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Writing Excuses 13.14: Character Nuance
Apr. 12th, 2018 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarkerWriting Excuses 13.14: Character Nuance
From https://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/04/08/13-14-character-nuance/
Key points: Characters who contradict themselves have built-in conflicts, and are more realistic. Motivations, backstories, and emotions are often intricate and self-contradictory. Let your characters wear different hats! External presentation and internal story are often different. What we believe about ourselves and what we try to project to others are often inherently contradictory, which makes us human. Imposter syndrome, the more your career improves, the more awards you get, the less likely you are to think you deserve them. Your internal map may not keep up with external changes. These are ripe areas for character conflict. Nuance lets you signal to the reader that the character is presenting, lets you hang a flag on contradictions. Think of the character as an ecosystem, and you present different features at different times. A character with questions feels more real. A character's beliefs, their motivations, may not always match their MO, their how, their toolkit. Characters should have multiple goals. Think about creating your character as world building, answering why, the past, how, experiencing the current moment, and with what consequence, what effect. Putting different hats on your characters? Think about the worlds that you jump between. How you code switch, changing vocabulary and speech patterns, shared experiences. "While you are telling a story about your character, your character is also telling stories about themselves to other people."
( Hang your hat on the wall... )
[Brandon] Well, we are out of time. It's another one of those topics we probably could have gone on for hours and hours. I'm going to use a director's prerogative and say our homework is going to be… Yeah, we're going to do the thing Amal suggested.
[Yay! Sorting hat chats!]
[Brandon] Sorting hat chats. Go look it up. Read it and sort yourself or one of your characters into one of these houses with subhouses. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
From https://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/04/08/13-14-character-nuance/
Key points: Characters who contradict themselves have built-in conflicts, and are more realistic. Motivations, backstories, and emotions are often intricate and self-contradictory. Let your characters wear different hats! External presentation and internal story are often different. What we believe about ourselves and what we try to project to others are often inherently contradictory, which makes us human. Imposter syndrome, the more your career improves, the more awards you get, the less likely you are to think you deserve them. Your internal map may not keep up with external changes. These are ripe areas for character conflict. Nuance lets you signal to the reader that the character is presenting, lets you hang a flag on contradictions. Think of the character as an ecosystem, and you present different features at different times. A character with questions feels more real. A character's beliefs, their motivations, may not always match their MO, their how, their toolkit. Characters should have multiple goals. Think about creating your character as world building, answering why, the past, how, experiencing the current moment, and with what consequence, what effect. Putting different hats on your characters? Think about the worlds that you jump between. How you code switch, changing vocabulary and speech patterns, shared experiences. "While you are telling a story about your character, your character is also telling stories about themselves to other people."
( Hang your hat on the wall... )
[Brandon] Well, we are out of time. It's another one of those topics we probably could have gone on for hours and hours. I'm going to use a director's prerogative and say our homework is going to be… Yeah, we're going to do the thing Amal suggested.
[Yay! Sorting hat chats!]
[Brandon] Sorting hat chats. Go look it up. Read it and sort yourself or one of your characters into one of these houses with subhouses. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
