The greatest stories often have characters that feel so real when looking back on them you almost believe they actually existed. But, of course, they’re not and if you come into the writing process trying to mimic real people down to the T, you will have a very hard time constructing good characters.
Why? Because real people are crazy complicated. We’re full of paradoxes, and a lot of times the choices we make seem random and a bit out of character. We’re not as simple as story characters. Obviously, good writers draw inspiration from real people, and at times, even create characters who are or were real at one time. But even if the characters are based on actual people, writers still reduce their complexities down so that they can align better with the specific story, just as they do with all their characters. Nothing more, nothing less.
But this post isn’t about creating good characters. That was written in this last piece about character engines, which I definitely recommend you check out before reading this. No, this post is about what to do after you create your characters.
Specifically, I want to go over how you create the right dynamic relationships between your ensemble. So let's assume you constructed all of your characters, from your main to your secondary ones. How do you get them to interact with each other in a way that drives conflict, meaning, and the possibility for character growth? And how do you do all of this in a way that indirectly expresses the central message of your story?
And here you thought that all you had to do was create your characters. No, no, no my friend. That is just the first step. Now you have to get them to interact with each other in a way that meaningfully drives the story. Let me show you how to do that.
Conflict Versus Opportunity
Sometimes we have single-character stories, but more often than not, our stories have a batch of characters, and as writers, we want them to interact with each other to drive the plot and meaning behind the plot. But any kind of interaction, even if it’s logical, isn’t sufficient to make your story move. While there are an infinite number of ways to build character interaction, most of the choices you make should ideally be things that either drive conflict or opportunity for growth.
Let’s take the movie, “Forest Gump” as an example. The opportunity between Jenny and Forest is their love for one another. Jenny is a broken woman who just needs a good person in her life to love her unconditionally, and Forest is someone who often gets rejected by society for his mental handicap and needs someone to love. So what they need in their lives and the opportunity they can provide one another is a loving relationship.
But what really makes this movie so remarkable is the conflict that also exists within their relationship, which stretches on through the whole duration of their lives. Jenny is a wild drug addict who does everything wrong and Forest is a good guy who does…Well, pretty much everything right…Surprisingly. How they live their lives and the stark difference in their mental capabilities is what creates conflict in their relationship.
It’s this interwoven opportunity and conflict that makes them so interesting to watch, and if you notice, every single interaction they have expresses this opportunity or conflict in some way. Take, for instance, when Forest meets Jenny for the first time on the bus. She offers him a seat when no other kid wants to sit next to him. We’re seeing an introduction to that opportunity as Jenny is already a broken girl living with an abusive father and Forest is clearly being rejected by his peers. So Jenny needs someone to love her and Forest needs someone to love.
But then, years later when he meets Jenny at her dorm, the conflict is shown in the form of Forest ruining her date because he thought this guy was attacking her in his car when really he was just making out with her. This is an expression of the disparity between their mental capabilities and how they live their lives so differently. But then the opportunity is shown to us once again when they go back to her room and have an intimate moment. She was on a date with a guy who just wanted her body instead of with Forest who loved her unconditionally, no matter how ugly her life was.
So when it comes to character interactions, It’s really just a back and forth between conflict and opportunity for growth. And when characters interact, almost everything from action to dialogue expresses one or the other or both in some way. Now with that out of the way, let me show you how to create meaningful opportunities and conflicts between your characters.
The Character Web
Meet the Character Web. This is what I use to map out my character relationships. Now If my story only has a few characters with obvious conflicts and opportunities, I generally don’t use this template, but if I’m dealing with a complicated, dynamic ensemble, then yeah, this really comes in handy and helps me focus on the most important underlying elements of my relationships. So how does this work? It’s super simple, even though it looks a little complicated.
First, let's examine what’s inside the circles. You see W, D, N? That stands for weakness, desire, and need. As you can guess, this is where I input each character’s moral weakness, desire, and need. If you don’t know what these mean in the context of writing, I highly suggest you read this before moving on. Now, why do I only write weakness, desire, and need instead of other character attributes? Because when you brush away everything else and only focus on these things, it makes it easier to create meaningful conflicts and opportunities between your characters. Think about it.
