The Mythcreant Podcast 474 – Character Development: What Is It and What Is It For?
Everyone knows that stories should have well developed characters, but what does that mean? Should you be racing to give your characters as many traits as possible? Does it matter at all what those traits are? The truth is a little more specific than some advice may have led you to believe, and that’s what we’re talking about this week. We discuss how character development works, which characters need it, and why it’s important to remember that fictional heroes aren’t real.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is:
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: And:
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Bad news folks. We don’t feel real enough. We have to fix that. Okay, so first we each need a memorable trait, so pick one.
Bunny: I have brown hair.
Chris: Very memorable. Oren, what’s your memorable trait?
Oren: My memorable trait is I’ve decided is that I’m now gonna be really into crypto.
Bunny: Oh no. I think we’re getting too three dimensional here.
Oren: Look, you guys are never gonna be able to forget the blockchain, okay, because I’m gonna bring it up in every conversation.
Chris: Yeah. My memorable trait will be that I complain a lot. I’m gonna first start by complaining about your crypto obsession.
Oren: You can’t silence me, Chris. This is who I am. I’m just a real true person.
Chris: That’s too true. It’s too real. And now we’re a little bit flat caricature, so we need more traits, because Bunny, you’re entirely defined by having brown hair.
Bunny: Damn. Oh well. Somehow I need another trait.
Chris: Or how about a deep motivation? What do we really want during this episode? What overriding desire is driving our actions?
Bunny: I could use a drink.
Chris: And this episode is your way of getting a drink.
Bunny: Yeah, I wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise.
Chris: Okay. Very good.
Oren: Okay. My motivation is that I want to convince everyone that I would totally vote for a progressive candidate, just none of the ones who are actually running.
Bunny: Oh, that’s elaborate.
Oren: That’s, look, I just feel like that fits with my crypto obsession. I’m not racist, but…
Chris: Oh no.
Bunny: Oh, you’re becoming more rounded by the minute.
Chris: Yeah, maybe I have layers because my complaining is a way to get attention. And that’s why I’m a podcast host.
Bunny: Oh, that’s right. You’ve got a tragic backstory now.
Chris: Yeah. I just want people to notice me, okay. And if I complain about your terrible crypto obsession and your brown hair – which is too brown, okay.
Bunny: Oh no! Don’t come after my hair like that.
Chris: Kids these days, the Gen Z, their hair is too brown. Have you noticed all the Gen Z kids have brown hair?
Oren: It’s so brown.
Bunny: Well, you damn millennials and your crypto.
Oren: There’s an NFT for that. I actually already own your brown hair because I bought an NFT of it, but that’s how crypto works.
Bunny: Oh no. I guess I have to dye my hair now.
Oren: Yeah, you better. Otherwise you’re gonna have to pay me 1 million Doge fan coins; that’s probably a real currency by now.
Bunny: I don’t even have a single Doge fan coin. What am I gonna do?
Chris: Alright, I think we’re off to a good start. Now I’m just gonna hand you 10 pages of random questions like what your middle name and favorite food is, and then we will be good. We’ll be totally developed.
Bunny: Sushi, easy. That’s my middle name and my favorite food.
Oren: Man, that’s efficient.
Bunny: Brown hair wants to drink sushi. In every scene.
Oren: I think we’ve got real winners on our hands here, Chris. I think we’ve solved it. I don’t know what it was, but we definitely solved it.
Bunny: Was there a problem? I don’t know, but it’s fixed now.
Chris: We’re very real now. Very real. So, this time we’re talking about character development, and I guess the first question is, what is it? It’s for the most part just designing a character or making stuff up about a character, but it’s really vague, and the implication comes with that your end goal is to create a quote-unquote “strong character,” which is also an extremely vague term, and it all just boils down to, like, design your character real hard, so they are a good character. That’s what the rhetoric – basically doesn’t have more to it than that.
Oren: Yeah, my official stance is that character should be good. Make your character a good character, not a bad character. I want quality of character to be high, please.
Bunny: Look, this is the hot takes people want out of Mythcreants.
Chris: So, not really helpful. I blame Romanticism because of course I blame Romanticism, but for everything.
Oren: That’s your real defining trait.
Bunny: So cliché, Chris blaming Romanticism.
Chris: So I guess the question is, is a real seeming character what we should be aiming for? To some extent. Obviously I don’t want a character to walk in and be completely unbelievable.
Bunny: Yeah. But I feel like realism is a bit misleading. Like, we want to believe in them as a character. You don’t want them to necessarily be like a real person, because they’re your character and they’re going on an adventure for a reason. Like, why is it them on this adventure?
