Designing The Character Engine

How to Create Good Characters That Move

To the average movie-viewer, developing a good character within a story seems pretty straightforward, but anyone who has ever tried to build one from scratch...Well.  You know you have a better chance of making a million dollars in crypto than you do creating a great character, never mind a great story.

Character design is by far one of the most challenging aspects of writing because there are so many layers in a character that needs to be carefully crafted.  It isn’t just simply about creating a fake bio of an imaginary person.  There’s a whole mechanical structure behind great characters and how they’re unpacked in the story, which requires many meticulous considerations.

I know.  It sucks.  You got into writing because you love coming up with stories and you think that since you’ve been writing on your computer for most of your life, you can easily write your great ideas into memorable tales with great characters.  You may very well have great ideas, but great ideas are a dime a dozen.  It’s all about the execution.  That’s precisely why there are more great ideas out in the world than there are great stories filmed and sold. 

Fear not, though, because it is possible to make great stories and great characters if you know what you’re doing.  But even then, it’s still really, really hard.  So, here’s my take on developing strong characters and I don’t know.  Maybe it’ll help you in your endeavors.  Full disclosure.  I’m not a pro, but I’ve obsessively written stories for over eight years pretty much every day for hours on end, and I’m currently using that knowledge to assist my brother in developing this app called Story Prism, which utilizes deep-learning tools that will help writers land their creative ideas faster.    

So, yeah, you should take my advice as nothing more than just that.  Advice.  In fact, you should probably do that with all writing advice whether it comes from a pro or an amataeur because at the end of the day we all have our own way of doing things and.  Well.  This is just my way of creating the characters for the kinds of stories that I love to write about and it works for me so perhaps it will work for you.  

What is a Character and Why Do We Build Them?

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of creating a character, let's talk about what a character is and why we build them in our stories because even though the answers to these questions may seem obvious, there’s actually a lot more to it than you think.  

Most people think a character in a story is an imaginary person and for non-writers this is a sufficient definition, but for writers it’s important to understand that the imaginary person is actually just an illusion.  For a writer, a character is more of an imaginary vehicle that carries some representative aspect of the premise and moral conversation through a plot.  Okay, that’s confusing, so let's unpack this a little.

In my last post, I discussed the importance of developing your premise and moral conversation and how all the choices you make for your story should ideally tie back to these two things.  The characters you build are no exception to this.  They are imaginary vehicles that you supplant your premise and moral conversation into.  And I say vehicle because you design them in a way that gets them to move and take action.  And if you do this so that their actions and dialogue interactions reflect your premise and moral conversation, then you have a character or a meaningful vehicle to carry your point across the story.

After all, what else can possibly move your point across a plot better than a simulated human being with real needs and desires?  Like, imagine watching a movie about a tree.  Sure, if you stretch your creative imagination, you can make it interesting, but most will agree that using characters in place of a tree will make your story much easier to turn into something interesting.  That’s because with characters you can much more easily have them make moral choices, which we use to express the deeper meaning behind our stories.  And by moral choices, I mean choices that are both big and small that your character makes, which suggests a kind of outlook they have on life.

But again, the characters themselves and how they appear to be invented individuals with motives is just an illusion because, at the end of the day, they are nothing more than the compilation of choices you make to build them in just the right framework.  

So what does that framework look like and what sort of choices do we need to make when designing this framework?

The Anatomy of Character Design

As I said before, there’s a ton of different ways to create your characters, so don’t assume that these are rules, but for me, it’s helpful to really dig into the dynamic relationship between the characters:

• Physical weakness

• Moral weakness

• Lie they tell themselves

• Desire 

• Need

You need to figure out the answers to all of these components in a way that allows them to relate to one another.  I know, that sounds super vague so we’re gonna break all of these down step-by-step and explain how to connect these into a logical matrix that allows your character to take action in a way that expresses your premise.

Physical and Moral Weakness

When I begin to write a character, I like to give them some kind of weakness, not because it makes them interesting or thrilling, but because it gives me a way to express their moral outlook on life to an audience.  If you just assign a random kind of weakness or trait that causes them to do things that are interesting or thrilling, then it won’t feel real or meaningful.  So, how do you pick the right weakness that adds value to your character and drives the story?

First, always, always, ALWAYS consider your premise whenever you make a writing choice.  That should be in the back of your mind at all times.  Second, consider breaking your weakness into two parts: Physical weakness and moral weakness.

