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When I read or write fiction, I like seeing characters make bad decisions and then deal with the consequences. However, if they make those decisions for implausible reasons, they can appear silly or inconsistent rather than attracting sympathy. If they’re forced into decisions because of overwhelming external factors, they may come across as lacking agency. In both cases, the decision seems made purely to further the plot rather than arising naturally. For me, the sweet spot is when readers can appreciate straight off (or shortly afterwards) that a character has made a misstep with likely repercussions, but it’s understandable why they ended up in that situation.
In my day job in a pathology lab, mistakes can have serious, even fatal, consequences. We try our hardest to minimise them as well as spotting and correcting them as early as possible. When (not if””we’re human, after all) a mistake happens, we investigate the reasons and see what we can do to prevent a repeat. Additionally, at corporate level, we are expected to attend courses on how to make systems safer. Such training can be a chore, but for me it has one significant plus: it’s fertile ground for ideas about where characters may go wrong.
I’d like to share here how I set up my characters’ unforced errors, allowing them to make plot-influencing mistakes in a realistic manner. The concepts aren’t new, but using risk management ideas helps me to flesh out details. This isn’t an academic treatise, so I have cherry-picked knowledge from workshops on error, mandatory training and general wider reading. Also, the definition of “wrong” in this context might be fluid, but I’d view it as something suboptimal for the character’s intentions (and interesting for the reader).
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Growing up, two of my favorite things were books and video games. If you’d told me twenty years ago that I’d grow up to write both, I probably would have choked on my Mountain Dew.
But over the past few years, I’ve been doing exactly that. I’ve written the Recoletta series, a science fantasy trilogy published by Angry Robot, and I’ve worked as a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment for three and a half years now, writing for the Pillars of Eternity games and expansions.
In both media, the principles of good storytelling””establishing a strong story arc; building a vivid, believable world; and populating it with complex, memorable characters””are the same.
But the user experience differs, and understanding that is key to knowing how to satisfy both audiences.
Readers generally pick up novels to immerse themselves in stories that they experience through the eyes of another character. Players generally sit down with games to immerse themselves in stories that they discover and define through their own actions.
A large chunk of storytelling in both media comes down to understanding the role your characters play and how to make them real.
Characters bring a fictional world to life. Their problems and dilemmas create the oft-sought tension and “stakes,” and their choices and conflicts drive the story. Most readers and gamers would be hard-pressed to discuss their favorite stories without also talking about the characters who populate it. We connect emotionally with the people in stories rather than the ideas and philosophies.
But who are those characters?
In a novel, the most important character is typically the protagonist. It’s not just because the action (mostly) follows her. It’s also because we experience the story through her perspective. We see what she sees and know what she feels, even if we don’t always agree with it. First-person and close third-person stories have become immensely popular because of the intimacy of the perspective they offer.
For the protagonist’s story to be engaging, she has to have challenges to overcome. Strengths and vulnerabilities that add variation to her journey. A deeply personal investment in the events of the plot. Writing a protagonist who meets these criteria is often a matter of architecture in the planning stages””figuring out who this person is and what it is about her that generates interest and tension””as well as retrofitting in the revision stages””finding ways to connect her more deeply to other characters and events and building momentum over the successes and setbacks she faces.
When it comes to games, protagonists may be a lot more varied. For the sake of simplicity (ha!), I’m mostly talking about Western-style RPGs, which are often characterized by protagonists who are defined by the player in some significant way and whose stories are often discovered over the course of (fairly) open-ended gameplay.
The degree to which players define their characters differs widely between games. In some games, you have a protagonist with an established identity and established personality whose significant choices are defined by the player. That includes Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher.
In other games, you have a character whose overall identity is set, but whose personality and outlook is determined by the player. For example, Commander Shepard of the Mass Effect series is always a human operative intent on saving the galaxy, but the player can cast her as an idealistic savior or a ruthless maverick.
Finally, there are other games, such as Pillars of Eternity, in which nearly everything about the protagonist, including personality, backstory, and race, is player-determined.
In these types of games, the task of the writer is to build everything around the player character as much as””or more than””defining the player character on his or her own. You develop a story that is just loose enough to fit whatever way the player might choose to define the protagonist according to the options you have given them. You create a world with enough freedom for the player to make choices and enough context to give meaning to those choices. You write side characters who establish the world as a living place and who frame the stakes for the player.
It’s a delicate balance, and it’s one that places a much greater burden on the writing that establishes the world around the protagonist.
That’s because you’re defining this character””or, to some extent, allowing your player to””through negative space rather than positive space. You’re creating a stage that will allow the player to shape a personal story, and one that doesn’t feel at odds with the choices you’ve given them.