Oren: Yeah. It depends on what you mean by real. If I wanted to be hip and cool, I would say you want a believable character. I would say you want a character who seems real, like, don’t get me wrong, if your character feels fake, people will notice that. If your character does things that just don’t seem to fit with who they have been established to be, then people will react and they’ll say, this character doesn’t feel real, or this character feels like a cartoon or something. So I think that is a real thing, like your character should feel real, but what it means is very context sensitive.
Chris: Yeah. I think for the most part, the realness of characters is an illusion, just like the realness of dialogue is an illusion. We want our dialogue to seem natural sounding. We don’t actually want it to be real. I think characters are the same way. You want them to not be so fake that they interrupt the experience, but real people are mostly kind of dull.
Bunny: That’s true. This is why I struggle with creative nonfiction.
Chris: I think about it, we can’t remember real people’s names very often, but we want our readers to remember character names and remember our characters.
Bunny: I’ve started reading Parable of the Sower, and there are so many characters. I can’t keep them straight. I can’t keep the people in my class’s name straight.
Chris: Yeah, and we want our characters to be entertaining at some level: to be interesting, or fascinating, and have something that stands apart. And all of those things are not typically present with the average person we happen to meet. But that – again, how real a character seems is one of those things that’s also often mentioned in the same conversations that character development and quote-unquote “strong characters” are mentioned.
Oren: Yeah, and it’s not even so much that real people are dull. It’s that, at least in my mind, they are unlikely to demonstrate things that are interesting in a fictional context most of the time. You could hang out with a person and they could very well have a lot of interesting things about them, but very often you won’t ever find out those things. And for a fictional story, it’s not just that they have to have interesting things about them, they have to have interesting things about them that feel like part of the story. Because you can have a really interesting backstory about how your character grew up in a protest camp and was part of an environmental movement. That could be interesting. But if the story is about, I don’t know, building Lego bricks in a tournament, how is that relevant? That just feels like some random side thing you brought up.
Chris: I do think that the conventional character advice treats characters like they exist outside of the story. Like they’re completely independent of the story and like they’re developing on their own with no consideration of what their role is. And I’ve even seen plotting advice that makes no distinction between protagonists and antagonists, which is very bad. And seeing people use that plotting advice, I’m like, no, you don’t do that with antagonists, that’s for protagonists. But if you don’t make any distinction, then they’re all just characters, because we’re thinking of characters as people who exist outside the story, which again plays into the whole like real, you gotta make somebody seem real, like a real person that you could just grab if they from the street when they feel like they step outside the story and start talking to you.
Bunny: I do think it can help to consider who they are outside of the adventure. Usually that comes in when they’re just about to start the adventure, and then they of course change over the course of the adventure. I think that can be helpful, but they are also in a story and their role needs to reflect that.
Chris: Yeah. And I think that’s why at Mythcreants, we spend so much time discussing what makes a character work in their role. Because that is largely what feels like it’s missing elsewhere, and that is a huge factor in whether they are successful. Again, conventional characater development is, there are some things right that are important for any character, and so we can talk about that too. But that kind of optimization for the role is a piece that is often missing.
Oren: Here’s the thing. If you come at this purely from the angle of I’m just gonna make a set of people and then I’m gonna put them in a room and see what happens, which is a way I have seen advocated of writing a story, and you’re not willing to like make any changes to these characters to facilitate a story, one of two things is almost certainly going to happen.
You’re either going to not have a story because you didn’t just magically, by extreme chance, stumble onto a connection of characters that would make a dramatically satisfying story. Or, you are going to have to suddenly make some of the characters act differently to how you’ve established them to get a satisfying ending, and neither of those are gonna go over well. People don’t like it when you do either of those things. The most obvious example of the latter recently was Game of Thrones, season eight, where suddenly Daenerys had to act like a completely different person to get the ending that the writers wanted. And we don’t see the first one that often because that almost never makes it to publication. I just threw some characters into a room and they just hung out. At least not in spec fic. Not in the kind of books we tend to talk about on myth grants.
Chris: So should we talk about what should we do when we’re developing a character? What things are we trying to do with our characters? What properties or traits should they have?
Oren: I think you should just draw random traits out of a bucket, and then that character just has the trait now, and just keep doing that. Because more traits is better.
Chris: They’ll be multidimensional. Each new trait you pull out is a dimension, and you want a hundred dimensions.
Bunny: So they have brown hair and they complain.
Oren: Yeah. That’s good. And just keep adding.
