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  1. samgallenberger

    samgallenberger Member

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    Depth to My Hero

    Discussion in 'Character Development' started by samgallenberger, Jun 28, 2018.

    I've been working on a book for some time now and will finally be publishing it this year. One of my last hang ups is that I'm not sure my character is interesting enough. Was hoping the fine folk here could help me out.

    He's a rich mid 20's male who was exactly who you'd expect him to be until he fell in love with this girl. She's killed the day he's set to propose to her and it tears him apart. He feels tremendous guilt over it (he picked the location), he has nightmares/visions of her and for a brief period after he leans heavily on alcohol. His best friend drags him out of it and he uses the resources he has to make sure no one else in their city suffers her fate. I'm thinking that eventually it will dawn on him that being a hero completes him the way that she did and after floundering he will have found a new purpose in life.

    However, sometimes it doesn't feel like that all shines through and he seems a little boring. Any comments, concerns, questions and advice welcomed.
     
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  2. mashers

    mashers Contributor Contributor Community Volunteer

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    Sounds like he needs a flaw. Anybody would be devastated to lose someone they love. This isn’t really noteworthy in itself. There has to be some existing conflict which he must overcome in order to reach his goal. In my opinion, being sad because his girlfriend died isn’t enough. That’s the inciting incident which sends him on his journey, but shouldn’t be the only conflict he needs to resolve.

    Also, I’m not sure how I feel about the moral message of “being a hero fulfils me just like she did.” This doesn’t sit right with me.
     
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  3. awkwarddragon

    awkwarddragon Member

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    I don't agree with killing off a female character to jumpstart a male character's story arc. This trope is common in comic books, but not necessarily unheard of in other mediums. This specific trope you are using is very similar to the Disposable Woman trope. This cliche, in particular, falls under Stuffed into the Fridge trope, wherein a female character is killed - in a rather gruesome manner - by a villain to trigger the male character's story arc. I would suggest rethinking how to start your MC's story/character arc. My two cents.
     
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  4. samgallenberger

    samgallenberger Member

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    This is good advice. My character does need a flaw. He's a little impulsive but that's not enough. That last part was what I was working towards but can easily be maneuvered around as it's not completed yet.
     
  5. samgallenberger

    samgallenberger Member

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    I see where you're going with this but she will be a constant presence and reason for his actions. She's not getting killed off in Act I and never getting mentioned again. She'll be present in all four of this characters books so she more closely resembles the Lost Lenore trope mentioned. I appreciate you getting me to think deeper about this though. I can see how you would think that though based off the "being hero a fulfills me like she did" line.
     
  6. Brosephus

    Brosephus Member

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    Your character must have a question they need to answer. And I'm not talking about simple questions such as "How am I going to beat the bad guys and save the day?"

    Questions like: "How far should we move on from the deaths of our loved ones?", "Does the death of someone we love blind us to who they really were?", or "Why bond with others if every person you get close to will cause you pain at some point?"

    This is the thematic question for your story. Stratedgy calls this the orientation of your story.

    The dead girlfriend thing is a little played out, but ideally it should cause your character to ask himself this thematic question, and going through the events of the story should cause him to find the answer.

    Link to Stratedgy's writing series.

    Long, but highly beneficial.
     
  7. samgallenberger

    samgallenberger Member

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    Appreciate it. I love constructive criticism and more material to read/watch to learn. This is very helpful.
     
  8. Seven Crowns

    Seven Crowns Moderator Staff Supporter Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Well, a vigilante needs to lose something. That's often a someone.
    Batman (parents), Frank Castle (wife and kids), The Crow (himself), Mad Max (wife and kids), High Plains Drifter (the old sheriff, brother/himself), Bronson in Deathwish (wife, daughter)
    Then they unleash hell.

    Death, rape, imprisonment, disfigurement--those are all fair game. Something is taken and the vigilante responds with cathartic violence. It can happen to them or someone they are responsible for. Hell, John Wick was avenging his dog. (They should have made it a cat. That would have been funnier. I don't know why. I love cats, but it would have been.)

    I guess you could play with the trope. The MC could be insane (De Niro in Taxi Driver, Rorschach from Watchmen) or under delusions of grandeur (Kickass) or looking for acceptance (Marv from Sin City) or responding to imprisonment (Kill Bill, The Count of Montecristo, Oldboy). And you still have other tropes: fighting corruption (V for Vendetta), resisting the alien (They Live), cleaning the streets, honor, loss of career, paid killer, etc. There's a lot of them. Keep that in mind when you try to get your MC moving down that path.

    It's a pretty dark genre. The sexploitation films of the 70s (I Spit on Your Grave) and the French New Wave of Horror (High Tension, Martyrs, etc.) speak to that. I don't think there's a pleasant entrance into the life of a vigilante.

    . . .

    Your main question, how to flesh out your character . . . Your MC needs inner conflict. He needs more than one goal. There's two things he wants and they should be at odds.

