How do writers create those "special" characters?

Those pure evil for the sake of being evil aren't that interesting, there's no conflict within them or really around them. Do those characters exist, yup. Are they the most interesting and complex? Nope. (not to me anyway).

 

Ah, I see what you're doing. You're including any type of strength or advantage—for instance, actual physical strength—as a positive quality, and any weakness/vulnerability as a negative quality, regardless of whether these qualities are moral or amoral.

Which means you aren't claiming villains can't be pure evil, they just can't be entirely weak/ineffective. The latter is true of course, because a villain needs to be a credible threat, and a completely weak and ineffective villain isn't a credible threat. This is neither profound or controversial. In fact, it's intuitive.

Though you lose the plot (not that claimining a villain need be somewhat competent is much of a plot) when you state the following:

Determination is an amoral quality, good and wicked characters alike can possess it. The same is true for intelligence (or lack thereof), work ethic, decisiveness, and so on.

 

It seems you do not understand what I mean by the positive qualities for the villain.
As I said, if you collect all the negative qualities in one character, you will not get a villain, and a parody with which you do not need to fight, as it will self-destruct.

So what positive qualities can a villain have?

He may be smart ...
He may be stubborn ...
He can be purposeful ...
He can be strong ...
He can be hardworking ...
He may have his own principles ...
He can be ambitious ...
He may be an idealist ...
He may be faithful ...
He can be brave ...

There is much more, but these qualities will not contradict the fact that he is a villain, but on the contrary they will make him even more effective as a villain.


But collect all the negatives: cowardice, greed, weakness, insecurity, laziness ...
Do you understand what I'm leading ... You don’t have to fight this villain, he won’t get out of his den to interfere with the hero and the hero will not even know that he had such an enemy.

 

The moral of man is built largely on self-development. People that work on themselves and develop are considered good. It is these characters who are the heroes of stories. As I said, nothing is taken from nowhere and does not disappear to nowhere.
Therefore, I have always considered the strengths and weaknesses of a character to be directly related to his positive and negative qualities.Any self-development and growth of a character shows his positive qualities.

Due to the fact that morality is a relative thing, and good for some means evil for others, this system with a causal relationship and strengths and weaknesses of the character always seemed to me more convenient and understandable.

 

Let's get started ...

He was a strong orator and idealist who managed to unite the people under one idea and to get out of the economic crisis after the first World War.
The idea was bad. But he was a strong and talented speaker, as a result, most of the country considered him a hero and savior of Germany, somewhere until the middle of World War II. If most consider it good, does that not make it good by your logic.

If he is bad, then the people that fought him are good ... What about Stalin. He also massively killed people, even more brutally than Hitler. The fact that by the beginning of the second war he had done a couple of genocides and killed about 10 million people, makes him a good guy, since he was Hitler's enemy.

I have always believed that good and evil are human inventions so that they can justify themselves. Your goal as a writer is to set a perspective for the reader. To determine for the reader what is good and what is evil.


Because everyone has their own truth. Everyone considers himself a hero of his story and himself right. Even the Nazis, if you ask them now, "What were they fighting for?"
They will say, "That they fought for their country."Can you call them villains for this? Does patriotism and the desire to fight for their country make soldiers evil?

What is good? What is evil? Without a pre-established perspective, these are just empty words that do not make sense.

 

"Hitler did good and bad things... " It seems we are back to the beginning.

"also being the enemy of a bad man does not automatically make you good - if one drug dealer kills another drug dealer does it make one of them the hero ? or is the hero of the story the cop who is trying to lock them both up?" - What is good? What is evil? Without a pre-established perspective, these are just empty words that do not make sense. Is killing a drug dealer a good thing? - If you are another drug dealer, then no. If you're a cop, then yes. What if the drug dealer was just trying to feed his family, or did it under threat of death.

