Episode 103: How do you write complex characters?

In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Devil card to guide their discussion. They discuss how to write complex characters based on their strengths and weaknesses and the balance between the two.

Question of the week: how do you write complex characters and flawed characters? Share your answer here.

Show Notes

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Transcript

JP: Hello friends. This is episode 103, and it is July 4th, 2022, as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch, with my co-host…

Crys: Crys Cain.

JP: And we are batch recording because good ol’ Crys has some travels to do, so you can hear our updates on the previous episode. But this week we wanted to look at the comments we’ve had on our website.

Crys: On episode 99, which is how do you capture your reader’s attention, our friend Tom said, “The Matt Bird book is really great.” A hundred percent agree. But he says, “Because I write crime novels that lean on the thriller side, I like Chapter One to be a Bond-Style action piece, just showing the character in mortal peril to get the juices flowing. I see no reason why you can’t just call your prologue chapter one.”

And I think in the most, in most circumstances, he’s correct. I did have a series of books where the prologue needed to be the prologue because it was the only chapter not in our dueling narrator POV. So we had first person POV between the two romance leads, except for that first chapter, which was an insight into the person they were going to be saving throughout the rest of the book. And it was in third person.

But a lot of it just depends on the structure of the novel. If you’re doing a first-person story, most of the time you can just jump in and go. I think these are just all tools for sure.

JP: A hundred percent. Like in the book that I have with Abe, we almost made chapter one a prologue but decided on renaming it chapter one simply because of the pace of the whole story. And sometimes seeing that prologue gives you that I don’t know if you’d call it a moment of breath or whatever, but the whole purpose in my mind for prologues is that it is a way to show an aspect of the world so that when you get to chapter one, your reader is aware that there is a gap of time until you reach that level.

So let’s say like any sort of Harry Potter magical thing. I don’t know if it is actually called prologue or not, but basically when they drop off Harry Potter at the doorstep, it’s not really part of the main story, but it is a way to show the magic of the world and show how things started at the Dunley home in the mundane world.

Crys: Yeah, I think that they just use the chapter names. They don’t do prologue for sure. But that’s a really good example of what Tom was talking about.

JP: Yeah. Yeah. And it is chapter one, but it could easily be a prologue.

Crys: For sure. And then one of our patrons Mary, on episode 98, which was the book club Three Story Method: Writing Scenes, said it was a very interesting and helpful discussion. Which thank you, Mary, for commenting. One of these days we will get you in on the live recording.

JP: Yes.

Crys: Schedules have not worked out yet.

JP: No, we are kind of chaos demons, but we’re trying.

Crys: Yeah, we have plans to sit down and plan ahead very soon. And we’re gonna see how well that goes.

JP: Very soon.

Crys: We’ve been planning on planning for a while. But now we’ve set ourselves a deadline on when we need to plan. So that shows you how we roll.

Okay. This week the card is The Devil. Would you give a description of the card, JP?

JP: Absolutely. Okay. So for The Devil for upright keywords, we have shadow self, attachment, addiction, restriction, and sexuality. Reversed, it is releasing limiting beliefs, exploring dark thoughts, and detachment. So The Devil card in the old school version shows Baphomet, a creature that is half man and half goat. That represented the balance between good and evil, male and female, human and animal. A lot of tarot cards involve a lot of balance if you couldn’t tell. And it has been linked to the occult and becoming like the scapegoat for all things considered evil.

The devil has wings of a vampiric bat, an animal that sucks the lifeblood out of its prey. Again, just showing what happens when you give into your raw desires. And this one is a wild card, more or less, so I am excited to talk about it.

Crys: Yeah, the question we came up with for our writing focus is: how do you write complex characters? And this actually came up because the keyword that popped out at you is faults or weaknesses.

And my SEO brain was like, all right, how do we SEO this? So complex characters, because I believe it is the faults and the limitations and the weaknesses that do make our characters complex.

So how do you go about figuring these out for your characters, JP?

JP: I’ve been planning this Publish in Six. And I know that your question of what is the lie your character believes is like one of the things that you nearly always start with. And I think that’s one of the things I end with, which is weird. Because I focus on the story and how to create characters based off of what theme I’m trying to go for.

So with this Publish in Six, I’m using the needs that are affection, identity and protection to really define what kind of story I’m going for. So affection, because it’s a little romancey, identity because it’s all about discovering oneself, and then protection because it’s the means in which these core group of three witchy characters are protecting their community.

So I’m looking for aspects of what does that mean when you’re in this protector role and maybe you either don’t want it or you’re not ready for that challenge. And then I think about what flaws flow in with that? So taking from personal experience, like being put into a leadership role, is that something I really want to do? Or am I someone that wants to sit back and guide from the background? What kind of flaw is there when there’s a call to action and you don’t want to take it because you just don’t want to? You’re like, I don’t want to be that person. So like you’re almost that reluctant hero.

So those are the kind of flaws that I think about as what develops that character and what’s the story behind it. And I’m still working through that as I’m writing. But that’s my process, is I take that core theme and I break it down into what makes the character not wanting to do that. And then what’s gonna push them to do it.

Crys: Yeah. In romance, I think I do come to the lies a little bit backwards because in romance it’s always this balance of opposites, right? If you have a character who is really strong in one thing, the other character’s probably going to be weak in it, or the beliefs that they have are going to conflict and heal each other.

