Patreon Q&A: July 2022 + Character Writing Tips

[Text Transcript]

Hello everyone! I've got the latest session of questions and answers. Thank you for all the comments this month 😊

And this month I’ve got those writing tips. However, I was still struggling to articulate more informational points as opposed to the conversational topics, so in order to make sure I properly answered the question I decided to just write it down. Hopefully that’s still good.

Right off the bat I’ll say that I’m not much of a teacher and these are just things I happen to keep in mind. It may or may not be helpful to anyone but me, haha. It might at least be interesting to see where I’m coming from with the characters I’m making.

There are three sections I’ve broken up the details into; the first is making a personality for a character, the second is about how a character’s personality isn’t something that I worry too much about, and the last is focused on making characters standout in actual scenes rather than a character being just a concept.

Part 1 - Personality:

For coming up with a personality I like to remember that all qualities are basically equal with a fictional character. Being the strongest person in real life is a major accomplishment and would be a pretty big deal, but in a story it means nothing unless there’s some kind of reason for it. Not being the strongest could easily be better, depending on what you’re trying to do. There’s no inherent value in anything. You’ve got to make it matter and you can make whatever you want work.

This is especially important to apply to flaws. I love character flaws and recommend everyone else who writes characters does as well. Flaws are your friend.

Having all generally positive traits makes a character uninteresting/unbelievable, that’s pretty agreed upon. But putting in something that’s not idealized for the sake of it isn’t the best approach. Flaws don’t have to be forced in because the writer thinks they have to have something to make the character not perfect. More negative aspects don’t have to be approached differently than positive qualities because it’s not the real world where having negative qualities might make getting along with others more of a challenge. As long as there’s a reason for the traits you’ve given a character, it doesn’t matter if they’re good, bad, in between, or hard to say one way or the other. In some ways readers are more forgiving of less great qualities and more questioning of better ones.

But regardless, what really counts is whether or not the character’s qualities are engaging and/or entertaining. If they make the reader intrigued or if they’re just making it a more amusing experience or whatever.

And character growth is good, but I don’t recommend all flaws being overcome or at least not overcome completely. Characters shouldn’t keep making the same mistakes forever, but flaws are more than a problem that is removed at the end. Again, they’re just another trait that can always work for making an interesting character as long as you can make a case for it.

For an obvious example, I can’t imagine if Our Life didn’t have a well-intentioned but extremely misguided adult man offering a small child money to be friends with his kid. And though Cliff does get better about that kind of thing, he’s never perfect and having it there in the first place still added a lot to the overall experience of playing the game.

So, my tip for personalities is that as long as you know you’re doing something with it and you can show what you’re doing to other people you can do pretty much whatever you want. And that flaws are inherently useful, not a problem, and not using them is like playing cards with a half deck.

Part 2 – Beyond Personality:

My next tips are about how personality can’t get you that far even if you do have lots of traits that are adding something to the experience playing.

In my opinion, a personality works for a minor character, but for a more major one that should be only a small part of how they’re written. Focusing more on other aspects of someone can make them a lot more interesting. Opinions, preferences, priorities, goals, beliefs, standards, habits, culture, varying amounts of knowledge (not an overall trait of being smart or not being smart but a level of awareness from topic to topic that changes and has various contexts; i.e.; I've personally been to this street and know it, I've heard of this street from someone I know, I think I overheard somebody talk about that place some time, I don't know anything about it), and etc.

Give the characters memories, references, callbacks, and dynamics between other characters that are different from one another because the context with every person is different.

It can feel a little flat when a character is written to express a personality trait over and over if that’s the only thing coming across. The character is stoic and so they react without emotion regularly. That’s understandable, but if there’s more to draw on than that, what you get out of dealing with a character can still be interesting even in repeated cases of them being stoic.

And not all of their knowledge or these other traits need to be explained; you can simply decide it's so and move on as long as it's reasonable. Not everything needs a point of origin revealed in their backstory and I advise against that. A single event, or even a longer period of time, in the past shouldn’t be all you need to fully understand a person. But speaking of backstories, I’d say it can be a bad idea to make it too important for more reason than one. The things that happened in the past probably shouldn’t be more interesting or impactful than what’s currently going on. If everything driving a character occurred before this story is taking place, maybe it’d be more interesting to set the game during the course of that backstory. Having something you can reference back to for why the character is the way they are is less important from my view than seeing what’s making someone set their priorities in the moment.

