The Design of Characters

THOUGHTS ON CHARACTERS

I go back and forwards on the issue of character.  I used to write long, involved, and often useless amounts of back-story and description with regard to character, planning out the internal and external traits and attitudes they held in great detail.  Typically, the character would morph into someone quite different during the writing.

Feeling this was largely an inefficient waste of time, I went to the other extreme and began defining some key traits and emotions that defined the character instead.  This was more effective (for finding the character’s voice at least) but left the character without enough past to define the character’s motivation.

I now vacillate backwards and forwards between some clear pre-planned parameters regarding traits, emotion and personal history and a more organic approach to discovering the character in the writing process.  Will this be my last pass at this?  I’m not sure.

Finding characters

There are a number of ways to come up with characters.  Brainstorming helps.  You can model characters on real people (that you know) or celebrities or characters from books.  This can help you find the unique voice of your character (as expressed in their word choices and the forms of expression they use). 

You may already have a character concept.  If so, you can interview the character to determine who they are.  Pretend you are an interviewer and ask the character questions – then answer the questions in the first person. 

A bit of research goes a long way.  My undergraduate psychology and sociology studies have been incredibly useful in helping me understand what makes a character tick.

Another approach is to actively set out to research and meet people of the type you wish to write about.  Real people are genuinely surprising.  You never know who or what you will encounter.  I have met concentration camp survivors, submariners, airplane pilots and engineers, academic professors, parents of kids with disabilities, disabled people, cancer victims, recently bereaved folks, tradesmen, police, politicians, doctors, nurses, teachers, accountants, travellers, refugees, con-men, criminals, and one serial killer (that I know of) in my lifetime.  Real people have fascinating and surprising stories.  Ask lots of questions.

Writing is a solitary pursuit, but taking the time to get to know real people will only enrich your writing.

Appearance

The basics of character are pretty easy to define; height, weight, skin color, body shape, hair, eyes, facial features and clothing.  In audio drama, none of these are obvious to the listener, being visual information.  Without the visual sense, they must be revealed through dialog and/or narration.  But, because audio drama doesn’t afford us the luxury of long prose descriptions in narration and because it is necessarily on-the-nose to deliver physical description in quantity through dialog, we must supply these traits to the listener in small, well-spaced, judiciously chosen doses.  Not every detail of appearance is pertinent, but the most noticeable details should be supplied. 

Imagine a default male.  The majority of people will construct such a male in line with their own ethnicity, average in height, clean shaven and, generally speaking, fit.  Such a character needs little beyond hair color and clothing to take shape in an audience-member’s mind (but don’t be surprised if such a character is so generic that they are as quickly forgotten by an audience member as they are easily imagined).

Deviations from the norm need to be highlighted for the audience.  Is the character grossly overweight? The audience member needs to know.  Does the character have eyes of a particularly striking color or shade? The audience needs to be informed.  Facial hair, ethnicity, scars, bald, a limp?  Anything out of the ordinary needs to be communicated to the audience.

Audio-drama is color-blind in so far as people will create a general (male or female) place-holder for a character that stands in for themselves.  As details arise, the picture is modified and “painted in”.  But the earlier that major deviations from the generic placeholder are presented to the audience the better.  Once the character feels established, the audience will begin to resist new information regarding how they look.

Inside a conflict is a great place to introduce physical features to the audience. Conflict is one of those rare occasions (along with gossip) that people will actually comment on appearance out loud.

1. SALIERI: Jimmy, you’re a disgusting tub o’ lard.  That yellow wind-breaker and thatch o’ red-hair on your head makes you look like a christmas pudding topped with custard and a cherry.

A short bit of narration can, likewise, do it…

1. NARRATOR: Jimmy was looking larger than ever.  He waddled into the room wrapped in his yellow windbreaker and thatch of red hair, looking for all the world like a christmas pudding topped with custard and a cherry.

And of course, you can provide a description through another character before introducing them to a scene…

1. MARY: Did you see Jimmy, yesterday, crammed into that suit of his and bulging like a balloon that’s being squeezed through the palings of a picket fence?  I’m surprised he could even move around in those trousers.  With that yellow wind-breaker and his thatch of red hair on top, he looked like nothing so much as a Christmas pudding topped with custard and a cherry.

Because human beings in an audience naturally use themselves as a fundamental template for the characters that are being constructed in their brains, a lack of detail can help the audience to identify with the character that the story is presenting – but don’t rely to heavily on this.  Some detail is needed to stop a character from blending into the background of the story.

Minor characters need less detail than major characters.  And often only one detail is needed to define a walk on part (the presence of a stethoscope, a mailman’s cap, a police uniform, etc.).  Minor characters need a bit more fleshing out, while major characters often need a good deal of detail.  However many details are required, I would suggest that you don’t try to deliver more than three in any particular scene.  Challenging as it is to do this in a way that feels natural, signature features should be communicated in the first scene in which a character appears.

Some writers try to increase audience engagement by hiding, and raising questions about, a character’s physical traits.  This isn’t a good idea.  Hiding information that is obvious and trivial (such as how someone looks) creates a false tension that merely annoys most audiences.

