Sanderson 2013.3 - Writing Great Characters

okay so today we are going to theoretically finish Sanderson's three laws but we're also going to spend a whole lot of time on characterization and viewpoint that's what I want to dig into today and we'll probably do that first and then move on to to getting to the other lives if we need to as I said last week I really personally consider character to be the most important feature of a story a story with a fantastic character but a bland setting has a much better chance of succeeding than a story with a fantastic setting and a bland character ideally I want you to learn to do both don't get me wrong I'm not excusing weakness in either area however you have all read books and enjoyed books that have a rehashed setting the or story that's not that original Harry Potter was not an original story Harry Potter had a great had great characters it had excellent execution but boy at Wizards school was a very common trope in fantasy she just did it better than anyone else it's kind of proof that if you you can take any of these things and do them really well people will latch on to it and you will find that your readers will respond much better to a really great character than to anything else like I said do all three but great characters this is going to make your book really feel alive as you kind of practice all of these other things and what do I mean by a great character well I'll ask you what is a great character when it would in your opinion what makes a great character okay relatable okay relatable sure um exists beyond the page this one's dying okay beyond the page that's better what else over here okay backstory you're really your reason is motivation that's pretty pretty important one gross okay has a narc alright admirable okay okay flaws and sympathetic you said over here okay yeah yeah okay um that's a pretty good list that's also a very challenging list your job is to do these things and to bring your characters to life your job is creation you are taking something that is unalike the page and you're making it feel alive as if there is somebody there who's real that's your job we're going to talk about how to do it this is all very important stuff early in my career when I was writing books it didn't get published I was dissatisfied with some of my characters and I came to realize that one of the reasons for this was that I was thinking of them as their role first and who they were second it became over the course of my career a mantra to me which was mentioned in here that the character needs to live beyond the page specifically for me I find that a character is more powerful if they have passions and motivations beyond the main plot beyond what the main plot would require of them okay people like things we all like things we're all interested in things we have things we want to be doing if today you were thrown into a major sort of plot you have some 20 years of experience behind you of a life behind you of things that have happened for some of us more than that you will you would have been interrupted in your life and I really as a writer look for this sort of interrupted in the life it's kind of a storytelling maxim that you know the story happens when whatever the character was planning to have happen in their life gets interrupted now this is slightly a problem because this is the basic way to start a story you have a life it gets interrupted the problem with that is the characters then tend to be reactionary they tend to be passive and this is another problem you'll run into it is is a major problem you can see it most powerfully sometimes in superhero films because they tend to follow a very specific cycle and they they have a certain trope to them in a lot of these the hero would do nothing if there weren't a villain doing interesting things interrupting their life this runs you into a problem that you somehow need to make your character proactive despite the fact that they're being interrupts is anyone read a story where the villain was more interesting than the protagonist this happens because the villain tends to be proactive the villain has plans the villain has passions they have things that they're about and they're doing and they have this great thing they want to achieve they get interrupted by the hero you know running afoul their plans and it innately builds this weird sympathy for the villain that is sometimes hard to overcome you end up having these films that are about the villain rather than about the hero this is a challenge for you as writers to be aware of that this happens and it's because of these things we are attracted as readers to characters who are proactive and who have a passion and who are doing things all right we are also attracted to characters who are capable okay Wow okay bubble yeah okay capable we're attracted to characters were capable they they're they excel at what they do we're also attracted to characters who are sympathetic that's part of kind of the definition of sympathetic what it let's go dig into that what a sympathetic main what makes a character sympathetic okay okay you empathize with them so how can you make them the reader empathize with the character okay okay they they're certainly it is more easy to build when you have similarities similarities good but one thing I'd point out here is it's hard to empathize with a character if they feel no emotion a lot of new writers it's harder for them to do emotion right once in a while someone just throws emotion all over the page and it becomes melodrama more often than not you're just not writing emotion into your characters they this is a function of not being practiced enough at Show versus Tell and watching a lot of films and so writing your books cinematically where you aren't showing the emotions because you can't you're not skilled enough to show the emotions which is what it filmed us right it can't tell you the emotions has to show them to you you're not skilled to pull that off yet so you just don't put it in which means that your characters become these robots who are fulfilling these action roles as if it were a film and you never get this empathy because we don't know what they're feeling we start reading the book and say wow I if you know if my dog got run over by a truck I would be feeling this way but this person just doesn't feel anything well you're trying to write this character that they have like this stoic sense of you know I must continue on and you know they've got a strength inside though inside they're really hurting but you don't have the skill yet to pull it off so you just don't mention it and then your characters become robots this is a major problem what new writers making characters sympathetic is that they just don't have any emotions going the other way and just telling us how they feel is also not necessarily the best thing to do so you run into this catch-22 this one is show versus tell so where that comes into play quite a bit all right so sympathetic characters usually are also flawed you were right whoever brought that up most really great characters are going to have some sort of flaw I also put in limitations as different from flaws and then there's the character arc so early on I realized I was just sticking people into roles right usually my main character was a little more rounded all the side characters were incredibly flat um you know I would have the romantic interest and she was in the book to be the romantic interest rather than to be a character unto themselves start thinking about this start asking yourself questions about how your character what your characters would be doing what would they be doing what would they be searching for if the main plot of the book didn't hit them and if the story is really about them and their passion then ask yourself what are they beyond their passion we are all more than one thing you can have you know the bounty hunter who's also a stamp collector once you start adding in people's real human passions then suddenly they become way more rounded the bounty hunter who's a stamp collector you can say that in one sentence and that character I