That’s my tips for this, not relying on personality so heavily that the many other aspects of a character aren’t drawn upon or created in the first place.

Part 3 – Actual Interactions:

For this part, I’ll give my consideration for how to write scenes with characters. How to make that work and be engaging. And my main one, is to let the characters themselves be engaged.

I try to avoid having characters who aren’t emotionally reacting. There should be regular small and larger shifts in how the situation is impacting them. Not because there’s major goings on always happening, it’s just because people are prone to reacting to the present rather than defaulting to a trait regardless of the situation. Plus, for every trait that someone has, no matter how core it is to their identity, there are times when they are not like that. It can be interesting to think about what that line is and make sure that is crossed, or it’s shown that the line is so far away that it’s unusual. But either way, it’s something the player has a grasp on.

The situation I’m not a fan of would be something like a character who is the smug/flirty type, and they’ll make some scandalous comment, be flippant or act like they’re so unaffected, or find some way to hit on the MC in every scene except when they’re backstory needs to be hinted at and they’ll have one extra type of response to show to hint that there’s more than what’s on the surface. But learning that someone has more than three ways they can react over the course of the whole game isn’t an ideal revelation to me. People can have parts of them they don’t show others, but there should still be a lot going on all the time.

An example for this could be Qiu from Our Life: Now & Forever. In Step 1, he’s the “cool kid” and so far everybody’s been able to get that. But I think he’s fun to talk to because he’s not confident and smug no matter what. He’s nice and excitable and friendly in truly earnest ways too, and he can be shocked/astounded/confused/at a real loss, he can be disapproving of the MC or reassuring to them, and so on. Heck, the way you meet him is because he lost a piece of paper and while being certain he never loses anything. That’s not exactly smooth, but it was entertaining, and he did enough cool things besides that to still make it clear what he was about.

If someone looks at a scene they’ve written and it doesn’t seem like there’s a high level of engagement or a variety of reactions, they could change the context of what’s happening/what others are doing so that it draws out parts of the character that they know are in there and need a chance to come out. Or if they’re really just getting started and don’t have many things that make the character respond differently, they can simply pick something already there and decide the character has an opinion on it. Perhaps a character makes a bad joke and instead of the quiet character having nothing to say, the writer decides that character particularly likes or dislikes bad jokes and so they speak up about it.

Besides a variety of emotional reactions, it can be good to intentionally give your characters words and phrases that are theirs. Some that are obvious and some that might be more subtle. Our games have stock voice phrases so there has to be words/phrases associated with each character. Even if someone isn’t doing voiced lines, pretending you are and searching for what would be voiced might help pinpoint what a character’s speaking style is or make it clear if there isn’t a distinct style.

If something is good, does your character say great, cool, awesome, wonderful, fantastic, amazing, perfect, etc? Every basic expression can be done in more than one way. You might want to challenge yourself to take a simple sentence and rephrase it multiple times to express different qualities. Making it casual or polite, clear or muddled, personable or distant, etc. Then do your best to stay conscious of what’s done to give those different impressions while writing for different characters.

As I imagine most here know, Cove has his “Oh my god”. He’s also got things like “I mean”, “I guess”, “sort of”, “kind of”, “probably”, he “um”s and “uh”s a lot too. When speaking with people he cares about, Cove’s got a very soft, non-committal phrasing style. He doesn’t speak definitively and couches his statements with extra conditional statements. Though, he’s quite blunt and straightforward if someone is just a stranger to him, or he’s in a bad mood. But that’s okay because he doesn’t have to act one way all the time to be a consistent character as long as it is consistent within those difference contexts. While he’s bashful with someone he’s crushing on, he’s generally unsociable with newcomers.

And those are my last tips for writing characters! I’m sure there’s more that I could think of, but this is going on for a while already and I don’t want it to be so much rambling that reading it is unapproachable, haha.

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