Episode 13: Character and Finn

Oh oh oh, I love character. I watch sports for character. I read for character. I watch television for character. And I certainly WRITE for character.

I have very strong feelings about character.

I recorded an episode of Sacred Cheese of Life yesterday about character and used Finn from The Icarus Triptych and Mazewood as my example, even though he's the least characteristic (sorry) example I could possibly have come up with, because I built his appearance and voice on an actor from a show I was watching. 

I never do that. Do you do that? I know plenty of writers do, but I'd never done it before. 

It gives your character so much more life and volume and specificity. It's also somewhat creepy, I have to admit that, because here you are focusing on someone YOU DON'T KNOW in order to write something that doesn't benefit them. I mean it's not like you're writing that person a movie they can star in or anything. He got nothing from it. Except a dedication and a set of the trilogy, and I'm not even sure they ever got there. 

Character has to run like an engine or your story dies. Give me a person who wants to do the right thing and can't. Or wants to do the wrong thing and can't! Give me anyone who wants anything and is thwarted for reasons of cracks in their own foundations.

My characters tend to want homes and security, because those are my own major drivers, to the point where I'm STILL in this very nice house in rural Maine with not enough work because giving up my home and security are more terrifying to me than anything else. That's bad! That's a problem! It's also character, for sure. I make choices about that not based on what's best for me but what I perceive as more important short term.

It's no wonder I always read memoirs about overcoming alcoholism, when I don't even drink. 

I like to write characters whose lives are somewhat out of control. It gives the story a great drive and direction. 

I also insist on internal conflict. That can be almost anything, but there has to be an inner reason they can't achieve their outer goal. 

Finn is tricky this way because I wrote a confident character who makes choices and feels sure about them, something completely alien to me but also means he lacks that essential wants things and can't get them element. But he also has a very upsetting past, things that he couldn't stop happening to people he cared about, especially when he didn't know about it. Wouldn't that give you a complex? 

A character in Agents of SHIELD--oh, Skye/Daisy, of course--said: "Mistrust of home is kind of my superpower." She was taken from her family as a baby and put in foster care, then constantly moved around. Any time she got comfortable, she'd get yanked again, on purpose, to keep her safe from those who were after her. The result is that she doesn't TRUST. It's a major feature of her character and it underlies everything. What's the worst thing you can do to a character like that? Make someone she trusts betray her. Of course they did that!

Find someone's weakest point and attack them there is pretty awful as a way of life, but it's what we have to do with character. So give them strengths, but give them a weak flank, a vulnerability you can use to take them down. 

 

Time to edit the Character/Finn episode. Whee! Bonus Eleanor content.