Make sure you use good (by which I mean attention-grabbing, visual, and specific) nouns and adjectives when describing a character’s physical appearance. 

Different characters will notice different things from one another and express them differently.  Where an unimaginative character might notice that the judge is “fat and has a double chin”, another, more literary, character might notice that the judge is “corpulent and has chins which flow down to his chest without bothering with the inconvenience of a neck”.  One description is far more evocative (if less efficient) than the other.

Clothes also have a generic placeholder in most people’s minds.  The average person will give a character a basic set of generic clothes suitable to the setting.  A business suit, or a casual and generic jeans and t-shirt combo would be common in most situations.  Color, etc. remains unimportant unless particularly striking.  The more details deviate from this base norm, the more description is needed for the audience.

People are less prickly about comments regarding their clothing than their physique, so to mention the red button with the gold trim that decorates a business executive’s lapel might not be as unusual in casual conversation and dialog as mentioning the size of someone’s nose.

Avoiding clichés

Often our first thoughts regarding our protagonists and other characters are superficial and cliched.  The lantern-jawed hero has been done to death.  As has the raven-haired heroine.  Brainstorm alternatives and variations to your characters.  Look for ways to make them unique and memorable.  What is it that makes your character stand out and depart from the template.  We have already discussed how to communicate these signature features when they arise in an audio play.  It is also important to seek them out and include them in order to make your characters unique.

Interior life and backstory

So far, we have limited this discussion to the exterior appearance of a character, but what about the interior.  The interior of a character is revealed in action.  It can’t be described like the exterior of an individual.  Instead it is revealed as characters interact with their goals.  In fact, description is the death knell of character because character’s never directly reveal their inner landscape so that if it appears that a character is doing so, the audience generally feels the behaviour is inauthentic, or the character is being deceitful.

The bare minimum of backstory needed, when it comes to the interior of characters, is the reason behind the desire and the wound.  The desire is what the character wants – the primary thing which they are willing to work for and gamble to get.  The wound is a flaw that they are desperate to hide and protect.  Why does the character have this desire – what, in the character’s past, has led to its pre-eminence?  Why does the character have this flaw – what hurt them or drove them to protect themselves in this way?  The desire and the flaw are both born of crisis.  Perhaps the character grew up poor and has a deep drive to achieve financial security (desire).  Perhaps the character grew up poor and feels the need to protect what they have, hiding their resources and refusing to share them (flaw).  The desire and flaw need not be born of the same crisis, but they are often closely related – for example, a need for recognition (desire) and a secret belief that they are unworthy of love (flaw).

It is important to understand that our experiences provide the motivations for our actions.  This is why many writer’s guides suggest we plan out ahead of time the love-life, family-life, friends, work-life, goals and ambitions, most significant conflict, strongest desire, strongest fear, strongest value, deep dark secret/secret shame, etc. of our characters.  A character can act any way we wish, so long as the behaviour is properly motivated.  I am toying, at the moment, with inventing the backstory/motivation of my characters on the fly, but it isn’t going terribly smoothly.  Once I discover that my character behaves a certain way in response to an event in the story, I need to go back and establish the behaviour as part of the character’s emotional repertoire at an earlier point.  Pre-planning the character more fully would make this a less onerous requirement. 

Expression of character

Characters express their interior desires and flaws through action, and action is expressed as a product of their traits and emotions.  If a character is loud (trait) and angry (emotion), she will express herself quite differently to a character who is shy (trait) and angry (emotion).

Actions are motivated in the first instance by a character’s desire or flaw.  They act to achieve an outcome or protect some hurt.  But all action provokes reaction, and the first action must necessarily provoke a reaction from the forces of antagonism within the story that in turn causes a reaction from the protagonist and so on.  Each action and reaction is an expression of the interior life of the character, expressed through trait and emotion, as an attempt to achieve some specific end, but what it tells us about the character’s emotion must be oblique, read in the subtext.

In a drama, a wife must never say to her husband “I am angry because you failed to wash the dishes last night”.  Instead a constellation of elements – her secret fear that the members of the family do not truly love her, her desire to run the house like a museum, her sense of personal pride, and her sense of hurt, all need to be expressed as subtext.

1. KAREN: (WHISTLING HAPPILY AT A DISTANCE)
2. SOUND: DOOR OPENS, FOOTSTEPS ENTER AND STOP.  WHISTLING STOPS ABRUPTLY.
3. KAREN: Dan?
4. DAN: Oh, hi honey.  I’m just fixing a couple of sandwiches.
5. KAREN: But…? (ALMOST IN TEARS) But you knew I was having the ladies’ auxiliary over to tea this morning.  (BEAT) Look at the state of things…  oh, how could you?
6. SOUND: FOOTSTEPS RUSH OUT.  DOOR SLAMS.
7. DAN: But Karen…?

This clearly isn’t enough to establish the character of Karen in its fulness.  The subtext needs to be built up over a variety of scenes and moments within the story.  But to establish the subtext and sell it to the audience effectively, the character must be well known and understood by the writer; personal history, financial history, medical history, how the character feels about his/her traits and experiences, how he/she reacts to things and what tends him/her towards conflict, etc.

