This is the nature of the Main Character’s struggle in a story. He has either built up an understanding of how to try and solve problems that no longer fits, or he has built up an understanding of what causes problems that is no longer correct
The backstory builds one of these scenarios. A context is established that creates one kind of problem requiring a specific solution. The story begins with a context in which the main character’s established problem solving technique is no longer appropriate. The question then becomes whether the Main Character should change his method to conform to the new situation or remain steadfast in sticking to the old method until things get back to “normal.”
This creates the core of the story’s message, which is brought to a climax when the main character must make a leap of faith.
Although it is possible to write without the use of characters, it is not easy. Characters represent our drives, our essential human qualities. So a story without characters would be a story that did not describe or explore anything that might be considered a motivation. For most writers, such a story would not provide the opportunity to completely fulfill their own motivations for writing.
For example, we might consider the following poem:
Rain, rain, go away.
Come again another day.
Are there characters in this short verse? Is the rain a character?
To some readers the poem might be a simple invocation for the rain to leave. To other readers, the rain may seem to be stubborn, thoughtless, or inconsiderate. Of course we would need to read more to know for certain.
Suppose we wrote the sentence, “The rain danced on the sidewalk in celebration of being reunited with the earth.”
Now we are definitely assigning human qualities to the rain. Without doubt, the rain has become a character. Characters do not have to be people; they can also be places or things. In fact, anything that can be imbued with motivation can be a character.
So, a fantasy story might incorporate a talking book. An action story might employ a killer wolverine. And a horror story might conjure up the vengeful smoke from a log that was cut from a sentient tree and burned in a fireplace.
When we come to a story we either already have some ideas for a character or characters we would like to use, or we will likely soon find the need for some. But how can we come up with these characters, or how can we develop the rough characters we already have?
Coming up with characters is as simple as looking to our subject matter and asking ourselves who might be expected to be involved. But that only creates the expected characters – predictable and uninteresting. Making these characters intriguing, unusual, and memorable is a different task altogether. But first things first, let us look to our subject matter and see what characters suggest themselves. (If you like, try this with you own story as we go.)
Example:
Suppose all we know about our story is that we want to write an adventure about some jungle ruins and a curse. What characters immediately suggest themselves?
Jungle Guide, Head Porter, Archeologist, Bush Pilot, Treasure Hunter
What other characters might seem consistent with the subject?
Missionary, Native Shaman, Local Military Governor, Rebel Leader, Mercenary
How about other characters that would not seem overly out of place?
Night Club Singer, Tourist, Plantation Owner
And perhaps some less likely characters?
Performers in a Traveling Circus (Trapeze Artist, Juggler, Acrobat, Clown)
We could, of course, go on and on. The point is, we can come up with a whole population of characters just by picking the vocations of those we might expect or at least accept as not inconsistent with the subject matter. Now these characters might seem quite ordinary at first glance, but that is only because we know nothing about them. I promised you a trick to use that would make ordinary characters intriguing, and now is the time to try it.
Of course, we probably don’t need that many characters in our story, so for this example let’s pick only one character from each of the four groups above: Bush Pilot, Mercenary, Night Club Singer, Clown.
First we’ll assign a gender to each. Let’s have two male and two female characters. Well pick the Bush Pilot and the Mercenary as male and the Night Club Singer and the Clown as female.
Now, picture these characters in your mind: a male Bush Pilot, a male Mercenary, a female Night Club Singer, and a female Clown. Since we all have our own life experiences and expectations, you should be able to visualize each character in your mind in at least some initial ways.
The Bush Pilot might be scruffy, the Mercenary bare-armed and muscular. The Night Club Singer well worn but done up glamorously, and the Clown a mousy thing.
Now that we have these typical images of these typical characters in our minds, let’s shake things up a bit to make them less ordinary. We’ll make the Bush Pilot and the Mercenary female and the Night Club Singer and Clown male.
What does this do to our mental images? How does it change how we feel about these characters? The Bush Pilot could still be scruffy, but a scruffy woman looks a lot different than a scruffy man. Or is she scruffy? Perhaps she is quite prim in contrast to the land in which she practices her profession. Since female bush pilots are more rare, we might begin to ask ourselves how she came to have this job. And, of course, this would start to develop her back-story.
How about the female Mercenary? Still muscular, or more the brainy type? What’s her back story? The Night Club Singer might be something of a lounge lizard type in a polyester leisure suit. And the male Clown could be sad like Emit Kelly, sleazy like Crusty the Clown, or evil like Pennywise the Clown in Stephen King’s “It.”
The key to this trick is that our own preconceptions add far more material to our mental images than the actual information we are given – so far only vocation and gender.
Due to this subconscious initiative, our characters are starting to get a little more intriguing, just by adding and mixing genders. What happens if we throw another variable into the mix, say, age? Let’s pick four ages arbitrarily: 35, 53, 82, and 7. Now let’s assign them to the characters.