Heroes of their own stories
And yet, protagonists aren’t the only characters on the page (or screen). A common piece of writing advice is to write villains as though they were the heroes of their own stories. It’s good advice, and it holds true for all characters””sidekicks, love interests, mentors, and spear carriers.
In many books, the most memorable and beloved characters are often secondary characters. Written well, they are typically less encumbered by the constraints of following the plot. Writers may feel freer to embody them with the quirks and idiosyncrasies that help them stand out. And the foil they frequently provide for the main character””whether as comic relief or as someone who pushes and challenges the protagonist””can create entertaining humor, conflict, and character development.
Put simply, these characters work because they have goals and interests that do not always line up with those of the protagonist.
Games may contain even more secondary characters””often called NPCs (non-player characters). Of course, if every character is the hero of her own story, you’ve still got to make them good stories. And “bring me five puffleberries” and “get my cat out of this tree” don’t quite cut it. We don’t like busywork in real life, so why does anyone assume we’d do it for fun? Yet “fetch quests”””formulaic tasks in which the player character is sent to handle a routine errand for someone else””are everywhere.
The problem isn’t just that they usually make for dull content. It’s also that they suggest a world in which other characters’ concerns go no deeper than grocery runs. In which they only exist to provide some degree of involvement for the player. And in which the protagonist only relates to them as an errand boy.
Every quest need not be epic. But it should mean something or reveal something, both with respect to the protagonist and the other characters involved.
In both games and novels, we rely on good characters to develop our stories and to hold our audience’s interest in them. Novelists and game writers merely need to understand how their readers and players will relate to them in order to deploy them most effectively.
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Bio: Carrie Patel is a novelist and a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment. She is the author of the Recoletta trilogy, which is published by Angry Robot. The final book in the series, The Song of the Dead, comes out on May 2. She works at Obsidian Entertainment as a narrative designer and writer. She has worked on the award-winning Pillars of Eternity and its expansions, The White March Parts I and II. She is currently working on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. You can find her on Twitter as @Carrie_Patel as well as at http://www.electronicinkblog.com/.
Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.
If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.
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So, how many people have you killed?
I mean, characters.
And how long have you been doing it?
I have to confess: It was hard for me to kill my first character, but after that it got easier. I actually stopped noticing how many there were or who they were.
I occasionally killed a major character, at the end, but even before I got to the end it was possible for me to kill minor characters as if they were placemats. I even people killed people I wanted readers to love. If it bumped up the plot, I was all for it.
And then I suddenly realized that I had gotten used to killing characters. I was killing them without remorse.
How many, I wondered, had I killed?
Ah. I didn’t want to go back and count. It was like going back and counting calories after an expensive dinner out. Why ruin it?
More than ten? Of course. Hundreds? Possible. Thousands?
Well, actually, even more than that. Like a great many writers these days, I’d killed off a proportion of the planet for an apocalypse that caught my fancy. It was a particularly lovely apocalypse. It would make a wonderful, visual, stunning movie. Not your usual, squishy, guns and guts and screams and hands-smashing-through-glass kind of movie, either. A grand and glorious apocalypse with lots of people dying in a very artistic way.
See? Even now I’m proud of it.
I remember being outraged by how easily Orson Scott Card got Ender to destroy a whole civilization and then absolved him of responsibility. Nope. Own up, Ender! Responsibility exists!
And yet.
And yet, I kill people.
How long will it go on? Will I ever grow tired of it? Will I switch to stories where no one dies; where, in fact, people fall in love and have babies? They could be strange new babies; I could, conceivably, do that.
Because even though I feel no guilt, I feel that I should feel guilt. It somehow isn’t right to say these weren’t really people and I didn’t “really” kill them.
Besides, I’m sure that the idea of killing is not a slippery slope. It isn’t, is it?
Just because I can write about it so easily doesn’t mean I’d ever actually do it, right?
Right?
Bio: Karen Heuler‘s stories appear in literary, fantasy, and science fiction magazines regularly. Her 2014 novel, Glorious Plague, was about a strangely beautiful apocalypse, and her second story collection, The Inner City, was chosen as one of the best books of 2013 by Publishers Weekly. She lives in New York City, where murder never happens and rents are extremely low.
Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.
If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.
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I’ve been teaching an advanced workshop that’s been a lot of fun. I gave them one of my favorite texts, an issue of Swamp Thing by Alan Moore called “Pog.” You might want to read it before proceeding on to the discussion of it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
I picked that text because it has a high degree of emotional impact. It was a great starting point for talking about how to create that in a piece of fiction. In discussing how Moore achieved that, we realized that it is primarily constructed through the characters. While it’s nice to see the images, they are not the primary source of the impact.
Here are the five ways that impact is created:
So what takeaways for character building can one draw from this? Are there axioms that can be applied in one’s own writing? Of course there are, and here’s the list:
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A bajillion years ago, when you could send the Science Fiction Book Club $.11 and get 11 books back, I signed up, receiving a fabulous armful particularly valuable back in the days when the Internet was just kicking off.
