Tools of the Trade #2 - Your Characters

[Duleigh]

Wow, this is a big one, I mean, our keyboards are the interface between ourselves and the written page whether it be paper or electronic, it's what we use to get our ideas out there, but the character is not just part of those ideas, but they help shape the ideas, they flow with the ideas, but they also move our ideas toward the conclusion which is their primary job. We build our characters from a single person, or we build them from an amalgam of people that we know, admire, or read about in other stories. Sometimes we build them from scratch and sometimes we steal them outright. In The Gate what characters I didn't steal lock stock and barrel from Takumi Yanai I tried to make up from scratch. In other stories many characters are composites made up from bits and pieces of people I know, and a few are actual people I know and love (or hate) but they've made quite an impression on me. Sadly I've got a few characters that are NPC's when they should be staring in the show.

Carny Taz - she's my all-time favorite 100% made up character, a Warrior Bunny with a heart of gold, who will cook you under the table. She was supposed to be just an NPC one off, I gave her a couple of humorous lines and she stole the show. I think I'll give her a Buck for her efforts. Have you ever had a character that just took off with the story and you let him/her run wild with it? I am so glad I did that with Carny.

Karole Krigbaum - you guys y'all haven't met her yet, she's a terror from Folkston GA a composite character wearing the body of one person I know, the personality of another person, the temper of a third person, and the courage of yet another person, and the sex drive of someone else. She's my favorite and most complex composite. Y'all gonna meet her in November. Do you have someone made up from that many parts?

Ayato and Julissa Tanaka - my absolute favorite characters stolen from real life. I have others in earlier stories, but I didn't quite nail the personalities, and that's a shame. The real Ayato and Julissa have such outrageous personalities it was easy. I'm just terrified that they may recognize themselves. Do you have someone from real life in a story of yours that just made the dialog flow so damn easy? Ayato and Julissa's real people do that for me.

Don and Lanh Campbell - Don is an invention and Lanh is a composite and I love them like they were my own kids. They were invented for my Winter Holiday entry, and when I was done with the story, I couldn't let them go, so I wrote a very Long story that leads up to the contest entry just so I didn't have to say good-bye. Then I wrote another story that picks up where the contest entry ends... which is why I missed the entry deadline. Did you every come up with characters you love so much that you couldn't let them go?

Kim-ly Nguyen - Kim-ly is the troublemaker, her job is to piss you off, she's always there to torture her little sister, piss off her brothers and her brother-in-law, drive her folks off the deep end, and walk away smiling. I have been writing her not to be liked, but my readers like her... I don't know if that says more about my writing or my readers. Do you have a character you created just to piss people off?

 

[Blind_Justice]

In the beginning, I had it easy. All the characters in the "Leo and the Dragon" arc were player characters from a long-running D&D game. For "Gost in the Machine", I borrowed every Cyberpunk trope I could find. That story was never meant to be anything more than an episodic sandbox for playing with sex fantasies, but the moment I wrote chapter five and introduced Katharina Zeiss aka Shine, things took a hard turn and suddenly I had a story to tell.

That aside, my three most favorite characters are:

Gheeran, the blind assassin. He's as close to a self-insert as I'm willing to go. Finding wasy to make him useful not only as a story lead, but as a somewhat competent adventurer was a fun challenge. Writing him also led to my first (and best) gay male sex scene.

Rembrandt Sharpe, the mutant who can fix or break technological items with a touch: I have no problem admitting that most of my Sci-Fi setting is one gigantic Mass Effect blowjob and when I was looking to write a Geek Pride story in that setting, my big question was "How do I get a relatively normal human on board a ship of horny aliens?" As it does happen so often, mylady love provided the answer. "Make him a mutant with a useful power, something not even your telepaths can do." Problem solved and the misfit from Earth eventually found his place to belong to. From The Rembrandt Legacy"

Salvador Rios, space trucker: He's the antithesis of every superheroic story protagonist. After reading the first chapter of Tefler's unending self-jerk, I wanted to write a better space opera, with a more believable lead character. Sal is no hero. He's stuck in an exploitative business relationship, he is estranged from his career-focused sister, his love life is a mess and the only thing he's good at is flying - but he's stuck doing low-risk cargo runs to pay offa mountain of debt. Writing an adventure to give him opportunities to grow was the real challenge, but "Express Delivery"... delivers in that regard. By the end, he's almost a hero. He did not only get the girl (AND a futa), but about 50,000 of them.

