Help make my protagonist more interesting

As I was surfing the interwebs the other day I came across a creative exercise in which, without saying anything about the characters physical appearance, specific relationships with the other characters or importance in the story, to describe the character to another person who had no prior knowledge of... well whatever it is your making.

Now I applied this to some characters in one of my projects and for most of them I was able to come up with a sentence or two to descript said character right of the top of my head. When it came to my main protagonist however the only thing I could say about him, after several minutes of nothing was “He’s a whiny teenage brat with a magic sword”.

That’s it an teen with a weapon. Hell I could probably think of more to say about the sword than the character. I know it helps to have an everyman that the audience can identify with, but it also makes him boring as hell.

Now of course he does have some personality quirks. Apart from complaining about everything, he’s comedicy unlucky, a Casanova wannabe who never gets lucky and is Genre Savey from reading lots of fiction as a child. However none of this takes away from the fact that he’s nothing more than a giant dush.

So any advice, ideas, concepts or mannerisms that you peoples can think of to give this character a bit more personality?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SoYouWantTo/DevelopCharacterPersonality

Look up Red Letter Media's review of Phantom Menace, which is where a lot of people have heard from that test, as it gives a pretty good example. Listen to how the surveyed people talk about C 3 PO/etc.

Also be careful with use of quirks/mannerisms, since sometimes they make a character just seem more fake, than the other way around.

-takes out writing craft book-

Hmm...actions, motivation, past, reputation, habits, talents, and personal tastes.

I would focus on motivation first (what drives him to achieve his goals in life?), and then why he is what he is, what other people generally think about him and how he reacts to that, and so on.

edited 18th Jun '12 1:20:36 PM by chihuahua0

Rather than just come up with quirks and mannerisms and slap them on a blank cardboard cut-out like labels to make a character, you want to make sure there is substance to them.

Why is your character a whiny brat? What in their temperament and childhood and teenage years made them so? Why are they a Casanova Wannabe? How does their constant unluckiness affect their personality and feelings, both in normal and critical situations?

Once you know these inner workings, especially how their core prsonality works and how their life has been this far, you can build more on those, i.e. In what ways does that personality manifest outside of those certain quirks.