can guarantee just became more rounded in your head in an interesting way than the bounty hunter because the bounty hunter becomes this sort of faceless person who you know is whatever either you're thinking Star Wars and they wear a helmet or you can't even see the face or you're thinking you know this gruff person who hunts down the protagonist or whatnot adding a few little touches like this you don't have to go overboard but adding a few little touches makes the characters come to life Blade Runner has the the guy that makes core origami anyone seen that film I mean that simple thing making the origami makes us really sympathize with that character who's primarily really an antagonist that makes me think of jingle when there it goes but when going to the big bar and all these big nameless right there but then you'll find out they have hobbies like he likes making things he played the piano right they kind of make fun of the trope a little bit entangled with that but yeah yeah yeah you like the characters more and it doesn't have to necessarily even be a direct contrast to to who they are but something and so this is this is usually when character when authors are talking about quirks they're talking about stuff like this ways to humanize your characters through small detail all right you can write that down ways to humanize your characters through small detail usually when you write write this word you start talking to people and you if I would ask for a list of quirks you would go bonkers you would say the most weird things that you could come up with because that's kind of what the word quirk means to us they don't have to be that weird now weird can be very good depends on the type of story you're telling and tangled gets into that tangle is playing off of the contrast between big burly men and guy who wants to be a ballet dancer or whatever it is that you know each of these each of these guys has a really weird quirk for who you picture them being and that works for contrast but it doesn't have to be humorous like that you you have you know characters who just do interesting things what is it is it is it Saving Private Ryan where the guy takes takes dirt from every place he's been that's cool a simple thing to do and suddenly you understand this person that's a quirk and it's not in a direct contrast it's just an expansion of who they are you can collect and gather these from people you meet and start stealing them like thieves that's what you do you're a writer and be watching just and be thinking about this you can have quirks you know hobbies interests actions tells having a tell for a character particular side character can be pretty useful don't go overboard on this but this is some sort of visual cue that sticks in the character the readers mind as they encounter that character much more important for side characters that are not going to be having viewpoints than main characters but if you will watch a lot of films or read a lot of books that quickly characterize you will see that someone had that people have tells tells are things like you know this person is always tapping their foot or this person is the one with the eye patch that's an easy tell to remember and giving them a tell that relates somehow to their hobbies or their quirks can be a very useful way to quickly characterize a side character and give them a little bit more rounding okay this is one method another method is the dossier method this is a method that a lot of writers use I don't actually use this one but one of my goals in this class is to give you multiple methods to try making your characters more rounded one of them is to start thinking about the quirks one is the dossier the dossier is a list of questions you ask yourself about every character do you force yourself basically to do this but also to come up with a backstory to fill out their passions and their interests and all of these sorts of things it'll ask you things like what's their favorite food you know who do they hate most in life is this kind of like a literary representation of method acting well even if even if it's happening offstage they kind of create this persona for themselves yeah sure I mean what I would call the method acting part is what we're going to get into later which is viewpoint which is how you use your viewpoint but this is just good storytelling I don't know if it's counts as method acting or what it's just ways to know your characters there's the old adage in writing that you generally want to look at storytelling like an iceberg meaning what you show the reader is this much but you you have have this much understanding about what's going on and kind of give them hints about this much that there is that theory of writing I do think this leads you dangerously toward Worldbuilders disease if you feel like you need to have this much before you can tell this much really all you actually need to do is this much meaning you have to show this much and be able to hint that there's all of this stuff down here and if you can hint at it then you don't actually have to do it they'll make it up for you and that's part of the point of doing things like this a friend an excellent writer always says skimp on the large details and be very forthcoming with the small details meaning when he wants to describe a room instead of you walk into the room and him giving this big long description of the room he picks one small detail and focuses on it you know the the shack had bullet holes in the window and gives you one very interesting detail about it or about the person so that you you get this and then you begin imagining the entire world down here of all of these things dan is a discovery writer I guarantee Dan doesn't have it much of this what Dan is really good at doing is making you think he has all of this and that's the point we are in a lot of ways what we're doing is writers is we are stage magicians all right these worlds you're creating do not exist at the their fundamental core you are telling a great big why okay and your job is while people are reading those pages to convince them and make them pretend along with you that the lie is truth okay and the methods used to do that are up to you but like a good stage magician usually you're wagging something in front of their faces while you're doing something over here that's going to later on smack them in the face and that's one of your jobs that's what we call good foreshadowing is when you're waggling something over here and then you smack them on the side of the head these are all methods of doing that all right and this is this is a shared lie everyone who picks up a book knows this isn't real but they want to participate in this they want to join in and they are your willing participant if you can do your job well which is not kick them out of the story which is not you know do all these things we're going to talk about that kind of ruin the experience and they'll be disappointed or put the book down and you're not tricking them right that depends on genre but yeah so anyway quirks so dossier method you can find dossiers online character dossiers lists of questions to ask yourself about your characters bloggers love to post these writing bloggers will be like 25 questions to ask yourself about every character and you'll find posts and posts and posts about things like this I don't use it because I like to I discovery write my characters as I told you before I tend to architect my worlds and my plots and then cast a character in the role and explore who they are through writing through their eyes and that usually means I start chapter one three or four times until I find the right character and then I go with it yeah do you plan you plan where they grow too after I know who they are I will and I will often be revising my outline as they go along because you run into this thing people will talk about characters who who have a life of their own who just do things you aren't expecting doesn't happen to me I'm an architect even though I discovery write my characters I'm always in control of my story things don't surprise me what happens is as I write along and