7 ELEMENTS OF STORY – CHARACTERS
In any story, we need at least one main POV character, usually the person we want the reader to identify with. The main character can be good or bad, but most importantly, the character must be interesting. What makes someone interesting? Many things: wit, humor, loyalty, bluntness, mystery, perversion, violence, etc. The interest comes from anything but being ordinary.
James N. Frey, in his bestseller, How to Write a Damn Good Novel, uses the bell curve as a way to explain this. Most people fall very close to the ordinariness shown in a bell curve. For a character to be interesting, that character needs to fall outside the bell curve. Not be ordinary. Not be boring. Not be average.
Being outside the bell curve can take many forms: physical, mental, spiritual. What makes Sherlock Holmes unordinary? Can he pole-vault in the Olympics? No. Is he a renowned artist? No. His unique intellect is his weapon and it puts him into a rarified atmosphere occupied by very few people.
Being outside the bell curve can also result from a character who has a major weakness, such as an injury or an addiction. Look at a character such as Miss Marple, an old woman, who can’t overcome an opponent physically, who would even have difficulty running away from danger. What makes her different than other old ladies? First, she’s a busybody beyond what we might expect from an old lady with time on her hands. Second, she’s fascinated by crime and applies a unique blend of intelligence and observation to unravelling mysteries.
In Anthony Burgess’s masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange, the main POV character is Alex, a criminal, narcissist, hedonist, rapist, and murderer. Not the usual character we would easily identify with. He’s so far off the bell curve, we have to assign him to another universe. But Alex’s warped, sometimes brilliantly insightful observations of the world are so challenging to the reader, it’s easy to get sucked into Alex’s orbit. He’s that different. And ultimately we find ourselves rooting for Alex as he becomes the nexus of the fight between totalitarianism and freedom. Amazing writing.
In developing characters, it helps to think of friends, coworkers, even enemies who have stuck in our minds. Try to identify specific characteristics of people. Find one outstanding strength or flaw that makes someone memorable. In real life, we’re surrounded by people we love and hate, people whom we secretly want to fail or succeed, people who seem to create a torrent of controversy no matter what they do. Try to winnow out how they do that and what makes us curious about them. Then steal those traits and make great heroes and villains.