(a.k.a. an insight on characters' wants and needs)
“[..] there's way worse things that can happen to you than dying” is --- loosely what Patrick Rothfuss stated in episode 6.14 of the Writing Excuses podcast, when referring to fictional characters. At the time, I was planning on killing a character, and the statement disturbed me enough that it stuck to the back of my mind, and as it bore its cosy nest and fell into a deep slumber, there remained only its snores to titillate the borders of my consciousness from time to time.
It’s only months later while re-working my character arcs that I came to face a hard truth about my writing: I did not know much about character arcs. I will not define character arcs here, because
As I just said, I’m not very good at them, and
There are many experienced authors who can explain it better out there. One of my favourites is K.M. Weiland, who does a wonderful job here. Do check it out!
My internal struggle, even after reading Weiland’s articles, is real. There are writing challenges that I feel fairly confident in tackling, but character arc isn’t one of them. Build a whole world out of thin air and periodically disconnecting neurons? No problem! Design a plot arc from end to finish with obstacles, complications, subplots and twists? Sure, I can do that! Maybe not perfectly, but at least the thought is not absolutely daunting. Moving my character up and down imaginary sliders of character development, however? Not even sure I understand what that means… I understand the words and how they relate to each other, but I have no idea where to start. So, as always when I don’t understand something, I opened a new tab in my browser and started researching.
Brandon Sanderson's Character Sliders
I listened (several times) to Brandon Sanderson’s 2020 lectures on Creative Writing at BYU, where he lays out his theory of moving your characters’ personality up and down sliders that he calls “Likeability”, “Proactivity”, and “Competence”.
To summarize:
Likeability | how much does your character’s personality make the reader like them? |
Proactivity | how much does your character simply react to external events versus taking things into their own hands and making their own destiny? |
Competence | how good is your character at what they do? |
The more likeable, proactive, and / or expert your character is, the more they will charm the readers. Typically, a villain in a story might be very competent (and proactive), but unlikeable.
Sanderson’s advice: as your character navigates through the story, make sure to move your character along each of these sliders, regardless of where they started at the beginning of the story. Now that’s all very good in theory, but how does one go about doing this in practice? You’ve probably notice the circularity of Sanderson’s argument: to make a character likeable, move their likeability slider up… Hm. So, how do you make a character likeable, and how do you move this emotion up and down throughout a story? How do you make them proactive? I guess to me, competence is actually the easier one to apply. Maybe I should specialise in villains!
Obviously these tips are very useful to keep in mind when developing your characters throughout the story. Still frustrated though, I went to find complementary advice elsewhere in my quest to understand how to make good characters. You might be wondering why I’m sweating this so much. Perhaps all I’m saying so far seems very straightforward and easy to apply to your own characters, and you don’t see where the problem is. If that’s the case, congratulations! You are a master at character development and you have all my admiration (and a little of jealousy, yes, yes). But for me, this was not enough. Something was lacking.
Why Is Character Arc So Important To A Story's Development?
I don’t know about you, but when I read a story where the plot and setting are good enough, but the main character falls short of feeling real and having a compelling personality, it just leaves a sour taste in my mouth. You could strip down plot and setting to a minimum, and still have a moving story that involves the reader, so long as your characters are relatable, dynamic, and ultimately, so long as the reader cares for them in spite or sometimes because of their shortcomings, and wants them to come out of the story a different person. The contrary, unfortunately, is not true (barring a few exceptions).
If you’re wondering whether there actually are stories completely centred around the character, one that comes to mind is Sleep, by Haruki Murakami. I personally prefer it when the characters tie to a rich setting and plot, but that’s not the point here. The point I’m trying to make is that characters are instrumental to a compelling story1, and if you butcher it, there’s no amount of cool worldbuilding and unexpected plot twists that will fix it. Well, unless of course your name’s Isaac Asimov.
In each well-written character you read, there is a part of yourself to be found, and vice-versa: every outstanding character will stay with you and change you and your worldview, even ever so slightly. That is why I’ve kept digging into the art of character development.
Can The Science Of Psychology Inform Character Arcs?
