The Emperor's Musings

Take in mind however, that they do not simply respond differently, but they also sound differently. By this I mean that they shouldn’t seem to simply be reciting lines from a page. Take the following for example:

Fred: I don’t believe that you’re telling the truth!

John: I am telling the truth, it’s your fault if you don’t believe me.

Fred: She doesn’t love you, I was with her first, she’s mine!

John: She’s not yours, she loves me. It doesn’t matter if she was with you, she’s with me now.

Is that really the kind of heart-pumping action that will prevent you from putting down a book? Hardly. They sound too much alike. When reading something it’s best if you can almost hear the people talking. Each character has his (Yes, I said “his”, not “his/her”. General rule of the thumb, just choose one. Don’t bother with “his/her”) own way of talking. Try this on for size:

Fred: Sod that, John, you’re a bloody filthy liar and you’ve always been a bloody ass as far as I know!

John: Can it. I told you what you wanted to know, and it’s really all up to you if you’re going to believe me or not.

Fred: That’s bloody bull! She was mine years before she decided to shag up with you. I don’t give a shit if she thinks you’re better than me, that tramp should know I’ve always been better for her!

John: First, if I hear you talk about her like that again, I’m going to shoot you once in each kneecap. Secondly, your language is atrocious. And finally, it doesn’t matter a whit what the past was, this is now, and I’m the one she’s with now.

See how different that is? It’s the same thing in essence, but you can almost get an idea of the background of each character. Fred comes off as a street-wise scrapper who happens to be very hotheaded. You can also tell that he’s relatively poor, compared to John. John on the other hand seems educated, but rather cold. Maybe he’s a gangster or a mob-boss? He’s also calmer, but has a mean-streak as seen in his threat to shoot out Fred’s kneecaps.

Similarly, you could try talking to your characters and see how they would respond. Remember our first lesson though: no character is one-dimensional. As much as you want your character to be the epitome of repressed anger, the utmost victim of misunderstanding, yet the final hope for the salvation of mankind (oh my, I’m sure we’ve never seen that kind of character before) you cannot have him as a one-dimensional creature. True, you may try to reason out with us that he’s really that focused that he seems to have a one track mind. My answer to you is plain and simple: “No.”

Let’s take a look at an example with such a protagonist: Yo’Bomë Resol IX from the fictional book Quest Against Evil.

Interviewer: Well, what inspired you to fight this, erm… quest against evil? So to speak that is.

Yo’Bomë: Because I am alone, and the darkness swirls around me like the wisps of dark shadowy darkness. The people do not understand me, but I understand them and have to save them even if the world does not really know who I am.

No.

Stop.

Please.

That just does not work. While characters must have personality, they do not have only one personality. No one is all angst all the time. To you, that character may seem different, special, so totally not like the other characters you may say. I say however, that that is an issue that we will tackle next time on C3. In closing then, I leave you with a few words. Your character must speak like a real person (and no, emo/goth/punk teenagers do not count) while still being an interesting character. They must live and breathe, think and act. Your characters make mistakes and they will think things through. They are not robots that move about as the plot dictates.

C3 – Characters, Cliches, and Crimes by Lakan David D. Inocencio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.