Category Archives: Characters

Matching Character Personalities to Archetypes

There is much to be gained by populating a story with interesting personalities, but personalities are not necessarily functioning characters. You can have as many “window dressing” characters as you want. Make sure, however, that each of the eight archetypes is represented by one of your characters.

For a given character, why would you pick one archetypal function over another? Simple: the archetypal functions are essentially descriptions of different personality types. Take the Sidekick archetype, for example. The Sidekick is described as a “faithful supporter.” If you select a character as the Sidekick, you have already said a lot about the kind of person it will be.

Note that the archetypal description says nothing about in what the character has faith or what it supports. This is why Toto in The Wizard of Oz can be a sidekick, but so can Renfield in Dracula. The Sidekick is not necessarily the faithful supporter of the Protagonist, but simply fulfills the dramatic function of illustrating how the qualities of faith and support fare in regard to solving the story’s central problem.

So, in choosing which archetypes you want to assign to which characters, select the matches in which the characters function best reflects its personality, and vice versa.

Excerpted from
Dramatica Story Development Software

Character Interests (Likes and Dislikes)

“Snakes… Why did it have to be snakes….???”

What a character likes and dislikes takes the curse of its larger than life stature. Whether you are writing a novel, play, screenplay, or teleplay, your characters loom in the hearts and minds of the audience. No one can relate to a loom. To humanize your characters and bring them down to size, give them feelings rather than just points of view.

You work in an office. Everyone does their job. The place runs like clockwork. Who ARE these people?! Until you know if they love football but hate sushi, you don’t really know them all. Who CARES what their purposes are; what do they take in their coffee, or tea, or do they not touch either but guzzle cola and pistachios.

Red. Does it do anything for them? What about wall paper patterns with thousands of little ducks? The things your characters like and don’t like set them apart from the crowd. And letting yourself go a little bit off the wall can bring forth attractions and repulsions that can suggest settings for a whole scene, sequence, or even the whole story itself.

Work yourself into the words. If you have pet likes and dislikes, this is the place to spout off about them. Assign them to your characters and you can get back at all those hated things, and express all those yearnings for the loved ones.

Excerpted from
Dramatica Story Development Software

Character Skills and Occupations

Nothing can flatten a character faster than to give it only the skills it needs to get through the story. There are plumbers who play piano and scientists who hold seances. Football players knit, and actors paint. A character with talents other than those central to the plot is a more interesting character.

But there is a huge difference between Vocation and Avocation. The work a character does for a living (or for charity, for the church, for the heck of it): this is an occupation too. An occupation, after all, is simply what keeps your character occupied.

Think about all each character does; all it might do that isn’t central to the story. Then load it up with any reasonable number of skills and occupations that can shed light on its makeup and depth on its nature.

Excerpted from
Dramatica Story Development Software

Character Affiliations and Beliefs

Characters do not live by structure alone. Background information and personal attributes are needed to turn these avatars of dramatic purpose into living, breathing, human beings (or whatever).

For example:

Mark Twain once said, “I could never join a club that would have the likes of me as a member.” To what kind of clubs does this character belong? What is its faith, creed, or manifesto? Is it a card-carrying member of…, a supporter of…, the founder of…? And just because it is a member, associate, or sympathizer doesn’t mean it believes any of it. One may be judged by one’s friends, and where there’s smoke there’s fire, but also where there’s smoke there’s smoke, and you can’t judge a book by it’s cover.

Try to separate your characters’ affiliations from their beliefs. They may go hand in hand, or they may be quite divergent, born of convenience, necessity, family ties, or any of the other oddities that make for strange bedfellows.

No character is an island. What you work out here will create bridges to other individuals.

Excerpted from
Dramatica Story Development Software

A Character’s Physical Traits

Characters do not live by structure alone. Background information and personal attributes are needed to turn these avatars of dramatic purpose into living, breathing, human beings (or whatever). 

In addition, the physical qualities of your characters will have a tremendous impact on how your reader/audience receives them.

