We’ve been going deep into character these last weeks, and I want to offer you some more ideas for developing complex, riveting characters. We hear things like “Your characters need to be larger than life,” meaning they should be extraordinary (extra ordinary? A whole lot more ordinary than the next guy? Sorry, that word got me thinking about how counterintuitive it is!). Okay, I get that to a point. To me, that means they need to be complex, unique, passionate about something.
But I would like to say you can have ordinary characters that are ordinary people, but what makes them engaging and believable is their complex issues that drive them. For we all have them. You could say we are all both ordinary and extraordinary people.
If I’m presented one way, I can seem very dull, boring, average. But if I’m presented another way, I can become compelling, fascinating, deep. It’s all in the presentation. And in tightly developing and understanding those three essential aspects I spoke of in the last post: knowing the character’s core need, their deepest fear, and the lie they tell themselves because of the wound they suffered early on. Continue Reading…