Physical weakness is something a character does that indirectly expresses a deeper reason for why they do what they do, which of course is always tied back to the premise in some way.  Typically, a physical weakness is something that hurts the main character or others, but it doesn’t necessarily have to.  It just needs to be something that holds them back from living a better way.  Perhaps the simplest example of this is a drug addict.  A drug addict’s physical weakness is their addiction to a drug and that, of course, hurts them in many ways from health issues to screwing over loved ones just to get their fix.  

But what is the reason behind their drug addiction?  Depression?  Anxiety?  Boredom?  All of these may be adequate answers, but they’re not the right ones for this particular question because if you think about it, all of these reasons are still physical weaknesses.  In order to get to a deeper understanding of this person’s drug addiction, you have to consider their moral weakness.

Moral weakness is basically the character’s initial belief or outlook on life at the beginning of the story and it’s this outlook that manifests in the form of the physical weaknesses.  So going back to the drug addict, if we wanted to come up with a logical moral weakness for their addiction we could say the character believes that instant gratification is better than actual achievement through hard work.  That now makes sense because certain drugs can provide an instant sense of achievement even though nothing was actually achieved and it can be rationalized that because of his belief in instant gratification, he became a failure, which led to depression, which led to drugs and possibly even selling drugs.  Now you have the beginnings of a moral conversation you can indirectly weave into a crime drama.

What’s really interesting about the moral weakness beyond the fact that it can make better sense of your character’s physical weaknesses is the fact that it can literally guide you through all of their decisions in the story and how they change or not.  This deeper truth about your character at the beginning of your story is also a way of introducing the point that you want to make at the end of the film by showing a way of life that runs against it.  So your character embodies that truth, which is expressed through their physical weaknesses.  And when you create a moral weakness for your antagonist and secondary characters to challenge your main character, it then becomes possible to have a deep conversation with your audience without having to actually have one.

The Lie They Tell Themselves:

Now, how do you keep a character in denial of their moral weakness or faulty outlook so that you can have control over when you want them to change in the story, such as at the end, which is typically the case?  I mean, let's say our drug addict is hanging out with a friend who tells them that he’s a mess because he believes that instant gratification and cutting corners to success is the way to happiness and meaning.  So the drug addict agrees because he finally sees what he believes deep down is causing him to fail and so he decides to quit drugs, get an honest job, and start a family.  The end.  Cool.  You just wrote a very boring character because if they can actually see their moral weakness clearly without having some kind of rationale to hide them from that deeper outlook on life, then why not make the adjustments and live better?

That’s why you want to give them a true outlook they have on life and hide them from fully understanding that outlook by having them deny that they even have it to begin with.  So let's say the drug addict has a family he started, but lost and now he wants to get them back.  He starts drug dealing to make money, which he uses to show his family that he’s becoming more responsible.  

The lie that he would tell himself to justify selling drugs would be that he’s doing all of this for his family.  But in reality, he’s doing this because he believes that instant gratification and cutting corners are the best way to become successful.  Otherwise, if it was just about the family, he would have gotten an honest job and worked hard.  But because it’s deeper and more reflective of his own moral flaws rather than simply being an obstacle to overcome, they lie to themselves because the truth is too painful, and revealing that truth to them too early pretty much ends the whole story.  So, it's very important to control all of that with the lie.  That way you can reveal the truth to them and the audience when the moment is right.

Desire:

This is by far the easiest component of a character.  Desire or goal as some might call it is the thing that your character is after in the story.  And when I mean what they’re after, I mean that literally.  Maybe it’s winning the gold medal or getting that job or taking down a corrupt leader.  Whatever the case is, it’s just simply a thing they’re trying to achieve in the story.  And yes, it should most certainly relate to your premise and moral conversation.  That’s a constant in writing.  

Now, the real question is, why do we give our characters a desire in the first place?  Well, think about it.  You give them a weakness, which reflects their flawed moral outlook on life and you reveal this through physical weaknesses that keep the person from becoming better.  You add in a lie that they tell themselves and express a false belief or an excuse to justify their actions and hide from them what they truly believe.  Great.  Now, how do you get them to move and do something?  This is where desire or goal comes into play because you can have all of the components, but if they have nothing to strive for or achieve, then they’ll just hang out and I don’t know, have conversations with their friends.