We have a female Bush Pilot (35), a female Mercenary (53), a male Night Club Singer (82), and a male Clown (7). How does the addition of age change your mental images?
What if we mix it up again? Let’s make the Bush Pilot 7 years old, the Mercenary 82, the Night Club Singer 53, and the Clown 35. What do you picture now?
It would be hard for a writer not to find something interesting to say about a seven-year-old female Bush Pilot or an eighty-two year old female Mercenary.
What we’ve just discovered is that the best way to break out of your own mind and its cliché creations is to simply mix and match a few attributes. Suddenly your characters take on a life of their own and suggest all kinds of interesting back-stories, attitudes, and mannerisms.
Now consider that we have only been playing with three attributes. In fact, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of attributes from which we might select. These might include educational level, race, disabilities, exceptional abilities, special skills, hobbies, religious affiliation, family ties, prejudices, unusual eating habits, sexual preference, and on and on. And each of these can be initially assigned in typical fashion, then mixed and matched. Using this simple technique, anyone can create truly intriguing and memorable characters.
Perhaps the most interesting thing in all of this is that we have become so wrapped up in these fascinating people that we have completely forgotten about structure! In fact, we don’t even know who is the Hero, Protagonist, or Main Character!
Many authors come to a story realizing they need some sort of central character and then try to decide what kind or person he or she should be from scratch. But it is far easier to first build a cast of characters that really excite you (as we did above) and then ask yourself which one you would like to be the central character.
So, imagine…. What would this story be like if we chose the seven-year-old female Bush Pilot as the Hero. How about the eighty-two year old female Mercenary? Can you picture the 53-year-old male Night Club Singer as Hero, or the thirty-five year old male Clown?
And how would things change depending upon who we pick as the Villain or Antagonist? In fact, by choosing one of these characters as the Hero and another as Villain it will begin to suggest what might happen in the plot, just as picking the subject matter suggested our initial characters. Writer’s block never has to happen. Not when you are armed with this technique to spur your passions.
There is one special character who represents the argument for an alternative point of view to that of the Main Character. This character, who spends the entire story making the case for change, is called the Influence Character for he acts as an influence to change the direction the Main Character would go if left to his own devices.
As with each of us, the last thing we tend to question when examining a problem is ourselves. We look for all kinds of solutions both external and internal before we finally (if ever) get around to wondering if maybe we have to change the very nature of who we are and learn to see things differently. We can learn to like what we currently hate, but it takes a lot of convincing for us to make that leap.
When a Main Character makes the traditional leap of faith just before the climax, he has explored all possible means of resolving a problem short of changing who he is. The Influence Character has spent the entire story trying to sell the Main Character on the idea that change is good, and in fact, pointing out exactly how the Main Character ought to change. The clock is ticking, options are running out. If the Main Character doesn’t choose on way or the other, then failure is certain. But which way to go? There’s no clear cut answer from the Main Character’s perspective. That is why the choice to change course or remain steadfast is a leap of faith.
There’s only one main character in a story. Why? Because a story is about the group experience of trying to achieve a goal. When people come together around a common issue in the real world, they quickly self-organize so that one becomes the Voice of Reason and another the Resident Skeptic, for example.
In essence, each “character” in a group endeavor takes as his job one of the major attributes we all have within our own minds. In this way, the group benefits from having specialists to look into each point of view exclusively, which provides greater insight to the group than if we were all acting as individuals, each trying to see the problem from all angles at once, as we do with personal problems.
And so, the group takes on the nature of a group mind in which our primary attributes are represented by people. In fiction, this group mind is called a Story Mind, and each of the people are the archetypes. This forms the basis of narrative structure.
But who is the main character among all of these? In real life, one of the archetypes will emerge as the leader who represents the identity of the group, such as a the CEO of a company, the team leader in sports, or the President of the United States.
Those who are part of the group assume the mantle of that identity, and the leader is the personification of the group mind’s sense of itself. In fiction, that character is the main character, for it is through his or her perspective that the readers or audience experience the story in the first person.
This main character may or may not be the protagonist. The protagonist is the archetype who represents our initiative – the drive to affect change. Every group mind has one. But that person is not always the leader. The leader is the spirit of the group, the protagonist may be his principal operative.
And so it is in fiction. Any of the archetypes might be the leader. So that leader might be the antagonist, for example, trying to maintain the status quo and prevent change. Or it might be the reason archetype who insists that all decisions are based on logic.
Still, though the leader may be any archetype, there will only be one avatar for the group’s sense of self, one main character in the story mind. For, just as in our own individual minds, we think therefore we are. There is only one voice inside that is our identity, our sense of self, who we are. (Unless, of course, we are mentally ill, just as a group mind might be dysfunctional in the real world if it has more than one identity – more than one voice that speaks for the group or tries to define the feel and essence of the group.