Chris: And they talk about cryptocurrency. I think that one thing that good characters tend to have is looking ahead to character arcs. Good characters tend to have character arcs. Yes. But then that means that when the character’s going into the story, when you’re first sitting up the character, they need to have something to overcome, like a misconception or a flaw. Learning to trust, for example, is one that a lot of action heroes have, where you’ve got the gritty veteran who needs to learn to trust the newbie, or something like that.
Murderbot, also; learning to trust the humans. Pacifism is another one that I’ve seen, like trying to learn nonviolent solutions. Legends and Lattes: the whole center theme is about this putting away the sword and all, and she gets tempted now and then to use it to solve problems. And then Avatar: the Last Airbender tried to do that, but it couldn’t really commit to it because the heroes had already beat a bunch of people up over the course of three seasons.
Oren: Yeah. But now suddenly fighting a guy means we have to kill him. Suddenly.
Chris: So I would think of this as an internal problem the character has, then make it part of a character arc. Usually either they are unhappy in some way, or discontented, or they’re making some kind of misjudgments where even if they don’t know there’s a problem, the audience is looking at them and being like, this doesn’t look good. That’s definitely something that I’ve seen for important protagonists. For minor characters, that’s a lot of investment because anytime you build an arc, you have to follow through.
And so you can’t give a character arc to all of your characters, but if you try to do a viewpoint character, especially your main character who has a viewpoint, and you try to give that person emotional struggles or just a bunch of negative feelings, and you do not think through a character arc for them, oftentimes just… call it spaghetti, like spaghetti emotions, where we just have strands of possible arcs everywhere and it feels like a mess. It feels very inconsistent. Suddenly the character’s angsting about one thing and then another thing, and they don’t seem to have consistent issues from one scene to the next.
Bunny: Their problem can’t just be angst.
Chris: Generally angsting about whatever happens to be in the scene at that time. Probably my favorite is from Eldest, the sequel to Eragon, where Eragon seems like a nihilist in one paragraph, and then he changes from paragraph to paragraph what his emotional issues are.
Oren: He just has a lot of facets, Chris. He has so many.
Chris: For anybody, if you wanna give a character deep driving emotions, a character arc provides structure. It’s just, we don’t necessarily have that much time for every character in the story.
Oren: Yeah. What I have seen is that audiences really like getting to know a character. They like to feel at the end of the story as if they know the character better than when they started. And often that means an arc. Not necessarily a hundred percent of the time, but arcs are very helpful just because they also have some attachment and drama while you’re learning things, and it’s more likely that they will feel relevant to the story and not just random pieces of information.
They’re especially useful for viewpoint characters because with viewpoint characters, unless you’re doing meta mysteries, which you shouldn’t, we’ve covered this. Stop doing it. Then you can’t do the thing where you just find out more random things about them, because in most cases, those are things you should probably already have known. Whereas with a non-viewpoint character, you might be surprised to find out that the jerk rival takes care of their siblings at home because their parents aren’t around. That might be part of an arc, but it might not necessarily be; but that’s hard to do with the protagonist.
Chris: With a protagonist, you can still get to know them better, but they have to be like embellishing details, right? A meta mystery happens when there’s something that would naturally come up. And the only reason it hasn’t come up is because the storyteller has decided to arbitrarily keep it a secret, giving the audience the feeling that there is something they don’t know or something missing, or just they don’t understand where the character’s coming from. Emotions are coming off as flat, and just missing. That kind of thing. Certainly if it’s something that’s more of an embellishing detail that wouldn’t have naturally come up and it’s not important to the story, sometimes those details are fun, right? A character really hates mushrooms.
Bunny: Oh no. They’ve gotta learn to overcome that. Nobody should hate mushrooms. Mushrooms are so good. That’s a character flaw.
Chris: …What have you. So you can add some of those things. But yeah, for non-viewpoint character, giving ’em a little bit more complexity, I think gives you more to learn. Giving them layers. Sorry, whenever we talk about a character being deep, or layers, it just, there’s just so much… I can’t take those words seriously anymore.
Oren: They get used for, I would argue, less than admirable purposes. You get the people who are like, the character arc is the true soul of the novel, and they tend to talk about that sort of thing. I will say that absent those perhaps ulterior motives, having a character with more than one side to them, if you see that character a lot, I would say is valuable, because if they are the same every time you see them and you see them all the time, then that starts to feel weird.
Bunny: Especially if they’re in a bunch of different contexts. Like maybe your character will be putting on a different face when they’re talking to a police officer than they do when they’re at home. And that can be useful and feel real. And you can still see the interiority of the character. They can still be having thoughts and feelings to themselves. In fact, they can think about how they wouldn’t normally act like this or that. They’re consciously trying to be a bit more rigid and official than usual. That can absolutely work. But if they act the exact same in every context, that doesn’t make sense.