How does each character move, what does it do with its hands? Does it have a nervous tick? A lisp? A permanent grin? And what about its stature, its weight, the color of its hair (if any). Is it pretty, handsome, pretty handsome? All of these can apply to men or women equally well but with different effect.

Take a moment for each character and picture it in your mind. Write down all you see. Then put it in motion and see how it glides, stumbles, slumps, or bolts. Note its motions and note them well. What you work out here can turn a paper person into cool character.

Excerpted from
Dramatica Story Development Software

Writing a Character Description

Your character description should be a thumbnail sketch of its personality and physical traits.

Note:

There are some mental and physical traits that are part of the dramatic structure of a story and others that are merely added to enhance audience interest. This is not a function of the trait itself, but of how it is employed.

For example, if a character speaks with an accent, it might just be an attribute from where he or she was born, or it might be an affectation of pretense. A character might simply have a big nose, or he might be Cyrano de Bergerac, in which case the size of his proboscis has a major function in the plot, triggering and driving forward key events.

Examples:

In Star Wars (Luke): A whiny farm boy, athletic, somewhat attractive, who dreams of excitement and glory. Now if he can only get out of his familial responsibilities and join the Rebellion.

In The Glass Menagerie (Laura): “A childhood illness has left (Laura) crippled, one leg slightly shorter than the other, and held in a brace….Stemming from this, Laura’s separation (from reality) increases till she is like a piece of her own glass collection; too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf.”

Excerpted from
Dramatica Story Development Software

Writing with Mental Sex

How can we illustrate the Mental Sex of our Main Character? The following point by point comparison provides some clues:

Female Mental Sex: looks at motivations

Male Mental Sex: looks at purposes

Female Mental Sex: tries to see connections

Male Mental Sex: tries to gather evidence

Female Mental Sex: sets up conditions

Male Mental Sex: sets up requirements

Female Mental Sex: determines the leverage points that can restore balance

Male Mental Sex: breaks a job into steps

Female Mental Sex: seeks fulfillment

Male Mental Sex: seeks satisfaction

Female Mental Sex: concentrates on “Why” and “When”

Male Mental Sex: concentrates on “How” and “What”

Female Mental Sex: puts the issues in context

Male Mental Sex: argues the issues

Female Mental Sex: tries to hold it all together

Male Mental Sex: tries to pull it all together

In stories, more often than not, physical gender matches Mental Sex. From time to time, however, gender and Mental Sex are cross-matched to create usual and interesting characters. For example, Ripley in Alien and Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs are Male Mental Sex characters. Tom Wingo in The Prince of Tides and Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October are Female Mental Sex characters. In most episodes of The X Files, Scully (the female F.B.I. agent) uses a(n) Male Mental Sex and Mulder (the male F.B.I. agent) uses a(n) Female Mental Sex, which is part of the series’ unusual feel. Note that Mental Sex has nothing to do with a character’s sexual preferences or tendency toward being masculine or feminine.

Sometimes stereotypes are propagated by what an audience expects to see, which filters the message and dilutes the truth. By placing a female psyche in a physically male character or a male psyche in a physically female character, preconceptions no longer prevent the message from being heard. On the downside, some audience members may have trouble relating to a Main Character whose problem solving techniques do not match the physical expectations.

Excerpted from
Dramatica Story Development Software

Writing an Initial Character Synopsis

When you are about to begin developing your story, you may already have some ideas about the characters you want to explore. Creating a brief initial character synopsis can help you pin down the list of people you’ve been considering to populate your story and to act as a reference as story development continues.

Some of your characters may play a role in the dramatic structure of your story, perhaps affecting plot and theme as well. Other characters might be included for entertainment value only and have no tangible impact on the course of the overall story. Either way, it helps to briefly describe them before you begin writing.

Try not to be overly literary or descriptive in your initial synopsis. You only need enough information to identify your characters by name, basic personality type, and traits and attributes, such as their job, a physical ability or disability and their relationships to other character as you currently see them.

EXAMPLE: Star Wars

Luke Skywalker is a farm boy with dreams of becoming a hot shot space fighter pilot in the rebellion against the evil Empire.