So, in your own stories, be sure you only have one main character. But if you want to write about other characters in your story and see how it looks through their eyes, create a sub-story around that character that doesn’t involve the others. Then, you can populate it with people such as his family or his religious group, and his personal story will allow you to stand in his shoes in that regard.
Be certain, however, that you do do not confuse your readers or audience by writing your sub story in such a way that this sub main character is mistaken for the overall main character, as this would create a dysfunctional story.
Still, it is important to develop the individual natures of every character so the readers or audience can identify with them more easily as being like real people. And this prevents your story from being about just one person surrounded by an army of automatons.
After all, each of us is the main character in our own personal narrative.
Archetypes, by definition, are characters defined by their plot function, such as the protagonist, who is trying to achieve a goal, and the antagonist who is trying to stop him. All of the archetypes have a counterpart whose approaches are opposite one another. For example, there is a Reason character who tries to solve plot problem with logic, while the Emotion archetype hopes to succeed through passion.
Stereotypes, on the other hand, are collections of personality traits, such as a Nerd or a Bully. So you can think of archetypes as the underlying psychology of a character, and stereotypes are the personalities that are built on top of that psychology.
For example, a protagonist could be a bully or a nerd. And so could an antagonist or a reason archetype or an emotional archetype. It is the archetypal function that determines what a character will do in the plot and the stereotype personality that determine how they will act while they do it.
In this way, composite characters reflect everyone we encounter in real life. We identify them emotionally by their personalities, and classify them logically by the roles they play.
Stereotypes allow us to connect with fictional characters because, quite literally, we’ve seen that type before. Archetypes allow us to understand where these characters are coming from – what their motivations are, and what they are trying to achieve.
Archetypes exist because each represents a facet of our own minds, turned into a character, so we can learn what is the best way to go about solving a problem in our own lives.
By observing how each archetype fares in the effort to resolve the story’s issues (which extend far beyond simply achieving a goal), we learn the author’s message about how to achieve satisfaction and fulfillment for ourselves.
Learn more about archetypes and stereotypes in this video clip:
In this article, we’ll first take a quick look at the origins of the concept of fictional characters, then outline some practical techniques for creating compelling characters from thin air.
Where Do Characters Come From?
When we speak of characters from a structural standpoint, there are very specific guidelines that determine what is a character and what is not. But when we think of characters in every day life, they are simply anything that has a personality, from your Great Aunt Bertha (though some might argue the point) to the car that never starts when you’re really late.
Looking back through time, it is easy to understand how early humans would assume that other humans like themselves would have similar feelings, thoughts, and drives. Even other species exhibit emotions and make decisions, as when one confronts a bear face to face and watches it decide whether to take you on or find easier pickings (a personal experience from my recent hike on the John Muir trail!)
But even the weather seems to have a personality by virtue of its capricious nature. That’s why they call the wind Mariah, why there is a god of Thunder, and why the Spanish say Hace Color, when it is hot, which literally means, “It makes heat.”
So while, structurally, to be a character an entity must intend to alter the course of events, in the realm of storytelling a character is anything that possesses human emotions. In short, structural characters must have heads, storytelling characters must have hearts. When you put the two together you have entities who involve themselves in the plot, and involve us in themselves.
Where Can We Get Some?
When writing a story, then, from whence can we get our characters? Well, for the moment lets assume we have no plot. In fact, we have no theme, no genre – we don’t even have any particular subject matter we want to talk about. Nothing. We have absolutely nothing and we want to create some characters out of “think” air.
Try starting with a name. Not a name like “Joe” or “Sally” but something that opens the door to further development like “Muttering Murdock” or “Susan the Stilt.” Often coming up with a nickname or even a derogatory name one child might call another is a great way to establish a character’s heart.
What can we say about Muttering Murdock? The best way to develop a character (or for that matter, any aspect of your story) is to start with loose thread and then ask questions. So, for ol’ Muttering Murdock, the name is the loose end just hanging out there for us to pull. We might ask, “Why does Murdock Mutter?” (That’s obvious, of course!) But what else might we ask? Is Murdock a human being? Is Murdock male or female? How old is Murdock? What attributes describe Murdock’s physical traits? How smart is Murdock? Does Murdock have any talents? What about hobbies, education, religious affiliation? And so on, and so on….
We don’t need to know the answers to these questions, we just have to ask them.
Why Does Murdock Mutter?
Next you want to shift modes. Take each question, one at a time, and think up all the different answers you can for each one. For example:
Why does Murdock Mutter?
1. Because he has a physical deformity for the lips.
2. Because he talks to himself, lost in his own world due to the untimely death of his parents, right in front of his eyes.
3. Because he feels he can’t hold his own with anyone face to face, so he makes all his comments so low that no one can hear, giving him the last word in his own mind.
4. Because he is lost in thought about truly deep and complex issues, so he is merely talking to himself. No one ever knows that he is a genius because he never speaks clearly enough to be understood.