    Let's say he starts out shallow and spoiled but empty. Maybe his parents berate him as a trust fund brat, just an undeserving scion, and he believes it (because it's kind of true). The GF shows him a new world where he proves himself, and he feels like he's a man. This is why he loves her--she makes him whole. He loses her and he assumes he's lost everything. (He hasn't, and maybe he'll realize that later. Maybe it will be too late to do anything about the events set in motion.) But the entire time, a second impulse from his old life pulls him back. Maybe it's the accumulation of wealth. Or since he has wealth, trophies. When he decides who he should "help," he tends to aim for the flashy targets. You could have him tooling around in fancy sports cars at the beginning, buying expensive paintings. At the end, he's trying to reclaim this new life (as he perceives it), but he's really sinking deeper into his old life by collecting famous scalps.

    So something like that. His materialism makes him collect things, while his longing for his lost future makes him pursue justice. And one should defeat the other. For example, he kills a head honcho and goes on his merry way only to find out that the second-in-command is even worse (More violence and loss of life ensues. This time the cat dies too.) Sometimes the character's decisions favor one impulse and sometimes the other. That's just one approach. Just come up with an inner belief that a rich person (or I guess, any man) might have. Examples: It's great to be waited upon; money buys happiness; everyone has a price. Something like that.
     
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  9. samgallenberger

    samgallenberger Member

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    This is exactly the type of response I needed. As for the trope it'd be a hybrid of revenge and cleaning the streets. Dueling goals is the perfect way to add depth to the story I have in mind. This is why I love this site, I learn a ton. Thanks!
     
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  10. X Equestris

    X Equestris Contributor Contributor

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    Agreed. It doesn't sit right at all.

    I think that's because, if one looks at the avenging vigilante types, the ones that make an impact on pop culture, they almost never find fulfillment. Or at least, they're never anywhere near as fulfilled as they were before the inciting loss. Those people are dead, and no amount of punching or shooting thugs is going to bring them back.

    Batman's a pretty textbook example, one lots of people are familiar with, and one already mentioned it this thread. From Batman #24:

    image.jpeg

    There are some similarities between your hero and Bruce. Guilt. The desire to ensure nothing like the inciting incident happens to anyone else. However, it seems like your hero is lacking a strong internal conflict.

    Seven Crowns is absolutely right: your hero should want more than one thing, and they should clash in some way. In the climax, your hero is forced to choose between one or the other.

    Returning to Bruce, he's torn between a desire to be happy and being Batman. As the narration of Issue #12 (a letter from him to Catwoman) shows, being Batman is basically Bruce committing a prolonged form of suicide by criminal:

    ...After the alley and the gun. And the pearls. What use was I? After the blood on her hand, what use was a little rich kid whose mommy and daddy got shot? I was pain. That's all I was. Everything else, every chance given to me, every promise I'd made, all of it was pain. And what use is pain? What use is being just pain? It's not dignified. It's not kind. And if it's not dignified and it's not kind, then maybe it's not worth anything. Maybe it's better off as nothing. Gone. Dead.

    I was ten. I got one of my father's razor blades, and I got down on my knees. I put the metal on my wrist. The edge scratching cold. The blood on my hand. And I looked up. To Mother and Father. I told them I was sorry. I was so sorry. I was on my knees in Gotham. And I was praying, pushing my hands together now, the blood and the blade between them. I prayed.

    And no one--no one answered. No one answered. No one answered. I was alone. Like everyone else. Like everyone in Gotham. I saw everyone in Gotham, all of us. We're all on our knees, our hands together, the blood and the blade warm between them. We pray. And no one answers. I saw. And I understood. Finally. Kindness. Dignity.

    I let the razor fall, and I understood, it was done. I'd done it, I'd surrendered. My life was no longer my life and I whispered--"I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals."

    So that's what it is. The ears. The belt. The gargoyle. It's not funny. It's the choice of a boy. The choice to die. I am Batman. I am suicide.

    And you, Cat. You know. Because if you've made that choice, you can see it in another. You can see it in me. I can see it in you. So you're right. When we kiss. The pain goes away. Because, for a moment, we share our deaths. And, for a moment, we don't die alone.

    The overarching question of the current Batman run is "Can Bruce Wayne be Batman and be happy?" and if not, which is he going to choose.

    Looking at your hero with all these things in mind, I'd take it a different direction than Seven Crowns does. The idea of being a vigilante to fill the hole left by a loved one is a fine concept, even if the moral message that it actually works sits poorly with me.

    Maybe your hero gets his start because he believes vigilantism will leave him as fulfilled as his relationship with his girlfriend did. He sets his sights on some big crime boss and decides to take apart the guy's organization. External conflict.

    Meanwhile, after a respectful mourning period, your hero's friend starts trying to set him up with new people. Other fish in the sea and all. Maybe he'll meet someone he finds even more fulfilling than the previous girlfriend.

    The hero is very averse to this; it seems too disrespectful to her memory. Vigilantism seems a fine space filler.

