Creating Complex Characters | Writing Tips

everyone it's chillin and I'm here today with another random video today I'm gonna be talking about creating complex characters character is arguably probably for many people's one of you including my own the most important element of story without good characters I don't think you're really gonna have a strong novel hope that hot take isn't too spicy for the day but I have kind of just a random hodgepodge of notes that I have literally taken over the past years on this topic and not made the video literally some of these points I jotted down when I was in second year of university I'm in fourth year now so I've literally had for so long like all of my videos this one's gonna start with a disclaimer I think it's important to know that this isn't really a checklist when you're creating a character you're creating a person and what you have to do is sell to the audience that this is not only a real person but a person interesting enough for them to spend eight hours of their life following and to do that requires a certain amount of empathy and just understanding of the character that goes beyond any specific technique or specific point this is gonna sound kind of like fluffy and airy but like understanding your characters soul understanding their assets as a person and kind of being able to feel that I don't know how to teach that's probably basically everyone who writes who's watching this is like I hear yeah I gotcha I don't really know how to explain that but I really think that um the most important part of writing a character is that your character has the spark of life to them and that that translates onto the page I'm gonna talk today in this video about some ways to make your characters more complex some strategies you can use some techniques to use this isn't to say that this is necessarily a checklist you just tick all these boxes for my personal process I don't consciously really think of all these things you know most of the time my characters kind of just start to appear and I kind of start to get a grasp of who they are and it's kind of like you know Vulcan mind-meld and you have access to who they are the person I think this is probably a pretty common experience I'm describing so I don't necessarily sit down and checklist all of these things but these are some things to consider if you feel like your character maybe needs a little more pizzazz even if you don't apply it consciously the better your understanding of the principles are the more it will start to appear just in your like natural you know your natural understanding of the character kind of just like strengthens your writers intuition so the first note that I wrote was complex psychology this is something that I had a writing professor who would always write on people's stories like needs more complex psychology and I think a lot of the time when characters fall flat it's because their psychology isn't complex enough read too simply and a character whose psychology reads too simply feels kind of robotic because people don't read simply people don't read like kind of just like you know boom boom boom and it's all perfectly logical like that's just not how people think or feel it's just a good thing to keep in mind is complicate the psychology but now I'm gonna get into kind of like some ways to do that the next point I wrote down was goals and desires this is standard writing 101 goals and desires are kind of the the basic way that your character interacts with the plot character without desire without goal or the way that we always say my workshop is yearning like what does the character yearn for a character without yearning isn't really earning themselves a place that's protagonist and I think that's a important thing to think of as with your characters is are they earning a place in the story right now without a goal especially for your protagonist they're not earning a place in the story without a desire of some sort lot and character really intersect at that yearning right so without that your character isn't really an active participant in the plot to the extent that we really need them to be with goals and desires this is a great place where you can look at psychology more complexly your character can have an external goal but underneath that can have some textual reasons for that goal and that's where things can get really complicated that's where your psychology can get really really interesting the reason why someone does something is much more interesting than just the thing they do this is a great thing to keep in mind with writing anti-heroes we might not be able to sympathize with the person's actions but we might be able to sympathize their reasons for those actions or the actions themselves might not be that weird or problematic they're kind of reasons behind that and a lot of that might be subtextual is what makes them interesting and it's what makes them complicated so the next thing I wanted to talk about is something that I learned I totally forgot about this term honestly I found it in my notes which proved to me how old these notes are because I learned about this at the beginning of my second year screenwriting workshop so I don't know if this is a particular screenwriting term it might be an acting term but I thought it was kind of interesting so I thought I'd touch on it and it's mask and counter mask mask is kind of the face your character typically shows the world it can kind of usually be summed up by this one key trait that really exemplifies how they show themselves to other people but then they also have a counter mask and the counter mask is kind of the opposite or like the inverse of that trait and it's just as much them it's not you know like a secret dark side or a true color it's equally them as is the mask but they really only show it in moments of true vulnerability or when really really pushed to show it thinking about the protagonist of the book I'm writing right now her mask is that she's very aloof and detached makes a point of very actively stating how little she cares about people and how little things other people's emotions mean to her but her counter mask which really only shows itself in moments of disparition is actually kind of a selflessness a lot of the time with kind of antihero type characters the counter mask is actually a more positive side of them like with my protagonist right now but a lot of the time with more hero type characters at the counter mask is more of a dark side now this might seem like a contradiction but I firmly believe that contradictions are what make characters suppose interesting because people are full of contradictions what you need to find our logical contradictions or contradictions that make sense and that's okay a contradiction doesn't have to be illogical because pretty much every person has a contradiction think about yourself remember this was a rule that my screenwriting professor same one who taught us about masks encounter masks said was that as a baseline rule your main character should be