You get the idea. You just pull out all the stops and be creative. See, that’s the key. If you try to come up with a character from scratch, well good luck. But if you pick an arbitrary name, it can’t help but generate a number of questions. If you aren’t trying to come up with the one perfect answer to each question, you can let your Muse roam far and wide. Without constraints, you’ll be amazed at the odd variety of potential answers she brings back!
Aging Murdock
Let’s try another question from our Murdock list:
How old is Murdock?
1. 18
2. 5
3. 86
4. 37
That was easy, wasn’t it. But now, think of Murdock in your mind…. Picture Murdock as an 18 year old, a 5 year old, an 86 year old, and at 37. Changes the whole image, doesn’t it! You see, with a name like Muttering Murdock, we can’t help but come up with a mental image right off the bat. It’s like telling someone, “Whatever you do, don’t picture a pink elephant in your mind.” Very hard not to.
The mind is a creative instrument just waiting to be played. It has to be to survive. The world is a jumble of objects, energies, and entities. Our minds must make sense of it all. And to do this, we quite automatically seek patterns. When a pattern is incomplete, we fill it in out of personal experience until we find a better match.
So, when you first heard the name, “Muttering Murdock,” you probably pictured someone who was in your mind already a certain gender, a certain age, and a certain race. You may have even seen Murdock’s face, or Murdock’s size, shape, hair color, or even imagined Murdock’s voice!
Give Murdock a Job!
Now ask one more question about Murdock – What is his or her vocation? Try out a number of alternatives: a school teacher, a mercenary, a priest, a cop, a sanitary engineer, a pre-school drop-out, a retired linesman. Every potential occupation again alters our mental image of Murdock and makes us feel just a little bit differently about that character.
Interesting thing, though. We haven’t even asked ourselves what kind of a person Murdock is. Is this character funny? Is he or she a practical joker? Does he or she socialize, or is the character a loner? Is Murdock quick to temper or long suffering? Forgiving, or carry a grudge? Thoughtful or a snap judge? Dogmatic or pragmatic? Pleasant or slimy of spirit?
Again, each question leads to a number of possible answers. By trying them in different combinations, we can create any number of interesting people with which to populate a story.
As we said at the beginning of the Murdock example, this is just one way to create characters if you don’t even have a story idea yet. But there are more! In our next lesson we’ll explore more of these methods.
Study Exercises: Reverse Engineering Characters
1. Pick a favorite book, movie, or stage play. Make a list of all the principal characters.
2. For each character, list all the key bits of information the author reveals about that character, as if you were writing a dossier.
3. Do a personality study of each character, as if you were a criminal profiler or a psychologist.
4. For each item you have noted in your dossier and profile, create a question that would have resulted in that item as an answer. In other words, play the TV game Jeopardy. Take an item you wrote about a character like, “Hagrid is a large man, so big he must be part giant.” Then, create a question to which that item would be an answer, for example, “What is this character’s physical size?”
5. Arrange all the questions you have reverse engineered in an organized list to be used in the Writing Exercises.
Writing Exercises: Creating Characters
1. Arbitrarily create a character name.
2. Use your list of questions from the Study exercises to ask information about this character.
3. Come up with at least three different answers for each of the questions.
4. Pick one answer for each question to create a character profile.
5. Read over the list and get a feel for your new character. Then, swap out some of the answers (character attributes) that you included in the profile for alternative answers you originally didn’t use.
6. Keep swapping out attributes until you arrive at a character you really have a feel for.
Tools for Creating Characters
You can easily build character in my StoryWeaver software. All of the techniques outlined above (and many more) have been incorporated into a step-by-step interactive pathway for building your characters, plot, theme and genre.
StoryWeaver is just $29.95 and has a 90 day money back Guarantee, so give it whirl and create great characters!
For a structural approach to building characters, nothing is more powerful or detailed that Dramatica Pro. You’ll learn and then apply techniques for ensuring all structural attributes are present, breaking down archetypes into their component parts and reassembling them into more interesting characters, ensuring all character relationships are explored and fully developed. Try Dramatica for 90 days, and if it doesn’t suit your writing style, return it for a full refund.
Watch the video below to learn more about creating characters in Dramatica software:
Some years ago, I wrote the following article describing the differences between the protagonist and antagonist archetypes. Pretty good stuff – BUT… Like any reasonably good teacher, I keep on learning – maybe not so much about the subject matter, but often a lot about how to present it better.
In this particular article I noticed a presupposition of mine – that in the story development process an author might create a whole cast of character but not have determined which ones are the protagonist and antagonist.
Now in reading this through today, I realize that doesn’t sound much like the way most writers go about creating their characters. In fact, the usual approach is to start with a protagonist and antagonist in mind, then populate the story with supporting characters to fill out the conflicts and the logistics of the battle over the goal.
And so, while everything in my original article is still true and actually quite useful, the approach it takes of suggesting that you come up with your whole cast of characters first might very well turn away writers who might otherwise benefit from what the core of the article is actually about.
