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Trick number 2...
I'm going to write that in an easier way to keep track of.
Trick number 2, for doing this with characters, it to make them care about things other than the plot.
People come to me a lot and say "readers are telling me that my characters feel flat, what can I do about this, what does it mean to have a round character?"
Well, this is one of the big things that we talk about.
One of the ways to have a round character is to have them care about things.
If a character, everything that they think about, everything that they are, is focused toward their role in the story, it feels fake to us and the characters feel flat.
I had this problem early on in my books. I would write characters into roles rather than trying to make them individuals in themselves.
I didn't know I was doing this. I was a brand new writer. I think it's very common
It's particularly common when you write about a gender opposite of your own because your natural inclination is going to put them into the book fulfilling a role.
Usually it's going to be a love interest role.
And so if you're thinking of a character as a love interest rather than as a character, they're going to only do things that the love interest does.
Pay attention, watch this some time. You're storytellers - start watching.
There are a few quirks that people tend to do when they put someone of the opposite gender into a book.
One is you will notice that the other character... often has to... like the woman has to play a straight man.
I notice this a lot in comic books, or in webcomics, or in any sort of comic, that the gender opposite the person writing it becomes like the solid, dependable one,
that's always rolling their eyes at the antics of the main characters.
That's because, rather than thinking of them as a person, they are thinking of them as a role in the plot.
They become the stoic foil role.
This is what I did, my female characters were always in the book to be the love interest.
So one way to get away from this is to start giving people things to care about other than the plot / main character.
Make sure they care about something. People do this. People have lives. People have cares and whims, and they are...
They shouldn't always be so neat that they tie up exactly to what's going on in the plot, ok? So, something to be aware of.
We may come back to this one, but I want to talk a little more about how to do this with a main character too.
Because your main characters basically need to be the ones that you need to focus on.
One of the ways you're going to do this is you're going to start thinking about your story and say "where is the character when the story starts?"
Most people's lives don't begin when the book begins.
Sure, 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' has a stream-of-consciousness begin born scene, but I don't suggest most of you do that.
So, you're main character should be going about their life when the plot hits them like a freight train and derails them from it.
And you should be considering what it is they want in life - what do they want most, particularly if the plot had never happened.
It's ok to intersect the plot with some of these things, but particularly if the plot had never happened what would they want most?
You can subset this in A) before plot, and B) after plot, or during the plot.
We can do this for, let's say, Peter Parker before he becomes Spiderman.
Student: Go on a date.
Brandon: Yeah that's one of them but he has more. What else does he want?
He wants to be a big important scientist, he wants to learn all these things.
And if you read the comics he got his basic geeky pursuits. He wants to go to science fiction conventions. He wants to collect comic books. He's got all these things.
You give someone these things that they want to do, particularly with a couple of big hopes and dreams.
And then, after plot, during the plot, you give them other things.
What does he want after the plot? Well, to fight the villains and defeat them, but these other things don't go away.
So you've got some nice depth of character because they have powerful different motivations that sometimes run into each other.
And these things will become a big part of the plot, but the idea is before the plot starts they have passions and desires and those don't go away when the plot starts.
This is going to go a long way towards making your characters have more depth. Just this one step alone, doing this for every one of your characters is going to go a long way toward it.
You have to be careful not to overemphasise some of these.
I'm thinking of... have you guys seen Lost? There's this one guy that lost his son and it became everything that he was. "I must find my son."
And it got really annoying because any time one of these things starts to dominate, the problem is everything else fades in the background, and you then have a character who is one sided.
You have to have multiple passions and desires and usually they should be conflicting within the character.
This is going to round them out quite a bit.
Buts, questions, ideas? I'll throw a gummi bear at you.
Yeah?
Student: In the Wheel of Time series, the last couple... the 6th, 7th, 8th books...
Student: Rand got very unidimensional, he's like "I am the Dragon," and Perrin and Mat were made interesting because they liked gambling and they did the blacksmith thing, they had those other things...
Brandon: Often times peoples' favorite scene in a lot of the Wheel of Time books is the scene where Perrin who is this character who has been on all these quests,
It's in book 4 I think it is, at the start, or maybe it's in... yeah I think it's book 4...