I start to really figure out this character I realize okay this character is not going to do this thing that the plot calls for the character and that role to do and so therefore I have to go back to my outline and have to rebuild my outline using the characters I know who they are now but to work it out this is why often I will actually won't finish my outline until I've got those first few chapters done I'll do like 75 percent then I'll go write the first few chapters then I'll go back and rebuild my outline now that I know who everybody is but still through the course of the book I will they will grow and I will just I will discovery right then meaning I'll let them kind of come to fulfill their role or things like this as I go along all right yeah there what's a good way to tell they're growing like I don't know okay we'll talk about that we'll talk about that the it's tough for me to talk about character because I do them so organically but I can definitely talk about how we know if they're growing or not alright so um alright Shep dossier method I'm not going to write that up there cuz I don't have to spell dossier um now you don't need to tell me I've already moved on we're beyond that we're gone mmm yeah next method this is one that Dave suggested when he taught this class many years ago was to intentionally cast the wrong person in the role in the story that you have built for them meaning if you're working on your plot and you kind of know what type of story you want to do so you want to tell a high story or you know you're going to tell a romance your first question to yourself is why can't this person be in this role what prevents them what are the big problems why would they be much better in the other roles in other words you jumble around the roles you you know yeah you stick the wise mentor a person you were planning in that and instead you make them the romantic interest and you know you take the romantic interest and instead you make them the plucky sidekick or whatever it is you've you filled out the role you've analyzed the plot that you're trying to tell and you jumble up the roles the purpose being to force yourself to put square pegs into round holes and pound them in there this is a source of way of creating conflict if your character doesn't feel like they belong in the role they're in that's generally going to be a good thing for whatever reason you know we we all are probably tired of whiny heroes who don't believe that they're actually a hero but they also can be the most some of the most endearing characters you know like the person who doesn't believe they're a hero but is acting heroically it works really well you could probably name off half a dozen stories where you have the reluctant hero who doesn't actually think they're a hero but they're doing heroic things and they've become you know some of the most interesting characters in the books because they're in a role they don't think that they fit sidekick to the hero what that's like I want to be that you right now and kind of like so they're complex that way yeah that could be a conflict whatever but you just stick them in again stick the square peg in the round hole find a way this is this is another method you don't have to use any of these you can use you can mix them but it is a way to force yourself to round out your characters the problem here is going to be generally for new writers you're going to start writing and your protagonist is going to be one of two things either they're going to be exactly like you and so they're going to kind of be bland or they're going to be exactly like they're going to be kind of bland because you're not doing the work on them you're going to cut the corners you can be like yeah this is I know this character they just are I mean this happens a lot and sometimes it's a good thing sometimes it's a bad thing but if you focus on any sort of groupings of characters usually the main character has trouble in that they tend to be the most bland they do feel real but they tend to be the most bland you can look at Harry Potter and Ron and Hermione who's the most bland Harry character wise is the most bland now there's an argument in why a that people make which is a pretty legit one which is that the blank slate main character on the main character being a blank slate surrounded by interesting people so that you can put yourselves in the shoes of the main character and therefore experience it as if you were in there it's not Harry whose best friend is Ron it's you whose best friend is Ron however that's one argument you can decide whether to do it you can decide to go that way if you want to or not but it is an issue for some writers that they kind of just assume that the main character is going to either be most like them or they're just the hero so I don't need to focus on them as much it's kind of a contrast to what I said earlier this is just problems that people fall into for me my main characters tended to be very interesting my side characters tended to be very flat quirky but flat meaning they didn't have passion in life they were just there to fulfill a role it's what I noticed about myself all right so characters making a character sympathetic one thing that I began to understand as I was writing I was kind of just a personal philosophy of mine I realized that there were two general types of characters that I really liked reading about one was the everyman right the everyman was the person who started their quest or their story or whatever kind of in the same place that I was there a normal person who has to gets trust into this great adventure these are the Frodo's of the worlds or even really the SAMS of the worlds right these are the people who just have you know no expectation that heroism is going to come their way and then suddenly boom it's it's forced upon them but we do also like supermen / women these are very popular stories there's a reason why James Bond was a very popular characters a reason why Sherlock Holmes is a very popular character you'll notice interestingly that the modern Sherlock Holmes all the adaptations of modern Sherlock Holmes are much more deeply flawed than the original you go read the original Sherlock really isn't flawed I mean the new Sherlock is great and you've got this whole you know sociopath thing going on with and you'll read the original stories he's not a sociopath he's just awesome okay and Watson is awesome too it's like Watson The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes the awesome and the slightly less awesome it's still very awesome Watson and you know they are just really really really good at what they do and this was very much more popular in the earlier part of the 20th century you'll if you watch the old Superman television program so if you listen to old radio dramas and things like this they were full of super men and women I'm not sure why back then that was so much more popular of an archetype maybe you know whatever the the collective unconscious was was looking for these heroes to look up to in certain ways but you you ended up with a lot of heroes that really didn't have flaws I mean you you have more of the you know the limitations yeah Superman can get can get hurt by kryptonite that's not really a problem with Superman you know it's it's just you know it's not like Superman is deeply flawed as a character because kryptonite can hit it hurt him no he just only has one thing that can kill him when we have a billion ya know so I mean is that would you then suggest that if we have a character it's like a Superman that we then try to achieve like bigger flaws I'm not saying anything right now I'm doing descriptions of of what seems to work so this still does work anyone read a Dirk Pitt novel probably no yeah okay so we've got one person Sahara yeah I guarantee dirt pit sells a lot of copies he's not necessarily our genre specifically but Dirk Pitt is a modern Superman there's nothing wrong with Dirk Pitt if you read the book it'll do these things like his flaws or things like he cares too much or you know he's just passed kids are awesome Dirk Pitt I've read it I read a great