On the other hand, in other articles I have provided methods that support my approach of creating a cast first and then picking your protagonist and antagonist from them. This works great when you are starting your story development from nothing more than a plot idea.
For example, suppose you want to write a story about an Amazon river boat running aground in the jungle, simply because the idea interests you. Well then, you don’t have any characters at all yet. And so, building a cast by working out who might be on the boat, who might be on shore and who might be coming up or down the river toward them would be a great first step.
Similarly, what if you are a character-oriented writer who just wants to come up with some interesting people to consider writing a story about them. In this case, you may or may not even have a plot idea in mind. But if you do, you can look into each of these characters you have created and imagine how the plot might evolve if each one, in turn, were chosen as the protagonist. How does the course of the story change? Would be goal be a bit different or a lot different? Who would the best choice of antagonist be for each of your characters, should he or she be selected as your protagonist?
It was from this point of view that I wrote the article originally. But now I realize that I just assumed that point of view, rather than stating it up front as a given for the sake of the article. Hence, this opening section to make the point that this article is really about how the structural functions protagonist and antagonist have in a story, and how they interact with each other.
In summary, if you focus on the core information of the article, you can easily apply it to any character development approach you like to take with your own stories.
And with that as a caveat, here’s the article as originally written some year back:
Protagonist v Antagonist
Protagonist drives the plot forward.
Antagonist tries to stop him.
The Protagonist is the Prime Mover of the effort to achieve the Story’s Goal. The Antagonist is the Chief Obstacle to that effort. In a sense, Protagonist is the irresistible force and Antagonist is the immovable object.
In our own minds, we survey our environment and consider whether or not we could improve things by taking action to change them. The struggle between the Protagonist and Antagonist represents this inner argument: is it better to leave things the way they are or to try and rearrange them?
The Protagonist represents our Initiative, the motivation to change the status quo. The Antagonist embodies our Reticence to change the status quo. These are perhaps our two most obvious human traits – the drive to alter our environment and the drive to keep things the way they are. That is likely why the Archetypes that represent them are usually the two most visible in a story.
Functionally, the character you choose as your Protagonist will exhibit unswerving drive. No matter what the obstacles, no matter what the price, the Protagonist will charge forward and try to convince everyone else to follow.
Without a Protagonist, your story would have no directed drive. It would likely meander through a series of events without any sense of compelling inevitability. When the climax arrives, it would likely be weak, not seen as the culmination and moment of truth so much as simply the end.
This is not to say that the Protagonist won’t be misled or even temporarily convinced to stop trying, but like a smoldering fire the Protagonist is a self-starter. Eventually, he or she will ignite again and once more resume the drive toward the goal.
In choosing which of your characters to assign the role of Protagonist, do not feel obligated to choose one whose Storytelling qualities make it the most forceful. The Protagonist does not have to be the most powerful personality. Rather, it will simply be the character who keeps pressing forward, even if in a gentle manner until all the obstacles to success are either overcome or slowly eroded.
When creating your own stories, sometimes you will know what your goal is right off the bat. In such cases, the choice of Protagonist is usually an easy one. You simply pick the character whose storytelling interests and nature is best suited to the objective.
Other times, you may begin with only a setting and your characters, having no idea what the goal will turn out to be. By trying out the role of Protagonist on each of our characters, you can determine what kind of a goal the nature of that character might suggest.
By working out an appropriate goal for each character as if it were the Protagonist, you’ll have a choice of goals. Developing the plot of your story then becomes a matter of choosing among options rather than an exercise in the brute force of creating something from nothing.
What, now, of the Antagonist? We have all heard the idioms, Let sleeping dogs lie, Leave well enough alone, and If it works – don’t fix it. All of these express that very same human quality embodied by the Antagonist: Reticence.
To be clear, Reticence does not mean that the Antagonist is afraid of change. While that may be true, it may instead be that the Antagonist is simply comfortable with the way things are or may even be ecstatic about them. Or, he or she may not care about the way things are but hate the way they would become if the goal were achieved.
Functionally, the character you choose as your Antagonist will try anything and everything to prevent the goal from being achieved. No matter what the cost, any price would not seem as bad to this character as the conditions he or she would endure if the goal comes to be. The Antagonist will never cease in its efforts, and will marshal every resource (human and material) to see that the Protagonist fails in his efforts.
Without an Antagonist, your story would have no concerted force directed against the Protagonist. Obstacles would seem arbitrary and inconsequential. When the climax arrives, it would likely seem insignificant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
In choosing one of your characters as the Antagonist, don’t be trapped into only selecting a mean-spirited one. As described earlier, it may well be that the Protagonist is the Bad Guy and the Antagonist is the Good Guy. Or, both may be Good or both Bad.
The important thing is that the Antagonist must be in a position in the plot to place obstacles in the path of the Protagonist. Since the drive of the Protagonist is measured by the size of the obstacles he or she must overcome, it is usually a good idea to pick the character who can bring to bear the greatest obstacles.
