Transcription
Hello, this is our web exclusive Q&A on character, a companion video to Brandon Sanderson's lecture series this year for 2025. Um, we have taken questions from you that were put in the comments section of the lecture on um character. So, if you haven't watched that lecture, you should and you should watch the other character lectures because these are going to be answering uh these are going to be questions that I didn't already answer. Questions that you might have might have already been answered. So, uh this is a companion piece um web exclusive. Thank you for your questions. We have selected 10 of them and I'm going to get to them here.
Brandon touched briefly on the idea of common arcs in his lecture when he brought up the apprentice arc. I'd be curious to hear him speak about some other common arcs, maybe their defining characteristics, like a little cheat sheet for common character growth directions.
What an excellent question. Um, if this method of storytelling helps you, and it does help me, I recommend that you start keeping a list of things that you notice so that you can be like, "Oh, this seems to be a common sort of character arc. What are its defining characteristics? What makes it work? What do I like about it?" And that's probably the most important part. Which sort of character arcs do you most like? Um, and the apprentice arc is one of them. Uh, the apprentice arc is obviously apprentice and master. Uh, kind of apprentice follows in the master's footsteps. Um, and the fun interplay in the apprentice arc is where does the apprentice decide to deviate from the master and where do they decide to follow the master? What can they accomplish the master can't? What could the master accomplish that they can't? And how do they have to approach it in different ways? This is really great for kind of separating two characters apart that might have the same skill set as you see one learn from the other and make it their own. Um, and that's why I love the apprentice arc because it really can highlight a character uh and show how they have to approach the world differently from how a mentor might have approached the world. Um, but there are lots of different uh sorts of sorts of character arcs that you can do. Um, one of the kind of primary ones, um, is the idea of you upfront show a character being bad at something and then they need to learn to fix it, right? Um, this is kind of your classic character arc. A character is shown to be prideful and how do they get over their pride? Um, you're just very classic. Usually with these arcs, what you really want to do is you want to show upfront how this impacts their lives. You uh most things that can be a flaw in a character can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. Um, you know, hubris can also just be self-confidence. So you want to establish early on look, this is how the way the person acts is causing them to miss opportunities, causing them to miss growth, causing them to their relationships to fall apart or something like this. And through the course of the story. Then if it's a downward arc, you show them learning this lesson but then still refusing at the most important moment to put it into toxilization. It's not just about someone is constantly arrogant and then that causes them to fail at the end. It is they know by this point that this is their tragic flaw and they will not let go of it at that important moment. Um, or you go the reverse. You show them learning the lesson and then you have that decision point and you show why they would make the different choice and that's the important thing. Uh, where this gets paint by numbers like, oh, I have to have them, you know, fail to this thing three times and then succeed. That's not interesting. What's interesting is the why, who have they become, why, how have they changed, why is this, why do we now believe that this is the person that they have become, why would they make this decision? And that arc can be really, really satisfying um for a character, but there's there's so many different things. Um, I really like the move from ignorance to to knowledge. This is, you know, your classic sort of mystery arc uh done as a character where they learn about themselves while they're learning about a mystery in the world. There's information they need to have. They need to learn to be a better or uh different person in order to actually put that information uh into place. Uh, spoiling an Agatha Christie novel. Uh, Hercule Poirot's uh final story is about him learning that there are um villains out there that are smart enough. He cannot prove that they have um that they have committed the crime. He can know because he's smart enough to do that, but he cannot find the proof. And that character arc is a really interesting one for a detective realizing that you there there are cases that you can solve but not prove that you've solved and what that does to him and the choices that he makes. Um, this is, you know, again, a mystery being solved while a character learns something about themselves. So uh, there's just a few of them for you. Uh, but be watching for these. Uh, have your your your book. I always joke that authors have a little black book, but it's not a name of uh people that they have dated. It is uh interesting character flaws that in the people that they've met that they don't tell them about, but that they watch for and watch how people overcome them so that they can make use of those in stories.
How do you make a character's arc in the first book of a series feel complete and satisfying? When a character has a lot to work on other parts of themselves um but we'll do which they'll do in potential sequels.