novel it was a blast but the funniest thing was like there's the scene where like his accountant is trapped on an island and his accountants like well what would Dirk do and so he like is unarmed but ghost takes out all of the bad guys and like grabs the rocket launcher and blows their helicopter out of the sky Dirk is so awesome that he makes his accountant awesome by proxy right this is how awesome Dirk Pitt is and you know these are just action adventures filled I mean the Vinci Code the character from the Vinci Code is not flawed really in any way except for that you know he just knows too much and he's just too you know it's like all the answers if your flaws are things like if you went to a job interview and they said what's your worst flaw the things you would list they're right like oh I just like working with people too much or you know I'm just I just I was I'm an overachiever I stay at work too long you know if those are your character flaws you're writing a Superman okay these do actually work there are there are lots of novels they don't tend to work in our genre as much but there are lots of novels that are like this and you will read them and find out about them and thing I mean yeah they happen in teen girl fiction you know the it girl books are about this they are super women that you know have some dire problem happen to them but they're still superwoman there's nothing really flawed about them it's just you know life turns against them for a little while and then they become the it girl again or whatever you know things like that so your characters generally will be somewhere on this scale and usually the really great characters our characters that have a little bit of each meaning you give us something to admire this is why we like the supermen right we like reading about these books the Dirk Pitt novel was a blast because it's kind of wish fulfillment they do all the cool stuff that we wish we could do we admire them and we enjoy that their their capacity we talked about it over here they are capable giving a character something they're very capable at doing is a good idea all right oftentimes you know we get into this sort of flawed character sort of stuff and we forget to give them something that they're actually very good at and I feel that this is part of the problem with creating sometimes these bland protagonists is that they don't actually have anything that they're specifically good at doing no there's nothing specifically wrong with the everyman you just can't do every right right yeah with that in mind how do you give a care whoa yeah Oh where did you guys let me do my lecture let me do my lecture we'll talk about all this stuff well we'll do my lecture all right you can ask questions you just can't you know don't jump ahead in the lecture you're skipping ahead authors don't like that yeah listen and find out yeah we'll get there we'll get there don't worry but so supermen supermen are very capable now what about the everyman do we like not necessarily the flaws you're right on that it's not necessarily flaws what do we like relatable what why do we like relatable characters we are not very specifically good many fantastic things yeah okay but we think it would be fun to be the hero okay yeah okay with that it makes you I mean you don't piss us okay yeah yeah yeah yeah it gives you an innate help on the learning curve okay you see potential for growth that's very good um yeah you see yourself in those shoes I wish I did that situation right right I want to find a dragon egg right I want I'm a normal kid hey this normal kid found a dragon egg hey cool where's my dragon egg yeah personally where we like your dog story yeah I was I was actually I was where I was going to go next is underdog there is something innate about us that loves the underdog if we generally don't know anything about a contest we will end up rooting for the person that is perceived to be weaker it's human nature I'm not sure why but we do and making a character and every man makes them relatable draws us into the into the story and gives us a sort of underdog syndrome now you'll notice that a lot of modern stories are very good at doing this right spider-man spider-man is this spider-man is hey there's this everyman oh he's turning into a Superman and through the course of the stories this is basically the Wheel of Time right here's Rand boom now I can destroy the world and you read fourteen books of him learning how to do that and it's fun and cool because we love this sense of progress so this is one method of progression that has become very popular in storytelling this is Luke Skywalker right Luke through the course of the movies what do we see by the third movie by the third movie Luke is Superman right he is he's obi-wan and we get this sort of reference in the first movie of here's the mentor this is what Luke's going to become we see him becoming that in the second movie in the third movie he is that so this is this is just one easy method and time-tested method of giving your character a sense of progress progress is important but we haven't really dug into flaws and that's the next place I want to go I personally break down flaws by character flaws being different from me from you know physical limitations and there is some blurred line between the character flaw the physical mental limitations and handicaps again these are just ways that I've learned to look at it these are not necessarily strict definitions it's not like you go to someone to date and and you could go to any writer and say what's the difference from the limitation the handicap may be like as the one gets you a sticker one doesn't I don't know this is just my way of thinking of it the way I divide it up is character flaws it is the characters fault fault all right this is not the characters fault but it is something internal they need to deal with and these are external external limitations alright so I'm breaking it up this way helps me as writer when I'm looking at my story and deciding how I'm going to tell this story how to approach overcoming these things if one of if your character has a handicap it isn't necessarily the right thing to like you know the story be about about overcoming that that's just a part of who they are if your character has one arm and they want to be a football player you don't want your story to be about them learning how to regrow genetically a new arm probably this is a function of who they are and it is something that they're going to have to deal with certainly but it is a factor it's something that that is just external to them usually another good example of a handicap is Aunt May and the spider-man movies you don't want Peter Parker to have to overcome Aunt May I mean you don't want his there's no sort of arc there where he's like you should just get rid of Aunt May but in May is a handicap at having her what's that um that's going a different direction but then someone's very passionate with his Batman shirt about his comics own Adam West's Batman even so external limitations these are things your character is going to have to work with that we don't necessarily want them to overcome in any way they're just they're all right these can be helpful for for filling out you know what makes it harder for your character to do what they do physical mental limitations these for me are just limits on what they're capable of doing for instance if this is Superman he's got this whole kryptonite thing right he is going to have to overcome it he's going to have to work around it but for me the sort of physical mental limitations are just things for me to keep in mind this is what they can't do this is actually Sandra second law of magic also by the way I build my magic systems this way there will be limitations to the magic system they may cause character emotion and things like this but basically this is just what that you can it can't do like I said the lines between these are very blurry an external limitation the one iron football player is probably more of the physical limitation and this is I'm looking at the external things but I'm building these two as things that