Ask yourself which of your characters would have the most to lose or be the most distressed if the goal is achieved. That will likely be your Antagonist. But don’t discount the other candidates out of hand. In storytelling, characters are not always what they seem. Even the character who seems most aligned with the Protagonist’s purpose may have a hidden agenda that makes them the perfect choice for Antagonist. You might play such a character as an apparent aid to the effort, and later reveal how that character was actually behind all the troubles encountered.
“My favorite creative writing book is ‘Setting’ by Jack Bickham. Use of setting as primary with characters, plot, theme, mood, etc derived from it and interacting with it seems of particular value in science fiction. Where would Deep Space 9 be without deep space and a space station! Setting is certainly the cauldron of my imagination.
So how can I best approach things this way with Dramatica? Do you have any examples where setting has been created as a character?
Can I have two antagonists, for example, one a person and the other a setting?”
My Reply:
In fact, the Antagonist in a story can be a person, place or thing – any entity that can fulfill the dramatic function of the Antagonist.
First, look at the movie, Jaws. The Antagonist is the shark. It may seem to some that the mayor in Jaws is the Anatagonist, but he isn’t against the goal of keeping the people safe and killing the shark – he just makes it more difficult. Therefore, the mayor is the Contagonist.
Next consider the 1950s movie with Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner called, “The Mountain.” Tracy plays an aging mountain climber whose nemesis is the huge mountain that looms over his home and nearly killed him years ago. He hasn’t climbed since. The mountain claims new victims in a plane crash, which may have some survivors.
Tracy is the only one qualified to lead an expedition to rescue them. Wagner, his nephew, wants to rob the plane of its valuables and slyly convinces Tracy to lead the expedition on humanitarian grounds. The mountain is the Antagonist and Wagner is the Contagonist, because he makes it more difficult.
In the movie, “Aliens” (the second film in the series), the Aliens themselves are the “Group Antagonist” and the Contagonist is Burke, the company man, who makes it more difficult.
In the movie, “The Old Man & the Sea.” Anthony Quinn is the Protagonist, the Great Fish is the Antagonist, and the Sea is the Contagonist, as it makes the effort more difficult.
In a short story called, “The Wind,” which appeared in an anthology released by Alfred Hitchcock, the wind itself it the Antagonist, having sentience and stalking down and eventually killing an explorer who accidentally stumbled upon the knowledge that the winds of the world are alive. The narrator of the story is the Contagonist, as he is the friend of his hapless friend, the explorer, who refuses to believe him and therefore makes things more difficult.
These examples illustrate that all of the dramatic functions (such as Protagonist, Antagonist, and Contagonist) need to be represented, but can easily be carried by a person, place, or thing. Still, there is only one Antagonist, and the other negative force is usually the Contagonist.
There are two exceptions to the “rule” that there should be only one Antagonist. One is when the Antagonist is a group, as in the “Aliens” example above, or with an angry mob or the Empire in the original Star Wars movie. The other is when the function of the Antagonist is “handed off” from one player to another when the first player dies or moves out of the plot.
A hand-off is different than a group insofar as all the members of the group are fulfilling the same dramatic function at the same time as if it were a single entity, but in a hand-off the characters fulfill the function in turn, each carrying forward the next part of the job like runners in a relay race.
So, while it is possible to have more than one antagonist in a story, that character function can easily be fulfilled by a person, place or thing (including setting).
Create believable and compelling antagonists with StoryWeaver Story Development Software
StoryWeaver will take you step-by-step from concept to fully developed story. More than 200 interactive Story Cards (TM) guide you through each step and automatically reference your work on previous steps. So, your story is constantly evolving as you revise, refine, and fold each version into the next.
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Perhaps the most fundamental error made by authors, whether novice or experienced, is that all their characters, male and female, tend to reflect the gender of the author. This is hardly surprising, since recent research clearly indicates that men and women use their brains in different ways. So how can an author overcome this gap to write characters of the opposite sex that are both accurate and believable to both genders?
To find out, let’s briefly explore the nature of male and female minds and provide techniques for crafting characters that ring true.
At first, it might seem that being male or female is an easily definable thing, and therefore easy to convey in one’s writing. But as we all know, the differences between the sexes have historically been a mysterious quality, easily felt, but in fact quite hard to define. This is largely because what makes a mind male or female is not just one thing, but also several.
First, let’s consider that gender itself has four principal components:
Anatomical Sex
Sexual Preference
Gender Identity
Mental Sex
Anatomical sex describes the physicality of a character – male or female. Now, we all know that people actually fall in a range – more or less hairy, wider or narrower hips, deeper or higher voice, and so on. So although there is a fairly clear dividing line between male and female anatomically, secondary sexual characteristics actually create a range of physicality between the two. Intentionally choosing these attributes for your characters can make them far less stereotypical as men and women.