Um, so uh, this isn't this is a good question and uh for this you'll need to number one, define if you are writing a um an iconic character or not uh or a character that becomes iconic. Uh, an iconic character is one that um has decided that you have decided has primarily external arcs or they have small internal arcs that do not necessarily make big changes to who they are book to book. Um, a lot of your iconic heroes are people that large series have been written about that you can read out of order. Um, if you're not writing that, um, and those are perfectly valid sorts of stories to write. Uh, there's some very excellent stories written about iconic heroes. Um, if you're not uh writing about that, then what you're going to want to ask yourself is um are there different things the character needs to work on about themselves? Um, and are there ramifications from the first book that cause further complications? Uh, the thing that I don't like um and I find that readers don't like is when you have a character backslide too much. You can maybe get away with this once. Um, where a character's made a decision and in a future book they are the scope of what that decision makes them live with is um is bigger than they thought. Uh, the classic example of this is Spider-Man 1 and two in the Sam Raimi trilogy. Um, you know, in Spider-Man 1, Spider-Man decides to be a hero. Spider-Man 2 has to live with being a hero and that makes him question. Spider-Man 2 is the strongest of that trilogy. And that's in part because one is expected and two is a really deep look at what it actually costs someone to have to do this and it makes him question. You can't do that again. Uh, at least I feel like if you do that again, it becomes a problem. And indeed, most people who have a character backslide do not do it as well as Sam Raimi and his writers did um with that trilogy. And so I recommend looking and saying, what's the next step? Uh, a good example again of this from film that is not a character arc but can help you understand is um Star Wars, the first movie introduces Darth Vader as a villain, but it doesn't really have Luke face him. The second film has Luke face Darth Vader and fail. And the third FA film has Luke face Darth Vader and his greater mentor together with an escalation and then succeed. Um, this is if you can look at a character arc in this way, what is the thing that you can get a small victory on in the first book? Luke defeats Darth Vader by outflying him and having better friends than him. Basically, um, Luke defeats Darth Vader because Han shows up at the last moment and Luke learns to use the Force. He has defeated Darth Vader and blown up the Death Star, but obviously the bigger challenge is still there. Um, and having a character have a victory, but also have this looming sort of, I know there's a lot that I still have to learn that I have to deal with and uh and whatnot for a future book is um is relevant. And the longer you go in a series, the more you may want to be able to move external conflict to replacing that. A character arc uh does not have to be, you know, completely internal. Uh, there can be lots of things involving the external arcs and indeed, uh, at the same time you can also have characters, you know, learn small things in the same way that an iconic character does go through experiences, become a different person. Uh, James Bond is a different person at the end of every book. It's just that you don't need to have all of that meaning to put context everything. Um, I really do like how the uh Daniel Craig movies uh did this. They have just enough continuity that there that earlier books are meaningful, but Bond doesn't have to go through an arc explicitly in each of them. He goes through one in a couple of them. Um, so anyway, there's some talk about that. It is I'm glad you're asking this question. Um, when you are working on sequels, this is one of the more important things to be considering. You want to avoid having the character learn the same thing every time, but also you want to avoid having the character um always have to be going through some very difficult arc. Um, you sometimes want them to do different things. So uh, good question.
How do you balance out a character taking risks with the readers just calling them idiots when something goes wrong?
Excellent question, especially when the stakes can be very high. For some more context, I have a character who is very competent, but I want to have them take a risk and miscalculate how dangerous it is because they're trying to act quickly. Specifically, they're trying to save a kid and fail to protect themselves, uh, which can have known catastrophic effects. Uh, the, uh, reader doesn't know the exact effect, but being first person, the characters realizing the disaster as they're failing.
