Oct 21 2008
Characters
One of the trickiest things about character creation is fitting the character’s personality into the plot, without compromising who you want them to be. Sometimes people feel that the characters are the most important part of the story, but to me, they’re only secondary. What they do depends on what happens to them, so that’s why I consider them secondary.
No matter how you view it, though, your base for your character has to be strong. Admittedly, my characters end up being a lot like me (at least the main characters): strong, witty, unconventional, rough aroudn the edge kinds of girls who march to the beat of their own drums. Relationhips the characters have are based largely off of ones I have (my fiance has told me numerous times that conversations that happen in my stories sound like conversations he and I would have…which is true ;-)). However, other people don’t want their characters to be anything like them.
Your characters have to be flexible whether or not they reflect their author. If your characters don’t go with the flow, your plot suffers, and if the plot suffers, forget it. Besides, think of your story like life: if you don’t change and roll with the punches, life gets either erally hard, really boring, or you become really narrowminded. Now, who wants to read about characters like that (unless your story is about a person who refuses to change)?
Good characters, just as good people, change as the story progresses. They learn, and evaluate their lives. Trying to devise perfect characters (go back to the Mary Sue references I made earlier) make the story boring. If everything about the characters is already completely formed and developed into what they should be to be ideal for their given situation, how can anything grow and develop? Where’s the story? That doesn’t mean your characters can’t be “good people”. Not at all. Even good people have imperfections. Think of the most noble, admirable person you know, and are they perfect? Doubt it. I bet even they have some quirk that gets on your nerves to no ends.
I know before I talked about how the plot in Nights in Rodanthe was a disappointment, at least to me. However, the characters went through a LOT of good change, and that was the redeeming quality to that book. In fact, Nicholas Sparks does a wonderful job of shaping and forming his characters, whether they just get older, or as the story grows their ideas and lifestyles are challenged.
Even though good characters to me are second to a good plot, in my opinion, they still need each other for the story to work out. If one suffers, so does the other. However, if both are strong, you have nothing to worry about.
