How To Make Characters From Tropes (The Guide Post)

Rule #1 - Formulas Are For Chemistry

"Luke I Am Your Father" is a cliche, but having the villain and the protagonist having a parent-child relationship is a formula we can use because writers have parental figures they can use as a relationship reference. For example, the villain has had to make the hard decisions about what justifies ends and means, and the hero who has not had to make those decisions is thus viewed as a "naive child." Meanwhile, there are children who will refuse to do something just because their parents told them to, so the hero will go out of their way not to make a choice or take a third choice simply because the villain told them they had to choose. The story ends not because the villain goes to jail, because they always break out in the sequel, but because the villain decides to sit back and watch the hero "grow up." "Every villain is the hero of their own story," and the villain wants the naive hero to succeed while staying naive because it meant that the world has changed and the naive idealism they once had can live again in this new and improved world. Meanwhile, because "parent-child" is a relationship between two human beings, the villain and protagonist are more likely to come off as two human beings than as designated anything.

Let's try an example with Deadpan Snarker.

The first challenge is to figure out what their relationships are. Who are their friends and their enemies, and who are their snarky comments directed at. There should be a difference between snarky comments made to amuse their friends and those made to wound their enemies and their foolish pride, but this is not always apparent when the quotes are made out of context.

Let's give the example some context with Daria. Daria is a fairly classic example of a deadpan snarker, and she has both friends like Jane and "targets" like Kevin. To a person who wants to write a Daria class snarker, its good to review how these relationships developed. Daria's relationship with Jane began when Daria first moved to the school and they were both placed in an "adjustment class" where Jane saw Daria doing a caricature of their teacher. They both turned out to be deadpan snarkers, which is much better because they can have snarky conversations instead of just snarky thoughts. Where it really takes off is when one of them makes a half-sarcastic suggestion that turns out to be a twistedly awesome idea, but we'll come back to that.

Daria's relationship with Kevin goes all the way back to the pilot, where she was in an unintended love triangle with the jock. You see, Daria was acting like she wasn't interested because she wasn't interested, but Kevin thought she was acting uninterested as part of the elaborate mating dance of the hormonal teenager. He not only thinks that, he preemptively dumps her for his cheerleader girlfriend. She tells this to Jane who half-sarcastically suggests that Daria get revenge. The revenge takes advantage of the fact that Kevin has already proved "hilariously bad" at reading signals, so when Daria starts dropping overt signals that something is going on between them in front of his cheerleader girlfriend, revenge is complete. This situation is revisited in the series, but it has a better application: being two ends of the same triangle gave Daria, a bookworm, and Brittney, a cheerleader, a chance to treat each other as friendly rivals. They should "naturally hate each other," but they also cooperate and treat each other like human beings instead of members of two separate cliques. Therefore they have more chemistry than most main characters have with their version of the Libby.

Meanwhile, Kevin's misinterpretation of sarcasm shows how to focus a plot around a character who makes snarky comments. The misinterpretation creates the conflict, the conversation between Daria and Jane brings up the solution sarcastically, and Brittney the Bystander being human gives just enough sympathy for the characters to do something even if they're too deadpan to really care.

Or you could just, you know, build a character organically instead.

This guide is a celebration of terrible writing.

I'm not entirely sure if you really need to overanalyze that much. Or maybe I'm just the lazy one.

Because everyone else who thinks themselves "serious" about writing seems determined to fling poo without explaining.

Tropes are descriptors. This means they are descriptive; they indicate and, well, describe action has taken place. They are not basic terms either (see People Sit On Chairs), but complex ones. Describing a character in such terms creates incompleteness, much like attempting to describe a building purely in terms of architectural execution without mentioning materials or colors.

This doesn't mean you couldn't make good characters from tropes, but then you probably end up with a nearly organic process anyways.

What is this "organic process" that people tend to mention, anyway? Looking at threads where people talk about how they create characters, everybody does it differently, and most people do it in several different ways, so who decides which are organic and which are not? And anyway, what's wrong with approaching it by a whole lot of thinking?

