Yes, that’s a story. It has a setting: the bush by the river. It has a plot: someone ate a berry and died. And it has a character: some guy with yellow hair. Looking at this example, we can see why stories are so important to us as a species, and why stories are the one common trait among every single culture on earth. They probably started like this one, as a warning, or a way to remember someone, or reminiscing in a memory between friends and family for bonding purposes. As stories were passed from person to person, they were added to, pruned for efficiency, or merged with other stories. What started as some guy eating a poison berry led to Star Wars, Harry Potter, Iron Man, and Indiana Jones. Everything starts with character.
So, in the last post we dabbled in character. We’ve written our sentence-summary with a character, a conflict, and a goal, and we’ve built on that to create a paragraph summary with the story’s beginning, middle, and end. Having the roughest of ideas of where your story will lead and where it will begin, let’s now dive into your characters.
While there are weird exceptions to every rule, it’s best to always start a new venture by following all the rules. Once you know the rules, you’ll know how to break them. I’m assuming you’re just beginning as a writer, so I’m going to present some rules to you now.
You need a protagonist and an antagonist.
Both of these characters are usually people, especially if you’re just starting out. If you want to write a story about a father and his son walking across a post-apocalyptic North America and have the protagonist be the idea of survival and perseverance and the antagonist be the landscape and harsh environment and the futility of hope, I’m gonna need you to slow down and stash that story away for the future. (Also, don’t write that because Cormac McCarthy already did, and if you haven’t read The Road, you need to. It’s also a fantastic movie.)
Let’s talk about your protagonist.
This is your main character, and they want something. Don’t confuse protagonist with good guy or hero. Often they are the same thing, but it isn’t necessary at all. In Paradise Lost, Lucifer is the protagonist, and he’s about as bad-guy as you can get. But he’s the main character, and he has a goal: to get back into heaven, and when that fails his goal changes to sabotaging God’s plan for humanity.
In the Joker movie, Arthur is the protagonist, even though he murders several people and starts a mass-movement of anarchy in Gotham. But we see the story unfold through his perspective, and it’s his goal that the story follows: the desire to be noticed—which he finally gets after murdering a man on live television.
But obviously, your protagonist can be good. I’m just trying to make the point that ‘protagonist’ and ‘good’ are not inseparable terms. Your protagonist is your main character, and he or she wants something.
As Kurt Vonnegut said, “Every character should want something, even if it is a glass of water.”
In my first novel, my protagonist Tarlos wants to be immortal, and the story is about him trying to reach that goal. But I wouldn’t call him strictly good. He does some questionable things in order to get what he wants, due to his fear of death outweighing his morality.
This brings me to the second trait. Your protagonist needs a weakness.
There needs to be something internal that your protagonist should overcome by the end of the story. If they don’t overcome the weakness, then they have no character arc. This can be fine in certain types of stories, and is known as a flat character arc. There is also a negative character arc, but we’ll talk about that some other time.
Let’s talk about arguably the most perfect story ever told, with one of the greatest protagonists, antagonists, a great love story, and a fantastic character arc.
That’s right… Shrek.
Shrek might be the most perfect example of how to construct a character arc that was ever written, and by extension has one of the greatest antagonists.
Shrek begins as a loner. He lives in a swamp in the middle of the forest with warning signs posted everywhere against trespassing. In the first scene, we see the villagers attempt to hunt him down, but Shrek scares them away. At this phase of Shrek’s story, he appears content with his life and accepting of the fact that he is a big stupid ugly ogre.
When Donkey shows up in his life, Shrek opens up the tiniest bit. He lets Donkey stay in his swamp, if only for one night. There’s a small moment in this part of the movie where Shrek sits down to eat, and for a moment we can see that he considers inviting Donkey to eat with him. This is both his character weakness and goal showing at the same time: Shrek wants companionship, he’s lonely, but he’s an ogre and that means he’s meant to be alone. The clever thing about this goal is that Shrek himself isn’t yet aware of it. Perhaps he knows something isn’t quite right in his life, but he won’t find out what he’s missing until later.
And then the rest of the fairy tale creatures show up in the swamp, and we learn that Lord Farquaad has forced them all to live there. Shrek’s identity is now threatened — he’s supposed to live alone, and if he allows these creatures to stay, he loses his status as a frightening monster.
So he decides to do the only logical thing to get them to leave — he goes after Lord Farquaad. Here again Shrek gets just a taste of what life would be like if he allowed love into it. The creatures applaud him and give him a cloak and a crown of flowers, which he quickly throws away.
The midpoint of the film is one of the most important moments of any story, and we’ll definitely be talking about it in future lessons. The midpoint in Shrek is when he rescues Fiona from the castle and the dragon. Yet again, we see Shrek almost enjoying hiding behind the helmet. He enjoys the fact that Fiona thinks he’s a prince, and that she’s being friendly with him. And we know this because he’s hesitant to take off his helmet and reveal that he’s an ogre. His rough demeanor immediately comes back, and he and Fiona no longer get along.