at least interesting as you use yourself you're the person you understand most complexly probably use yourself as the baseline and aim for higher because I'm not the protagonist of a book for a reason my main character is because she's earning that place so I think contradictions are really really important and I think contradictions are kind of what make a character interesting and you can really think of yourself and look at your own contradictions so like what I mean of myself mine aren't going to be that interesting or weird probably a contradiction that exists within me is that I'm very much of a pushover really Bend easily under the will of other humans some ways I hold myself to like a really strong moral code of things I live by and but then at the same time I sacrifice my own opinions and values so easily for other people in a lot of situations so it's kind of a contradiction that exists within me not to just like psychoanalyze myself like this got a little too much I'm so sorry so I think of your own like messed up and all the contradictions that exist within you because basically everyone has them and your character can have some to it next this one's actually a little easier to implement and because it's a bit more surface level in a bit more concrete it's one I really like to look at when I feel like a character isn't interesting enough because I feel like it's a bit of a lens for more complicated stuff and it's just quite simply there interests skills hobbies and line work you know these are really like clear obvious things they're the kind of things you would fill out in like a character profile if you're into doing those they make really good windows for more complicated things very rarely will you meet a person in life who's not passionate about something even if it's weird and niche like I'm thinking of my family right now like my brother is super passionate about chess and super passionate about economics I have a cousin who's just super passionate about birds like she just loves birds and obviously like I'm super passionate about writing and I think characters without a passion can sometimes almost feel like they're missing the spark of life in them because most people are passionate about something these things can tell us so much concretely about a character that it gives the reader room two and four about then the things they do in their spare time the hobbies they you know dedicate their time to the skills that they have and the line of work that they've either ended up in or have chosen to pursue it's a really good window to their psychology and their kind of vibe and feel as a character these things can also be used as plot devices if your character has a specific skill that should come up and can be a good way to intersect character and plot so next stop is one that I think is very important and it's revealing action in detail so revealing action in detail are basically though if there's something small but they do that's unexpected ideally or something about them that's unexpected that reveals kind of their colors so I'm gonna use an example and this is an example from this is so random my current writing professor I remember him teaching us about revealing detail when he like guest spoke in on my first-year writing class and that's where I remember him talking about writing about revealing detail and I guess I just like wrote it down and now I'm remembering it now and I don't remember what book he was referring to but this is a real example but he said that there's a Sun book where the main character who's like quite poor and doesn't have a lot of money and he basically has not a dollar to his name or maybe this isn't from a real book and he just made this out I don't know anyways this is the example I'm using because it's the one that's coming tonight he ends up like somehow acquiring a very small sum of money and instead of going to like buy food or something he goes and buys himself a set of paints and that's a revealing detail it shows what he's passionate about what he values that he requires artwork that's something so integral to his character so that's a really good example of a really good action and similarly you can have revealing details which is just like not saying the character does but it's kind of always existing within that so actually need the beginning of your book but honestly all the way throughout we should constantly be thinking of revealing action because we should constantly be learning more about our characters every kind of unexpected thing that they do every time they're active which they should be continually active that should be a window to who they are next up now to steal another term from my writing professor which this is one that like does any other does I don't even know if he made this term up or if it's like a common thing but I've only ever heard from him and it's artful incongruity any of my friends who are watching this are gonna be like they know exactly who told us about artful and rowdy and it's so legendary because we just had this one professor who like he would never stop talking about our flank crunk grody he was like obsessed with our twin Rudi but I understand why cuz I think it's a good thing to talk about this comes back to what I was saying about contradictions artful incongruity it's exactly what it sounds like it's incongruous in a way that is artful okay like what you guys split and then I literally just restated the words basically this is a way of taking a character type a character that's maybe a little familiar or can be kind of typified or put into a box and bringing them out of that but if you have a character who think of an example so let's say you have a character who is like I'm like he's like a carpenter he works in trades he's maybe a bit of a loner that would kind of be at this point we're kind of type of find him even if he's complex and written complex scene we're still kind of type of on him so how can we make him more complex give him a little artistic contradiction and making more interesting kind of a revealing detail maybe this character has a really specific interest I don't know Renaissance art maybe he's been like saving up his money from this like really low paying job that he has so that he can go like to Italy to go to some art museum I don't know I'm just making this up off the top of my head you get the idea but like make it better than that every time I do an example in a video it's like so bad because I don't play my examples I'm such a garbage a way that we were taught to you over and Groody that I think is is good to keep in mind it's have a character so maybe a character type and then you think of something that completely contradicts that type but a lot of the time if you go for a complete contradiction it's actually kind of obvious or cliche in itself because it's it's the first thing we would think of so you kind of have to scale back just a little so that it's the contradiction in itself is also interesting and not obvious next up is internal world internal world I think is