Characters that Matter

Think of your story as a body: head, shoulders, knees, and toes. Plot is the skeleton. Characters are the muscles, nerves, and organs. The things that move the bones. You need both. Skeletons can’t move without muscles, and I don’t want to know how a body without bones would move. Thinking about it gives me the heebie-geebies. Anyway, muscles, nerves, and organs are what keep the body functional and healthy. Your story will suck if your characters suck. So how do you make characters that don’t suck?

The rules according to Pixar are as follows: " What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal? Give your characters some opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way? If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free." Starting to understand why there are 22 rules? Yeah, me too.

Opposites Attract

What is your character good at? Comfortable with?

All my characters start as Mary Poppins: practically perfect in every way. This is boring, but it’s a start. Start figuring out what your character is good at doing. What are they passionate about, what do they like, what are their goals? Create the perfect person. Then, add the opposite to their personality. The dark side of their superpowers. The character’s flaws are usually just their strengths taken to absolute extreme. What would a person be like on the edge of breaking? Look at the other end of the spectrum from where they are on a sunny day.

Challenge them. Throw the polar opposite at them.

Once again I'd like to add an example from a Pixar movie: Buzz Lightyear and Woody the Cowboy. Woody is traditional, safe, and a confidant leader. Buzz is unconventional, innovative, and a pioneer. And obviously they clash in the first movie because they are opposites.

That's why they make the perfect team. Just like you use the opposite of the positive qualities of your character to give them flaws, you can create whole characters that are opposite of each other. These characters then either balance each other out, or clash to make the conflict of the story.

You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way? If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

Not everyone can be a James Bond, nor should everyone a James Bond. It's unrealistic, and unrelatable. Unrelatable Mary Poppins is boring. To remedy this, just write how you, the author, would respond to the situation if it happened to you. That usually helps me when I'm writing. I take myself out of the ordinary life I live and place myself in the shoes of the character I'm writing about. The trick is not to sugar coat it. No one will read it but you, so be honest about it. Then, once I have a first draft of it, I rewrite it as if it were the character themselves and not me.

Give your characters some opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

This rule goes hand in hand with the previous rule. Perfect people don't have opinions. So it's a good thing your characters aren't perfect. Everyone's got armpits, and they all stink. Just like opinions. Yes, even Mary Poppins has stinky arm pits.

The Editor gods

Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

Ah, the Editor gods. Us writers must make sacrifices to them from time to time. What this rule is trying to get across is that we often complicate things more than they actually are. The delete button is how we use this rule. We often write more things into our story than what is necessary for us to get our message across to the audience. How can you tell if it is necessary or not, you ask? I think that question alone is a topic for another article. But you can delete characters pretty quick with this method that helped me with a story:

Does the character move the story (plot)?

Do you really need that sage advice from a character that the audience only interacts with once? Probably not. Do you really need the spunky side-kick that only gets into trouble, when the main character can just do that themselves? Nope. Do you really need, like, three villains? Abso-freaking-loutly not.

Can another character do multiple things that advance the plot?

Can the work of those three villains be rolled into one? Um, yes. Do you really need the sage, the side kick, and the girlfriend to all say the same thing in order to get the point across? Nah, I don’t think so.

Is the message diluted through multiple characters’ mouths? What if it was only one character and one message?

Do the “side characters” move the plot in another act, so that’s why they’re in this act?

These are just a few questions that you could ask yourself that could combine characters for your story.

If you are anything like me, every story, whether flash fiction or six part saga, must have a plethora of characters. It really isn’t necessary, even though I think it is. I love creating likable, relatable characters. Even creating villains is a joy to me as a writer. The scummier, the better. It’s my favorite thing about writing.

It was a hard pill to swallow the day I discovered I could tell the exact same story with a fraction of the characters. No plot point was lost, no underlying message overlooked. It was the exact same story, but with two characters instead of twenty. No kidding. And to tell you the truth, I thought I lost a lot of the story, the value, and the message. I thought I was killing my story. But really, I set it free.

No gobbeldy-gook, no spunky side-kick for the punchline, no sage advice from a character the audience meets once and then forgets about. The story I was telling was no longer diluted. The message came through clearer, more poignant, than before. Instead of multiple characters saying the same thing, it was one, and boy did that improve the impact of the script.

So this Pixar rule will probably be one of the hardest for a writer to accept and put to use, especially if you’re like me and the characters are your lil babies and you realize you have to sacrifice them to the Editor gods.

This has gone on long enough, so I'll keep it short. Give your characters opposite characters to interact with, give them opinions and real reactions, and if you have too many, just cut some of them out.