Character Creation

This will be by no means a comprehensive or even fully applicable post.  Some of the things I say are purely observation on my part, though I do believe that my critical eye will always have at least some value.  Digressions aside, today I'm going to talk about the creation of characters, and what you can do to make your character sympathetic to your reader.  Because this is a broader subject, I'm going to use general examples, all of them real, whether created by me or by a global conglomerate author.

There are two things that I have noticed, in my experience, that cause me to remember a character.  I'm not talking about sympathizing here.  I'm talking about the kind of character that sticks.  The kind of character that hands you a new lens to look at the world through.  The kind of character that shows you new things.  These two things are powering up, and undeserved hardship.

The character Eragon, from the Eragon cycle, is a perfect example of the first trait.  Through his own hard work and the teachings of his mentors, Eragon goes from simple, powerless boy to warrior demigod to literal god at the end of the series.  (At least, that's how I interpreted the end.  Spoilers?)  Because of this, he stuck with me.  His power felt earned.  I felt like I had taken part in the creation of his power.  His power was part mine, because I had read him in the act of gaining that power, step by step, all the way to the end.  I love this about Eragon.  He is the perfect example of the human quest for vicarious empowerment.  There is a scene in the second book, Eldest, where Eragon's older brother, Roran, meets him in the middle of a heated battle on his dragon Sapphira.  While Roran is no weak man, Eragon is so much more powerful than Roran that that scene stuck in my head, and hasn't left since.  I loved that scene.  It was an orgasmic payoff, at the end of two books worth of training.  My wording is a little strong, yes?  That's because that's what I liken it most to.  Okay, maybe I should censor it.  Ice cream.  It's like taking a big bit of ice cream after churning it in a bucket for an hour.

Because of this scene, and others like it, Eragon stuck with me.  I like the way that he works.  And, like the writer that I am, I want to take the best in him and blend it into my own characters.  While I will say that my own experiments with empowerment didn't work so well over the course of a book, I can say that I know of several useful tips to keep in mind while creating an empowered character.  A hero, so to speak, that transcends his boundaries.  

First: the hero must start weak.  Normal.  But--and here is the caveat--he must deserve power.  He must have some skill set, some sort of internalized--normal--power, that he can draw on at the beginning of his story.  For example, Eragon was a hunter.  He was good with the bow.  He was strong.  Another character that becomes quite empowered later on in her story, Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games, is very good with her bow.  The character to be empowered must have something to set them apart from the rest of the normal crowd before they ever begin their journey.  They must be admired, not pitied, from the very beginning.  Admirable, but within reach.  That is the root of vicarious empowerment through the growth of a fictional individual.

Second: the hero must train for every last ounce of his power.  The training is the buildup.  The training is the churning of the ice cream.  Without the training, you have a superhero, rather than an empowered every man.  And, while superheros have their own merits, they are of a different sort than what I'm talking about.  When a character grows in visible increments, it makes the end payoff all the more satisfying.  

Third:  there must be a payoff.  A payoff of the sort where the hero faces up against incredible forces, and dominates them.  His struggles with power are over.  He deserves to win, every last bit of the way.  Of course, he has more powerful enemies, but a moment where, perhaps, the hero lays waste to a legion of little baddies that gave him trouble early on before going to face the ultimate monster is always a good payoff.  As well as the big payoff, there can be little payoffs as well.  I'll give two examples.  In the Eragon series, there are two moments that I remember stand out above the rest: when Eragon looks in the mirror to see his limber body for the first time, and when a mentor comments that he uses his left hand very well, after he was forced to train it earlier because of a broken right wrist.  These little moments reminded me of how powerful Eragon was in the process of becoming, and cemented his growth in my mind.

The second thing that marks a character in my mind is undeserved hardship.  Or, more specifically, rejected vulnerability.  I don't have any characters off the top of my head that are archetypes for this characteristic, but this characteristic does color my attachment to Katniss Everdeen, from The Hunger Games.  Her pitiful, vulnerable state at the beginning of the book cements my involvement with her.  I believe it to be an extension of the human sense of justice.  When we see unjust things happen, things that we believe shouldn't happen to good people, we become involved.  I'm not going to make any grand arguments here.  This is just an observation.  There's that feeling in the pit of the stomach that balls up tight when we feel something unjust happening to a character that we like.  In fact, that unjust thing can cause us to like said character.  It certainly makes them memorable.  

I know from experience that this sort of thing is painful to write.  It hurts, to put the people that I have created in situations that they in no way deserve.  But, I think it's a necessary hurt, that mirrors the feeling that the readers will have when they read said character.  And, that's a good thing.  Emotional involvement is what reading is all about.  

Of course, its easy to overplay this characteristic.  But, you'd be surprised at how much leeway there is, as long as the situation is believable, in the traditional sense.  At the very least, it wouldn't hurt to experiment.  The heartstrings are powerful tools for the writer to pull.  And one of the best ways to pull them, in my experience, is to send just characters into undeserved, unjust situations.  The deeper, the blacker, the better.

That's it.  That's all I have to say on the subject of characters that speak to me.  What kind of characters speak to you?  What kind of characters do you enjoy writing?  Tell me below, in the comments.  

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