    Fast forward to the climax. Externally your hero is poised to take down the main bad guy. Internally, he's questioning if vigilantism is as fulfilling as he thought. Maybe, despite his reservations, a relationship with one of those new people is looking pretty promising,

    If he achieves his external goal, hopes of fulfillment from anything other than being a hero are going to be dashed. He'll always have a target on his back; he'll never be able to completely walk away from vigilantism. Bringing in a different source of fulfillment risks it being destroyed by his enemies,

    If he walks away to find happiness from another source, a very bad man is going to get away, and everything he's done so far is going to be pointless.

    Personally, the former strikes me as more satisfying. He realizes that his initial belief (vigilantism will perfectly fill the whole left by his girlfriend) was false, but only after it's too late to turn back. He'll never be as fulfilled as he might have been; the best he can manage is preventing others from feeling this sort of pain. That might be a more negative character arc than you were going for, but it carries a certain ring of tragic truth to it.

    Hopefully that gives you some ideas. There are tons of ways you could go about adding depth and making him interesting, but I think clashing goals are the best. The choice made at the climax really shows you the kind of person a character is.
     
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  11. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    The way you've described it sounds pretty textbook - it's pretty cliche. I'm not into superheroes much but off the top of my head I can think of Spiderman when his uncle gets killed, right, and that spurs him into becoming the hero he's supposed to be, or something. It's the same concept: lose a loved one, become a hero lol. Batman was similar right - he witnessed his parents getting killed and then becomes a vigilante, protecting the city. How's yours different from any of these famous examples?

    Since you say you're ready to publish it this year, it seems a little late to do a major character overhaul for none other than your MC. Personally, I might choose to play to the strength of the cliche instead, somehow. Cliches are cliches because they work extremely well and they resonate with people, and therefore end up being done to death - you just need to find a fresh way of using it.

    If you have other interesting important and side characters, it might not be a problem. People tell me in LOTR, Frodo is the dullest character. Harry Potter was apparently the same. MC often serves as the reader's self-insert, and so depending on the kind of novel you want to write, it could be a good thing to leave the MC kinda blank. Just look at Bella... o_O

    I have the same problem, really. My MC's too good lol and he's probably the most boring character of everyone in my book - nothing I can do about that now when I'm 100k words in. But there's an audience even for this sort of MC. I'm hoping the strength of my other characters and all their relationships will be enough to pull it all through (and I do have a few quite interesting ones, the villain being one of them. I also have a beautiful friendship within my love triangle - between the two female rivals :p which is pretty unique) So, I know I certainly have things that would be good enough, shall we say. The proof is in the pudding though I guess, so I don't know yet how I'll do, as it's not finished - wish me luck eh? :coffee:

    I think it could be all right - you just need to realise the potential weakness is there and you have to somehow... play it right, if you get what I mean? Make it a deliberate choice for your novel and then structure things around it and make it into a strength. Not got a clue how to do this, but sounds good in theory I think! :agreed::crazy:
     
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  12. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    For me, strength makes a character interesting. I don't mean physical strength, I mean strength OF character. I found Frodo to be a very interesting character, in that he tried to do the right thing himself, yet was willing to delegate when needed. He punched above his weight, and I think that's interesting. If he had been a sparkly character, I doubt if we would have identified with him the way we did ...I'm talking about the book here.

    Your Will is an equally interesting character for me, @Mckk. A lot more interesting than Batman or Spiderman. He's just got himself. No magical powers, etc. And that's human. I find that interesting.
     
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  13. samgallenberger

    samgallenberger Member

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    Since Batman is my favorite character of all time their are definitely some homages paid in my origin story. This is extremely helpful though. Just going through the process of the dueling internal and external goals helps me understand a lot. I literally have zero writing experience before this story so learning as much as possible is not only beneficial but fun. Wasn't a focus of mine in college, not part of my career, it's just something I've wanted to do for a while and finally decided it was time.
     
  14. samgallenberger

    samgallenberger Member

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    Yeah on the surface that's been the main complaint people have had it-it sounds cliche, at least the set up does. The rest of the story definitely plays out a little differently. I'm probably 90% done of the content of the book but I have left some things intentionally vague as I tried to sort my character out. Just going through responses I've received here I can see opportunities to expand on things I have left bare that add to his internal conflict. Though by no means does that mean I don't want more advice, suggestions. I definitely don't want my main character to be the dullest, though his story over time will be one of tragedy and despair so starting him off relatively normal and boring would kind of fit.
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2018
  15. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    I dunno, if you do a major character overhaul, I don't see how you could keep the majority of what you've written. Your MC's rationale and reactions are what drive the book forward, after all. It would be work indeed to think of alternative rationales and reactions that lead all to exactly the same behaviour/consequences, if you get what I mean. But maybe you can - I guess it depends on a lot of factors.

    As I said, cliches are be a good thing. There're plenty of people who read and love cliche novels. I'd rather just do the cliche well, rather than not doing the cliche at all, if you get my drift? Like, you don't need an overhaul - you need ways of making the cliche work. Cliche isn't always bad if it fits.
     
  16. samgallenberger

    samgallenberger Member

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    The character as it stands is pretty dry. If I go further in depth with some of the issues I've already planted seeds for the story shouldn't change exponentially. I'll have to change parts (thus delaying probably another month+) but not the whole book.
     
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