What do you think of this guy?

You're still missing the point. This is a slight improvement over the character sheet, but it's still little more than a resume.

The only way to evaluate a character is in the context of a story. You see him responding to challenges, making mistakes, having doubts, setting doubts aside, intreacting with others around him - that is the essence of a character.

Descriptions, just like plot summaries, are utterly useless for evaluating a character.

Write the story. Don't keep asking people for permission/approval to proceed. You'll make mistakes, and you'll go back and fix them as you learn. But take the need for approval and run it through the garbage disposal.

 

While I agree with Cogito in principle, I still can't help commenting on the details:

"Here, the Special Forces personnel discovered his uncanny ability of marksmanship, and hand-to-hand combat, whilst his terrible hand-eye-co-ordination let him down on many fronts. "

Is this perhaps an error? I think that marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat would both be heavily dependent on eye-hand coordination, so these seem inconsistent.

"However, Carter is a modest man, and, not wanting to boast about himself, he joined the Royal Navy Pilot’s course."

Becoming a military pilot is a substantial, ambitious achievement. This is phrased as if it's a minor, easy fallback career.

In general, again, this guy is a superhero. I see that you've tried to add a few flaws - "stubborn" and "perfectionist". But these are the kind of flaws that are often written to be advantages. And the eye-hand coordination problem doesn't seem to exist, given his skills.

He's powerful and perfect, to a near-superhuman extent. He would be far, far more interesting if he were just an ordinary guy, someone that the reader could identify with, at least a little.

To repeat myself, I think, there's a reason why Chuck in Chuck, for example, is a _very_ ordinary guy. There's a reason why Lord of the Rings is about Frodo and Bilbo and not about Gandalf and Aragorn. Sure, James Bond is about James Bond. But I think that the amount of successful fiction that's about the already-superhuman character is smaller than the amount that's about someone that the reader can identify with.

If your character were, say, someone who competently completed the UK equivalent of high school, struggled with college but failed, spent a few years working in various retail and food service jobs without breaking into management, joined the army with the goal of getting out of that rut, and found that he had talents (not "uncanny" ones, just ordinary workmanlike talents) that led to him slowly moving to the edges of intelligence work and achieving some modest leadership success, I would find him far, far more interesting.

He's your character, and you seem pretty set on making him a superhero, and it's true that you really can't know who the character is until you actually get him out in your fictional world. But I wanted to say, one more time, that superheroes are _not_ usually interesting.

ChickenFreak

 

It sounds to me like a character you wish to live vicariously through...a bit of an alter-ego, someone you wish you could be in another life...way too cliched

bri.

 

No man is a template RN officer, and there are always exceptions. However, many things about this character are too a-typical and contradictory for someone born in 1975. The name Robert is better, though.

DON'T move him away from Plymouth! It's much, much more believable for him to have the ambition to go into the Royal Navy if he stays in this naval city and doesn't move to London. He would have grown up sailing and loving the sea, and had relatives like this, too.

Also, if he is from the type of upper-middle-class family that would be typical, Rob would most likely have gone to an independant prep school and then later public (that is, private) school, or Dartmouth College (we don't have 'high school' in the UK).

He would be more likely to go into something like cartography/surveying if he likes maths. He could have got his degree (in anything, subject really not important) after signing on as an officer to the Royal Navy before starting full naval training--but what did he take two degrees for? It would be unusual for the navy to finance him on full salary like that. He would have been selected for specialist officer courses for special language/technical training later. I know the Royal family train as helicopter pilots etc but again that's not so typical for a man who intends to spend his whole career in the navy. Why didn't he just join the airforce if he wanted to fly?

Actually, your guy sounds much more like an air force officer than a naval officer, although I know a naval officer who was a specialist in translation, which took him into intelligence work, who seems a bit like your man.

P.S. My father's family come from Plymouth, and all my male relatives on that side are either surgeons, or officers in the army or navy.

 

What are his flaws? What makes him angry? Does he have any pet peeves? What about his personal/love life? Sure, he could be Mr. Cullen (haha) of the Military world, but this Edward needs some flaws. Does he have anger issues, or is he submissive? What about pets and sibilings?

 

Heh...I was thinking the same thing.

 

Look, all the skills you put in eventually can work for the character, but only if you portray him realistically. Unless you make him and all his attributes believable, he'll look like some idealized, overpowered action hero without any real substance. No matter what you do with him as a character, you need to create a picture in the reader's mind that doesn't seem like some stock character, but instead is a believable human being that has some impact on the reader's mind.

And don't think of him as "ordinary," no matter what he's like. No character is "ordinary" in good writing; even intentionally boring and/or unpleasant characters have to be viewed as individuals by the writer and the reader. If you try too hard to make him "ordinary" in any respect, not only will you be drifting into Naturalism, but your efforts to make him too ordinary will show.

 

Make him a little older, maybe late thirties early forties and it could seem much more realistic. I have one of the overqualified characters but it becomes apparent how she got that way. I don't need to mention the name as almost everyone has.

But I would say that yeah its just a list of qualification but I am sure in your head there is more going on there than just this.

 

Mmm... Not good having a character with extreme skills... unless you're writing something like Die Hard. Then I can see him being very cool- just don't write your story in a serious way. Nothing wrong with being outrageously over-the-top (look at Zombieland!), but doing so means making it so much so that it's entertaining in an almost funny way.

If he's supposed to be in a serious, war-oriented story... bleh, too over-skilled. Either way, you gave us no context or information...