Following advice from my writing group, I’ve turned to actual research on the actual human mind to try and see whether it could help me build compelling character arcs for my stories. This appealed to my scientific mind straight away, and so I dived head first into the rabbit hole. I listened to online lectures on behaviour; learned about the dimensions of character (which, by the way, vary depending on who you ask, 3 to 4 to 5); I read too many articles on the determining factors of personality to remember… And after days of research, I felt more lost than ever. No wonder: psychology is a vast domain in and of itself, and people spend decades studying it! What’s more, by its very complex nature, human psychology is far from finding consensus among its own experts. Still, I’m keeping all the research and interesting articles I’ve read under my sleeve, because I have hope that one day, it will all click together and help me write better, realer characters into my stories. But eventually, I had to stop myself for fear of never coming out of the rabbit hole. I suppose my problem up until this point, was that I was looking for some neat formulaic way to design the perfect characters for each situation. Which is absurd, because for your character to feel real, you have to account for the messy part of human psychology and life.
Defeated, I went back to storytelling, and found fascinating views on how psychology can inform your character arcs. Below are a few examples that you might want to read yourself.
Wants VS Needs
This was all well and nice, yet the more I learned about character arcs, the less I felt I knew about it. To tell you the truth, I was disheartened and thought I’d never manage to give proper arcs to my characters. During my research, I stumbled more than once upon something you may already know or have heard of yourself: character wants versus character needs. Now, this is a huge thing among authors and screenwriters, so I’ll only give you one general reference of where to learn about it and a quick definition, but you can easily find more online in blog posts or video tutorials.
Wants | what your character thinks they want for themselves, for instance to have a comfortable routine in a quaint and quiet home (Bilbo in The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien). |
Needs | what your character truly needs to grow, for instance to discover the outside world through adventure and make meaningful connections along the way (Bilbo in The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien). |
It’s not always easy to identify your character’s wants and needs. There might be several for a single character, because in real life, we all want multiple things, and might also need different things at once. The character’s wants need not be the exact opposite of their needs. However, characters' needs and wants that tie into the plot and are supported by the worldbuilding will make your story feel complete, tight and satisfying. The progression in the character’s journey throughout the story will answer the character’s needs and wants. It might be a negative answer, where the character doesn’t get what they should, for instance in a tragedy. But the keypoint that made everything click in my head was this: if at the end of the story, your character gets what they want, then it’s satisfying to both the reader and the character. If they also get what they need, you have a perfect world with a very happy ending! If they get what they need, but not what they want, you have a bittersweet ending (I suppose this would work too with giving the want but not the need) that will move and keep your reader thinking about your story long after they’ve closed your book (Not convinced? Watch this). Keep this in mind.
To Kill Or Not To Kill Your Character
Now you may remember that at the beginning of the post I quoted Patrick Rothfuss in a seemingly unrelated topic. Bear with me as I repeat his words a second time: “[..] there's way worse things that can happen to you than dying”.
If you put this together with the idea of giving your character what they need, but not what they want, you might finally be seeing where my long-winded post is going. There was this character in a story that I wanted to kill. Over time, as I got closer to writing the end of the first draft, and as I got to know my character a bit better, I started feeling uncomfortable with that ending. I was asking myself how I could make it work and convince the reader that this was the inevitable end for my character… When I myself didn’t believe it anymore (though I wouldn’t admit to myself)! When I finally did see the truth for what it was, I was horrified: what ending could I give my character, now that they weren’t dying anymore? Then it hit me: I will give them what they need, but not what they want. And, at least in that case, this turned out to be much harder for my character than to die, because now they had to deal with the consequences instead of taking the easy way out.
In short, if there’s two things that I want you to remember from this post, it’s this:
Give your character what they need, not what they want
Don’t kill your character because it’s the easy way out. Kill them only if it’s the hardest thing for them.
If you need help developing your character(s), get in touch with me at The Story Witches, editors.
P.S.: All supporting visuals are originals. I’m not a great artist, but I had fun making those, and hopefully it didn’t hurt your eyes too much.
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