The Hero with 0.25 Faces

On creating compelling characters

So you’re trying to create a character. There are methods. So many methods. My god, all of the methods. 6-point methods. 12-point methods. Acronym methods. Methods named after weather and shapes and chakras¹.

Some of them give straightforward directions like, Determine your character’s role in the story and Decide their occupation. Others that get weird about it, like What’s your character’s zodiac sign? And What kind of tattoo does this character have? When I first started writing, I spent a lot of hours filling out forms like these. My main character was a scientist. He had a tattoo of a cactus on his ass. He was brown haired and wore chinos. His first kiss was in the fourth grade. His parents were dead and he had feelings about it. His role was to be the main character. Despite all of these concrete and/or quirky details, I was still dragging his stiff, chino-wearing, cactus-illustrated ass from page to page like he was an overfilled waterbed.

So I tried other methods. I looked up Jungian archetypes. I looked up increasingly specific TV Tropes archetypes (and then spent several hours down a rabbit hole about cast calculus). I tried filling out D&D character sheets, complete with random skill rolls. I tried to reskin other, more complete characters from my favorite fandoms. At one point, I was looking up Myers-Briggs personality types, picking a random one that sounded good, and grafting that onto the blank space of an MC.

I was still getting only Cactus on Ass, Overfilled Waterbed characters.

How to get that other 0.75 of a face

The struggle with characters is usually a Step 2 struggle. As in, you probably already have some other aspect of a story that’s well fleshed out – the plot, the premise, a setting, maybe even just an interesting image, and you’ve probably already built out this idea into something that feels real and concrete. Your conflict is based on a fantasy re-imagining of the Goths vs. the Western Roman Empire, or you’ve invented a new kind of warp drive, or you’ve figured out a whole new way that the world in 2100 is going to be a dystopian hellscape. This is how I start about half of my stories, and after all this worldbuilding is done, the next natural place to go is, This part is awesome, now I just need some characters.

But most online character-building guides and forms are based on the wrong way to think about the purpose of a character in your story.² A character is the person whose story we’re following. The character should be an extension and expression of the story you’ve built thus far, not just an avatar to walk us through your worldbuilding. Hence, creating a character in isolation of the larger story is how you get someone that feels shallow and random.

A Hypothetical

To illustrate what I mean, let’s walk through the character sheet-adjacent process. Let’s say I want to write a story about a knight who saves a princess. In this story, the princess is actually a peasant girl who is crowned ‘The Princess of May’ and then sacrificed at the castle in order to ensure a good harvest. The character that we’ll follow is the knight who is intent on saving her.

So I’m just going to make my knight Myers-Briggs ESFP. Sure. Extroverted, Sensing, Feeling, and Perceiving. Okay, he’s off on his journey to save the princess. What happens next? He’s extroverted, so to get him started, let’s have him recruiting some other characters to help him with his quest. An . . . INTJ wizard and . . . a bard who is ISFJ. The wizard immediately takes over planning how they’ll rescue the princess and his brusque nature starts creating conflict with the others. The bard tries to smooth things over and doesn’t want them to move on any plan until they all agree and everyone’s feelings are respected. Conflict! That’s good. But their group is losing cohesion. My knight, sensitive to criticism, now thinks maybe he over-committed in deciding to do this. Maybe he should quit. If only he weren’t so spontaneous!

And . . . now I’ve written myself into a corner and I don’t know how to get the knight to save the princess. I also don’t know why all these people are still journeying together. How do I get them to keep journeying together? Money? Or maybe I can make some backstory where they all know each other? But then I have to rewrite all the “recruiting with his extroversion” stuff. Also, why are they all trying to save the princess in the first place?

This is why I’m not a huge fan of this type of character building. First, it imposes on characters a bunch of characteristics and motivations that feel more like bowling alley gutter bumpers to direct them around the story. The second problem is, it usually feels exactly like what it is — a bunch of random characters thrown in together that you now have to figure out how to move around the proverbial board. Even if your characters have clear wants and needs and goals and interpersonal conflict, these nevertheless come across as surface level because it’s all just sort of happening rather than interacting with the other story elements in a meaningful way. And if there’s no real interaction with the other elements of the story, there’s no real reason we should be following these particular characters in this particular story. You could drop them into any story and this conflict would play out exactly the same.

I call this D&D writing, and while D&D is fun to play, most games don’t usually result in anything close to a coherent narrative that would be enjoyable to read, the same way that most improv is fun to perform but decidedly less fun to watch. D&D-style writing doesn’t tend to stay contained to the characters, either. It’s too easy to then create a plot where just a bunch of random stuff happens.

The characters that are the most successful are ones that own the story. That means, the story has a reason to be about this particular person in this particular time and place, and the central conflict is in some fundamental way theirs.