I think you're probably going to be okay with that one. I will just tell you. Uh, this is a good question. Um, you do want to balance the character's incompetence and their likability in general at the beginning of a story. Uh, having a character be incompetent in a few areas, incompetent in a few other areas. Having them take risks and having those risks have consequences is good. I think you've already kind of got it here, right? A character has to act quickly. They cannot make their decision. Uh, and particular if you foreshadowed this is a character who's bad at making decisions quickly. They're really good at making decisions if they have the time and maybe over the course of the story they are learning how to make, you know, how to not freeze up or maybe it's just a bad situation and there's no character arc here. Uh, sometimes you make the wrong call. Uh, a lot will depend on how other characters respond to this character. Um, and initially having other characters be like, "You screwed that up. I can't believe you screwed that up." But then having somebody kind of wise and more knowledgeable be like, "This happens. We have to make judgment calls last minute. Sometimes they'll be wrong, but if we don't make a call, it's always wrong. So you did your best." And kind of having that or having the character come to that decision is one way. Again, control the reader's um focus by what the story focuses upon. If you get bad feedback or if you get feedback on this that is good feedback but says that people are really thinking this character is dumb. Well then either add some more foreshadowing that this could possibly be a problem again. Hang a lantern on it so to speak so that the readers when it fails say, "Okay, I saw this coming. It was foreshadowed. Let's see how the character handles it." That is a way to take off the edge on some of that. Making sure the character is competent in other areas so that when they fail in an area like this, it um it doesn't hit quite so hard or hinging your whole story around this big failure and having the character earn back our trust through the course of it. These are all perfectly valid ways. Um, this reads like one that's going to work to me. Um, what you want to avoid, the big danger with this is having a character make a big mess for everyone else at the beginning of a story in a way that turns us off to liking them. Uh, that's a danger and you you got to be careful about those things. It's reason why a lot of the the things that characters flub at the beginnings of stories don't directly impact characters we love and that the stakes aren't too high and the costs aren't too high. But you know, there is a question here. Uh, you know, one of the issues I have with the way Shadow and Bone was handled, which as I recall was not handled uh this way quite uh the same way in the in the books is, you know, the main character makes a very big mistake in uh the first or second episode and it's explicitly kind of for selfish reasons. This is a hard thing to work back from. You totally can and I think season one of Shadow Bone is really excellent and I think that they do, but that was a very dangerous move and you know, there are things you could have done to that show to just not make it seem so selfish. Basically, she insists that uh, you know, a certain thing happened and then a disaster happens because of that. If you could have made they would have made it so that she insisted upon that for reasons that didn't feel quite so selfish. Watch for that selfishness. Uh, a character being selfless and things messing up, we're going to take way better than the character being selfish. Uh, even if that's a character flaw, if it is a character flaw, own it and then uh then recoup it as the uh as the story progresses. You can do dangerous things. You can do things that um early on would that people would say this is a mistake because if you own them and you make your story about them, they will then be hallmarks of your story. Don't try to write a story that everyone is going to love. Write the piece of art that you want to write. But do be aware that that's a danger um that you know you you want to do intentionally, not accidentally.
When writing multiple viewpoints, how do you know when a scene should be written from one perspective or another? How do you decide which viewpoint is better suited to a scene?
Uh, generally, rule of thumb, character taking the actions, character um that has the most investment and emotional stake, um character going through the most pain. Uh, watch for those things when picking your viewpoint character. You can't always do that. Um, and sometimes it is interesting to have an external viewpoint, but watch for those external viewpoints on interesting things happening. Try to, if you're doing multiple viewpoints and they're all viewpoint characters, put us in the head of the person acting. Um, this again is a rule of thumb. One out of 10 times you'll want to do it the other way for artistic or storytelling reasons.
Sometimes you talk about setting being its own character like Arrakis or a town in 100, the town in 100 Years of Solitude. Does this happen intentionally and does it follow the same rules?
I can't speak for Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Frank Herbert. Uh, when I do it, it's intentional. Um, setting is usually its own character, but usually deciding whether you're bringing it to the forefront or kind of leaving it in the background. Um, and how much are you making the setting have conflict, causing conflict for the characters? How much is it having its own quirks and its own flaws and limitations and handicaps and all of these things? How are you using the setting and how is it impacting the characters? When I say the setting is its own character, uh, in the same way that the character influences decisions of others, how is the setting influencing the decisions of others? Um, I do this intentionally. Um, and it follows some of the same rules, but not the exact same rules, right? Um, uh, I imagine setting as a character in the same way that I might imagine a character who is external to the main character who's not going to get viewpoint, who causes a lot of conflict and problems for the character that they characters they must overcome. Um, and I want to make sure that there's quirks to them. I want to make sure that there's advantages to living in the setting as well as just disadvantages, right? I want to be able to see, you know, how the characters navigate living in this setting and making use of the setting or responding to or against the setting, whether it be Arrakis or whether it be the religious climate or whatnot of the place they live in.
How do you manage dialogue in scenes with multiple strong-willed characters? Specifically, the people might be aligned on the overall goal, but all of them have slightly different motivations, and each one believes themselves to be the leader of the group.