 

[neuroparenthetical]

I try to use as little of real people as possible. Isolated physical descriptors are an exception, though I resist describing a real-life person (which includes all the "real" people from movies and television) completely. I imagine my sources of inspiration would be simultaneously flattered, repulsed, and insulted. "Wow, you like my butt that much? Ew... you like my butt that much? Hey! Why the fuck didn't my nose make the cut? What are you implying?"

The NPC issue is less salient in stroke stories. Even though I tend to get off the rails, all my stories are stroke stories in their boners. I have no issue peppering my main characters' worlds with tropes and cliches. That's how lots of real people initially appear when you don't take the time to get to know them. It's true to the subjective human experience of the characters themselves. Meanwhile, an omniscient narrator knows that it can't just go around fleshing out every single character in the world - not if it wants to be a good storyteller, anyway.

My favorite character to date is Bobbi Carter-Cruz, for a three main reasons. First, they're quite unlike me in their personality and narrative voice. How much of it is a put-on? Well, I'll leave that to the readers to ponder. Second, they're emblematic of a utopian ideal. They're a genuinely good person living in a genuinely good country (fictional, of course,) and it's just a relief to be able to write stories with so much happiness and positivity in them. Third - intimately related to the second, I suppose - is that their life is an escapist fantasy, even relative to the lives of their fellow utopian neighbors.

I do like the characters I've created whom I morally condemn. They're fascinating, and writing out their perspectives is a taboo thrill. Unsurprisingly, the most interesting one among them is the one who's the most conflicted. The father of Jennifer and Jessica, otherwise unnamed, is a bad person living in a bad country who buckled under the strain. He gave in to temptation. With overtones of Dostoevsky's wretched lot, he's persistently aware of his own weakness, his attempts to excuse and justify himself, and his attempts to avoid any just deserts from any external sources.

I'm not sure I'll ever be unable to let my characters go. Why? Because they're simultaneously never there and never gone. The latter is the more important one, I think. They're going to be just fine without me. They'll live out their not-real lives whether I check in on them or not.

 

[Carnevil9]

This is a fascinating question! Mostly because it made me ask myself a follow-up question: could one write a story WITHOUT characters? I'm not sure what the answer to that question is.

Certainly there would be problems: who would the reader relate to? How would you portray motivations? How would you make the reader care about the story? It seems like an impossibility, but on an academic level, I don't want to write it off as a silly question. I want to brainstorm how one might write a story without characters. Maybe nobody ELSE wants to, but that's cool.

I could imagine a story that describes an ecosystem, and its rise and fall. Or a civilization, and its trends and issues. Or a chemical or biological system with its rises and falls as inevitable scientific process carry themselves out. Might be tough to make this interesting, but maybe it could be done.

Okay, probably a stupid idea. But I just wanted to throw it out there. Carry on!

 

[PennameWombat]

This is a fascinating question! Mostly because it made me ask myself a follow-up question: could one write a story WITHOUT characters? I'm not sure what the answer to that question is.

Certainly there would be problems: who would the reader relate to? How would you portray motivations? How would you make the reader care about the story? It seems like an impossibility, but on an academic level, I don't want to write it off as a silly question. I want to brainstorm how one might write a story without characters. Maybe nobody ELSE wants to, but that's cool.

I could imagine a story that describes an ecosystem, and its rise and fall. Or a civilization, and its trends and issues. Or a chemical or biological system with its rises and falls as inevitable scientific process carry themselves out. Might be tough to make this interesting, but maybe it could be done.

Okay, probably a stupid idea. But I just wanted to throw it out there. Carry on!

It's not that I don't see ways to do such a story, I don't see a way to do it for this site. But if this is the sort of thing you're thinking about - There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury, then something like this is not only possible but was recognized (belatedly) by the Pulitzer Prize Board. But. Is the house itself the 'character'? Or, is it that the humans have, uh, well, they're not present, but clearly they existed, just not at the house, count as them being characters? So yeah, I guess something like this in Non-erotic could be posted here, I've only dipped into that Category a bit so can't say. The story I have in there definitely has a main character.

I do have a story here where non of the characters have names. But mostly the erotic categories here are tied to character actions. Kind of hard to do EV without an exhibitionist and/or a voyeur.

 

[tenyari]

For me characters start with a need and a flaw.

That's basically my plot and my hook for the given character.

Then I need to 'feel' something about them. I need some emotion that ties that need and flaw together. The need is what they want to achieve, the flaw is some trait they have that makes it difficult for them to get what they desire, and the emotion is the 'journey' - an emotion I feel about that character, not their emotions, which becomes the view through which I process telling their journey.

