Writing Tips and Reviews

Character Development

All characters change and grow just as humans do, experiences and life lessons shape who we are and our personality is part of what effects how we see the world and react. But there are sometimes when adding more to a character makes them worse.

Anecdotal evidence:

My characters aren't perfect in the sense of being good characters but I try harder then not at all. Unlike the example person down below. I have an outline for the character then I development them as time goes on. They usually have a massive development if I come up with this neat idea and add it on, or sometimes they change completely backstory wise. Vendetta Nemesis is that way. She started off being much like Velvet Crowe from Tales of Berseria, she is inspired by Crowe. Then two years went by and I had this new idea and changed her backstory. Shain Millennium is pretty much the same. Stories are the same way, but we're talking about characters.

Development:

Applies to personality, traits, skills, relationships and more. As I've said with copying and pasting characters, everything about a character is unique to them, it shapes them as a whole and reasons why they react to certain situations. A thing you don't want to do is only have the shape without the making of the shape anywhere. An outline is nice, having something to guide you through development is what many writers, including myself, do.

But good lord, if you fill in the shape with shit, convoluted story telling, a bucket of what the hell? Contradictions, "because it's cool" and "I'm a special snowflake" then you don't have a good character. What do I mean?

Example of how not to do it:

Let's say you have an outline, for some reason beyond my understanding (most likely because it's cool) the character is serial killer who has a traumatic backstory. So where do we start? How about we make their sister say one mean thing to them then have them fight for five years and that automatically makes them the most amazing fighter in the entire universe? Then, let's make them immortal because "I don't want anyone to hurt my OC" and make them really annoying by constantly saying how much better they are than everyone else at everything.

Let's then make their personality a whiny little baby who can't stand it when people aren't talking solely about them. Then how about we add more the backstory because that's not stupid enough? How about at two years old they had a special power and became king of the world? Now I realize this could mean king of a game they played with friends, but, you have to specific if you say "king of the world". Now, let's make the backstory even more traumatic, their parents gave them up because...I actually don't know why and don't think the creator knows why either. Because they need a traumatic backstory. After that, let's add alcohol, drugs and smoking to the mix because "I think that's cool". (Makes you wonder what the special snowflake behind this shit ball is like.)

Don't worry, the character is immortal And invincible, they can't die from silly things that kill real life humans who have an addiction and end up homeless or dead most of the time if they don't get help. Let's also make them be raised by serial killers and psychopaths because we need to fit a quota of "every character I have is a serial killer and a psychopath". Let's make them tell other characters in role plays how much of a wimp they are for not wanting to fight, not like every single role play is about something not to your standards of fighting and killing. It could be about school.

(Coughing) I'm actually dying writing all that down. Okay, break down of this shit ball of a character who gets worse and worse with every new update. Good lord, does someone not know how to make a good character. I don't care what they say, a new version doesn't mean a new character, otherwise you'd literally just have the same character running around in large quantities, and it's not like they don't do that already. Oh boy, I could talk about the creator and how they don't want to change anything because they're a perfect special snowflake and how they say "god" to everyone who doesn't agree with them, but I think that's all you need to know to figure out why their OC is so bad.

I have a literal headache thinking about this so let's move on to how to do character development right.

So here's the thing, if you're going to make development to a character, OC or otherwise, please don't just fill in the blanks with things that make no sense. I could think of a hundred ways to make this character so much better with the same outline. Watch me do one.

Traumatic backstory? Have their parents abandon them because of their power (cough what I did with Shinnei Samara cough). You would have to do this so they have the traumatic experience. I don't think a newborn is going to remember. Quick psychology lesson, memories and personality aren't fully formed until eight years old. They were found and raised by serial killers and psychopaths, as much as I hate it, it's part of the outline. They had to practice and learn for most of their current life, we are upping the age from fourteen to the late twenties and upping the training from five years to about ten at least with the age eight being when they were abandoned.

I am aware the age is now in the thousands, that's just for number reasons, it doesn't matter. Personality, make the character be sad sometimes about their past, don't make them brag about it as if they're proud. It's a traumatic backstory, not a high school cheer leader who's dating a football player. If they have to be aggressive towards others, then make it because they don't want to get close to anyone because they don't want those people to be hurt, or, their nature has becoming more untrusting. The "I'm going to kill you then just stand there" has to be removed, I don't care if it's part of the outline, I'm done with it.

Replace it with pushing others away, make them not want to stay and maybe threaten them back off. Not "just because it's cool" which is literally the main focus of the character development and it makes me want to throw the character out the window.

Are we done? Please tell me we're done. We still have to fix the addictions? Shit. Either remove it entirely since it doesn't matter in the slightest, or if it has to be there, then make it a side note or something. Vendetta Nemesis is an alcoholic and you only know that now since I told you. She actually has a super high tolerance and well, she's a pirate, one what do you expect from a pirate, two, she's twenty four, not fourteen.

Conclusion:

Was that entire section unnecessary and for the purposes of shitting on a bad character? Mostly. But it was to show how not to do something. If you know how not to do it, you'll be a step closer to how to do it.

So, how do you do it? Well, like I said, it does have to make sense, point A cannot go to point 56866 for no reason. There's a before, during and after. The usual past, present and future if you like those terms better.

Contradictions can happen, in the right way. If you say a character is "well educated" then say "they can't do anything academic without a magic pencil" then you can be thrown out the window with your horribly done character. And if you write "no flaws" on your character bio, we aren't talking anymore.

Development isn't just adding more shit to shit, it's trying to make a character better on a writing stand point. Make them an even worse person, a better person, someone in between, or do what Tetsuya Normura does with Kingdom Hearts and just add ideas then relate them to existing information later. But, at the very least, if you have new ideas, connect them to existing information. A million ideas that came from the imperial void with no connections are not going to be well done or make for a good story or character.

I have a headache, bird woke me up talking up a storm, I'm going back to sleep. Good night.