Category Archives: character development

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Problems with my main character

As I work through the first few chapters of my current story yet again, one of the main issues I’m trying to address is a weak protagonist. For the last re-write of these chapters I intentionally focused on him having a lack of confidence. I thought this would be a good way to show the character grow as he regained that trait and took charge of his particular situation. Turns out this wasn’t a good idea. The entire story was written so that a protagonist without confidence simply isn’t believable. Damn. Now what?

Another aspect of this character is that he has been born with a special gift of magic. It’s a gift he doesn’t trust, and if anyone knew of it, he’d be ostracized. Not only that, it’s a gift he’d never been taught to fully exploit. There are some other twists to it, but this is the gist. By the end of the story, he will have learned the trick of commanding the better part of his real power, and use it to win the day. At first glance, it’s a pretty subtle bit of character development, but when I look back at what he goes through, it’s not really subtle. In fact, it’s the key change he undergoes through the story. From that perspective, it makes perfect sense that I should focus on his magic as the dynamic element, especially since most of the story revolves around his learning of magic. The next step is to go through each chapter and re-write to make him confident, perhaps to a fault, and instead focus on magic as the key aspect of character development. With luck, this change will make the story more interesting, believable and engaging. If not, well, I’ll just revise again.

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The strong female character

In the chapter I’m banging through right now, I’m just past the part where I’ve introduced a female character, the first of any consequence for the story. She is by far my favorite character. Not so much because of the role she plays, although it’s important, but because she was the first character I’d ever written who simply jumped off the page and told ME who she was. In fact, the plot of my whole story totally sucked until she walked into my main character’s dreams and tries to kill him. (I generally think this sort of description of how characters are created as total flowery bullshit, I usually think about it as a long intense process. However, this really happened. My wife wrote a couple of pages about this woman before she was introduced into the story, and this is what happened when I let the character loose in the events of my story.)

I am fighting hard against the cliche of the type of woman one might think of with bad fantasy. Her favored garb consists of drab cloaks and armor that conceal her nature. (yes she’s still beautiful, but it’s not the first impression of the main character, it will take time for him to see it) She is the body-guard, and not the other way around. She is not the totally indestructible warrior princess either. Yes, she’s very good, and very mouthy about it, but she’s as susceptible to a misstep as any man. I’d describe her relationship with the main character as similar that of Brienne of Tarth and Jamie Lannister from Game of Thrones, though in my story I would say my female is both Jamie and Brienne in one person (I look forward to the day where a reader might read far enough in to argue the point). Also, my female character is much more like to equal my male lead than the Brienne/Jamie situation. In a male-dominated society of my story (Yes, so typical of high fantasy, why not get rid of that – I did consider it. My wife, however, suggested it would be a difficult thing for an amateur such as myself to pull off without sounding patronizing.), having equal females shouldn’t really happen, but I can’t help myself in this case. The character is so strong, she knocks past all of those barriers and demands they stay down. What I hope is that the strategy of allowing her to take charge as she has done so far makes for a believable, engaging and cohesive world, and not a disjointed, confused mess.

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Ripples in the space time continuum

So, I got all my stuff together reasonably early this morning, so I got to go to the coffee shop and spend a few quality hours getting all jittered up and and writing. Except for the fact that I can hardly sit still just now, I feel good about the progress I’ve made so far. Tonight looks good to make quite a bit more progress as well. Of course, I haven’t checked my work e-mail, so all that could change.

Sometime this past week, I was thinking hard about one of my main characters, and realized the voice I’d tried to give him wasn’t working. It didn’t make for consistent reactions through different parts of the story. It took a bit more character history writing to figure out what voice would work, but I think I got there. So, my task today was to go back through and revise three or four chapters, hitting all of the spots where one of these characters appears, in order to work on giving him that new voice.

After bopping around for a while, updating dialogue, and feeling super good about myself, I hit a point where one of the characters had been written to react in exactly the opposite manner than he had done in an earlier chapter. I wouldn’t have even thought about it except that I was reviewing all of the conversations for consistency of voice, and this one was obvious. It wasn’t a major problem, I don’t think, I just went back and added a few sentences to explain the change his position on the matter, the circumstances already set it up for him to change his position anyhow. Unfortunately, this edit brought my attention to other issues of consistency. Mostly stuff about who said what and when.

Needless to say, this became an exercise in flipping around through all of the chapters to make sure everyone was reacting to situations in a consistent manner, as I progressed through the dialogue re-writing. For the most part, I was looking for instances where new information was being presented as known, or known information was being presented as new. Nothing seemed to require major changes, just a few well-placed sentences, and in a couple instances a paragraph or two. A lot of the inconsistencies appear to have come from earlier revisions where I was smoothing out dialogue so it felt more natural, and less like an information dump. Based on the issues, it appears that I had moved a bit of explanation, then removed it later because I think I thought it had been addressed somewhere else. I’m nearly to the point where I’m back to working on new material, and so it should be easier to prevent those inconsistencies.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, except that I’m making progress. I suppose this is also a note to be careful when you’re revising, even small details, because they can have a way of rippling outward in your story from the point the change was made, even if it’s a tiny change. The longer you let those go, the bigger they’re going to seem to the reader.