From Tabletop to Paperback – Chargen Part 1
Character generation. Almost all RPG rulebooks start with this, and it only makes sense. You can't really play the game without your character. But in addition to simple utilitarianism, what kind of character you can and do make will tell you a lot about what kind of game it is you're playing. Whether I say Dashing Swordsman, Scruffy Spacer, Zealous Inquisitor, or Helpful Wizard, I'm beginning to tell you things about the game and what it'll be about. Essentially, Characters can be the easiest gateway to Plot and Setting (but more on those later).
The Bare Bones
I have a pre-writing package. It's sort of a road map that I use to plan out a novel before I even start the actual writing of it. It's absolutely invaluable and I do not recommend starting a novel without it. For those of you keeping score, pre-writing is not cheating on National Novel Writing Month. In fact, it's encouraged! You can't get to where you're going if you don't have a route planned.
The pre-writing package was created by my coach and publisher, Aaron Pogue. You'll hear a lot about it as we go and, if we ever get around to reworking it for public consumption, we'll probably even make it available. It isn't a state secret, it's just a tool we use to get the story together before we get the story together.
There are all kinds of great sections in the pre-writing package like the Mock Table of Contents, the Scene List, the Story Question Worksheet. There's even a section for Characters. For main characters, Aaron suggests 300 words to describe them before the Big Event (that's the thing that kicks off the novel). That's not so bad if you've only got two main characters (the Hero and the Villain), but what if you're doing a Tolkien-esque traditional adventuring party with four, five, six, or even seven characters? At 300 words apiece, that can add up pretty fast for the novice writer.
As for secondary characters, Aaron suggests a hundred words apiece. That's enough to flesh them out and keep them from being flat and single dimensional. But what constitutes a secondary character? Depending on how liberally you define it, that could be dozens of characters, each one needing their own century of words.
Ligaments: Connecting the Bare Bones
You may be asking why it takes so many words to flesh out your characters. There are all kinds of reasons, but they all boil down to this: The more you know about your characters, both primary and secondary, the more smoothly you can integrate them into your story in a compelling way.
It isn't enough that each character has a distinct voice or interesting mannerisms (although they won't if you don't do the pre-writing). They can be menacing, clever, funny, or frightening, but if they're only a cog in your Story Engine with just enough teeth to move your plot ahead, then they aren't good characters. Flat characters might as well be just a rushing flood or an inspiring ray of sunshine.
Now, I'm not saying we need to know that the traffic cop your hero whizzes past in a high speed chase always wanted to own a boat and his favorite song is Barry Manilowe's "Mandy". That would be ridiculous because he's not a character, he's scenery. I don't need to know who laid the concrete in the street or which dog used the fire hydrant either. But your characters, the people who are going to impact your story in some way, they have to be fleshed out.
Think about guys like Sgt. Powell, the cop who talks to McClane all through Die Hard. Or Commissioner Gordon in Batman. Or even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet. That duo were bit players yet so well fleshed out they could be plugged into a totally different story where they were the protagonists! Those are strong characters!
Secondary characters like that are the work of master storytellers. If you hang with me, I'm going to demonstrate how you probably already unconsciously do this for your games.
But in the meantime, you're left with this: Your bare minimum word count just to flesh out your characters is anywhere from several hundred to several thousand words. Better oil up that keyboard.
Single Cell Characters
If it sounds like I'm being pessimistic about the character work, it's only because Aaron tends to be a bit pessimistic about it and he's rubbed off on me. I lack traditional classroom training in writing fiction, but Aaron recently finished his Master's in it. From what he tells me, a lot of people struggle to hit the hundred word mark on even their major characters with barely a line of text for secondary characters.
That boggles my mind. I can't imagine how anybody is able to take these blank slates and make any kind of story about them, let alone incorporate them in a smooth way. If you don't know what your main characters are like before the Big Event, how can you even be sure the Big Event will have an effect on them?
One answer is that they don't write a story where the Big Event effects the main characters. They write amoeba characters who only react to the Big Event. Why do I call them amoeba characters? Because amoebas are uninteresting single cells who never take an active role in their environment. They can only react.
If you put something nourishing near them, they'll move to eat it. But they'll never go hunting. If you put something threatening into the mix, the amoeba will fight or escape. But it won't take proactive measures to guard against danger.
The amoeba character is like this. It floats along the plot river reacting to whatever comes near enough to help or threaten it. But the amoeba character isn't interesting enough, it isn't "multi-cellular" enough, to take an active role. It eats the McGuffin and flees from the danger, then waits for the next plot morsel to come along.
That's Plot, guys, and it's important, but if you don't plug a fully realized person into it, it's just stuff that happens. It might become a series of interesting anecdotes, but it isn't a story.
No, I'm afraid you're stuck doing the hard work of figuring out who each of these people are and what they want. And (nearly) the only way to do that is to write about them. You keep adding words until they add up to a character.
My Scandalous Confession
I have to come clean with all of you right quick. Get ready, I'm about to bare my writer soul.
I never do the Character part of the pre-writing package.
Oh, I did when Aaron started coaching me. He assigned it, I wanted help with my writing, and I did the assignment to prove I was serious about improving. But the Character section was always the most tedious part. I hated doing it because I already knew all of these fictional people just as well as if I'd gone to high school with them. Half the time I could tell you a ridiculous factoid like her favorite color. Not because this was something I'd already written down or because it would be important to the story. No, it was because I could answer seven or eight questions about the character that would naturally lead to her wearing a lot of green.
The reason I'm able to do this without writing all those words is because I've been making fully realized characters at a breakneck pace pretty much since I was eleven years old. I used to do it with dice and rules, with pencils and character sheets. But I did it for so long and so often that those two dimensional numbers and words turned into character holograms in my head, three dimensional and in living color.
Because of my background as a gamer, I walk around with a cast of thousands in my head. And I keep adding to it as I go. In fact, at this point, it's probably a cast of tens of thousands. I make Eve and her three faces look like an underachiever. I just scroll through them until I find the one I need, like ties on one of those motorized tie racks.
Heck, at this point, I've got enough "spare parts" laying around that, if you tell me a little bit about your story or campaign idea, I can build a good character for you from scratch. Usually within a few minutes (depending on the rules). It's entirely second nature to me. And I bet it will be for you, too. Just like me, you've all spent years creating interesting characters for your various games. With a little focus and fine tuning, that instinct can become an endless array of living, breathing, fictional people just ready to appear in your novels. Come back Tuesday and I'll show you how.
