Character Creation: Personality Core
Sylvester Stallone as Rocky (1976)
Your character’s personality core is more complex and will fill up a large portion of the body of the character iceberg.
The six basic areas include: Strengths and Weaknesses, Complexities, Emotions, Attitudes, Values, Unique Qualities, and Quirks.
Strengths and Weaknesses
A character defined by only strengths or only weaknesses is one-dimensional and uninteresting. Characters with both strengths and weaknesses, therefore, are more believable and realistic. Even superheroes are defined by both.
Superman is “more powerful than a locomotive,” yet he is powerless when exposed to Kryptonite, Storm can change the weather at will, but she suffers from claustrophobia, and venom negates Spiderman’s spider sense.
Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk.
Sometimes a particular character trait works as both a strength and a weakness. The Incredible Hulk’s temper is clearly his greatest and worst attribute.
Complexities
Conflict doesn’t always have to arise between characters; often it simply festers from a multitude of complexities within. We all possess ironies, paradoxes and hypocrisies, and you should never ignore these qualities to maintain character believability.
Exploring these qualities will unlock doors that lead to your character’s fears, desires, and deepest seeds of denial, often allowing for readers to sympathize or empathize even when they don’t condone a character’s actions.
Chris Cooper as Colonel Frank Fitts in American Beauty (1999)
In American Beauty Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) does everything in his power to teach his son how to be a man: strong, disciplined, and heterosexual. To our surprise, however, we learn that he is in fact gay. The paradox within Fitts is both bewildering and understandable, given his strict military background.
Emotions
The way a character feels is crucial knowledge you must have, allowing him or her to create motivated and rooted actions for your story.
A wife and husband may have a discussion about taxes, but in order for the scene to go anywhere, you must know how each feels about money and financial security.
Emotions also allow for subtext: what a character is not saying. People rarely say exactly what they mean and knowing a character’s underlying emotions will allow for the artifice of realistic and believable dialogue.
Attitudes
Understanding a character’s attitude toward themselves, toward others, and the surrounding circumstances is also essential.
If your character is an alcoholic preacher living in Harlem during the 1920s, knowing his attitude towards prohibition and racial inequality will be vital.
Moreover, clarifying two characters’ feelings toward one another before they enter a scene together will be a launching pad for their interaction.
Values
The decision you make in previous stages of research regarding the character’s upbringing, religion, and culture will be extremely helpful in establishing their values.
Knowing what a character stands for, from specific morals, concerns, philosophies, and belief systems, also helps to clarify actions and objectives.
Kevin Costner as Robin Hood in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).
Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor, but his actions to obtain that objective stems from a deep moral belief in the value of ethical justice.
This same value was echoed centuries later in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letters From a Birmingham Jail, where King declared that, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
Unique Qualities & Quirks
The icing on the cake comes when you toss those unique qualities and quirks into the mix.
Jon Heder as Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
Maybe it’s a wink, a repetitive tick, or even a word all their own. Juno constantly carries around a super-size slurpee while Napoleon Dynamite fills his notebooks by doodling ligers.
Giving your character some incredibly specific quirky and unique qualities helps make them even that much more memorable.
The more work you do in character creation helps make the development of the story easier. It’s clear how to navigate your characters through the plot because you know exactly how they feel about the circumstances and people around them as well as what informs the decisions they will make.
Believable and realistic dialogue will flow more easily because everything from vocabulary and speech patterns to emotional motivations and subtext will be clear in your mind.
Understanding the physicality of your characters will also allow you to distinguish how they move about in their world, how others view them, and how they view themselves.
Devoting the necessary time to research and development of character—whether you go about it internally or externally—will equal the quality of your creation. The more specific, the greater the opportunity for creating truly complex, compelling, and unforgettable characters.