Developing Characters for Your Story
“The properties of people and the properties of character almost have nothing to do with each other. They really don’t. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, characters and people. But, people don’t speak in dialogue, their lives don’t unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc, the rules of drama are really very much separate … from the properties of life.”
—Aaron Sorkin, from “What’s Character Got to Do With It”, Aspen Institute discussion, 2015
So you’ve developed your theme and it’s time to develop characters that will be one of the four roots grounding your story! Thanks to the last section, you already have some solid guide posts to work with via the theme question and your characters’ thematic choice statements. With this done, let’s consider the role major characters play in the story structure.
The Purpose of Characters
It’s quite common for writers to be attached to our characters and to even romanticize them and their personality as if they have their own agency and aren’t things we made up. If you are one of those writers, I don’t want you to abandon that lens. This type of imagination is an essential part of what makes storytelling fun for us. Instead, I’d like you to simultaneously adopt another lens: characters are a narrative element that exists to connect the theme with the plot through the decisions they make. If they’re not fulfilling that function, they’re not needed for your story. The task will be to balance your love of your characters with your need to tell a meaningful story that your readers will find engaging.
I’ve read countless stories where a character is objectively fun, interesting, really cool, or even endearing, but their choices (or lack thereof) felt irrelevant to or disconnected from the story as a whole and so the reading experience was tedious and disengaging. It read as if the author was trying hard to create a character that the reader would like to hang out with, but that’s not the purpose of character in stories. I have yet to come across a book where the author makes this mistake and I still feel the story works. Some of my favorite characters, and likely yours too, are characters I’d never want to even meet in real life, let alone spend time with, but they’re fantastic characters I loved to read about.
Our job as writers is to make sure our characters are the right fit for the story we’re telling and feel real and relevant to the reader. The emphasis here is on feel, because as Aaron Sorkin aptly put many a writer’s observation: “The properties of people and the properties of character almost have nothing to do with each other.” So, how do we accomplish this tightrope walk where the character feels real to the reader, but also accomplishes the narrative function of connecting the theme to the plot?
The Importance of Emotion
There’s a lot that goes into creating an effective character, but the foundation on which all other techniques rest is a coherent motivation. You might be thinking of backstories when you hear the word “motivation” and while that’s not off base, there is an element that is a much more useful guiding light for writers: emotion. Specifically, what I call the “emotional goal”, i.e. how do they want to feel? The distinction between how a character feels and how they want to feel accounts for the majority of what you need to know about them to model their behavior in a variety of scenes throughout your plot.
An emotional goal is one of the few properties of character that does overlap with us as people, in that pretty much all our behavior is at its core driven by our desire to feel a certain way. If you think about it, if you’re feeling sad and want to not feel sad, you might pick up your cat and huff its fur, you might hug your friend, or eat a pint of ice cream. But all of these are driven by your desire to not feel sad. If you’re feeling sad, but do want to continue feeling sad—on the occasion of mourning or grieving, for example—you might play sad music or watch a sad movie. The man standing on the corner strikes up a conversation about the weather because he feels lonely and wants to feel a little bit of human connection. The cashier complaining about her job feels undervalued and wants to feel validated. Humanity chases after feelings. Unless we really stop to introspect, we are rarely conscious of the root feelings driving our behaviors, especially with more complex behavior, like choosing one romantic partner over another, where to go to college, where to live, etc. So make sure that your characters aren’t fresh out of therapy with preternatural insights into their emotions. They most likely won’t be consciously brooding on the emotion that’s motivating them, but you as the writer will need to know it.
But wait! What if someone is not acting out of a feeling, but out of a belief? Gladys is always kind because she deeply believes in treating everyone with kindness. So glad you asked! How does Gladys feel after she treats everyone with kindness? Let’s just say that if giving out lovely compliments made Gladys feel like she fell into a patch of poison ivy, she wouldn’t be doing it. Her very belief in kindness is formed because of her desire to feel a certain way. And this isn’t a bug, but a feature in both life and fiction. It’s how we understand each other and understand characters. It’s this underlying layer of emotion that makes characters and their motivations feel real to readers.
Creating Coherent Motivation
There are three aspects to ensuring your character’s motivation is coherent from theme through plot and creates that real feeling in readers.