aren't necessarily the characters fault but still will have to be overcome in some way these are the ones that are the characters fault that builds your growth arc all right they are the characters fault they are something the character can actively change they are important to who the character is when they begin the story but they are not just necessarily who the character has to be by the end of the story and these are all the things you probably think of when we talk about flaws but the thing to keep in mind is that when you're building these for your character they don't need to be terribly awful things like when I say building character flaws people like mm they're a sadist that I could burn cats um okay that is indeed a deep character flaw but it can be something as simple as they're too shy right this character is very shy and they need to overcome their shyness this character is you know is exceptionally rude and they need to learn to not be exceptionally rude this character always jumps into their problems feet first without thinking that there are as many of these as there are people out there and these are where you want to spend your time thinking and saying I'm going to make my character more flawed why do we do this and makes them more relatable it adds conflict very good it adds conflict and if you care just a lotta more relatable people I should read your story by the book that's right that's right I need to be throwing these out did you bring these again now awesome they are you've answered like a bunch here you go there's three we just answered that other one it was somewhere over here who I'm gonna throw at you oh there it's on the floor that's all right answer more questions you'll get then you'll get Sour Patch Kids I'm going to throw you the oranges because I don't like this building character flaws this should be part of your process for developing a character these days the reason being as I said the the holy Superman characters don't they yeah they just aren't necessarily they're just not that cool anymore we've gotten beyond that there's a reason why the the movie studios have had so much trouble rebooting Superman because Superman is a character from the old days and at coming up with a way that Superman can be interesting is tough it's doable but you do it by making them very relatable and I'm certain there other ways but there's a reason why Batman has been so popular because Batman is flawed Oh Batman has so many flaws and we're like yes you are so flawed but you're also awesome I want to read experience this story about you being flawed and awesome if we go back to the early Superman the animated black and white he's like flying over to Europe and beating up the fascists yeah it's not this realistic thing it's form like this allegory yeah yeah storytelling was everyone also made Superman like really relatable in the past was the fact that Superman even though he you know had like all these superpowers like that when it came to Lois Lane is ideal girl he was really shy about rattled today and so that made him relatable once he marries Lois Lane now it's got all these superpowers and he's got his dream girl and Superman leadership drop like crazy like nobody cared anymore right right and I know that and that is a very good thing Superman when he he works he has trouble relating it's the Clark Kent that's interesting it's not the Superman um and yeah if I remember typically Superman character changes yeah yeah every they're different writers have taken so many different takes on Superman I'm curious to see how the new movie this summer does because the everyone you know there's this exploration of how do we make Superman work and you as writers you do want to have super heroic characteristics you know superpowers it will it be for your characters I think the best characters always do even if it's something as simple as against Sam Sam is the one I listed as kind of the everyman over here the the paradigm of every man but he has a superpower he is extremely loyal he is superhumanly loyal he has loyalty like Superman has has super strength in equal measures and that loyalty that he expresses is part of what makes us fall in love with him historically poll after poll Sam is chosen as the favorite character in The Lord of the Rings by readership overwhelmingly chose as the favorite character and I think it's because of that mixture of every man and Superman in the books Aragorn is a Superman if you read the books one things Peter Jackson did is a humanized Aragorn a little bit more gave him the sort of do I become king or not sort of thing that isn't in the books and the books Aragorn is just the man it's like all right how many orcs are we going to slay today Aragorn well I'm going to shoot for 700 how about you Gimli I might hit 650 okay let's go I mean that's um you know that's that's how it goes he is an expression of this I mean Tolkien was available scholar Aragorn is Beowulf he is the the superhuman warrior king and that that works in there but people don't generally go like Oh Aragorn I love Aragorn he's so interesting I mean they'll read about him but then when they start talking it's usually Sam followed closely by Gollum as people's favorite characters yeah and so this is relating to this sort of thing so as you're building your character you you want to start asking yourself what limitations they have external handicaps physical limitations mental hang up to me you could you can make the argument I don't put something like depression in here depression is a demon to work against it is not a character flaw if that makes sense and dividing those two in my head is very important for me as an author to understanding my character if one of my characters have as depression it's not getting rid of depression that is their their character arc their character arc is dealing with the emotional ramifications of that and becoming the person you know a flaw can be I don't know yet know how to deal with my depression the depression is limitation the flaw is I don't deal with it very well this can change this doesn't necessarily have to now there are stories about overcoming these okay those things do exist and you can write that story but I approach it very differently than I approach this okay questions yes yeah yeah oh yeah I would say there definitely is there's inherent trade-off between maybe not epicness but sheer awesomeness versus relatability now the the giving up 10% of sheer awesomeness and gaining 120 percent of relatability I mean there is a trade-off there you're losing 10% awesomeness but what you gain is so much more useful for your story but there is that and you can make the argument that there are readers out there that just would rather have that 10% and that's why we still have stories that focus on these superhuman characters that just do everything right and if they have a flaw it's that they're just too good yes or you know they're unwilling to bend on their convictions that's when I've read before it's just like you know his only flaw was that he wasn't willing to be evil you know yeah that is actually one of Superman's limitations code of honor a lot of the superheroes have a code of honor it is something to deal with but it is not something to overcome because the way you know to overcome it would be to just get rid of it though so there are some very good stories about you know a code of ethics that gets broken and what that does to the character you can write those stories if you want but yeah how the Code of Ethics it's in the way and things like that but again I talked about it this way so you can start defining these two groups in your head to help you really split them apart because you approach them differently with flaws my goal is to show incremental progress alright here you are incremental progress this we will talk about this in the plotting section but to give you a preview plot is about a sense of excuse me a sense of progression plot is not about actual project progression it's about giving a sense of aggression the reason for this is that all of these things are arbitrary in your book all right you can make 