Personally, I'm just tired of trying to explain it again and again.

I, personally, am tired of seeing 'serious' writers looking at these things and dismissing them based solely on the idea. Sure, it's a bad idea to try to create a character by plugging a list of tropes into holes and doing no other work. That doesn't mean that any character created by a process which takes note of the existence of tropes is necessarily 'contaminated'. It's an easy out to say "any character made from tropes sucks"; perhaps it's sparing you the effort of actually looking, thinking about it, and making a judgment. If you don't feel up to that, fair enough; just don't comment, instead of dropping random condescension everywhere.

edited 27th Apr '12 5:36:36 PM by alethiophile

Honestly, I think what the OP is suggesting is, if not the best way of making a good character, infinitely more likely to do so then just slapping a bunch of tropes together and calling it a day. But I still don't see why there's any need to do it when you can just create characters naturally. My comment was less meant as "this is a bad way to do things" and more "why would you do things this way?"

edited 27th Apr '12 5:51:49 PM by nrjxll

As I noted, if you plug a list of tropes into holes and then do a bunch of other work to fill the gaps...what you've done isn't that different from the way most people who don't simply shake characters out of their arm do. The only thing you've really got going for you as a difference is that tropes restrict you to things that have been troped. And that's a negative, not a positive, difference.

So, as njrxll poses, why do it that way?

I have to ask: what is considered "organic" character creation?

And I never thought of tropes as restrictive. They're not rules, they're guidelines, to be bent and even broken at your whim.

edited 28th Apr '12 2:33:42 AM by fillerdude

One might have many reasons to do things a certain way. Maybe one ends up with better characters when one does things this way. Maybe one is working on a trope-conscious project (like a parody or simply a story that does not take itself seriously). And maybe one simply wants to do an experiment and see what they end up with if they do things differently than they usually do.

And again, what exactly is "natural creation of characters" even supposed to be?

You could perhaps consult any of the numerous threads on that subject, like the Developing Characters one, or Finding Personality For A Character That Has None, or any of the dozens of others that have discussed the creation of characters either in whole or in part in the past.

(I'm finding honestly hard to believe that you've never encountered this concept before and are an active member of this forum. This appears to be willful obtuseness.)

You missed the point, it was over here.

Troping restricts you to things that have been troped.

We've already established via People Sit On Chairs that tropes describe complex actions or modes of behavior with very specific outcomes. This ignores simple modes of behavior, complex modes of behavior with non-specific results, etc. Since the wiki is still expanding, it should also be painfully obvious that there remain tropes undiscovered and tropes that are unknown to individual authors.

And those are "organic" how? People in those threads talk about "adding quirks", "creating flaws", "creating the character according to role in story"...

I just don't see the problem with using tropes as a foundation. "I wanna make a Magnificent Bastard" sounds similar to "I wanna make a character who's devious, charismatic and whose plans are so extensive that anything his opponents do probably further them".

Am I misunderstanding something here? Please do tell.

edited 28th Apr '12 6:17:54 AM by fillerdude

The reason why I'm asking for clarification on the "creating characters organically" thing, is because people always just end up citing whatever they themselves do as the organic way. Surely, all those radically different ways of creating characters cannot all be "organic". And even if all of them are, you are still unfairly implying that thinking and analysis is wrong.

There is nothing that would make it impossible for someone to think their way into a good character. Your approach is not the only valid approach, and some people might find it much easier to dissect, analyse and engineer (rather than doing whatever it is that you personally do), and might find that they achieve much better results while following that approach.

But anyway, most of the writers you find online (not just on this website, but generally on the internet) seem to be quite a close-minded, conservative and "my way is the RIGHT way" bunch. With that kind of narrow mindset, it's really unsurprising that there isn't much original writing out there.

Also, the fact that a trope has not been documented on this website, does not mean that one is not conscious of it and cannot use it. And as I said, there may be many reasons for why one might want to create characters from tropes. Mine are very project-specific.

