📖Writing the Narrative Short Unit 2 – Developing Characters

What's Character Development?

• Character development involves creating and shaping fictional characters in a story
• Includes crafting their personalities, motivations, and growth throughout the narrative
• Requires establishing a character's background, traits, and how they change over time
• Aims to make characters feel authentic, relatable, and engaging to readers
• Involves showing characters' thoughts, feelings, and actions through dialogue, description, and plot events
• Ensures characters have distinct voices and mannerisms that set them apart from others
• Focuses on characters' internal struggles, conflicts, and how they overcome challenges

Building Character Foundations

• Start by determining a character's basic attributes such as name, age, gender, and occupation
• Establish their primary goal or motivation that drives their actions in the story
• Define their key personality traits, both positive (loyal, brave) and negative (impulsive, jealous)
• Consider their physical appearance, including distinguishing features or mannerisms
• Determine their role in the story, whether protagonist, antagonist, or supporting character
• Identify their strengths and weaknesses that will impact their journey
• Decide on their core values, beliefs, and moral code that guide their decisions
  • These can be shaped by their upbringing, culture, or personal experiences

Creating Backstories

• A character's backstory includes their history and life events prior to the story's beginning
• Develop key moments or turning points in their past that shaped who they are
• Consider their family background, childhood experiences, and important relationships
• Determine their education level, skills, and any notable accomplishments or failures
• Identify any traumas, losses, or significant challenges they've faced
  • These can be sources of internal conflict or motivation in the present story
• Establish their social status, financial situation, and living conditions
• Create a timeline of their life events leading up to the story's start

Crafting Unique Voices

• A character's voice includes their distinct way of speaking, thinking, and expressing themselves
• Use dialogue to showcase a character's personality, background, and emotional state
• Consider a character's vocabulary, sentence structure, and speech patterns
  • Are they formal or casual, verbose or terse, articulate or inarticulate?
• Infuse dialogue with subtext, revealing what a character leaves unsaid or implies
• Ensure a character's inner thoughts align with and deepen their unique perspective
• Utilize body language and gestures to convey a character's mood and intentions
• Let a character's voice evolve over the course of the story as they grow and change

Showing vs. Telling in Characterization

• Showing reveals character through actions, dialogue, thoughts, and reactions
• Telling directly states a character's traits or feelings without demonstrating them
• Use vivid descriptions and sensory details to immerse readers in a character's experience
• Convey a character's emotions through physical reactions (racing heart, clenched fists) rather than naming the emotion outright
• Reveal personality and motivations through a character's choices and behaviors
  • How they treat others, handle stress, or make decisions
• Utilize subtext and implication to suggest a character's inner state
• Balance showing and telling, using telling sparingly for efficiency or emphasis

Character Arcs and Growth

• A character arc is the journey of change and growth a character undergoes in the story
• Most protagonists follow a positive change arc, overcoming flaws and challenges to become better versions of themselves
• Flat arcs involve characters who remain largely unchanged but inspire change in others or the world around them
• Negative change arcs see characters devolve or succumb to their flaws and weaknesses
• Character growth often involves a series of turning points or key events that shift their perspective
• Characters' wants and needs should evolve as they learn and grow throughout the story
• A character's growth should be gradual, believable, and tied to their experiences in the plot

Relationships and Interactions

• Relationships between characters reveal personality, create conflict, and advance the plot
• Establish characters' history and dynamics, including power imbalances or unresolved issues
• Use dialogue to show how characters communicate, argue, and express affection
• Develop characters' roles in each other's lives (mentor, rival, love interest) and how those roles may shift
• Create contrasts and parallels between characters to highlight their unique traits
• Allow relationships to evolve and change as characters grow and face new challenges together
• Explore how characters' differing goals, values, or worldviews create tension and conflict

Advanced Techniques and Common Pitfalls

• Use foils (characters with opposing traits) to highlight a main character's qualities
• Employ archetypes (the mentor, the trickster) to evoke familiar roles and expectations
• Subvert character tropes and stereotypes to create surprising, memorable characters
• Avoid creating "Mary Sues" or "Gary Stus" - overly perfect, idealized characters without flaws
• Beware of character inconsistencies or actions that contradict their established traits and motivations
• Ensure supporting characters are fully developed and not just plot devices or one-dimensional stereotypes
• Challenge characters with difficult moral dilemmas that test their beliefs and reveal their true nature
  • Force them to make hard choices with consequences that propel the story forward