This is the drum I’m going to keep banging on for many a post: each element in a story should meaningfully interact with all of the other elements. Which means that whatever story element has come first — the setting, the plot, the premise, whatever —should be what you’re also relying on to also form your main characters, their motivations, strengths and flaws.

An easy way to do this is to ask yourself one question: Who is the worst* possible person to put in the scenario of your story?

The Worst*

This is not the worst in the “ugh this guy is the worst” sense. Please don’t make all of your characters rampaging clumsy dickhead -ists. It’s the worst* in the “uniquely unqualified to handle this scenario,” sense. At the same time, your character is still attempting to handle this scenario, so they must also have an aspect of their personality that is driving them to do so.

Think Star Wars. If you sat down the Jedi council and said, “Yeah, the guy we’re going to have take care of our Darth Vader problem is some untrained douchey punk raised on a dirt farm,” they would have laughed you out of the room.

So, in effect, you actually have three questions to answer: Who is the worst*? Why are they the worst*? And, Why are they doing it anyways?

Let’s Try It Out

Back to our knight saving a princess scenario. Let’s flesh out the premise a little by asking a bunch of questions until we figure out who would be the worst* possible guy to try and save her.

Obviously there are skilled and competent knights out there who could be saving her, but aren’t. Why not? I could go with “a bunch have tried and failed because they’re not strong or virtuous enough,” but that feels cliché. Let’s go with, no one has tried to save her because no one thinks she needs to be saved. Everyone wants a good harvest, including all of the regular heroes, and they all believe in this ritual.

So who’s the one idiot who would go against the whole kingdom to try and save her? Maybe he’s a love interest or a brother or something (Yawn. Done before. Boring. These might be not the best guys, but none feels like they would be the worst*.)

Maybe this guy isn’t a knight at all, but a scholar. Maybe he’s been keeping records of sacrifices that still resulted in failed harvests and has been trying to convince these people they’re giving up their daughters for nothing. And no one believes him.

We’re starting to see the skeleton of a character taking shape. He’s a scholar and he’s been studying this ritual, so he’s probably learned and analytical and skeptical. He’s not willing to just go along to get along with the villagers’ beliefs, so he’s probably headstrong. But here’s some flaws becoming apparent, too — he hasn’t been able to convince the villagers to stop practicing their sacrificial magic. Why not? Maybe he’s arrogant and talks down to the villagers, who’ve written him off as a big city know-it-all. Or maybe, despite being headstrong, he struggles to be assertive; maybe he gives the appearance of going-along-to-get-along while internally despairing because he doesn’t believe in his own argumentative skills. Either way, he’s also probably not very charismatic, since charisma goes a long way towards getting people on your side, and a lack of charisma can doom even the best argument.

But he does care about people! He’s willing to risk his life to stop this killing, after all.

There are still a lot of questions to answer — why is he willing to risk his life to save this girl and not last years girl? Also, How does he become a knight?

Still, we’ve got a strong idea of positive traits are going to drive him forward, and an idea of how his flaws are going to get in the way. He’s going to have to deal with the ignorant superstitious masses in order to get to the princess. Even if he gets to the princess, what if she’s also superstitious and refuses to be saved? Even if he manages to rescue her, that won’t stop the villagers from sacrificing the next girl the following year. What’s he going to do about that? He’s going to have to try something new (and grow as a person!)

See how much more vibrant and alive this second knight character is? Everything is interacting. The princess is in trouble because of the setting and the knight is coming to save her also because of the setting and secondary people are going to get into the knight’s way because of the nature of their beliefs and the knight is in conflict with them because of his beliefs! Not to mention, even if I don’t know what the story is going to say, I now know it is somehow fundamentally about the nature of ignorance and superstition. Making the character deeper makes the story deeper, too.

I’ve become convinced that making three-dimensional characters isn’t based so much on the author’s talent in conveying emotions or dialogue (though it also isn’t not that, let’s be clear — those are also extremely important.) It’s how much you can make a character feel like a product of their unique environment the same way that real people are.

This realism is what gives your character a sense of depth, intimacy, texture and authority from the start of a story, lending them a heft that the emotional arc and dialogue will develop and draw from. And the great thing about the worst* character is, they instantly have a lot of conflict with the natural barriers that your story has already set up. You’re automatically starting out with a huge amount of propulsive tension. It’s not the only way to build tension, but it’s a great one.

So, who’s your worst* person?

Is there someone even worse*?

1. Okay I made this last one up

2. You used to be able to get away with idea-driven stories. See Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, etc. A lot of these stories are really great. But most agents and publishers explicitly call for character-driven stories, so even if you want to write idea-driven stuff, you’re more likely than not going to have to develop this skill to get your foot in the door.