Any action can be presented as heroic and villainous. Because we have such strength. The strength to choose how to show heroes and villains, how to present their words and actions, it does not matter what kind of character has good or bad features. If a character has both good and bad qualities, then we always have a tool to direct the story in the direction we need. We will be able to move the story not only with the virtues of the characters, but also with their shortcomings. Making the story more believable, at the same time always has the tools to guide the story as we want.

 

Mod hat on here: The topic of what determines if a character (or a person) 'good' or 'evil' is an absorbing topic—one that people have grappled with for aeons, and are likely to continue to grapple with till humanity dies. However, this discussion is a bit off-topic here.

The OP wanted to discuss this: How do you create really interesting, complex characters? The ones that feel like they could be a real person out there somewhere.

This is a writing thread, so let's return to the writing issue. Let's return to discussing HOW, as writers, we can create interesting, complex characters (complex is more than just where they stand on the good/evil spectrum.) I'm sure we'd all love to do this in our stories. So ...what can we do to lift our character out of the ordinary, to become a "person" the reader will always remember?

 

Actors say that in order to play a character who's significantly different from yourself you need to dig down deep and find their qualities in yourself. They're there - we all have the potential to become a Hitler or a Pol Pot - it's just that we've discarded those potentials and developed other ones. If you can immerse yourself into a character deeply enough to bypass your own moralistic (or otherwise) traits and reach your long-buried potentialities, then you can understand how you yourself might be able to do what the character does, or believe what they believe. Jordan Peterson came to understand the human potential for evil by imagining over and over what it would actually be like if he were trapped into being a guard in a Soviet Gulag or Auschwitz. He said he could understand how the pressure between choosing to be one of the inmates or one of the guards torturing them would force you into some pretty horrible choices, and then he was able to understand the motivations behind that kind of behavior.

I don't mean for this to be about good and evil, just using that as an example (which unfortunately fits in with the OT part of the convo as well). But it's also about putting yourself into the shoes of a person who's very different from you. Maybe a social butterfly if you're a wallflower - a mover and shaker if you're a common laborer, etc.

You can talk to the character in your imagination. I sometimes have round table discussions with several different candidates and see which ones come alive and project a powerful persona. Some remain uninteresting or won't speak up. The ones who come alive in your imagination are the ones you can write about effectively. By imagining talking to them rather than being them I think you're able to access those buried potentialities better, because you're thinking of them as someone else. The mind is very good at modeling behavior in this way. Then maybe after some deep conversation you might be better able to imagine being them (though that might not even be necessary).

Some call it daydreaming, I call it imaginal dialogue. Really it's just what we all do when creating characters.

 

For me Bilbo Baggins was very relatable. All he really wanted to do was stay home in his comfy little house and stay one step removed from the outside world, then he stepped out of his comfort zone. This was instantly relatable to me as a child because that was all I wanted. School was out of my comfort zone and all I wanted to do was stay home. My Grand-dad told me to see each day as an "incredible journey" and this encouraged me to go. I wonder if there was anyone who didn't relatable to Bilbo or was he a universally relatable character. He felt like your net door neighbour.

 

Getting a character to step outside his/her comfort zone is a really good way to test them. Real people get forced to do this all the time, don't they? And they grow from the experience. If they cope with the new scenario, they know they can cope, and while they might not relish having to do it again, they know they can. They might even excel at the new experience, which will open up their lives to so much more. And of course they might fail. Which may reinforce their opinion that they can't do anything much at all. Or it might motivate them to try again.

All of these outcomes builds character, and builds "a" character for the writer and the reader.

I'd say one of the simplest ways to build complex characters is NEVER let life be too easy for them. Or—if life does come easily to them—let that be a detriment to their character, not an asset. I think of David Copperfield's best friend Steerforth, when I think of the kind of character who always gets what he wants, never fails at anything. Steerforth was depressed, suffered self-loathing, made reckless, and was ultimately defeated by his own easy and undeserved successes. Steerforth is one of literature's most memorable (and realistic) characters.