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The emotional goal. This is how your character wants to feel. This should be a one word feeling. I often give writers I work with this feelings wheel (any similar one will do) and tell them to ignore the surprised section and consult the rest of the feelings. It’s not an exhaustive list of possible feelings, but it’s a good reference sheet. Note, your characters start the story feeling the opposite of how they want to feel (either from the very get-go, or very quickly when the inciting incident hits). The story ends when they achieve their emotional goal or definitively fail to achieve it.
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The character’s belief about how to achieve the emotional goal. Two characters might both feel lonely and desire to feel loved. One believes that she can accomplish this with financial success. The other one believes she’ll meet her emotional goal by seeking connection. This is where backstory often comes in. Note that depending on the length and complexity of your story, you may not even need a backstory for why your character believes what they believe about meeting their emotional goal. You just need the belief itself.
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The plot goal. This is what the character is pursuing in the plot based on their belief and their emotional goal and it’s the bridge that brings the theme into the events of the plot. In longer stories this is often (but not always) the long-term plot goal that has several shorter term plot goals in order to be achieved.
Emotional Goals Are Rooted in Theme
Because these things are always easier to explain with an example, let’s go back to the theme I created in the last section: How do you find somewhere to belong? Let’s say our protagonist here is named Kiara.
Given the theme, I know I want her to start the story out feeling like she doesn’t belong where she is right then. This can take several angles from a relatively quaint “feeling misunderstood” to a much harsher “feeling persecuted”. What you ultimately pick for your protagonist and other major characters will be informed by what genre you envision the story as, how lighthearted or grim you feel it will be, and what circumstances, conflicts and consequences you might already be leaning toward. For the sake of this example, I’m going to say that Kiara starts the story out feeling unappreciated and she wants to feel valued. So I’d jot this down:
Emotional goal: Feeling valued. (Starts out feeling unappreciated.)
It may not seem like a lot, but pinning this down is a huge step for your story structure. The next thing to determine is what the character believes about what will achieve this emotional goal. And before I answer that, I have to give you a quick detour into misbeliefs.
A Note About Misbeliefs
If you’ve never heard of the term “misbelief”, honestly, I’m happy for you and you might want to skip this interlude. But if you’re the remaining 90% of intermediate or advanced writers, here’s a recap: a misbelief is tied to the concept of a positive character change arc where the character starts out having the wrong belief about what will meet their emotional goal. Over the course of the story they change their mind and adopt the true/right belief. This can indeed make for a very satisfying positive change arc. However …
These days almost every story formula I encounter and every (younger) writer I speak to talks about a character’s misbelief as if it’s an obvious and inevitable part of a story’s structure. I believe this notion became popularized by Lisa Cron in her book Story Genius (2016) and its banner has since been taken up by several influential story coaches. I have no irrefutable evidence for this origin story, so apologies if it’s a misbelief. But in case you have fallen under the sway of this dictum, what I’d like you to understand is that your character certainly can have a misbelief, but absolutely does not have to. Misbeliefs and positive change arcs are very popular in TV and film (which is Cron’s industry) in part because they fit nicely into quick feel-good formulas for mass consumption. But even in that medium there are plenty of good stories without misbeliefs at their center.
Characters that fall outside the misbelief realm are often referred to by the oxymoron of “flat arc” character. The primary distinction of a flat arc character is that their core beliefs don’t change over the course of the story. An obvious example would be Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. She arguably wants to feel safe throughout the first book and her belief is that she will accomplish this by protecting herself and those she cares about. There is no grand revelation where it turns out this has been the wrong belief and she should do something else to meet her emotional goal. She’s been self-sacrificing and giving to those she cares about from beginning (“I volunteer as tribute”) through the middle (mourning Rue and giving her a funeral) to the end (refusing to kill Peta and rather putting her own life on the line). Her core belief about right and wrong and how to deal with her problems and achieve her emotional goal remains static and there is nothing wrong with that. We still have a very compelling story about survival and resistance under a brutal, authoritarian regime. You could make the same argument for the character of Peeta. His core beliefs also remain the same. You could maybe say that Haymitch has a positive change arc in that book. Maybe.
The bottom line is that there is no universal law that decrees that your characters must have a misbelief that then changes by the end of the story. Most great books have a mix of characters with and without these change arcs.