So if you have one character who believes that they can’t trust anyone because everyone’s out to get something, then your other character is going to be someone who probably believes in giving freely with no strings attached, but their weakness might be that they give too much.

So you take that strength and take it to an extreme, often to a point where it causes faults. They give too much, they don’t know when to stop. They don’t have very good personal boundaries. While the other person probably has way too strong of personal boundaries. It doesn’t allow them a lot of intimacy and connection in their life.

And so then you take those two characters who you’ve just made complex by balancing them against each other and having strengths that turn into weaknesses. And then you throw them at each other and be like, all right, figure things out.

JP: I love that. also thinking of The Emotional Thesaurus I’m just gonna highly recommend again, onestopforwriters.com because I don’t have the book on hand, but that website has all of the thesauruses and has really good resources for all of the things. And that’s a really good way to figure out what your flaws are. If you think about what those wounds are and how to convey that story.

That’s my next, even though I’ve started drafting I like doing these pieces as I go because through the process of writing the story, I feel like I learned the character more. And then I just go back in and make some edits, but I’m not in their head yet. And I just got through the first chapter and I am sitting in this character’s head. And I just need one more chapter to really get to know them. And then I feel like I can go back and be like, okay, now I need to know your back story.

Crys: And you know what, I think often that I don’t actually start with the character’s wound. As we’ve been talking, I think I do start with an idea of what’s their strength. What makes them attractive to the reader or just as a human, like what makes them interesting? Like when you meet a stranger, one of the first things you notice is what they’re good at often, unless they’re really annoying, then you’re gonna notice the annoying things.

But wherever you start, whether it’s with the strength or whether it’s with the flaw or wound, I think you do have to then move and say, okay, what is the related strength or weakness. And then also what is the unrelated strength or weakness? Because we’re all strong at multiple things and they don’t always have to be linked, but there’s gonna be a power in having a strength that taken too far is a weakness, but then also have other strengths to balance it out.

And that’s how I look at it. So whether I look at the flaw first or whether I look at the strength first, it’s like, okay, so on the flip side–it’s not the flip side would be the opposite–but taking this to its other value very much, the way tarot cards are the internal/external, positive/negative, but not really. This is the weakness, what is that when it is at its strongest point?

If you’re a fan of Clifton strengths, these are referred to as balconies and basements. And depending on where you’re at and your acceptance of your different strengths, sometimes you’re at the balcony, you’re using it to its fullest capacity, you’re not letting yourself get slowed down by its snares, or you’re in the basement where you are just living in the worst aspects of that strength.

For instance, one like input is a strength where you like to gather a lot of information. When you’re in your balcony, when you’re in your strong spot as an input person, you’re gathering information, you’re storing it, and you’re putting it to use. When you’re at your basement, you are mindlessly doom scrolling social media.

You’re mindlessly the doom scrolling, and you’re not doing anything with the information that you’re gathering. It’s not necessarily even useful to you. You’re just downloading and doing nothing, and it doesn’t make you feel any better because you’re in your basement. You’re not utilizing the information that you’ve added. I think that’s why I send you so many TikToks. That’s my way of outputting my input.

JP: Wonderful. That is 100% true. So that was like a punch to the throat. Rude.

Crys: So with your flaw, you need to think about when this flaw is a strength. Because if your character has that flaw, most likely they also have that strength. It is hard to100% sit in the flaw, or you can take them from the flaw to the strength of that thread. So if your character is someone who has really strong personal boundaries and doesn’t let work take over their life. But the downside is that they also don’t let people into their life. Then you’re gonna move them from that flaw to the strength of being able to open the door as it’s needed and let down those boundaries somewhat.

JP: Definitely, that’s a good way to look at it. I still need to develop the flaws of my characters and I like the idea of how to use those flaws as strengths.

Crys: Yeah, I don’t really know with the cozy fantasies and them being more like lighthearted and in some ways less growth, less internally growth oriented the way that I’ve been imagining them. I don’t know how that plays out as much with the complex characters.

I think part of what people go to cozy fantasy for is a much slower movement of growth that your character starts in a probably fairly decent place. And then moves slowly to a not so different space, but a good space. So we’re not moving from like deep in the flaw to the strength of the flaw, but we’re moving from we’re not at our best selves, but we’re moving to a better self.

And I’m curious, I probably should just have a whole sidebar of learning how to tell low stake stories.

JP: Definitely need that.

Crys: As I’m learning how to tell low stake stories, I’m like, I know how to tell high stake stories, like the action. Genre fiction teaching is all about how to tell high stake stories. There’s very little information on how to tell low stake stories that aren’t super literary. And that’s what I want to do. Not literary low stakes.

JP: Yeah, I almost have to look at like the Japanese kamishibai, where it is a different setup completely in a way of storytelling, I almost have to look at that in order to figure out cozies.

Crys: Yeah. we’ll be back with more information about low stake stories a different episode.

I guess as a question to our listeners is: how do you write complex characters and specifically your flawed characters?

We are about to go record our Patreon episode which is focused on business. And in this episode, we’ll be discussing how using a pen name can be freeing.

Thank you so much for joining us each and every week and we will be back next week.