Um, these are fun. Uh, what you're describing here is very fun. Um, when you can make characters' motivations manifest through dialogue and the way that they speak with others and the friction points between how they want to accomplish what they want to accomplish, it that is often where your characters become most clear and most manifest. Um, and I recommend it being something that you practice. Uh, because generally dialogue is a better place to do this than uh narrative. You're going to do it in both. Uh, but dialogue tends to be a stronger show versus tell. Um, and being able to write great dialogue scenes where people back and forth. Um, you know, how do you do it? How do you manage um dialogue in scenes? Well, uh, I tend to go into a scene with goals. I tend to go into a dialogue scene saying, "Here's what I want to accomplish." And now, um, all writing is improv. All writing is discovery writing. At some point uh I go in with a with a bullet point. Dalinar is going to discuss um with um, you know, this monarch about joining his coalition. That's my bullet point. Here's what's going to happen. You know, I'll have the bullet point saying he's going to get rejected. Uh, it's not going to go very well uh because this character is like this. And then I'll sit down and be like, "All right, what makes this scene interesting and dynamic? Uh, what can I reveal about Dalinar? What can I reveal about the other character? Is there foreshadowing I want to accomplish in this? Are there side characters there that I can show glimpses of that can also, you know, be entering the conversation? And what is their conversation showing about them and their motivations? Um, and I I do I bullet point a lot of this as I sit down to write the scene. Uh, these aren't in my outline. It's in what I kind of call a floating outline where I just take a list of bullet points and I say, "Okay, I'm gonna try this. These are my goals. This is what I want to accomplish." And then I'll sit and I'll free form it. Uh, I'll improv it. Uh, and and see how the scene goes. At the end of the scene, after writing it, I might have had things that that didn't go as well as I wanted. I'll usually bullet point those at the top of the scene um for revision later. Sometimes I'll go back and I'll fix them right then. Usually, I'll bullet point them as long as they're kind of small things for things to try on a reread.
So, what is the role of iconic characters when they are something other than the protagonist? Can iconic characters who've already learned their lesson help the protagonist learn and grow? And how does that relationship work in fiction? Are there roles that iconic characters are very well suited for in a story?
Uh, wow, that's really cool. I'm glad you're thinking about that. Uh, the answer to all of that is of course yes. U, but let's dig into it a little bit. Um, what is the role of iconic characters? We've already learned um that when they are something other than the protagonist. Uh, iconic characters do make excellent villains, right? Uh, you generally are not going to be showing viewpoints from your villain. Um, generally meaning like 60% of the time, 40% of the time you will be. Um, but they won't necessarily have something to learn. Uh, and if you treat them like a character, like I kind of talked about, um, you can have them kind of learn the lesson, but then refuse at the end. And that's part of what makes them a villain. Um, but they can also, uh, be somebody who, you know, has had their chances and is now determined, uh, to accomplish what they're going to accomplish. Um, and uh, you can go both directions. Uh, Gollum in the Lord of the Rings uh films in particular, you know, is struggling with an arc. He's uh he's less iconic, but uh he eventually makes that that failed decision. But I would say that uh in the Dark Knight, um Joker is an excellent example of an iconic character as a villain. He has made his decisions. He's already come up with his life philosophy. He already has his flaws. Batman manifests those flaws to him through their conflict, but he does not change. And um that, you know, that's where his downfall happens. Uh, he laughs about and says, "Oh, we're just going to keep doing this because we won't change." But through the course of that story, Batman does change. Batman does learn and he doesn't. So that contrast is really cool. Um, can iconic characters have already learned their lessons help the protagonist learn and grow? I mean, you are outlining what the mentor character usually is. It depends. Obviously, in Mistborn, Kelsier is not an iconic character um and things like that, but you know, in a lot of stories, Gandalf is iconic, right? Gandalf is not changing. Uh, Frodo's on a downward arc through the course of Lord of the Rings. He is being corrupted by the ring. He is doing his best, but it is slowly destroying him. And Gandalf has already made that decision. He does not accept the ring. He's refused it. Um, he continues to be Gandalf. His evolution of a character happens kind of to him rather than because of him. He fights the Balrog and is reborn because sends him back um and things like this. So Gandalf is there for wisdom and for learning. He's known he's he's learned a lot of things. He knows a lot of things. Um, and you'll find that your uh your mentor figure is often an iconic character, but you know, a lot of your sidekicks are iconic characters. Uh, the Mission Impossible films uh is a really interesting series film series because I feel they get better and better as they go along, which is odd. You don't usually have a series running that long where your strongest entries are like films, you know, seven and eight or whatnot. Uh, I I reserve judgment on Dead Reckoning till I see the second half of it. But until Dead Reckoning, I feel that each film got stronger with perhaps a little dip for film 2. Uh, as much as I love Jon Hamm, um so but in that series, I would say most of the team do not have arcs. They are iconic characters whose job is to be there to do their stick, to make us laugh now and then uh to give us some emotion. Because the majority of the time is spent on Ethan Hunt and usually one villain and one um one secondary main protagonist um who are often going through some interesting arc, and I think those films are excellent because of that and you can see that the role of the side characters being to offer some continuity um and just some fun. So, uh, there's three reasons why you might want to use iconic characters other than your protagonist.