One of the 11 was P.C. Hodgell’s fantasy novel, Godstalk. I recently reread it when I found it and its sequel were available in the form of a single e-book, The God Stalker Chronicles.
I loved that book for its density of innovation as well as its creation of Tai-tastigon, a city is vividly alive as any other in speculative fiction, as evocative as Ambergris or Gormenghast, as alluring and perilous as Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, as historied as Minas Tirith or fictional London or any of the cities George R.R. Martin evokes so well.
And I loved it for its heroine, Jamethiel. She comes to the reader as a semi-amnesiac, unsure of exactly what lies in her past and bearing, as such heroes and heroines often too, a magical object. Or agical objects. Those objects shaped my naming convention for magical objects and remain as lovely as when I first encountered them: the Ivory Knife, the Book Bound in Pale Leather and the Serpent Skin Cloak.
Their bearer enters the city of Tai-tastigon and swiftly is embroiled in the doings of several groups of characters, including the staff of a local tavern, the Thieves Guild, assorted priests and gods/goddesses, the rooftop-dwelling Cloudies, and assorted bandits, allies, and felines, all of whom turn out to be more connected and in more mysterious ways than one would expect. I am an inveterate re-reader. More so in the days when I didn’t have the ability to download just about anything from the Internet, but even so still a habit I indulge in. Godstalk stood up to multiple rereads over the decades and shaped my expectations for fantasy novels ever since. It set a pretty high bar.
I loved Godstalk to death and managed to find its sequel Dark of the Moon much later. It always frustrated me not be able to find others in the series. Therefore I was overjoyed to find out that that not only were there more in the series but that they were available in electronic form. I’m halfway through the third book, Seeker’s Bane, and looking forward to the next three.
One of the things that makes returning to the book so satisfying is the heroine Jamie. Her flaws as well as her strengths are written deeply, shaping her actions inevitably and eloquently. The author takes us deep into Jamie’s head, letting us watch her development as well as her struggle with her complicated existence.
The main source of Jamie’s struggle is her adherence to the Kencyr code of honor, a trait that makes her a hero in the classic sense, someone to look up to and emulate, and which often talks directly about the nature of honor. Here’s a passage I just hit in Seeker’s Bane:
Trust honor, Immalai had said.
yes. For her, balanced on the knife’s edge, honor was more than life, its loss infinitely worse than death. And part of honor was taking responsibility for one’s actions and choices, over and over, as long as one acted or chose.
Jamie is complex and compelling. Her twin brother, Tori, begins to share the viewpoint in the second book and is interesting in his own right, but Jamie is rightly the core of the series. As I’m reading through the series, it’s a pleasure as a reader to watch her history unfold even as her personality is sharpened and shaped. As a writer, it’s a terrific lesson on the effectiveness of going deep into a character’s head.
Fantasy books and series that share this depth of character development:
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We’re currently covering characters in the Writing F&SF class, so I thought I’d pull out a little from my notes.
Some simplistic stories have characters that seem like placeholders, as though any individual could fit into that slot. Fairy tales, for instance, tend to have generic characters: the princess, the prince, the witch that have little dimensionality to them. One delightful strategy for working with them, in fact, is to pick a character and flesh them out to the point where they shape the story.
That is the most important thingL: characters must shape the story. They need to influence the action and make the narrative one that could only happen to them.
Let’s take a simple plot: a character must escape zombies. Our first character, a survivalist, keeps two shotguns in her apartment and is steel willed to the point where she is capable of cutting off a limb to avoid infection by zombie bite. The second is a meek-mannered scientist who faints at the sight of blood but is capable of building marvelous devices. The story and what happens in it is very different depending on which character gets put into the situation.
What happens in the story should be the result of what your character does, and her/his actions are dependent on both their personality and what they want. Vonnegut tells us every character in a story needs to have something they want, even if it’s just a glass of water. Because what they want dictates what they will do while their personality decides how they will go about doing it. You’ll also want to keep in mind that humans, like water, follow the path of least resistance. They will usually pick the easiest way before moving onto to something harder if it fails them.
Stuck and wondering what your character will do next? Think about what they want and how they might try to get it. (Then how you will thwart them, because the more you put that character through, the more your reader will come to know and identify with them.)
Look at your favorite characters and see how the writer communicates their nuances. Some of my favorites:
Who are your favorite characters and why?
Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
(Fiction, short story) The thing is, I was never a hero. The first wave of aliens taught me that. The war with them – my older brothers became heroes there, one died in the stand-off at Ucer-25, and we never did discover what happened to the other. My parents celebrated them both, burned scarlet and gold candles that made the house smell like flaming trees and sulphur, every weekend without fail…
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