Even small characters will get some level of this. "Driveby" characters like a person who I just note as there and not in the action don't get it. But if a character has a 'screen actor's guild' card, as in if they're supposed to be remembered past the sentence they appear in, they get the treatment.

The main protagonist of a story is usually drawn from the story's theme - and my ideas often form from dreams or the moments just after waking up. That said, I'm one of those people who is often not a character in my own dreams. I'm often observing stories in my dreams, and can sometimes move into and out of different characters in them. So they aren't necessarily versions of me. In a current story I'm writing I had a lucid dream where I was the female 'lead' in my story, but in writing it I chose to flip perspective and be the other person - with a prequel and sequel that go back into her POV for other stories of moments in her life.
- These main protagonists still get my 'need / flaw / emotion' treatment once I start developing them.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Have you ever had a character that just took off with the story and you let him/her run wild with it?

At the beginning of my story Riddle of the Copper Coin, my narrator Penny is trying to get over her ex Lucy, who broke up with her in order to take up a job opportunity overseas.

Some years later, about halfway through my series Anjali's Red Scarf, I wrote a scene where Sarah and Anjali go to a concert, and meet a group of people. I wasn't planning on doing much with them, but I needed to give them names and by chance I called one of them Lucy.

Months or maybe years after that, I noticed that both Copper Coin and Red Scarf had a Lucy, and I thought: what if they were the same Lucy? And somebody who was meant to be a one-scene extra with no lines ended up becoming a major character in the story. In return, she helped me resolve a point where I was blocked trying to get Sarah and Anjali's relationship where it needed to go.

Did you every come up with characters you love so much that you couldn't let them go?

I'm fond enough of Dr. Marchand that I want to write more of her. I don't often write villains but she's a lot of fun.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

John Abernathy is a made up character in his six novelettes. His companions, Susan Reynolds and Michelle Tomlin are based on a couple of people I know as is Jenny. Most of my male leads are based off of John and I have reused Susan and Michelle in other stories.

All the rest of my characters are completely made up.

 

[MrPixel]

This is a great idea.

One of the first things I did in writing my current series is create a separate document outlining the characters, editing as I added characters and better fleshed-out some of the existing ones. It is too lengthy to post here (currently 8 MSWord pages), so in the interest of sharing I will touch it up for uploading as "a story" and post the link here once it is approved and visible. I do need to review it again for any spoilers, such as new characters to be introduced in major sections most likely to be published much later this year.

 

[MrPixel]

My character outlines are now up: http://literotica.com/s/off-campus-00-character-outlines. The two main characters are loosely based on real people enhanced by a massive quantity of artistic license, but all the others are purely out of my imagination. They've been fun to work with.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Amelia, from Rope and Veil, because she caught not only my heart but gave a voice to people with disabilities, which humbled me as an author.

Amanda, from The Floating World, because she was based on a lovely young woman who served me coffee every day for a year, and the resulting story became one of my most popular.

Ruby, from Garter Belts and Cigarettes, because she arrived from nowhere, and got herself into three stories.

 

[Maxiine]

I don't subscribe to the typical "story arc" (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution) methodology. I like personalities and my stories are primarily the interaction of multiple distinct people as they interact with one another. Typically nothing huge or monumental happens and I can usually add another "episode" if I wish.

Every one of my characters (except for those in my fan fiction collection) are based on my real life friends, neighbors, family, co-workers, lovers... Ah, but I repeat myself, it is a very concentric Zenn-diagram.

Many of my fan fiction works are based in the fact that in my humble opinion the "rising action" in the original story was contrived for the purpose of driving the plot forward. So, I simply deconstruct the original to what I consider to be a logical base and proceed from there, focusing on my perception of the character.

In one of my longest series, a virulent outgrowth of a simple fan fiction, I have created a literary world of advertisers, consultants, bankers, regulators, television executives, directors, producers, writers, caterers, fans, soundstage workers, agents, actors, and actresses who ignore the fourth wall and openly squabble about what the actors-- who portray highly stereotypical big city teachers, paramedics, cops, firemen, doctors, therapists, lawyers, struggling families, gangsters, petty criminals, restaurateurs, bar owners, other businessmen, and politicians in a "family" of interconnected shows-- do, should do, won't do, or can't do on screen.

Story lines, character backstories, and relationships abruptly change because of advertisers desire to sell product "A," the political issue de-jour, contract negotiations, strikes, writers quitting or being fired, Salmonella, nepotism, or the opinion of focus groups led by consultants working for the network.