10 minutes last a and pages if you want to or you can cover ten minutes and a couple of words this is you have complete control over this you have complete control over the characters progress you can have them change in an instant you are fully capable of doing that in your writing you are capable usually of ending the book in chapter two if you wanted to you could write that ending it wouldn't be satisfying but you can do it so the story is about giving this sense of progression in a satisfying way it's not necessarily about that ending because you could give them that ending at any point it's interesting to consider that to keep that in mind so with your flaw incremental progress toward the flaw is going to be very helpful this is where the thing that you probably learned in high school that looks like this comes in alright that's because usually you have this thing this sort of hey they're working on this oh they back slid hey they're working on this oh they back slid hey they're working on this woohoo we survived and then you know Danny mwah this is this is usually used for plots but that's basically what you're looking at it works for all these things and so your idea for giving the character progress on their on their what they're working on is this sort of method all right so if you're your idea is that you know your character jumps into things too quickly you probably actually will start like this down down down down and then like okay then you realize need to work on it oh they made a mistake oh you know you'll start going like this because you need to establish that they're doing something wrong at the beginning your challenge in doing this is making sure that they remain proactive and that you don't turn the reader off a lot of get writers like to do this thing where they like make their character very very flawed at the beginning they're going to be this great antihero and then they're going to turn into a real hero and things like that and then your character your readers hate your character and it's very hard to get them beyond those initial chapters this is where having them be relatable and flawed at the same time comes into your story now you can tell great stories about characters who are exemplary they don't have to have all of these things who are exemplary in a few of the areas and if you're writing a true sort of a story about you know an unsympathetic protagonist you can skip the sympathetic and make them super super capable and super super proactive and it'll work it's not necessarily the right thing for every story but it does work in fact you you'll you can probably pull out a host of sort of super villain stories that do this at the beginning things like Despicable Me and whatnot they're super capable they're super proactive you know those stories are also comedies which really helps honestly doing that without the comedy would be a whole lot tougher but since you've got the comedy and you're really there for the comedy you show capable you show proactive you know Megamind is another one of these and you know even though they're getting foiled he's getting foiled by the superhero you see all this cool stuff that he's capable of doing and then he actually succeeds that sort of thing um was there yeah I had a question specifically about this idea of making a character proactive because I feel like you know again we have the situation where we don't have characters that are reacting to things that they didn't expect to happen you know how's that we go about making them proactive working towards something that is not related to the main action of the story that's a fantastic question you win a gold star in the form of a Sour Patch Kid so good question that this is basically digging into the villain dilemma how do we make our heroes as interesting as our villains when they're reacting against their villains or how do I make the protagonists of my story protag Howard likes to say that protagonist protag it's verb how do you make your protagonist protag one way is to look at their hobbies and passions and have them be working toward one of those as they're being interrupted and they keep doing it a good example of this is I mean we oftentimes people use the opening Raiders of the Lost Ark is a great way to establish sympathy and rooting interest for a character who is following their passion and yet things are going wrong right at the end of the opening four register start go watch it again Indiana Jones does not end up with the idol that he was trying to get for his museum but he tries so hard and he is so capable despite getting knocked down he becomes an underdog despite how capable he is and this shows we start the story with him being very proactive and then from there you know he goes on this adventure to deal with Nazis Nazis keep getting in his way and he can react against the Nazis but since we started off with this extremely proactive start it helps us cement in our mind Indiana Jones is an active character who's working toward his passions so showing your character in a scene where they are pursuing some sort of hobby or interest or goal of theirs and then that gets interrupted because of what's going on can initially establish our character in an interesting way as someone who does things I'm using a lot of adventure stories as my examples this doesn't necessarily have to be an adventure story this works just as well for a you know young kid in school who is you know their passion is art and they're going to get interrupted by moving to a new city and having to deal with things and you could see how showing them initially being passionate about something and then finding out that they have to leave and leave it all behind could be helpful in establishing rooting interest and the how the capable the character is before you uproot them and then start telling their story where everything's against them they move to the new place everybody hates them and you know there's there some rival who's trying to destroy this this poor girl's life and how do we deal with this in all of these things so show them that's one way show them doing these things another way is what we call the try fail cycle which is we'll do a lot more of this in the plotting section but the idea is that you have your character try initially and fail fail to achieve to work against the problems there's there's an old adage in in storytelling that has to do with that I've recently seen it post is an internet internet meme name you say meme don't you yeah which is people like to point Han Solo when on this the second Star Wars movie when the doors open and they're expecting to go to dinner and there is Darth Vader there what is Han Solo do a pulls out his gun and shoots alright he doesn't say you betrayed me he doesn't say whoa Darth Vader's here he takes out his gun and shoots does it work no it's futile but he tries and we have because of things that he does cemented in her head that Han is proactive han does stuff han doesn't say oh I'm so surprised sahan gets out his gun and shoots and this establishes a huge amount of rooting interest on our parts with Han despite being you know somewhat deeply flawed in a lot of Erica's areas we love Han because of this this is really what makes Han awesome han is actually not that capable he's okay capable but he's really not that capable he usually doesn't do things right and they don't usually work out but boy is Han proactive han doesn't stand there hans hahn picks up the microphone and starts talking yeah everything's okay here how are you um you know and we laugh but we love han because of that right this is another way to make your character proactive in the face of something going very wrong is they do things they don't just sit there and and say oh no or get worried or run hide you know they're the ones they're like well dragons are attacking our city I'm going to go and try and shoot my catapult at them because I'm not a very good warrior but I built a what a ballista I'm going to take him down we like that kid in in How to Train Your Dragon because when the dragons attack even though he's the weakest smallest one he doesn't go hide