Obi Wan Kenobi is a former Jedi Knight who befriends Luke and teaches him warrior skills. He is an old man now, but still has strong powers, especially of the mystic sort.

Princess Leia is a leader in the rebellion. She’s a real take-charge lady. Perhaps a love interest for Luke.

Uncle Owen. Luke’s somewhat authoritarian Uncle and guardian.

The Alien Band: A group of musicians from all over the galaxy who play weird music in a local bar.

Excerpted from
Dramatica Pro Story Development Software

Acts and the Obstacle Character’s Influence

The following  excerpt is taken from

The Dramatica Class Transcripts

Dramatica : Every “Act” in a four-act structure, is not really descriptive of an activity, but is a sign post on the path of that throughline. If your Act I for your Obstacle Character is Progress, then it means they are starting at Progress. In other words, when we come to them at the beginning of the story, Progress best describes the principal area of their efforts and concerns. For an Obstacle Character, we measure them most by their “Impact” as opposed to what they, themselves, are paying attention to.

So, the Obstacle Character’s impact concerns “Progress” in Act one. But that is just where they start. Their impact shifts from Progress to Future. That is really what the first act of the three-act structure is all about. The OC’s impact “shifts” from Progress to Future over the course of the act. When the OC’s impact is fully on the Future, that is where we feel an “act break” in the story. Now, an impact on Progress, simply means that the OC is having an effect on Progress, everywhere they have an influence. They might be speeding up Progress, or slowing it down. Whichever way the impact, depends upon what is needed to ultimately bring the Main Character to consider changing their approach.

By impacting Progress, the Obstacle Character forces the Main Character into a position where they must abandon their approach in one area, and therefore, by the end of the act, the Main Character has “grown” a little closer to addressing the central issue of the story… the Obstacle Character has forced them to grow a bit, in order to avoid having to deal with that issue right here and now.

But as soon as the Main Character thinks they can relax, the act changes, and the OC’s influence can be felt in a new area; Future. Future is just the thing that will force the main Character forward in their growth to that ultimate decision to remain steadfast or change. And, Future will be able to do that without allowing the MC to back slide to where they started. It is important to keep in mind, that the OC may not even be aware of their impact on the MC. They might, of course, but they don’t have to be.

Sometimes just their presence can force the Main Character to address issues they would rather not. And by their continued presence, as the OC changes their relationship in response to the overall story, their impact changes in just the right way to keep forcing that MC closer and closer to the reason they feel impacted at all. Then, the MC will ultimately be changed, or remain the same, whether that happens in a “leap of faith”, or in a subtle way, where the audience sees that the MC has been changed, but the MC just grows into that change: they never make it consciously. Well, that should open up some questions…

Change, Steadfast – Success, Failure

The following  excerpt is taken from

The Dramatica Class Transcripts

If you have a steadfast character and the story ends up as failure, you know they were not standing on the right spot. Its pretty easy to do for the change character. For change, if it is success and they changed, they must’ve started on problem, and jumped to solution in the end. So the MC will be on the Objective Problem element in build characters and the Obstacle will be on Solution.

In that case, the Obstacle was a friend trying to help the misguided MC see the light and change course, so the Obstacle was on the solution element all along. The main was on the problem and changed in the end. But if the change results in Failure, then the MC was on Solution all along, the Obstacle was on Problem, was a true foe, and the MC jumped FROM solution to Problem, causing the story to end in failure. Steadfast stories are bit more complex, because the terms “focus” and “direction” don’t carry any intrinsic positive or negative feel to them like problem and solution do.

In fact, it is the judgment of Good or Bad that determines which of the two elements the MC and OC are on in a steadfast story. Focus is seen as the symptom, direction is seen as the treatment. If you have a steadfast Main character who ends up still having their angst (bad) did they stick it out on the treatment or on the symptom? In fact, they are stuck with the symptom. So, they would reside on the focus element.   But if the character remains steadfast, and they are over their personal angst. then they are stuck on the treatment, which means they still have the resources.