Character Development

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I decided to enroll in Masterclass online, figuring I might as well learn something while I was quarantined. Mainly I watched classes taught by writers, but I also ventured into classes on advertising, how to apply makeup, and filmmaking. It was in the filmmaking class, taught by Ron Howard, that I came across a valuable tool, a book titled The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri. The book jacket touts it as “The classic guide to writing a play,” and while I’m not (currently) interested in writing a play, I found it valuable for a different reason. Chapter 1, titled “The Bone Structure,” offers a list of characteristics the author should know about a character in order to create a three-dimensional being. There are 27 questions/prompts total: 8 under the subheading of physiology, 9 under sociology, and 10 under the heading of psychology. The next time I started a novel, I typed up all 27 questions/prompts for each of the main characters and then worked my way through them one by one. By the end, I was surprised by how much more I knew about my characters than I had before. Of course, I already knew their sex and their ages, and maybe I had a fairly good idea of how they looked, but I’d never asked myself if they had any physical flaws. Or what their backgrounds looked like. How were they raised? What did they value? What motivated them? What type of education had they received? Were they middle class? Blue collar? Privileged? Poor? What kind of moral standards did they have? Had they experienced disappointments in their lives? What kind of hobbies did they pursue? I had to pause in between questions to really think about what type of people my characters were. It forced me to go beyond skin deep and really put meat on the bones of my characters. I understood them a lot better once I’d put them through the screening process.

Here’s an example of how this process works. In my current work in progress, the protagonist is a nice seventeen-year-old named Duffy. He’s a big kid—6’2”, 250 pounds—and he’s a linebacker on the high school football team. He is very conscious of his size and describes himself as a Triple-B: big, blocky, and blond. He worries he will never have a girlfriend or get married because he’s such a big guy. When I hit the question asking about disappointments the character has experienced, I had a lightbulb moment. Duffy feels self-conscious about his size. But why? Was he teased at an early age? Had someone said something nasty to him about his size? Did the fact that he was so much bigger than his peers at an early age negatively impact him in some way? Why is he uncomfortable as he is? Those questions caused me to dig much deeper into his background and his emotional makeup. It made me try to figure out what made him tick. It gave him multiple layers of complexity and sensitivity, something he’d lacked before. It made his character better.

You can purchase the Egri book on Amazon.com in paperback format for $10.99. Used books come in at a much cheaper price, and the Kindle version is $2.99. (If you buy the paperback, be careful to purchase the version that has a black cover with a reddish exclamation mark on it. A different, cheaper version featuring a blue cover and a spotlight illustration that sells for $9.77 appears to have (from the reviews I have read) such tiny printing as to be almost unreadable.) If you’d rather not spend the money, I’d encourage you to check your local library and see if they have the book, and if they don’t (which is quite possible since it’s not exactly new anymore), ask them to obtain it for you via interlibrary loan. My library district very rarely charges for interlibrary loans, but I can’t speak for all libraries. Ask if there is a fee at your library before you commit if cost is an issue. Speaking from experience, interlibrary loan is a good, cheap way to obtain books that aren’t quite mainstream anymore.