really important especially if you're writing a character in first person you can really really play with internal world internal world is exactly what it sounds like it's the characters existence within their own mind and this includes how they interpret situations and people their imagination how their unique internal world is going to color the world an example of this one of my favorite books history of wolves I never stop talking about this book the reason I think this book is so good and why I love it so much is because the main character Linda has a really really interesting internal world basically the entire plotline is colored so specifically by her really dark twisted messed-up internal world but it's very specific X for a really interesting plot like the plot here is basically rooted in her internal world and how she's interpreting events but because her internal world is so specific and so interesting it makes her one of my favorite point of views I've ever been it I think we can all recognize that as people we have rich internal worlds so don't deprive your character of that give your character a rich internal world you know this is gonna include like how they perceive and interpret events what they think about how they theorize about other people on the assumptions they make and this can be very very flawed this is a really great place to look for flaw and to make your character more interesting through interesting flaws because every person's worldview and internal world are going to be a little flawed and you can really do interesting things with flaws through this element next step let's talk about my favorite thing ever with writing and that specificity I loved specificity I never stopped talking about specificity it's my bread and butter when I'm a vegan it's my bread and earth specificity is the I would go as hard to say that specificity is the key to good writing maybe that's like drastic heartache but like I would defend that so I think that a character who is nonspecific is going to be one we don't really care about because they are not a specific human mean when you're thinking specificity be as specific as you can you know like if you say oh my character what do they do they're an engineer that's not that specific what type of engineering what specific job sites they work on what specifically is their work you know there are a lot of different ways that you can show specificity through concrete details that will then again help to create the more the characters so as I'm calling it whether you believe in Souls or not it's the term I'm using for the sake of this video he's specific with their career but also be specific with their appearance I think appearances one that I don't like to overlook I have a video and writing character descriptions and I'll leave a link to that but being specific with your character's appearance it have just been like here's my character she has brown eyes and blonde hair like I don't know that's not that much give us something interesting say that she has liked us like an ox car and when I was something interesting I don't know but be specific just to create that stronger image in the readers mind be specific with their hobbies like I talked about earlier be specific with the objects they own and the clothes that they wear and the space that they inhabit be specific with their habits and their idiosyncrasies and the way that I wrote this down in my notes and it's not phrasing that I think I would use which means that I definitely stole it from a professor was make the details unexpectedly congruous great specificity doesn't do much if it's obvious so with your specificity try to be a little incongruous but in a way that makes sense does that make sense it makes sense to me I don't know if I'm articulating it well but it's kind of like what I talked about a little earlier with our clicker brownie that little incongruous anise that still kind of actually makes sense once you see it it's hard to do if I could come up with a brilliant example I would do it right now next up let's talk about belief system belief system kind of ties into internal world but belief system can be a really key part of your characters arc so belief system is exactly what it sounds like it's the beliefs all of these are just exactly what they sound like belief system is the you know the set of beliefs that your character holds about the world and this is often colored by their backstory you know some people say that every aspect of your character has to be justified by backstory I don't really believe in that I think some parts of people are kind of inherent or you know they are influenced by backstory but maybe to subtly for us to trace to like a single event but this is a great one to tie in to backstory if you really like to work with backstory as a writer I think backstory is really important as well I just don't believe that like every single aspect of your character has to be justified by their past I don't I think that's a little extreme but belief system so this is you know this set of beliefs that they hold about the world and a lot of time their beliefs are flawed their beliefs are the thing that's going to continually get them hurt throughout the story and a lot of the time your characters arc or your characters change finds itself in the character being hurt by this belief system hurt by this belief system and then eventually realizing their belief system is flawed and then changing that would be more of a hero's journey a book we're like the character changes and this is there positive which it doesn't have to be you might see a character whose belief system is negatively colored he is already maladaptive but then continues to be maladaptive and maybe a different way but basically the key with belief system is it's what the character believes about the world and how the world works you can challenge it with the plot the plot and the belief system can like should really butt heads and that's a really good vehicle to push the character into change next what I want to talk about is self awareness and self perception kind of again could be part of your character's internal world but just to touch on it a little more specifically I think typically a character almost has to be more self-aware than the average person because they have to be able to articulate themselves in a relative when you want sway on the page however your characters kind of gaps in self-awareness or self perception can be really really interesting points to explore them it's something I'm really enjoying exploring with the protagonist of my current work right now because in some ways she's really self-aware but in other ways she was really really inaccurate self perception and she almost villain eise's herself in her mind she kind of believes things about herself were negatively then her true like there's one part in the book where she straight-up says that she has a god complex which she doesn't actually but the fact that she believes that about herself when it's not true is you know kind of a