He's become something larger than he was. He's become a friend to the wolves, he's learned these superpowers and things,
and at the beginning of this book he goes and remembers being a blacksmith and spends a chapter just making door latches.
And it's often picked as one of peoples' favorite chapters in all of the books, because he feels so real and genuine in those moments, because he IS a blacksmith and he likes making things.
And sure, saving the world is important.
But simply sitting down and making some... err he's standing up... standing up and making some door latches or nails or whatever it is is so humanising to him,
and shows someone who has a passion other than the main plot, that that scene keeps getting chosen as one of peoples' favorite scenes.
Likewise, one of peoples' favorite Star Trek episode tends to be the one where Picard is trapped inside the alien probe and lives an entire life learning how to play the flute and having a family.
This generally tops The Next Generation lists as the best episode, by people watching, of all time.
This is not a fight against the Borg scene. This is not what you would pick as the most dynamic.
But it is so humanising because it shows him being passionate about different things in conflict and those different things... people love it.
Student: You mentioned having characters interests conflict with what's going on. How do you do that without it seeming contrived?
Brandon: Everything in a book is going to feel contrived a little bit, because they're really coincidental.
Your job, as a novelist, is to learn how to work like a stage magician, to make people forget about that, because books are filled with coincidences, there's no getting around it.
So what you do is you make it rational enough...
We can bring in Peter Parker. Being a scientist would not necessarily have to conflict with being a superhero.
But in the second Spiderman film they were able to believably convince us that he would work himself so hard doing one that he couldn't do the other,
and it kind of became a dichotomy between him... "I can't do both of these things." It becomes a big conflict to him.
Putting the things in conflict like that works very well.
So what you're going to have to do is make them passionate about both and make them interfere with each other.
Making it not contrived can be difficult.
The terrible examples of this are things like... when, you know... oh, "the love interest wont let me pursue my goals in life because she's scared of wizards," or something like this.
This can feel very contrived unless you can worldbuild it to the point that the love interest... you know, she comes from a world where people who can use magic are executed on sight,
and her father was killed by a rogue wizard, and she meets the main character who is a magic user, and that's a real conflict.
"I just don't like them" is not a real conflict.
So how a lot of these things work is through proper foreshadowing and worldbuilding, and making sure the depth is there, the backstory is there, to make it believable.
Can you see how you could do that the wrong way and the right way?
The wrong way being... she ends up meeting the guy and is like... "oh you're a wizard, that's yucky, I'm not going to be with you any more."
Student: So flimsy excuses versus actual systemic things that are part of the world, you obviously expect as the reader at this point.
Brandon: Yeah. Yeah exactly.
If the reader can say "oh no that's going to be a problem" before the characters realise it, that's a good thing.
Student: So, with the love interest, you see with a lot of YA novels there's always a love interest.
Brandon: There is.
Student: And if you were writing a YA novel and you just don't feel like it's appropriate, then what other relationship can you put in there that would drive the same...
Brandon: The same? Well, nothing's going to be the same. But there are lots of other interesting relationships...
Mentor and student works very well, particularly in YA. But also... best friends who start not as best friends.
My wife's making me watch "Camelot 90210," the new Merlin show. She really likes... it's the BBC Merlin, I call it Camelot 90210, it's quite sappy.
But you can see that they've got Merlin and Arthur and they hate each other at the start, and I'm anticipating that "hey these two are going to be best buddies by season three" or something like that.
And that's perfectly acceptable too.
And a lot of YA fantasy will do that with the unnatural... the strange creature, you know...
"I have the dragon that I have met that I must tame and become the dragon whisperer" or whatever... and things like that.
That's a perfectly reasonable conflict.
But, you've got to understand, teens are interested in romantic relationships. They have just started to really get interested in them.
It is one of the main things that draws them to books.
That doesn't mean you have to have characters getting married by the end.
But if you write a character who is a boy who is 16 and he's not sizing up most girls he meets, you're probably writing him wrong.
He's at least going to acknowledge which ones are pretty and which ones aren't because that how teenage boys of that age think.
Unless you've got a very unique character who you're building that in as part of who they are.
Girls I assume do the same thing. Not having been one, I don't know.
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