Give your character difficulties they struggle (or even fight) to overcome. Give them opposition. Give them problems that can't be solved, but only coped with. Conflict will, of course, drive the plot of your story (which is good)—but it will also mold the character into a more complex and more memorable individual. Let them discover their own strengths and weaknesses as they confront and work through their problems. And don't be afraid to let them fail. We all fail at some things, don't we?

 

I can relate to this "stepping out of comfort zone" throughout my life as well, not just in childhood. When my Father died suddenly and I found myself living alone at nineteen. I didn't know a lot of things about living alone and it was a real learning curve. But I did it and it definitely changed me, mostly for the good. It made me more confident in my abilities and coping abilities, I got a lot of insight into myself.

 

Writing characters to be believable, not necessarily relatable, and with clear goals are givens. I place emphasis on exploring new concepts that haven't been done to death in existing fiction, usually taking external inspiration instead of basing it on myself. I like to write motivations without a plan on how they'll be achieved because chaos and tragedy are compelling.

Example of my thought process:
Let's say I'm reading an article about living off-grid (without the infrastructure of civilization) and primitivism. Alright, that could be the character's motivation. They want to live like a caveman because they find themselves incompatible with modern society for whatever reason. The conflict would be something that prevents them from achieving that goal.

Maybe they suffered an accident earlier in life that caused both their aversion to civilization and a dependency to the medicine or technology that civilization provides. I can write this character as an amputee cyborg who needs monthly pharmaceuticals to maintain their life support implants.

Maybe they're just a regular person, but their pampered upbringing made them simultaneously dependent on and take for granted the comforts of civilization. Their character development would be figuring out whether their longing for the wilderness is genuine or just romanticized escapism from an entirely different problem like being overwhelmed with the responsibilities and complexities of life.

 

Imagine if instead of hobbits it was about strong warriors who kill dragons every morning before breakfast and fear nothing. Not nearly as good of a story.

 

Well, true. I guess that's what Beowulf was too, and Conan etc. I should say it wouldn't be relatable in the same way.

 

I have a powerful case for your character. The human psyche hasn't evolved past the era of hunter-gatherers (paleolithic), and the comforts of modern civilization are actually an illusion - they don't make us happy. We're literally built to respond to nature, to physical activity in the wild, to close knit communities, to the thrill and risk of hunting. In an age where people spend excessive time on the internet and work too many hours at jobs that are meaningless to them, we've become estranged to our own well-being. I would argue the primitive longing for the wilderness isn't romantic or escapist - it's one of the few things genuine, and I genuinely believe that.

 

Maybe the romantic part was just my projection. I always try to combine the comfort of modern technology and the freedom of the natural world for my settings, just because I personally find it comfy. My current project is about humans colonizing an alien planet covered in lush forests, fertile land, and a breathable atmosphere. I'm a sucker for utopias and fictional universes that I'd actually want to live in.

 

Creating a complex character is all about the layers you put in. Sure, every character should want something, but that want or desire doesn't need to be the center of their existence or even what drives the story. By making it only a part of them, you open yourself up to creating the rest of what makes them. And don't most people want several things for different reasons? Also, people in real life don't get to deal with one issue at a time. We're always juggling the pieces of our lives. Give your character layers and the story will have more texture. Also, maybe what they want isn't the point of the story. Just because your character has a goal it doesn't mean that it's a set path your story has to follow. In fact, if the story isn't so focused on what the character wants, it opens the door for you to create more layers and really play around with that. If you want a quick read of great complex character examples, pick up a copy of The Gettysburg Review and read a few of their short stories. They seem to have a real handle on complex characters.

 

My personal route is to mix up standard archetypes into something different.

For instance, two major characters in my story are a lonely humanoid abomination and a younger daughter of the royal family who inherited the throne. They share the antagonist role.

 

I don’t feel like Sauron was a real character, but the embodiment of evil. We never saw things from his perspective.