revealing detail and it shows kind of a blip in her self-awareness and how she perceives herself there's a point where the reader can catch a little discrepancy where the character doesn't perceive himself perfectly accurately that can be a really interesting flaw so then the last thing I wanted to talk about was the darkroom we love the darkroom a lot of these are really specific terms that I use a lot in my writing classes and I think different people probably have different language for this and different terms that these but these are just the terms I was taught all the time so the term comes from an Alice Munro essay so let's get a little pretentious and Kenley here okay so basically Alice Munro wrote this essay if I can find it online link to it I will leave it in the description her idea and this was kind of a way of looking at theme but we're gonna use it as a way to look at character because theme is kind of rooted in character a story and she was talking write a short story about this applies to a novel is a house and what you're gonna do is you're gonna bring the reader into the house and you're gonna guide them through every single room and you're gonna show them every single room and then eventually you gonna leave the house there's gonna be one room in the house that you never show them and that room is the dark room inside the dark room it holds the key to what the story is really about or in this case what the character is really about we're never gonna go in the dark room this is something that's never stated explicitly we're never actually gonna go there but through seeing all the other rooms we can kind of infer what's in the dark room and the dark room is called dark room because it is often dark so I talked a bit about dark room with one of my own characters in an upcoming video that I'm in the process of filming right now two line editing video of me lion editing my short story symbiosis which you may have read the story is so old and the writing in it is a little uh but basically in and I was talking a little bit about the main character Jensen's dark room I feel weird explicitly staining the dark room of my character because this is like something you're never supposed to say but basically the dark room for him is that finds it easier to have relationships with people who are dead than people who were alive so the fact that he collects bones is kind of a window into that the fact that the one person he's really in love with is probably dead because he has major attachment issues and a dead person can never leave you I don't mean this in like a necrophilia way like I don't mean that like he has relationships with dead people I just mean that like he idealized this dish that was kind of a dark room in that story it's like that inner messed-up thing that we're never gonna say but it's kind of coloring everything the character does the dark room is kind of the thing we're like if your character went to therapy a therapist would have to spend like years unpacking everything your characters been through in order to like figure out what the dark room is like it's that part of them before I get into like my last kind of rounding off points in this really long video I just wanted to share a couple questions that you can ask yourself if you feel like you're struggling to really pin down your character what makes them different from any other person a character especially a narrator should be someone we've never seen before in life what makes their outlook on the world different from everyone else's again if we're gonna spend so long wrapped up in their viewpoint what are we getting from their viewpoint that we can't get from any one else's what questions do they ask themselves about the world or about their own life how do they see other people and how do they see so these are things that kind of briefly talked about other points we're gonna talk about a flaw so flaw is obviously something that everyone kind of knows that interesting characters are flawed law can find itself rooted in any or all of the things I just talked about every single thing I just talked about is a way to explore your characters flaws and if anything every single one of those things should be flawed in some way flaw isn't really just like a single quality you can throw onto a character and be like oh but she's arrogant oh but he's insecure it's not just like a single thing you can throw into a character flaw is very deeply rooted in a character's worldview and a character whose experience and a character's lens and a character's interpretation of events so basically everything I just told you every like technique that you can use to look at character all of those things are ways of constructing a character flaw and I think it's important remember that a character flaw is really only useful in the plot if it actually affects the plot sorry awkward is not a good character flaw everybody is awkward if your character is awkward that just makes them kind of cute it's really a bad character flaw because it's not making your character different from any other human it's not really earning them a place as a narrator so when you're thinking of flaw you can think of primarily like it's in the dark room but their flaw is rooted in basically every single aspect of their psychology and then the last thing I wanted to say it around off this video is when you're creating a character don't be afraid of the human messiness I think characters you know are people they may not be real breathing people but they are kind of real people on the page and as a writer they probably feel pretty real to you don't be afraid of the messiness that is a human being and as a human beings mind a character can't really be created in a perfectly logical way because that's not how any human being works people are messy and their internal worlds are very messy and don't deprive your character of that if you feel like your character is missing something the thing they might be missing is the messiness that makes a person a person so don't be scared to give them that because it's going to be what makes them interesting and what makes them do interesting things on the page I'm gonna wrap up this video now I'm sorry it was so long but this is like a huge topic it's kind of probably one of the biggest topics in writing but also one that in some ways it's kind of to teach so those are just some things you can look at when you're creating characters do create more complex characters I hope this video is helpful thank you guys so much for watching and if you have any questions you can send me an ask on tumblr bye [Music]

Channel: ShaelinWrites

Views: 104,497

Rating: 4.9588451 out of 5

Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, character, writing complex characters, how to write complex characters, how to write strong characters, chacterization, how to develop characters, 3 dimensional characters, three dimensional characters, character driven

Id: IdA8DjiQ6us

Length: 24min 46sec (1486 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019