How to make characters from tropes.

Thanks, , and have all distilled what my OP was trying to say.

(BTW 'TL;DR'? You're a WRITER! )

I tried not to mention experience in the original, as I don't want the younger members (listen to me, you'd think I had a long white beard!) to feel the old gits are ganging up on them. However, like all skills, it comes down to practice. That can not be helped. I just worry that sometimes people tie themselves to tropes to much: "How do I write a <trope>".

Things that have helped me in my writing.

1) Know your character. Don't think trope, Think what is their background, how are they perceived. You don't need a fully fleshed background to start, just a handle on what they are/how they are perceived at the start of the story. Let's take the rather fine first 8 minutes of Pixar's 'Up' (Definitely a better love story that 'Twilight'). If you wanted to write similar style you could go, 'Okay, Carl, fantasist, loves adventure, but shy around girls, Ellie, tomboy. What happens when they meet? how do they grow? what are their dreams?' Not a trope mentioned. You know their basic personalities, and as they interact you will think 'Ok, how does Carl react to this, given what I know about him', and that gives you a little more insight, so the next decision has more facts to support it. Then you can go back to the beginning and add all that you have found out into the earlier writing. (Word processors have a lot to credit for the improvement in my writing, when I started on paper in the 80's, major edits were impossible with out a lot of time).

2) Act it out. This definitely helps me. I improve'd a whole speech by one character, pouring his heart out. If my wife had walked in to the kitchen, she would have wondered what the hell I was doing! I did it 2-3 times, changing bits I didn't like, then once I knew it almost off by heart, I wrote it down. I just went one long rush to get it all down, then edited it into 'literature' (because if you write how people actually speak it looks silly) Final passage is 1600 words, and it is Gabe just pouring his heart out.

3) Give the characters a trade mark. Something they do or say. Lizzie calls everyone 'Babe', Gabe is precise with his language, he actually texts [sad face], Lucy says things like 'silly' - making her a bit girly, a bit childish (to emphasis her vulnerabilities).

4) Listen to your characters. I have discussed this with other writers in other fora. Sometimes characters will do or say something completely unexpected. Run with it, just type what they are telling you, and doing. You have a 'delete key' after all, if it really crap. I give a couple of examples on my blog http://lasthussar.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/the-trials-of-writing/#comments and http://lasthussar.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/my-characters-surprise-me-again/

5) Imagine your book is book of the week at a Book club, and you're doing a Q&A session. What questions would you ask? Now answer them.

The more you know about the characters as real people, not tropes, the better. When (4) happens you will know what happens next. I find I am getting more pleasure from the act of writing now - 25 years ago it was a means to get to the end, now it's a journey. Word processors help - you can write out of order, if a great bit of dialogue hits you, you can get it down before you are ready to do that scene, and you will learn about the characters, so use it to inform earlier passages.

edited 9th Mar '12 3:03:23 PM by LastHussar

—yawn— Of course, even if you do all that, that doesn't mean you have a proper character on your hands. You also do indeed have to consider the mechanical, like I did, when I tried to write a very flawed character.

Even if you decide "Yay I'm going to write a Deadpan Snarker" you can end up with a good character, and even if you do all the heavy lifting you can end up with a bad character. In fact, after any given single decision, you could still end up with a good character or a bad character. No one has ever come up with a foolproof formula for writing a good character that any old hack can follow with guaranteed success, and likely no one ever will.

This does not imply that your artistic process doesn't matter and you should just do whatever. "Being a good writer" is not some sort of magic quality that can take any concept or execution and turn it into gold. It's the concepts and execution themselves — an intuition for what works and what doesn't.

A good writer knows when to take a step that, in itself, would be a step in the direction of mediocrity, and then turn around and run that distance for a leap towards excellence. This is true. But a part of knowing how to pull off this trick is being able to recognize the step to begin with, so as not to follow it in vain. Because if you're ignorant enough to take a step towards mediocrity without collecting a hefty payoff, ten more such steps will almost surely follow soon enough. Making a character out of a checklist is exactly that kind of thing. Make sure you know why you are doing it, what the implications will be and most importantly, what sort of work will have to go into rescuing the result from being derivative fluff. When in doubt — don't.

edited 9th Mar '12 9:20:28 PM by TripleElation

(Thread bump for everyone who is derailing (The Guide Post) )

If you came to this thread looking for How-to knowledge, you're in the wrong thread. That discussion is in "How To Make Characters From Tropes (The Guide Post)" for your convenience.

If you get to The Guide Post and find people are still talking about why you shouldn't make characters from tropes, just keep reading. We appologize for any off-topic discussion, but there is still how-to knowledge coming in.