Sexual Preferences may be for the same sex, the opposite sex, both, or neither. Although people usually define themselves as being straight, gay, bi, or disinterested, this is also not a fixed quality. Statistics shows, for example, that 1/3 of all men have a same-sex encounter at least once in their lives.
Although it often stirs up controversy to say so, in truth most people have at least the occasional passing attraction to the same sex, be it a very pretty boy or a “butch” woman. This isn’t necessarily a physical response, but could be just an elevated sense of interest.
Consider the sexual preference of your characters not as a fixed choice of one thing or another, but as a fluid quality that may shift over time or in a particular exceptional context.
Gender Identity describes where one falls on the scale between masculine and feminine. This, of course, is also context dependent. For example, when one is in the woods, at home with one’s family, or being chewed out by the boss.
Gender Identity is not just how one feels or things of oneself, but also how one act’s, how one uses one’s voice, and how one wishes to be treated. Often, a male character may have gentle feelings but cover them up by overly masculine mannerisms. Or, a female character may be “all-business” in the workplace out of necessity, but wishes someone would treat her with softness and kindness.
Actually, Gender Identity is made up of how one acts or wishes to act, and how one is treated or wishes to be treated. How many times have we seen a character who is forced by others to play a role that is in conflict with his or her internal gender self-image? Gender Identity is where one can explore nuance in creating non-stereotypical characters.
Mental Sex is a rather new term. It grows out of research the indicates there is, at some level, a hard-wired difference in the way the brains of men and women function. This is far below the level of consciousness, and acts almost like a pre-bias or filter to how the world looks before the conscious mind even gets involved.
This is a complex subject, and not yet fully understood, but in narrative and in characters, it shows up in very specific ways. Consider whether the mind of your character organizes its thinking more in a binary, linear, hierarchical manner,or in an analog, holistic, interconnected fashion.
Essentially, mental sex is the cast-in-stone foundation upon which all of our thinking and feeling are built, and it provides a subtle tilt or bias to the very fabric of our self-awareness.
Now, in creating characters of both sexes, consider that each of the four categories we just explored is not a simple choice between one thing or another, but a sliding scale (like Anatomical Sex) or a conglomerate of individual traits (like Gender Identity). Then, visualize that wherever a character falls in any one of those four categories places absolutely no limits on where he or she may fall in the other categories.
For example, you might have a character extremely representative of male anatomical sex, bi-sexual (but leaning toward a straight relationship at the moment), whose gender identity is rough and tumble (but yearns to be accepted for his sensitivity toward impressionistic paintings) who is practical all the time (except when it comes to sports cars).
Any combination goes. And that allows your characters of both sexes to avoid becoming stereotypes and opens up all kinds of opportunities to explore individual personalities,with all their quirks and and subtleties.
But there’s more. Beyond all of these considerations is the cultural indoctrination we all receive that leads us to respond within social expectations appropriately to the role associated with our anatomical sex. These roles, while not necessarily rigid, are certainly less flexible than we are, and they include what is proper to wear, who speaks first, who opens the door or orders the wine, who has to pretend to be inept or skilled in regard to particular kinds of activities (regardless of real ability or lack there of in that area), the form of grammar one uses in constructing sentences, the words one is expected to use (“I’ll have a hamburger,” vs. “I’d like a hamburger”), and the demeanor allowable in social interaction with the same and the opposite sex, among many other qualities.
While these social expectations are in constant flux, sometimes more open and sometimes more restrictive, there is always the cultural code of the moment that gently messages each of us to function with more conformity than is reflective of our nature. And since these social pressures change with time, one of the attributes identifying people of different ages are the gender-based roles that have set in place within them, gradually firming up into a pattern from birth until is becomes progressively second nature.
In the end, writing characters of the opposite sex requires a commitment to understand the difference among all these qualities, to identify which are inherent and those that are learned, and to accept that we are all made of the same clay, sculpted partly by ourselves and partly by an unseen hand.
Create believable and compelling characters with StoryWeaver Story Development Software
StoryWeaver will take you step-by-step from concept to fully developed story. More than 200 interactive Story Cards (TM) guide you through each step and automatically reference your work on previous steps. So, your story is constantly evolving as you revise, refine, and fold each version into the next.
With our 90 day money-back guarantee you can try StoryWeaver risk-free.
And, even if you choose not to keep it, you still get to keep our Writer’s Survival Kit Bonus Package!
Here are six ways in which your Main Character can flirt with change over the course of your story, up to the climax where they will either embrace change or reject it, as Scrooge accepts change in A Christmas Carol while William Wallace remains resolute in Braveheart.
Let’s take a look at each of these six kinds of characters, and how they respond to pressures on their belief system, morality, attitude or personal code.