Saying 'I will make this character to fulfil X role; they will have Y good qualities and Z flaws' is no more organic than saying 'I will make a Villain Protagonist who is a Corrupt Corporate Executive and a Child Hater'. That is not how people work and it is impossible to simulate any kind of realistic human psychology by simply selecting characteristics and combining them. 'Organically' is a strange word to use and not perhaps the one that I would choose, but what it means, to me at least, is thinking of your character as a whole person rather than a list of distinct features.

I agree with you there, but still, you have to START somewhere, and every writer starts creating a character in their own particular way. That's why I personally was a bit baffled when I found all those "character questionnaires" online. That's just not how I think about my characters, the idea of answering questions on behalf of your character just makes me confused, but evidently, that sort of thing makes sense to other writers, and they seem to get something useful out of it, so who am I to tell them that they are doing it all wrong?

Yes, exactly.

Also, I'd note that "creating characters from tropes" can mean different things depending on the trope in question. For characters with a relatively minor role, I've been known to essentially design them based off of their role in the story; while this is (again) a bad practice for creating major characters, not everyone needs that degree of being fleshed out. And while I don't think of it in terms of tropes, this is functionally equivalent to building a character from one of the Characters as Device tropes.

On the other hand, building a character from a Characterization Trope like the OP's example is essentially choosing one (or more) character traits and putting them together to form a character. This is, when simply done like that, a bad way of creating characters, and even when more elaborately done (like in the OP) still strikes me as fundamentally pointless. Regardless of whether you agree with that or not, though, it's clearly not the same as what's described in the first paragraph.

So while I don't think any of them are good starting points for characters, not all tropes are alike, and neither are the characters that can be "made" from them.

Edit: Also, I have to ask - if you feel this way about tropes:

then what is the point of "making" characters from them in the first place? If you're going to take this attitude, there's really no difference between making a character from tropes and making one another way except that you're slapping some played-with trope on them as a label.

edited 28th Apr '12 2:49:19 PM by nrjxll

In addition, doesn't the entire idea of tropes as building blocks miss the point of what tropes are? They are, for all intents and purposes, thematic memes and narrative devices that we use either as shorthand to describe recurring fictional concepts or as simple intellectual tools to convey particular ideas more easily.

Consider the original use of the word "trope": A little fragmentary melodic motif or miniature chord progression used in a musical piece, particularly a recurring one throughout many pieces used as a reference or a call-back to an earlier, well-known composition. Now, think of a composer consciously creating a piece entirely out of other people's melodies. Interesting idea? For a parody or some kind of conceptual piece, sure, but a serious composition, a symphony or a concerto? Probably not.

It should be pointed out here that some of the people arguing in favor of making characters from tropes are saying it can be used in parodies or "conceptual" pieces.

And you're correct in that tropes are meant to describe patterns in existing works, not serve as templates for new ones.

edited 28th Apr '12 3:52:38 PM by nrjxll

I mean "conceptual pieces" in the sense of Dada and Pop Art: Readymades. collage pieces and so forth. I don't think that's what they're actually talking about.

There's also something to be said for asking oneself what kind of person would develop in the real world to fit a stereotype or trope and then writing them as such, but even then, sacrificing character for the sake of plot or concept is something I cannot abide by. If they turn out to fit the mould while still being human, fine; if they break that mould and show themselves to be a complete person in the context of the work independent of the seed that bore them, even better.

(In other words, you can, in theory, use a pre-existing trope or series of preconceptions as the inspiration for a character, but where believability ends, so should the character's similarities with the base concept. Similarly, a character might fill an archetypal role, but that does not mean that they should, by definition, conform solely to that role. It is more important that they are their own character than what they do, if you catch my drift.)

edited 28th Apr '12 4:07:14 PM by JHM

Maybe not - I guess what I meant is that I feel that kind of thing and parodies are the one case where deliberate usage of tropes for the sake of using tropes is appropriate.

Anyway, I certainly agree with you as regards sacrificing character to plot or concept.

And I feel the same way about parodies and the like. So, are we square?

Apparently.