Blog - Writing Characters
Thursday, April 17, 2008Today it occurred to me a way in which my writing has improved:
I've gotten much better at writing characters.
This is due to a shift in how I write, I think.
I was for a long time in a big kick about writing stories set in everyday reality. I did so under the exploration of the idea that there's enough drama in our lives that there is no reason to enhance it with the fantastical.
I would base characters on friends of mine, people I knew, or very often: me.
The result? They were pretty bland characters.
Even my best completed piece suffers from characters that aren't as interesting as they perhaps should be.
I don't mean to imply that my friends or I are uninteresting people.
I built characters around what I found interesting in them, after all...
I just don't think I was good at capturing their soul, if not also their voice.
A guy in my screenwriting class at the moment is attempting a biopic, and our professor pointed out that it is very difficult to make biographical films that have a strong sense of personality in their characters, due to the fact that the writer must inevitably invent on their own the inner secret souls of real life people. That's a difficult risk to commit to.
I suppose the same is true when writing my friends into characters.
That doesn't excuse me for writing bland characters based on me, though. Perhaps I do imagine myself as a bit of a dullard... ;)
For a screenwriting class I took earlier this year, however, I had to write a spec-script episode of 30 Rock. When reading it a couple weeks back, a friend of mine said I had totally nailed the voices of all the characters.
This may have been the first step in my recovery, although I didn't see it at the time. I couldn't rely on my old tricks when I wrote that episode. Again, I can champion the wonder that is constraints.
For a class I had last quarter in writing for games, I created a main (player) character for my game project, which pleasantly surprised my professor.
She expected the protagonist of my game, which was set in the early Paleolithic era, to be your stereotypical hulking, brutish caveman. Instead, I asked the player to step into the role of a curious little adolescent girl.
Granted, I'm still not especially proud of that character, as I perhaps didn't invest as much time into developing her "voice" as I should have (voice might not be the right word as none of the characters in my game can actually talk...)
It was, however, an example of being given a world far removed from reality, forcing me to actually make up an original character.
Now I'm writing a sort of epic fantasy piece: a challenge I gave myself as I've never really written fantasy before. (Dark secret revealed: I'm not a fan of fantasy fare!)
As an aspiring game writer though, I figure I shouldn't let that stop me from writing it well, given how many games would fit under the fantasy umbrella...
In any case, it seems the experimentation with a completely out-there fantasy world has allowed me to play with some very fun characters. My inner dislike of the fantasy-genre has caused me to create a world and characters that take the clichés of fantasy trappings and turn them upside-down and inside-out.
Apparently the results are good: everyone in my class has been raving about how fun the characters in the story are.
...
Of course, maybe I'm just over-thinking all of this, and in reality my character-writing has improved simply because I've written more and more and improved over time. ;) posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:11 PM
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