Oren: If you have a wise mentor who is in two or three scenes, wise mentor can be their character. They could be memorable as that, as long as there aren’t a lot of other wise mentors. But if that wise mentor is in a lot of scenes, you’re gonna wanna show some other sides to them. Common ones are, this character’s normally show wise and calm. Let’s show what would make them show anger. And that feels cool. That creates contrast. People like that sort of thing.
Chris: I think another important thing to think about in this category that lets you learn more about a character, that is useful for non-viewpoint characters, is the fact that people are not going around purposely showing everyone their emotions all the time. A lot of times there’s what they’re feeling and their motivation, and then what they choose to show other people. What they’re trying to show other people is different from that. So that gives you opportunities for them to put on one face, and then when you hit the right situation, for them to reveal what they’ve been thinking underneath the brave face. They put on a brave face, but really they’re scared. That kind of thing. And you can also have that with motivation.
You can leave a character who has a very simple, obvious motivation. But you can also add a deeper motivation. Like, I want good grades just because I am kind of a teacher’s pet or something being superficial; or I want good grades because I really need approval, because I have low self-esteem and I really need the approval of others, being a deeper motivation. That’s more emotional about their personal identity, that kind of thing.
Oren: So here’s a question. How does backstory fit into character development? Because I have a tendency to write characters with too much backstory. That’s just my toxic trait. So how does that work exactly?
Chris: I think backstory, again, is one of those things like character arcs that is a very high investment choice. If you’re gonna do it, it has to be usually for an important character, and also it has to matter. I’ve seen a trend with candied characters where we reveal a backstory and it just doesn’t change anything. Again, it just feels very glorifying. The author’s like, don’t you care that this character used to work for the bad guys? No. I don’t. It doesn’t change anything about the story. It’s like, but isn’t that cool? No, I don’t care.
But for a more important character that you wanna spend more time on, explaining their character arc is probably one of the number one things. It depends on the character arc. Sometimes characters have flaws that don’t really need explaining very much, like they’re impulsive. Maybe they’re just started that way and they have to learn restraint, but there’s no deep backstory reason why they’re impulsive. But there could be deep backstory reasons why if they have trust issues. That suggests somebody hurt them. And then that backstory could end up being very relevant because it might change which situations are really sensitive for them, or what kind of people they trust, or the person that hurt them might show up in the story.
Bunny: And I feel it’s very difficult or impossible to create a character without any backstory, I guess unless they’ve just been born or something. But at the same time, you have to know how to doll that out in ways that are actually supporting the story. And in that case, I think you’re right that it’s usually explanation. I’m thinking of backstory that can explain their relationships with other characters. I think that’s another big one, especially if that ties into the character arc. And I think that’s especially important if they have a character arc about either reconciling with or finding a different way to relate to another character.
Chris: For a relationship arc backstory, their relationship can also be important, but I would say that when you talk about backstory, it has to be something that is not self-explanatory, that’s important enough to actually take time out of the story to relate something complex. And there are many cases in which, especially if you have a young character, where things are fairly self-explanatory, and then the issues start when the story begins.
They’re a young character who’s naive, they have a friend that they grew up with… That doesn’t really take much explanation. And then when the story starts, then stuff goes down. Then they lose things, then they develop their flaw. Then they have a fracture with their friend. And it’s all in the story proper. None of it is backstory. So if you’re going to take time to relate something that happened in the past, that doesn’t move the story forward, there has to be a bigger reason for it.
Oren: My favorite weird backstory thing is when the author gives their character more backstory than it feels like they’ve had time to do. It’s like, you’re not that old. How did you have time to do all these things?
Chris: How did you have time to watch every single episode of All In The Family, or whatever it is that Wade does in Ready Player One?
Oren: Yeah. The ones that come to mind immediately are Lockwood and Co. and Six of Crows. For one thing, it’s really obvious that in Six of Crows, those characters were not supposed to be teenagers. They don’t act like teenagers. They don’t have any teenager related arcs. They clearly were supposed to be at least mid-twenties, and were aged down because YA is hot. That seems very clear to me reading the story, but Kaz still has the backstory of someone in his mid- to late twenties and I just don’t believe he had time to do all the things he is talking about having done.
Chris: Yeah, Buffy made fun of that in the episode, I think it’s called Superstar, where Jonathan uses a magic spell to give himself all the candy. Like how did he have time to go through medical school and do all of these other things?