The opportunity between your characters is the opportunity they share with one another, which allows them to grow. The conflict is the thing that creates the tension between your characters and prevents growth from happening. But to know how they should grow or be prevented from growing, you have to have your blueprint design for how your characters even grow, and that blueprint, of course, is the dynamic relationship between a character’s weakness, desire, and need.
With this character web, you can basically plot all of your character’s weaknesses, desires, and needs. Then you can put them side-by-side, which can make it easier for you to write the opportunities and conflicts in between your characters, and doing that can help you determine how their interactions allow or prevent growth from occurring. The inherent conflict and alignment that manifests from each character’s opposing weakness, need, and desire is what helps you figure out the appropriate opportunities and conflicts. So let's start with developing a central conflict.
Say you have two characters. One of them believes that achieving greatness means everything. The other believes that there are more important things than achieving greatness. Those are our two moral weaknesses that inherently compete with each other, right? Now, let's say we also have two competing desires. One wants to create a great empire that rules over everything and the other wants a world ruled by the people.
With this information, then, we can begin developing a central conflict between these two characters, which in this case might be the conflict between how the World should be governed. It’s this central conflict that prevents growth because each of them is driven to stop one another, and as they pursue their goals, their extreme focus on the other’s faulty approaches to governing blinds them from seeing their own faults in how they govern.
The one who believes the empire should rule over everything is using draconian measures to bring about a world order, which overshadows the benefits of that type of governing. And the one who believes that the world should be ruled by the people doesn’t have any real way to structure their own cause or a World order that’s as effective as the empire, which also overshadows the benefits of that system.
So through this central conflict derived from their weaknesses and desires, we can see that the conflict prevents both from seeing the value in each other’s beliefs, which further emboldens them to lean heavier on their own flawed ways of governing, and thus, they are prevented from growing.
But what about the central opportunity between the protagonist and antagonist? In other words, what is the opportunity they share with each other that allows them to grow? To establish this, it’s good to know what each character needs to understand in order to grow (the need). So in this example, the tyrant who wants to rule over everything may need to understand that achieving greatness is important but not at the expense of human suffering, and the ruled by the people guy might need to understand that human life is important, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to be great or do great things.
With an understanding of their needs, we can create an opportunity for the characters to grow, and in this example, a strong opportunity might be the benefits that each system offers. Because of the competition and clashing, the conflict between these two beliefs prevents growth. But it simultaneously creates an opportunity for growth because their failures in defeating one another allow them to see the downsides to their way of governing.
The tyrannical empire is organized and efficient but controlling and cruel to people they disagree with, and the ruled by the people approach is messy and less efficient, but it’s also more equitable and fair. So through their successes in defeating one another, they fail to grow, but through their failures in defeating one another, they succeed in growing.
Establishing a central conflict and opportunity in your stories allows your characters to see how they’re better and worse than each other, which can help them fine-tune their moral outlook and grow…Depending on whether you want them to or not. In fact, you can simply have your protagonist and antagonist compete without ever learning anything.
But by expressing your characters using the approaches explained above, the audience can learn and grow from the experience, which is ultimately what matters most. As long as your audience understands what your characters need to understand in order to grow, then that's all you need. And if you design your character’s relationships to express both the opportunities and conflicts, then you can instill meaningful growth in the tension and alignment between your ensemble.
Conclusion
So that’s basically how you create meaningful interactions with your characters. It's a lot easier than how I described it, especially since the central conflict and opportunity are usually inherent in the character designs themselves. So most of the time, you probably don’t have to spell it all out for yourself.
But sometimes the central conflict and opportunity between your characters aren’t that obvious. That’s when this character web comes in handy. It’s nice because it allows you to cut all the meat and potatoes out, which makes it’s easier to connect the core elements of your ensemble together in a more powerful way that can clearly express your character growth and the central message of your story.
Hope you got a lot out of this post. I know it was kind of a complicated one, so to make it easier, here’s a filled-in version of a character web so you can better understand how this works for developing meaningful character interaction. You don’t have to do this for your character webs, but for the sake of giving clarity and context, I added in the ensemble descriptions, logline, and central message.
Best of luck in your writing endeavors!
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Story Prism, LLC