{"id":1886,"date":"2019-02-18T19:22:30","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T00:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/?p=1886"},"modified":"2019-11-29T23:38:39","modified_gmt":"2019-11-30T04:38:39","slug":"how-to-create-real-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/how-to-create-real-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Create &#8220;Real&#8221; Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>[This blog was originally published in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nightowlreviews.com\/v5\/Blog\/Articles\/How-To-Create-Real-Characters-by-Shana-Figueroa\">Night Owl Reviews<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"683\" src=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Hemingway-quote-on-characters_no-caption-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1890\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Hemingway-quote-on-characters_no-caption-1024x683.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Hemingway-quote-on-characters_no-caption-300x200.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Hemingway-quote-on-characters_no-caption-768x513.jpg 768w, http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Hemingway-quote-on-characters_no-caption.jpg 1455w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px\" \/><figcaption>Another terrible Hemingway quote. Why was this guy popular again?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Characters in your head are <em><strong>not real people<\/strong><\/em>, no matter what a platitude typed\nin Corsiva font scrolled across a picture of a quill tells you. They are not\npeople, and they don\u2019t do anything you don\u2019t make them do. To think otherwise\nis to have a fundamental break with reality, and please see your doctor to\nadjust your medication dosage accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>Sometimes I\u2019ll be spacing out\nduring a particularly boring meeting, and I\u2019ll envision a scene from one of my\nnovels in my mind\u2019s eye. The protagonists stand together in a field of\nwildflowers, ready to finally declare their love for each other after a\nharrowing adventure that brought them together. Then the sky darkens, and I\ndescend from the clouds on a chariot made of blue fire. My visage grows larger\nas I approach, skin radiant like the sun and eyes black like the devil until I\nloom above them, beautiful and terrible, near but distant, like a blood moon in\nthe daytime. My hero and heroine cower before me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cLook upon me and despair,\u201d I tell\nthem. \u201cYou do not exist outside of me. I AM YOUR GOD.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then someone in the work meeting\nasks me if I can update chart five of the briefing I\u2019ve been staring blankly\nat, and my God avatar and protagonists, and the universe they inhabit,\ndisappears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So characters are not people. The\nsame way fiction is an approximation of real life, characters are\napproximations of people\u2014with several key differences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cReal\u201d character:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Must be consistent.<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Other than corporeality, the\nbiggest difference between characters and real people is that <strong>characters are consistent; real\npeople are not<\/strong>. When characters do something a writer doesn\u2019t\nexpect, it\u2019s not because the characters are \u201cpeople\u201d; rather, it\u2019s because the\nplot and the characters are conflicting. Why? Because characters must be <em>consistent<\/em>\u2014they\nmust respond to story events in ways that are in line with their established\npersonality traits. If a writer introduces a plot element and expects a\ncharacter to react in a way that\u2019s not consistent with what\u2019s come before, and\nshe realizes it, that\u2019s when she says a character \u201cgot away from her.\u201d Or she\ndoesn\u2019t realize it, and readers accuse the story of being too \u201cplot-driven.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Must be believable, but not necessarily realistic.<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>As stated above, characters must\nbe consistent or they\u2019re not believable; they become plot devices. Ironically,\nreal people are not consistent and are therefore \u201cunbelievable.\u201d We do\nirrational shit all the time for no obvious reason.&nbsp;The existence of Las\nVegas is clear proof to that fact, where the house always wins eventually but\npeople play anyway. Think of all the times you did something bizarre or stupid\nthat your close friends would say is \u201cout of character\u201d for you,&nbsp;and you\nthought, \u201cYeah, that was dumb. Not sure why I did that\u2026Made sense at the time I\nguess.\u201d Literary characters aren\u2019t allowed to do this. Real people&nbsp;do\nthis&nbsp;all the time. We\u2019re a mystery even to ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Have character arcs that mirror the plot.<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>As I stated in a previous post about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/forget-your-protagonists-favorite-color-the-only-thing-you-really-need-to-know-about-your-characters\/\">plot versus characters<\/a>, the plot of a story should mirror the main character\u2019s internal growth. For instance, if your main character has a crippling fear of confronting his overbearing parents, the plot should culminate in him being forced to confront his parents in a gut-wrenching explosion of cathartic emotion. On the contrary, real people\u2019s lives are often impacted significantly by random events that may or may not result in them growing as people. We\u2019re fickle like that, but your characters can\u2019t be because nobody wants to read about a guy having random things happen to him\u2026those stories do exist, but they suck so don\u2019t write one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Have other characters around them who are foils of them.<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I also touched on this in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nightowlreviews.com\/v5\/Blog\/Articles\/What-You-Absolutely-Need-To-Know-Before-You-Start-Writing-by-Shana-Figueroa\">previous\nblog post<\/a>\u2014characters in a story exist in a \u201ccharacter web\u201d where\nthey interact with each other in meaningful ways that directly affect the hero\u2019s\ntrajectory. In real life, every individual is the hero of their own story,\nseparate from everyone else, and have their own concepts of right and wrong,\ngood and evil, love and hate, etc., that are based on their own unique life\nexperiences. In fiction, stories have <strong>themes\nthat commit to one worldview<\/strong> that are supported by all the characters\u2019\nactions in concert. The characters are effectively one entity rallying around a\ncentral theme, usually embodied by the main character\u2019s story arc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Are almost always active, and always have driving needs and\ndesires.<\/strong><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Real people often drift through\nlife with no driving goals or desires other than getting through the day. Or\nthey really want something\u2026and then get hit by a car, or get cancer, or change\ntheir minds, etc. Real people are fickle and their desires fleeting, helpless\nto the randomness of the universe. Characters, on the other hand, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nightowlreviews.com\/v5\/Blog\/Articles\/You-ve-Got-A-Lot-Of-Words-But-Whats-The-Point-by-Shana-Figueroa\">want\nsomething with every fiber of their being<\/a>\u2026Well some don\u2019t, but just\nlike the guy stumbling from one random event to the next, those characters suck\nto read about. Hell, even The Dude from <em>The\nBig Lebowski<\/em>\u2014the ultimate slacker\u2014spends the entire movie trying to get his\nprecious rug back!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Never forget the characters you create\nin your mind are not real people! You can base a character off a real person,\nbut I\u2019d caution against hewing too close to reality because you\u2019ll run into the\nproblems with real people I mentioned above, and you open yourself up to\npossible liability\u2014unless you take care to note the character in question has a\nsmall penis. No one will come forward claiming to be that character.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[This blog was originally published in Night Owl Reviews] Characters in your head are not real people, no matter what a platitude typed in Corsiva font scrolled across a picture of a quill tells you. They are not people, and they don\u2019t do anything you don\u2019t make them do. To think otherwise is to have &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/how-to-create-real-characters\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;How To Create &#8220;Real&#8221; Characters&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[500,494],"tags":[418,419,415,417,416,414],"class_list":["post-1886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-characters","category-craft","tag-character-driving-needs","tag-character-webs","tag-characters-are-not-real-people","tag-consistency-versus-randomness","tag-realism-versus-believability","tag-terrible-hemingway-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Vyi8-uq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1886"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1900,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1886\/revisions\/1900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shanafigueroa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}