Oren: Yeah, and Lockwood has the same problem, specifically the character Lockwood. He just has too much backstory; he has so many people that he knows and so many things he’s supposedly done, and it’s like, was he 10 when he was doing these things? My favorite is that he supposedly has had a rotating cast of casual girlfriends and the story – he’s 15 when the story starts. How many girlfriends could he possibly have had by that point? He hasn’t been dating age for that long.
Bunny: You went through puberty two years ago, Kaz.
Chris: One of my favorites is a newspaper article about the death of his sister that’s like, you know, oh, and the sister died and her brother was unable to stop it, or something like that. And it’s like, okay. He was a young child. What was he, eight or… he was seven. His sister was older than him. How many newspapers reporting the death of somebody are like, oh yes, and their seven-year-old younger brother was unable to stop it.
Bunny: This tragic child death occurred, and the family hamster was not able to stop it.
Oren: What a scrub.
Chris: So another one that is sometimes worth thinking about is the character’s motivation, which people make a lot of. I think a simple motivation goes a long way. And the reason is just to make the character more consistent, usually, so that you can catch if they’re doing things that are inconsistent with whatever they might want. Because there’s a good chance readers will notice if the character switches sides inexplicably, or seems to go do something in one scene that’s contradictory to what they do in a different scene. And if you know what they want and their primary motivation is, that just helps you make them more consistent.
Oren: This one is hard for me to intellectualize. It’s like, I know when I see it that a character is going against their established motivation, but it’s hard to give advice on it beyond don’t do that. Very helpful advice.
Chris: I will say that one thing that does happen, and I think we talked about this a little bit when we went over believability, is that it’s one thing to know, but you also actually have to communicate to the readers. So if you have any issues with consistency and believability, the first step is actually knowing what’s going on yourself. And the second step is making sure that readers do. Because if you do have a character that’s complex, for instance, and you’re thinking, oh, they’re on the fence about this, or they have nuanced feelings, they’re really divided, it is tricky to make that come across as being complex instead of just inconsistent.
Oren: Yeah. My advice to clients I work with is when in doubt, simplify their motivation, because a lot of the issues that I’ve encountered of ‘this character is doing something that just seems to contradict what they wanted,’ is that the author has this very complicated idea of their motivation in their head that is hard to portray on the page. When in doubt, simplify, is my constant refrain.
Bunny: I’ve had this problem myself, especially in short stories, which I’m terrible at writing, where I’m like, I want this complicated background and I want the characters to have history with each other and interact in complex ways. So I come up with a backstory that’s completely tangled and requires tons of explaining. And then my professors, “This feels like a chapter of a novel,” and I’m like, goddammit.
Oren: No, I get it. I have the exact same thing. Okay. So these two characters, they used to date until they had to split up because of a war, and then they met again, but that one of them cheated on the other one, and then the other one stole all their money and then they worked for rival crime syndicates for a while. How long is this story again? 5,000 words. Don’t worry about it.
Bunny: Yeah. The one I’m thinking of was that there was like two vampires and initially one of them had turned the other one, and then that one wasn’t ready for it and went on a rampage, and now they blame the first vampire for that. And it’s all very hard to explain in a ten minute play with only dialogue.
Oren: Sounds like it could be a good novel premise though.
Bunny: That’s my problem!
Oren: Just saying.
Chris: Backstory, there’s the issue of communicating, but I think the other issue that happens with lots of backstory is that you want your audience to be on the same page as a character and feel what they’re feeling. And so you have to be able to relate the backstory in enough detail that you can feel that with them. So if you have them meet up with their ex, you want that to be an emotionally meaningful moment. The audience has to understand all that history enough to feel something about it, right? Feel whether that this is a good ex or a bad ex, or what have you, so that when you see the ex, they’re like, oh yeah, the ex, or like, oh no, not that ex.
And when all of those emotions are poured into the backstory, not only is it hard to explain, but it can also be really hard to then bring forth emotions in the story because it all depends on all this stuff. So, yeah, that’s again a matter of how much time do you have to develop your character. That’s a big one. And you have less time in a short story than you do in a novel. It depends on basically, what is the total number of words you have to devote to this character? And if you don’t have that many words, you gotta pare it down. And if it’s a character that only makes a small appearance, they can be a flat character. You’ll get away with it because people won’t have time to know the difference, and they’ll probably just be memorable, which is good if they appear more than once.
Oren: Okay. Now that you know all of our backstory and we are all very well developed around here, I think you can agree we are very real people who exist. We’re gonna call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you think we are real enough, consider supporting these very real podcast hosts on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. Finally we have Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. Thank you all so much. We’ll talk to you next week.
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