Even if the goal or desire isn’t explicitly clear like winning a gold medal, it should still be something.  For instance, take the famous hang-out movie, “Dazed and Confused”.  Seems like it’s just a bunch of kids in the late 70s hanging out on the last day of school.  There doesn’t really seem to be much of a specific goal or desire, but if you examine closely enough there’s actually a number of goals at different points in the movie with different characters.  The main character’s desire was to quit football and walk his own beat despite the peer pressure.  The freshmen kid’s goal was to fit in with the older crowd.  The nerd who gets picked on wants to stand up for himself and be a man, his guy friend wants to hook up with this freshmen, and his redheaded friend wants to hook up with this creepy older guy who still hangs out with the kids.  

Pretty much everyone had a goal of some sort even if it wasn’t clear in the beginning and it’s these goals that got all of them to do things in the movie.  Now, the reason why we saw multiple goals in, “Dazed and Confused” was because we had an ensemble of characters we followed, but each character had one singular goal, so when you design your goal, don’t give your characters multiple goals.  Sure, you can and should give them mini goals, but they should really all be in service of that larger goal.

Lastly, giving your character a desire or goal is a good way to guide you in your plot.  A premise and moral conversation can guide you on tone, character makeup, and pretty much all the choices you make, including how you design your plot.  But a plot is something that goes from point A to B.  So, how do you define your starting and ending point?  How do you define the journey?  You give them a goal.  David Mamet actually describes the plot as one giant “desire line” because after you establish who your character is, their weakness, setting, setup, and inciting incident, you reveal a goal for them to achieve, which essentially puts them on a desire line or a course that they must journey through in order to achieve the goal.  

But again, not every story is the same and a lot of times the goal and their journey to achieve it or not isn’t so obvious or clearly defined, which does make their plots ill-defined such as the case with, “American Honey”.  Really, that was just a bunch of rag-tag drifters traveling America selling magazine subscriptions.  There wasn’t a gold medal or a giant competitor to destroy.  But within that world, you had a main character who fell for a guy who was going out/enslaved by the head of their operation, and falling for him was going to stir the nest, which of course, it did.  So in a way, she did have a goal to go out with this guy, but at the same time, she also didn’t have clear and concrete plans on how to go about it, let alone what to do if they were to start dating.  Yet, the movie was brilliant and entertaining the whole way through.

Need:

The last component that I build for my characters is their need.  Now, what do I mean by a character’s need?  It sounds like I’m talking about what they physically need in life, but that’s not what character need means in the context of character development.  A character’s need refers to what a character needs to know in order to understand the error of their initial moral outlook on life at the beginning of the story and thus, change or not change upon discovering that understanding towards the end.  And, it is also the synthesis between the main character’s initial moral outlook on life and the antagonist’s moral outlook throughout the movie.  Yeah, I know.  Confusing again.  So, let me break this down.

Okay, so going back to the drug addict/dealer scenario, we have a guy who believes that instant gratification and cutting corners are the best way to achieve success, but he denies that he believes this by claiming that his actions are because he wants to provide a future for his family.  

We have his physical weakness, which is the drug addiction, the moral weakness, which is the belief in instant gratification, and the lie he tells himself, which is that he’s providing for his family.  So, let's say he ends up taking an opportunity that can either make him rich or land him in prison.  The opportunity, whether it's a big drug deal or a bank heist, is his desire, which sets him on a course or plotline to some kind of end, and throughout this journey, we give him an antagonist who impedes his progress, we give him some wins, some losses, and intensify those losses more and more towards a climax and it’s somewhere around here whether before or at the moment of the climax when our character finally owns up to the lies they’ve been telling themselves.  

In this case, it’s the fact that he was doing it for his family.  This owning up allows him to then see his moral weakness and the real reason why he did what he did, which in this case it was his belief that instant gratification is the best way to success.  Now, if you craft your antagonistic forces to be representative of the opposite view of what the main character believes in the beginning, then you can set it up so that by the end the character learns that the best way to live is through a synthesis between what he believed at the beginning and what the antagonistic forces believe and challenge him with throughout the story.  This synthesis between the main character’s moral weakness and the antagonist’s moral weakness is what our character’s need is.

