I DID NOT MAKE THESE VIDEOS. I thought it would be of benefit to other people if I shared this three part series. While the creator, The Man Behind the Screen, approaches this study from the perspective of role-playing, I think just as much can be learned for the purposes of writing fiction. The first video takes a look at the history of The Burned Man. Developing your character's backstory is an important step in understanding who your character is at the start of your story, and why they are that way. It can help provide connectedness and depth to your story, and a means to inform their future actions. In the second video, he discusses what Joshua Graham's (The Burned Man) motivations are. This is more than the things that happened to him. Motivations aren't just reactionary; an interesting character also takes action. Through his zealotry we can discover that Graham's motivations rest in his belief in God, and a desire to make that righteous anger "his own". The YouTuber provides plenty of great examples of Graham referencing the Bible. Of course, in our fiction we may want to decide what should happen to our characters. Come the end, will they be different? If so, how? At the end of the second video, we explore the best of the several different endings for Joshua Graham, and compare how his character has changed since the player first meets him. The third video is a brief recap to tie things together, before discussing ways that we can take the lessons of this case study and apply it to the characters we create for our roleplaying. Or, in our case, for writing our fiction.