he goes and grabs on his best his best Dylan tries to take one down and that's what this is okay this is the proactive stuff I keep talking to this one I mean this one all right because I mean there's lots of movies were like here's me all fractal I can almost stopping it yes see even then essentially you've been to the David builds plant step 80 the gas FP tries to stop Stepney then today we divert inward actually yes that's what I was talking about earlier where you could have them succeed in chapter 2 and your story would be done oh it's all a facade everything in a story is a facade Kate get that in your head you are making it up you have absolute control there is no realism you you I mean even if your story is a Jane Austen asked romance you know what in chapter 2 the arrogant guy the defender in Chapter 1 she could find out that he's actually very sweet and they could fall in love and the story could end and you could make that ending happen now telling your stories about you know again people are going to buy into this you have to do it in a way that they buy into it you you don't want to as a friend of mine says do deus ex wrench I'll get you in a second Deus Ex wrench I think Howard came up with this one too I can't remember ice breasts more he called something called deus ex wrench where the deus ex machina is where the reader art if it feels of the author artificially saved the heroes in the end when they shouldn't have been saved deus ex wrench is where you artificially inflate the length of your story to the readers noticeability by throwing in problems that don't feel realistic and this is this is a real issue you want your the problems and issues to feel real this is also called idiot plotting if you do it the wrong way meaning the only reason that the characters don't get together or that anything goes wrong in the book is because the characters are idiots that's a bad place to be and the difference between the characters being idiots and the characters being real characters with with deep flaws is in matter of good writing and foreshadowing really if you can convince us in chapter one that this flaw that the character has is a real issue preventing them from getting together with the the character that you want them to get together with in Chapter three the reader will buy into it it's okay we all have flaws we understand this they're going to work on it if instead they have no realistic reason in Chapter three you haven't done your job right and it looks artificial it is all artificial your job is to make it not look artificial does that help Scott do you understand so going back to an earlier example you were mentioning dragons attacking yes attacking is a situation but at the same time there's somebody who is able to be proactive in the situation do you need to have a balance between situation and proactivity or is there a way to have them both in the same place I don't know what you mean by situation versus proactivity in that statement yeah that question you're on now if you just throw a situation at a character and then they react to its magic on the reactionary bland character right let it see oh no no that doesn't doesn't actually make them 100% blend what it makes them is reactionary and we lose some of our rooting interest in you're right the problem is the rooting interest tends to go to the person being proactive and this is the villain problem you know if the characters are only reacting to the villains we we sometimes have an issue in Hollywood they actually split this up by Vice doing three acts and saying you're OK in act 1 reacting Hollywood says act 1 is react Act two is is try and make it work worse in other words the you know now you've tried now reacting is different from being proactive and saying okay we need to do something about this rather than just waiting for the villain to do something and stopping them that's reacted action is there's a villain in town I need to outthink him and lay a trap for him is proactive rather than reactionary there's a bit of reaction to it but you're never going to get rid of that bit of reaction so in Hollywood is act 1 react act to make it worse act 3 try a Hail Mary and it succeeds right I don't particularly love three-act format simply because the way that Hollywood talks about things they're very smart people they know what they're doing but they're limited by their screen length and because of that they tend to focus very much on you need this here you need this here you need this here you only have you know 100 pages to tell your story we're telling stories that are much more freeform and because of that we don't have necessarily to worry as much about the rigidity of these sorts of things but there's a lot you can learn from three-act format with this and so in your question right here what they would say is yes the characters reacting and they'll probably spend the first act only reacting then they will find ways to start acting and but the problem is going to get worse and then they do a very proactive thing at the end which is crazy and outside the box and wow I can't believe anybody thought of that we're going to need lots of guns yeah this sort of thing nobody fights back against an agent right you can't do that the outside the box super proactive thing and then it succeeds and that's their format I would say to you initially yes there's going to be some reaction but there's this balance between reacting and acting for instance dragons are attacking we've got to go high is much more of a reactive reaction than dragons are attacking I'm going to go get my super crossbow and yes it's a reaction but the next step is to go do something about it and do something about is like I'm going to the reason I think that scene works is it's not just I'm going to do something about it obviously what everyone else is doing isn't working because the Dragons keep attacking this one character is saying no I'm going to try and do something new that maybe will stop the Dragons permanently and that's much more proactive and I think it's part of why that character works so well in that movie is because from the get-go we have this sense of everybody else's is really just reacting even though they're fighting they're not doing anything and he's trying to stop it okay but that's a specific example really the idea is you want to kind of look at these and when we talk about plotting you want to try and figure out what about these plots plotting method works for me how do I like doing this - I like try fail cycles do I like the three-act format do I like the roadmap method of plotting and doing all these sorts of things so I went forever on that but we did get into plot a little bit which at least gives you some of the plot lecture I'm going to not talk about viewpoint because that would go too long and I'm going to finish up I'm talking about magic systems from last week and then we'll be done and go to writing groups all right so this the reason I chose to do this lecture today is because this whole flaws and limitations things really is about how a big part of how I develop magic systems the second rule of magics I've given to myself again these aren't like hard fast rules this isn't like I read a book and say oh they're breaking Sanderson's second law this is a bad magic system these are rules I use for myself to help me make my magic systems more interesting and my story's more interesting second Brandon's second law Sanderson's second law is that limitations are more interesting than the powers themselves and this tends to be true yes yeah yeah magic is an interchangeable technology and like I said this really kind of applies to a lot of things for instance I think that what is going wrong in your world is generally going to be more interesting than what's going right generally the things your character can't do are going to be a more interesting to your reader than the things they can do the things they can do can still be very interesting but the things they're not capable of doing are generally where your story lies and so that's what people focus on and so this is a greater storytelling thing to go back