1. The Steady Freddy
This kind of Main Character starts out with a fixed belief about the central personal issue of the story. Act-by-Act, Scene-by-Scene, he gathers more information that leads him to question those pre-held beliefs. His hold on the old attitude gradually weakens until, at the Moment of Truth, he simply steps over to the other side – or not. This kind of character slowly changes until he is not committed to either his original belief or the alternative. It all comes down to which way the wind is blowing when he ultimately must choose one or the other.
2. The Griever
A Griever Main Character is also confronted with building evidence that his original belief may have been in error. But unlike Steady Freddy, this character suffers a growing internal conflict that starts to tear him apart. The Griever feels honor-bound or morally obligated to stick with his old loyalties, yet becomes more and more compelled to jump ship and adopt the new. At the end of the story, he must make a Leap of Faith, choosing either the old or the new, and with such a balance created, there is not even a hint as to which way would ultimately be better.
3. The Weaver
The Weaver Main Character starts out with one belief system, then shifts to adopt the alternative, then shifts back again, and again, and again…. Like a sine wave, he weaves back and forth every time he confronts information that indicates he is currently in error in his point of view. The intensity of these swings depends upon the magnitude of each bit of new information and the resoluteness of the character.
4. The Waffler
Unlike the Weaver, the Waffler jumps quickly from one point of view to the other, depending on the situation of the moment. He may be sincere but overly pragmatic, or he may be opportunistic and not hold either view with any real conviction. Still, in the end, he must come down on one side of the fence or the other.
There are also two kinds of characters who change, but not really.
5. The Exception Maker
This character reaches the critical point of the story and decides that although he will retain his original beliefs, he will make an exception “in this case.” This character would be a Change character if the story is about whether or not he will budge on the particular issue, especially since he has never made an exception before. But, if the story is about whether he has permanently altered his nature, then he would be seen as steadfast, because we know he will never make an exception again. With the Exception Maker, you must be very careful to let the audience know against what standard it should evaluate Change.
6. The Backslider
Similar to the Exception Maker, the Backslider changes at the critical moment, but then reverses himself and goes right back to his old belief system. In such a story, the character must be said to change, because it is the belief system itself that is being judged by the audience, once the moment of truth is past and the results of picking that system are seen in the denoument. In effect, the Backslider changes within the confines of the story structure, but then reverts to his old nature AFTER the structure in the closing storyTELLING.
An example of this occurs in the James Bond film, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” This is the only Bond film in which 007 actually changes. Here, he has finally found love which has filled the hole in his heart that previously drove him. He resigns the force and gets married. End of structure. Then, in additional storytelling, his wife is killed by the villain, and his angst is restored so good ol’ James Bond can return just as he was in the next sequel.
Variations….
Each of these kinds of characters may be aware that he or she is flirting with change or may not. They may simply grieve over their situations, or just breeze through them, not considering how they might be affected. Each of these characters may arrive at a Leap of Faith where they must make a conscious decision to do things the same way or a different way, or each may arrive at a Non-Leap of Faith story conclusion, where they never even realize they have been changed, though they have been, gradually. The important thing is that the readers or audience must know if the Main Character has changed or not. Otherwise, they cannot make sense of the story’s message.
There are many ways to Change or Not to Change. If you avoid a linear path and a binary choice, your characters will come across as much more human and much more interesting.
Melanie Anne Phillips Creator, StoryWeaver Co-Creator, Dramatica
Although it is possible to write without the use of characters, it is not easy. Characters represent our drives, our essential human qualities. So a story without characters would be a story that did not describe or explore anything that might be considered a motivation. For most writers, such a story would not provide the opportunity to completely fulfill their own motivations for writing.
There is one special character who represents the argument for an alternative point of view to that of the Main Character. This character, who spends the entire story making the case for change, is called the Influence Character for he acts as an influence to change the direction the Main Character would go if left to his own devices.
There’s only one main character in a story. Why? Because a story is about the group experience of trying to achieve a goal. When people come together around a common issue in the real world, they quickly self-organize so that one becomes the Voice of Reason and another the Resident Skeptic, for example.
Archetypes, by definition, are characters defined by their plot function, such as the protagonist, who is trying to achieve a goal, and the antagonist who is trying to stop him. All of the archetypes have a counterpart whose approaches are opposite one another. For example, there is a Reason character who tries to solve plot problem with logic, while the Emotion archetype hopes to succeed through passion.
In this article, we’ll first take a quick look at the origins of the concept of fictional characters, then outline some practical techniques for creating compelling characters from thin air.
Some years ago, I wrote the following article describing the differences between the protagonist and antagonist archetypes. Pretty good stuff – BUT… Like any reasonably good teacher, I keep on learning – maybe not so much about the subject matter, but often a lot about how to present it better.
Can things be characters?
Perhaps the most fundamental error made by authors, whether novice or experienced, is that all their characters, male and female, tend to reflect the gender of the author. This is hardly surprising, since recent research clearly indicates that men and women use their brains in different ways. So how can an author overcome this gap to write characters of the opposite sex that are both accurate and believable to both genders?
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