Everyone, at some point in their lives, has run into that ever so deeply infuriating fact known as the shallow character. It doesn’t matter where. It could be a novel, a comic or manga, movie, or television series.
I’m not talking about a character who just so happens to be shallow. Like, the single minded crypto-tech bro, or the narcissistic princess. They may be shallow in some ways, but if their character is well crafted, well, then there’s the magic of the intentionally shallow character.
No, I’m talking about the character who was just never very well fleshed out. The character who has all the well worn, tropy lines that just make a reader or a listener or a watcher cringe with embarrassment. The character who is a placeholder for an idea that is just an idea: A floating, nebulous cluster of electrons in outer space. A character who leaves the observer breathlessly bored, un-anchored, and ready to pick up their phone so they can knock out one more round of Candy Crush or one more grinding booty battle in Genshin Impact.
I’ve seen many of these types of characters. And I’m sure you have, too. And in my own writing, I’ve even written these types of characters.
Time is the Determiner of All
The world of the sci-fi novel series Slipshot, and all its character development, took over a decade for me to create. It wasn’t really because there was just so much content to make. The story itself is actually quite simple. Vol 1.0 is about 300 pages long, so we’re not talking about a 2,400 page tome of biblical proportions. Rather, the reason for the time taken has more to do with character development and, in particular, the theory of the mountain.
The Theory of the Mountain
If nothing else, mountains are many layered things. They are oftentimes the result of the warping and churning of the earth’s surface. The turning over of rocks and soil. A long and drawn out change in the crust. Were one to slice a mountain cleanly in half, one would see the layers by which they were built.
Character development is like this. Character development is all about the layers, and as a result, the nuances. The Uniqueness. The individual qualities that make a character who they are. And, a direct result of this, the manner in which they interact with and respond to the world around them.
Flaws, Strengths, and Stats
I want you to look at this chart. It’s a snapshot of an exercise we went through when we started the process of creating illustrated versions of the characters of the Slipshot.
If there is nothing else you will do, do this. Define your character’s age, appearance, archetype, personality scales. Dive as deeply as you can into who they are and what makes them specifically them. For example, starting on the top left, we see that our little Vérkatros friend Blinky is introverted and kind of ugly. He’s also a caregiver. Mora, who we will meet in Vol 3.0, is extraverted and highly rebellious. She’s also an explorer and a bully. Now we know almost intuitively how they will talk, behave, dress, and move through their worlds.
Once you’ve done this, stick to it. Don’t waver. Don’t pay any attention to that turning sensation in your gut that tells you to stick to something you know, or something you are comfortable with. (Know what you write, not write what you know.) Remember, writing is hard. Writing is pain. Writing is suffering. Your characters are born from this crucible, and that is what will make them great.
Characters are people. But they also have stats, as the chart demonstrates. Stats, like journeys and experiences, help us to become who we are. Or, maybe, are a result of who we have become.
People, from our perspective as fellow people, are complex. They are filled with emotions, struggles, contradictions, feelings that they just can’t get a grasp on. And, motivations. Most importantly, they want something.
Want inevitably boils down to a hot, steamy stew of conflict. And this is where good character development comes in like an elegant danseur from stage left. Nobody, in the entirety of human history, no matter how rich and powerful, no matter how small and insignificant, ever got 100% of what they wanted.
The reason: Other people.
The Rule of the Other
Character one wants something. Character two stands in the way. This is the heart and soul of conflict. Simple, raw, real. Now, expand that to the macro-universe of your fictional world and you quite possibly have a war on your hands. It could be a war of global, apocalyptic proportions. (Who doesn’t love that?) It could be a romantic war. (Mon petit chou!) It could simply be an interaction between a man and his dog. (Dogs always desire those things that ultimately do them harm. Like that dried out chicken bone, or that crunchy pile of old poop.)
The rule of the other is all about the other. And it’s the presence of the other that inspires conflict.
Garble, Garble, Garble, Blah, Blah, Blah. Or, the Importance of Dialogue
Although it oftentimes seems like it, character development doesn’t always have to happen after 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. Good character development can happen in good dialogue.
I love good dialogue. Slipshot, whether for good or bad, is filled with dialogue. Far too often, however, dialogue is more like a train wreck spawned by the author’s infatuation with the control-c-control-v buttons. In other words, stale and corny. Eye rolling. Inspiring deep sighs and frequent watch-checking.
Dialogue, however, is critical to the development of a good character. That’s not to say that we can’t use phrases that are common in our language. We are a social group, after all, so we communicate with each other in ordinary, collective, and (nauseatingly) repetitious ways. That’s all good. But it has to be real. And it has to be felt.
The Journey
Sometimes it’s hard to find something to talk about. One thing everyone loves talking about is their journeys. Life journeys are what make us who we are. They are the things that form us for the entirety of our time here. They can be joyful, they can be traumatic, they can be completely neutral. They are inevitably always filled with conflict. And they define us.
The journey is what catalyzes our evolution, our growth, our characteristics. Well-developed characters always have intense journeys in their background. This doesn’t mean one has to be a superhero, an adventurer, a high-stakes gambler, to be a well-developed character. It means that their journey is what defines their lives. Good characters are not dropped from heaven like map pins. They are, rather, forged from their journeys.
A Never Ending Trudge-ery
The way to creating a well-developed character is hard. It takes time. It takes living. It takes rain and snow. Although it is oftentimes easier to rely on tropes, these types of characters are just not all that satisfying. A good character is surprising, refreshing, exciting. There’s a reason for this. For better or worse, whether the protagonist or the antagonist, a good character is someone we can get behind. Only because they are ultimately human, and so, in one way or another, just like us.