So if our main character, the drug addict/dealer in the beginning believes that instant gratification is the best way to live, maybe our antagonist is a play-by-the-rules cop who lives a boring safe life because they believe that prudence and hard, honest work is the best way to live.  You could then show the drug dealer living it up as he makes it big while the honest cop spends his time at the dirty laundromat when he’s off the clock.  But because the dealer is doing highly illegal things, it all catches up to him so that by the end, he ends up in prison, but the antagonist ends up continuing a boring life.  So what the character needs to learn whether he does or doesn’t is that instant gratification and living a safe boring life are not the best ways to live.  Rather the best way to live is to be safe, but also not be afraid to take intelligent risks for a better, more enjoyable life.  That right there is the character’s need.  

And if that is the need, then you could really cement this in an epilogue where the main character gets out and decides to write a book about his crazy life where he makes a good chunk of money, a movie deal, and a nice new career being a traveling guest speaker to talk about how it’s not worth cutting corners for the instant gratification.  And you can show the cop continue his boring life where maybe he sees the guy he locked away on a famous talk show.  All of that shows that the best way to live is to play it safe and by the rules but to also not be afraid to take those intelligent risks that can move you to a better life.

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it.  Heady stuff, I know, but characters are hard to build and they’re very important to build them in just the right way for your story.  So, to make this more understandable below is a template that I generally like to use when developing my characters.  Feel free to use or adapt it in any way you like.  Also, I didn’t mention this prior, but personally, I like to add a small bio, just to initially get my head around the character.  But, it’s not important at all to the story because a character’s life begins at the start of the story and finishes at the end.  Some aspects of a backstory, such as a traumatic event that shaped the character into who they are today can be relevant to specific stories, but having full-fledged detailed backstories isn’t important.  However, it is good for introducing yourself to the character that you plan to build. 

Also, if you notice, I added a section for what they might say.  I like to do this because it really helps me establish my baseline tone for how the character sounds and operates in dialogue.  It’s also a good exercise for summing up all of the components of your character into one sentence.

Then for extra measure, I add a final section, which is just a short summary description of the character.  All of this is what I call a “Character engine” because just like an engine, your character is made up of these components described above.  And when combined, it allows your character to move and take action.  If the components aren’t designed properly or if you don’t consider all of them, then your character may move poorly or not at all.  And if you have none of these elements...Well, then you just have a car frame.

So check out this template and I hope it’s able to help you on your own journey.  Until next time! 

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Name: Marcus

Bio: Grew up in a bad neighborhood with no opportunities.  Lived with a single mom who did some shady stuff to make ends meet.  He’s been pretty much on his own since he was young.  Tried to do well in school, but he didn’t have the patience for learning.  Marcus got a minimum wage job as a young man but sold drugs on the side.  He put on a clean front, and although his friends were degenerates always getting high, he only messed around with weed and a little bit of alcohol whenever there was a party or get-together.  Marcus was after a future in a world without one.  Later on, he met a beautiful woman and fell for her hard.  They had a kid and since he needed more money, he started hustling full-time with bigger supplies, which eventually got him busted.  Marcus then spent a few years in prison before finally getting out.  Now he wants to win his family back, but the only way to do so is to show that he’s responsible. 

Weakness:

Physical: Impatient, too smart for his own good, opportunist, overly optimistic, risk-taker.

Moral: Believes that instant gratification and cutting corners are the smart way to become successful.

Lie They Tell Themselves:  He’s doing it for his family

Desire: To pull off this hustle and win favor with the family he lost

Need: To understand that instant gratification for a better life should come from safe, intelligent risks, not ones that will hurt you or the ones you love.

Something They Would Say:  “Those who win?  They’re the biggest risk-takers and they’ll put their whole life on something they believe in just because they can’t possibly live knowing they could have done something for a better future”. 

Summary:

Marcus grew up in a bad neighborhood with no opportunities eventually getting into small-time drug dealing.  He was after a future in a world without one.  He ends up falling in love with a woman and has a kid with her.  He ends up getting deeper into the drug game before going to prison and losing his family.  Now he’s out and wants to win his family back, but the only way to do so is to show that he’s responsible.

Marcus is impatient, too smart for his own good, he’s an opportunist, overly optimistic, and a risk-taker.  This is because deep down he believes that instant gratification and cutting corners are the smart way to become successful.  He hides from this deeper belief by claiming that he’s doing everything for his family.  In the story, he desires to pull off this hustle and win favor with the family that he lost and through this journey, he needs to understand that instant gratification for a better life should come from safe, intelligent risks, not ones that will hurt you or the ones you love.

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Story Prism, LLC

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