Exchange of Realities

By this time, you’ve got a pretty good idea what the character you’re designing is going to need. You’d think it’s time to start answering questions, right?

Not yet. There’s one more factor you’re going to want to take into account before you solidify the character: emotional impact. What sort of response do you want this character to elicit from the audience?

Rich Burlew’s Villain Workshop suggests writing characters as being based on two emotions: one that drives them, and one that they’re meant to instill in the audience. This phase is where those two emotions come in, or something like them. Starting to see why we haven’t answered any of the questions from Step 2 now?

Now, implementing the driving emotion—that’s pretty straightforward, and can be hashed out pretty much any time in the process. Evoking an emotion or bringing out one particular quality, on the other hand, can be a lot more of a challenge. But when done well, the results are spectacular.

Chosen yourself an emotion or quality? Good. Now we start brainstorming.

Start with the first ten things that come to mind when you think of that emotion or quality. These can be things that have triggered that emotion in you, or just things that you might think fit; you can use people, places, objects, events, images—the sky’s the limit. Write them down and set them aside; we’ll be back to them in a moment. If you’re running a game, or you know people you think would be representative of your audience, try to do the same from the point of view of one or more of them. You can even ask them, but be careful: the more astute will probably start keeping an eye out for use of their information. Besides, trying to guess doubles as an exercise for thinking as someone else.

Picture courtesy of awadh from stock.xchng

Now, take the lists and look through them. Some of the things listed will probably have shared elements: take note of these, since they’ll probably telegraph the theme more clearly than the non-repeated elements. (This sort of thing is a feature of repeated elements—why else do you think so many people create correlations between coolness factor and number of explosions?)

Ready to get a little more technical? Let’s look at this by part of speech: find yourself five nouns, five verbs, and five adjectives that have connotations that fit with the emotion/quality you’re trying to bring out. (Not familiar with connotations? They’re secondary meanings of a word, things that aren’t part of the definition but that native speakers all know are lumped in there anyway. Think about the difference between “woman” and “chick”.) If you’ve got a character you’re trying to get across as obnoxious, they might be strident where another would be forceful, nag where another would remind, shriek where another would shout, be a busybody rather than a helper…. things like that. Getting the idea?

Now we’re going to start combining lists. Choose yourself five elements from the above, things that you think should definitely go into the character concept. These will need to a. fit the character, b. fit the situation, and c. be something you can logically implement and bring attention to, whether they actually occur on stage or offstage. For instance, the five elements for a potential love interest might include two features you would consider attractive on that kind of character, two that a member of the audience like the character this is supposed to be the love interest for (or the player of that character, in a game—or if you’ve got the right details, the character him/herself) would find attractive, and an appropriately romantic backdrop for an encounter.

See what we’ve got here? We’re taking associations and using them to try to trigger the desired responses. It’s tricky, but rewarding. Be careful, though: a discerning audience, particularly when given very blatant examples of this technique (fanservice, anyone?) or having a pet issue jarringly played to, might rebel, acting contrary to what’s expected or snarking about the tactic. The key, then, is subtlety, carefully blending the aspects into the overall character. This is why it’s an early stage in character creation; we still have plenty of time to cover our tricks with details and colors.

We’re going strong; let’s keep it up!

Want to do more with secondary characters? The site hub is here.

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