Conflict and character expression

Stories are about the interactions/clashes between characters; their fears, hopes, rivalries, jealousy, feelings, etc.

To give characters the room to express their inner drives and hurts, the writer needs to maximise the opportunity for conflict.  All characters within a story, even those who are friends (and especially those who are family) must be in conflict with one another.  These conflicts needn’t all be on the level of the primary conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist.  They can be relatively minor, but they must be present.

Further every conflict should be attended by complex and conflicted feelings between the characters.  Bill and Mary, a married couple, have won a cash prize.  Bill wants to take a holiday.  Mary wants to spend the money helping out their adult kids.  Mary knows Bill really needs a holiday, the first real vacation they will have had in years, and Bill knows how much the kids could really use the money.  As a result, both sides of the conflict are internally conflicted.  The outcome of the conflict could genuinely go either way.  Such a conflict is far more interesting than if the two characters simply wanted what they wanted and there were no extenuating (or complicating) factors at work in the debate.

Character roles

Characters within a story have a number of functions and roles.  A given character can inhabit more than one role.  It can be helpful to inventory the characters in the story we have developed to make sure that all the story functions are covered.

The first essential role is that of the Protagonist.  The protagonist is the primary viewpoint character of the story and the character with whom the audience is expected to identify and root for.

The Antagonist is the protagonist’s polar opposite.  He or she is everything that the protagonist isn’t.  He or she is an older, more powerful, more experienced, center of power.  This individual wants something that conflicts with what the protagonist wants.  The protagonist happens to be in the antagonist’s way and draws the antagonist’s ire as a result.  Like every character, the antagonist must be fully motivated in their actions.

The Guide is an older, more experienced teacher, mentor, wizard, scholar, and friend to the protagonist.  He or she may reject the student at first.  This mentor may, in some cases, be in competition with a number of potential guide.  The protagonist may reject his or her guide at first also.  Conflict arises when a protagonist and his/her guide reject each other.

The Contagonist is an individual who is an underling to the antagonist (with an agenda of their own) and the opposite number to the Guide.  This individual often tries to recruit the protagonist.  The protagonist is in danger of becoming a contagonist (and vice versa; the contagonist is quite capable of betraying the antagonist and switching sides too).

Sidekicks support the protagonist through thick and thin.  These individuals believe in, are loyal to, and devoted to the character (though this devotion is not necessarily that rational).

Minions (there are usually a minimum of three) exist to expose the weaknesses of the protagonist; they are hecklers who tell the protagonist what is wrong with them.  Sidekicks and hecklers can switch sides.  The antagonist rarely sees others as equals and so has minions rather than sidekicks.

The true love character can combine characteristics of other character types (offering wisdom, loyalty, love, etc.).  The true love functions to reward the protagonist for making the right choices. This character need not be a real person, but can rather be an abstract personification of places or ideals.

The Temptation character can combine characteristics of other character types (offering the worldview of the contagonist, loyalty, love, etc.).  They function to reward the protagonist for  wrong choices. Like the true love, the temptation character need not necessarily be a real person, but can be an abstract personfication of desire, power, etc.

Characters within a story can change roles.  The contagonist can become an ally or guide to the protagonist.  A sidekick can betray the protagonist and become a minion of the antagonist, etc.

Family structure as a model for protagonist relationships

The characters you group around your protagonist often take the form of an artificial family of about six members.  A father character, a mother, three sibling rivals, and a supportive uncle or aunt.  They do not need to be related by blood, but they take on the relational characteristics of such a group.  For example, a military team might be formed by a tough but fair captain and supportive lieutenant.  Three squad members, competing for attention, head strong and wet behind the ears, take the role of the siblings, while a gunnery sergeant acts as the uncle or aunt to the group.

Protagonists and likeability

It is essential to make the protagonist in a story likeable.  The audience must want to hear this character’s story and they will not do so if there is nothing likeable about the character.  Create curiosity.  Create conflict. And find a way to get the audience on the character’s side (if only a little bit).  Some things are known to assist in promoting likeability in characters…

• Sympathy is created when you put your character in pain.
• Likeability is promoted where you weigh your protagonist down with conflicts and obstacles (creating an underdog vibe).
• Likeability increases where the protagonist engages in a kindness to the helpless; patting a dog, rescuing a cat from a tree, donating to charity.
• Likeability increases when a protagonist is made to care about others.  Even if they don’t care at first, they must learn to care.
• Give your protagonist an attractive personality; attractive people have fun and are interested in others.
• A character increases in likeability if they are liked by others.  Give your protagonist a crowd of loyal friends and they will appear more likeable.         
• Make the character admirable.  Give them an ability or superpower – something or a couple of things that they do really well that brings admiration.

Number of characters

You must have at least one protagonist that functions as the point of view character.  Point of view characters may be added to a story, but they increase the length of the story by about double.   A 32 page script becomes a 64 page script with two point of view characters to explore.  It becomes a 96 page script if three point of view characters are present, etc.  Be aware that the more characters you, the more pages you will need.

Copyright Philip Craig Robotham © 2022 

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