Choosing a Belief Based on Character Arc
Whether or not you have one or more characters with a change arc ultimately depends on what story you want to tell. When you’re developing your character’s belief, you should know whether your character will have a change of belief, i.e. a change arc, by the end of the story or not.[1] Knowing this directly impacts your character’s motivation in relation to their thematic choice statement. Going back to the example of Kiara, her statement is:
It is better to choose integrity over success even if it means losing social status.
Now, if she’s a flat arc character, it would mean that from the get-go she would be a very honest character with high integrity. She’d stick to her guns of being honest even if it meant that she would need to give up something she really hoped to succeed at and would lose status over that. This would mean that her belief about how to achieve her emotional goal would center around integrity. E.g. Since her emotional goal is to feel valued, she would believe she can achieve this by acting with integrity.
But if I wanted her to be a character with a change arc, then she would start the story out being more focused on the success part of the thematic choice statement. She would be willing to compromise her integrity, maybe in ever-increasing amounts, in order to achieve success. In this instance, her emotional goal would stay the same (to feel valued), but her initial belief about how to accomplish it would be to focus on success. She would believe that if she’s successful, she’ll feel valued. In other words, if you have a change arc character, their initial belief would be the opposite of the thematic choice statement you wrote down.
Knowing the story I’d like to write, I’m going to give Kiara a change arc. So while her emotional goal is to feel valued, her belief about how to achieve this goal is to achieve outward success. At this point I could figure out what in her backstory shaped this belief. Again, depending on your story, you may or may not need this, but for the sake of a complete example here is Kiara’s:
When Kiara was little, her father often told her that the two of them are better than everyone else in the village and that they belong at the courts of nobility and not hauling timber and doing other manual labor necessary in the village. He also left the family when she was little, but she still remembers him fondly and continues to hang on to the beliefs he instilled in her. She believes that she and her skills would be valued at court the way she doesn’t feel in her village.
This leaves us with only the plot goal to complete her motivational coherence development.
Long-term Plot Goals Based on the Thematic Choice Statement
If you’ve done your thematic choice statements well, they will read a bit broad. If you look at my example, (It is better to choose integrity over success even if it means losing social status) you will notice I haven’t defined “integrity” or “success” or even “social status” exactly. Is integrity just “not lying”? Is it acting in accordance with a strict moral code? Leaving it untethered to specific actions allows me to develop the specifics in the plot. I can have progressive choice points that push the boundaries of the concept as I explore it in my story. Maybe the first time she sacrifices her integrity to gain success it’s just a white lie, the second time a lie by omission, the third an outright lie, the fourth time she knowingly hurts someone she cares about because it serves her, and so on. The broadness of the operative terms in the thematic choice statement gives our creativity structural support with both the motivation and the plot itself once we get to it.
Based off the backstory I’ve written above, I already have a pretty good idea of what the overarching plot-goal will be for Kiara. However, if you find you’re not there yet with your characters, don’t worry. As mentioned, the roots of your story tree (character, circumstance, conflict, and consequence) are intricately intertwined and interdependent. So if you’ve got the emotional goal and belief, but not quite the plot goal yet, work on the circumstances first and then come back to this.
As I’ve already done that work, for the sake of example, let’s say that Kiara’s plot-goal in the story will be to become the Manor Valet of the Bothorro family. This aligns with her belief about what will make her feel valued and it aligns with the thematic choice statement in that she would consider this position to be a marker of success. And with this, I’ve got the triad of my protagonist’s motivation pinned down. If I were planning a novel, this is what I’d write down at this point:
Emotional goal: to feel valued (starts out feeling unappreciated)
Belief about what will accomplish the emotional goal: outward success in the eyes of her surroundings
Plot goal based on belief: become the Manor Valet of the Bothorro family
Armed with this development, let’s move on to the circumstances fueling your story.
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This advice and structure is primarily applicable to positive change arcs and flat arcs. Negative change arcs are often part of tragic stories and work slightly differently. I mostly don’t discuss them a lot because the vast majority of writers I’ve encountered don’t write tragic stories, in the Aristotelian sense of a tragedy. If you’d like advice on this element of storytelling, send me a message or comment on one of my YouTube videos. If there is enough interest, I can put out a guide for negative change arc characters.