That is, until Fiona saves him from Robin Hood and his band of Merrymen with Matrix-level martial arts. This begins the phase of Shrek’s story where he begins to open up, and he and Fiona begin to bond. The main theme of the story is strengthened: don’t judge a book by its cover.
By the end of the second act, Shrek is almost completely opposite from how he started in act one. Instead of insisting — subconsciously or otherwise — on being alone and forcing everyone away, he is now openly friendly toward Fiona and Donkey, and is upset at the idea of leaving her the next day. He builds up some courage and resolves to confess his feelings for the princess, but due to a misunderstanding, all of his positive progression is reversed, and Shrek relapses into the big stupid ugly ogre he is comfortable being.
But he isn’t comfortable anymore. He’s had a taste of what life would be like if he overcame his weakness — needing to be alone due to not trusting others or others not trusting him.
He trusted Fiona enough to open up to her, and in the process learned that she doesn’t mind that he’s an ogre, that she genuinely enjoys his company. It’s only when Donkey confronts him about his flaws that Shrek realizes what he stands to lose, and he drops the ogre act.
He is now fully embracing his goal of companionship and love. And we all know how it ends. Shrek interrupts the wedding, confesses his love, Fiona reciprocates it, and they live happily ever after.
This is the perfect character arc.
And now some remarks on antagonists…
An antagonist, similar to a protagonist, is not necessarily evil or malicious, although this definitely is common. The role of the antagonist is to keep the protagonist from reaching their goal.
If I wake up in the middle of the night and want a glass of water, I am the protagonist with a goal. But if it’s dark and I can’t find the light switch and I keep tripping over things on the floor or stubbing my toes on furniture, my story now has an antagonist: the dark. The dark isn’t evil, it’s just keeping me from my water.
Lord Farquaad, however, is a bad guy. His own goal is to marry Fiona, and he’s willing to risk the lives of his knights no matter how many times they fail. But this on its own isn’t enough to make a compelling villain.
In Shrek, Lord Farquaad represents Shrek’s weakness. Farquaad sees Shrek as a big stupid ugly ogre. His first interaction with Shrek is calling him hideous. He never uses his name, only calls him Ogre. He sees Shrek as a means to an end, not a person in his own right. And when Farquaad shows up to get Fiona, he remarks that Shrek doesn’t have feelings, and at the end he thinks it’s hilarious that the ogre has fallen in love with the princess, implying that the idea of an ogre finding love is in itself ridiculous.
But the very moment Shrek confesses his love for Fiona is the same moment when the dragon eats Farquaad, symbolically destroying Shrek’s weakness in the process.
The Dark Knight’s Joker is my favorite villain of all time, in any medium, book, play, or film. Joker is another example of a villain who represents the hero’s weakness.
Now you might be saying, Batman doesn’t have a weakness. I’m sorry to say though, you’re wrong.
—Quick tangent, remember Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones, way back in season one? He had a huge weakness. He was honorable in a world where honor got you killed. And spoilers, it did. Instead of go along with a lie and bending the knee to Joffrey, Ned insisted on doing the right thing and refused to acknowledge Joffrey as king, knowing he was illegitimate. And now he has no head.
So can you guess what Batman’s weakness is? That’s right, he refuses to kill. He won’t even kill Joker, the man who kills a dozen people in the movie, has definitely killed more before the movie started, and would’ve blown up two ferries filled with people if his plan had gone through.
As Batman solves all his problems without killing, Joker is the opposite. Joker believes that everyone has it in them to be like him, and he spends the duration of the film trying to prove this by constantly testing Batman, even to the point of standing in front of his motorcycle, commanding Batman to hit him.
Objectively speaking, a lot of deaths could have been avoided if Batman had just killed the Joker when he first found out about him, but Batman’s weakness causes his only love to be killed and the most lawful man in Gotham to turn to the dark side.
Remember how I mentioned the flat character arc before? That’s the Dark Knight. Batman keeps his weakness, although he does defeat the Joker in the end, but it results in him being forced to make the decision to take blame for the people Harvey killed and become an outcast. (Arguably, this might also be considered a negative arc.)
Your protagonist and antagonist are the two most important aspects of your story, and they can be anything from an ogre and a lord, a terrorist and a vigilante, or a man with yellow hair and a poison berry.
Here is your homework for this lesson:
Name your protagonist. Decide what it is they want. Give them some kind of weakness or a lie that they believe that will keep them from reaching their goal. This will ensure that when they reach their goal at the end of the story, their weakness will be overcome and they will have a character arc. Also, find out why they want it. The motivation for reaching a goal is just as important as the goal itself.
Now do the same with your antagonist. How are they keeping your protagonist from reaching his or her goal? Are they doing it on purpose, like Joker, or is it impersonal like the darkness when you’re trying to find the kitchen?
What is your antagonist’s goal, and how does it conflict with your protagonist’s goal in a way that both characters’ goals can’t be fulfilled, only one or the other? And how does your antagonist represent your protagonist’s weakness?
Answer these questions, and you’ll be well on your way to writing a great story, which always starts with great characters.
Until next time, happy writing.