to comic books because a lot of us have seen these movies we go to Batman the things that Batman can do are pretty cool we like reading about them but those don't make stories the problems that the when the the villains play into Batman's like issues that's where a story comes from and his flaws tend to be what drives our story the same thing happens with Superman stories and in at least modern-day Superman tellings not about Superman being able to fly there about someone has kryptonite right the flaws Litton limitations are where your story generally happens for your what's that yeah you can't stop world hunger that's true didn't he push an ice fly an iceberg to to Africa once or something like that though yeah so he stopped drought that was something yeah yeah exactly um yeah so head let's get back to this with magic system good magic system in my opinion has limitations and flaws and I do divide these in my head meaning you know that what the magic can't do and what holes or problems they're on the magic like what when you use the magic what kind of problems does it cause and usually it should cause some sort of problem this can be minor it can be yes using the magic costs money and we don't have a lot of it or it can be the magic using the magic makes me very tired and that's bad because then people can stab me that one is very as a standby I've used it myself I encourage you to to look beyond don't use that one too often come up with interesting limitations Orson Scott Card suggests one in his book that he ended up using which is when you use the magic someone close to you dies you know it like kills one of your grandparents when you use the magic that's a pretty big flaw in the magic system and you can only use it a limited number of times usually when you're younger and things like that like it requires like some blood sacrifice or things like this you can go all sorts of directions with this but coming up with interesting flaws and limitations to your magic system for me a limitation is more like in the Mistborn series I wrote a telekinesis you can move things with your mind I put a limitation on it says you can only move metals and they have to be directly away from you and or pull directly towards you I'm using vector physics right you know mass versus mass and things like this this limit actually for me as a writer was the most fun thing about the magic system I had seen telekinesis done a lot Star Wars does telekinesis everybody does cell denise's x-men does telekinesis and yet limiting it specifically to the pushing and pulling forced me to be more creative with how I used it which in turn forced my characters to be more creative which allowed the readers could to say wow that was clever what this character just did which is different from this character can move things with their mind and so they just move this and it happens you don't think oh that was clever you think okay they did that that's within their powers that's good but when a character does something that that they use the limitations to their advantage or they work around them it allows you to make the characters very capable and I have found more and more that what the magic can't do becomes more interesting than what it can do and so like we just talked about with characters when you start developing your magic or your technology in your books start asking yourself these limitations what can't it do and when using it what does it cost that's really for me like the flaw of the magic it's there they're different for characters things but what is what does that cost what does it do when you do it other ways you can limit the magic are based on you know how you get the magic being born with it is of course the old standby but if you aren't born with it how you get it can be very interesting if you have to kill somebody to gain their magical power that's a very different story throws in lots of conflict and it makes them an interesting flaw slash limitation to the magic system but if your character wants to have the magic these sorts of things or if the character has the magic and people are hunting them down to chop up their head to get their share of it so it makes the magic more interesting all right so flaws versus limitations we just had a whole lecture on this and I think you can probably apply that to magic the last one is the one that haven't come up with the apathy enough phrase for yet but the concept of the last law is that everything is interconnected and a really good magic system you're in a book with really good magic system your job as an author is to out think the reader about the ramifications of that magic all right readers who read science fiction/fantasy love interesting magics or technologies they tend to like these things but one of the reasons they read specifically science fiction is they want to see what ramifications how the world would be different if this interesting technology existed how would how would cyberspace if we could actually you know upload our brains to the computers how would that change everyday life and that's the thing you've got to ask yourself and you've got to connect it to everything a good magic system isn't just about magic it involves economics and therefore involves warfare and it involves how the governments relate to each other theoretically a really good magic is going to have some sort of relationship and tie to the ecology of the world and what you're working and it's going to relate to the cultures the religions all of these things religion changes a lot when magic is real and your job is to extrapolate these things in technology how does a religion deal with technology how does a religion deal with the fact that you could become immortal by uploading your brain to a computer do you still have a soul or did the soul die and this is just a copy of your soul and your connect these things urban fantasy is a little bit tougher simply because the world is going to be the same world you still want to ask yourself these things like if you've got your main character you're doing address and files sort of magic sort of thing let's say you've got a main character is using the magic what is their opinion on religion magic is real are devils and angels real if so how does that change their their look at religion how do people with magic how they influence the economy and you know Harry Potter they're like well they've got a bureau in the government that deals just with them Harry Potter does the normal thing of children's which is with with the secondary world which is it really doesn't affect the real world you can get away with that depending on your genre and an urban finish you're probably going to have to but readers are going to want to know how your interesting magic things affect the economy of the people who know about it can you pay someone to use the engine if show so how much does it cost this is this is a very very big issue for story telling doesn't exist in some of the other genres for instance in games you don't have to worry about this if you're you know you happen to be writing a videogame you don't ask yourself man these people can turn mud into diamonds that would ruin the economy if diamonds are worth anything wouldn't it you don't have to worry about that in a video game yeah but in a book you better ask yourself if they can make diamonds what are diamonds worth and why would they be worth anything at all what does it cost to make them these sorts of things you've got to be asking yourself that so third law good magic is interconnected with the world around it and you have thought further than the reader and extrapolating the ramifications of that magic and I want to let you go so that we have time I will have substitutes for you the next two weeks I think I might be back the third week I don't know

Channel: zmunk

Views: 84,525

Rating: 4.9278293 out of 5

Keywords: brandon sanderson, byu, creative writing, characters, superman, everyman, character flaws, proactive, sanderson's second law, sanderson's third law, magic systems

Id: lmaVRqzgtM0

Length: 72min 9sec (4329 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 11 2016