In any tips for troubleshooting when your main character becomes less interesting/lovable than your supporting characters?
Oh man, this is this is a problem uh that you will run into. Uh, this is in part because you'll be giving these weird quirks to your side characters and uh, oftentimes you forget to do so with your main character. Um, I could suppose I could reconsider whom I choose for my main viewpoint character, but I find that I repeatedly end up loving my supporting characters more than most of the in more most of the stories I've written so far.
All right, so this is a good problem to be having. Uh, it means you can write uh interesting and uh quirky characters. Um, I would say that um I encountered this in the early draft of the Wax and Wayne novels where Wayne was more interesting um than Wax was. This is in part because of things that make Wayne a good sidekick that it's kind of the Jack Sparrow problem. If Wayne had headlined the books, actually I tried writing the first book about Wayne when it was a short story. The weirdness is too much and it's one of these things like rich milk chocolate. They're getting in um getting in small doses uh is actually makes them a stronger character. Having one or two Wayne viewpoints per book really makes him pop as a character and lets him have arcs that are interesting, but if it were all Wayne all the time, I think you would just get tired of him. Um, and so, uh, I wrote the first book and Wax was kind of bland by comparison. What I realized was I had not given, uh, Wax a really strong motivation for being there. Um, I had not um, you know, like um, the uh, this is when I sat down and I put in uh what happened uh a lot of the stuff in Shadows of Self um are things I came up with to add as foreshadowing in book one because I knew I needed more for Wax. That's when it became a series when I was doing the revisions. And because of that, I added um a much bigger arc about why he left, why he came back, what he's hoping to accomplish, who he is, and I I'm like, what are Wax's flaws? Uh, he what what what is he working on? What are his problems? Um, and I had to work on this idea that, you know, Wax approaches problems too analytically sometimes. He forgets the people involved. And this let me have him have a flaw uh that I he could work on. It let me uh have him uh have an arc which made him really much more interesting. Um, and it gave him investment and stakes in what was happening. Um, and you know, it let him have some quirks. Let your main characters have some of those quirks. Like I said, a character like Wayne, sometimes they can headline um, but sometimes they're better in supporting. But learn the lessons from what you're doing with your side characters. This is this is a problem when someone decides, "I want to make a character strong. I'm gonna make a cool strong character." They make them an absolute badass and then don't make them flawed in any interesting way. And so they become bland. Um, you know, it is it is the Harry Potter problem. Less about him being awesome and more about him being, you know, he's the viewpoint through which we see the story, but then his uh other characters um his his two friends are more interesting to him. Well, he can have some more flaws, some more quirks. Um, so, uh, look at that. Uh, see what you're doing with those side characters that, uh, that is working.
How can you avoid repeating a character's name too often? Especially when I have a lot of scenes with two, uh, male characters, I find you need to name them very frequently to avoid confusion. This be avoided by improving characterization or using traits in place of names.
Uh, just use the name. Don't stress this. This name is largely invisible, uh, except as a marker to the reader. Uh, don't worry about it unless you're getting a lot of complaints. Um, but if you have pronoun fluency, um, you're going to be using the name uh often because anytime you use a pronoun, you need to make sure it's referencing back to the most recent uh noun that it could be referencing. And if you don't do this, your writing will just be unclear. So I would say don't stress this unless you're getting just a ton of feedback uh that you're using the the character's name too often. And if you are um, I mean in that case, you may look at your dialogue sequences that are just between two characters and when they're between two characters, you can uh cut the attributions um more often. Uh, you can look at starting paragraphs with the character's name and then using a pronoun for the rest of of that paragraph. But just make sure you you have you're fluent with your pro um pronouns. You don't want to be confusing people with those. So uh, my gut is don't stress this.
Can I talk about how Robin Hobb uses characters to guide her story and why it is so effective. She puts them through much through so much, they make bad choices, but in so many, but so many love her characters. How does she get that kind of dimension?
Uh, I mean, Robin Hobb is one of the greatest living uh writers. Uh, and so uh how do you do it like Robin Hobb um is a bigger answer than I can give right here. Uh, but maybe a few tips. One of the things that Robin Hobb focuses on her in her books is really authentic, real-life living for her characters. Uh, she doesn't skip the parts that a lot of us skip when we're writing action uh stories. She goes into the daily life. And so you have signed up for that by reading one of her books. You have self-selected to be a crowd that is okay. Uh, that you're going to see daily life and the struggles of daily life. It's not boring because the characters are having conflict and problems and things like this, but you're getting a lot more of that so that as the struggles happen, you've bonded to these characters because they are so real. And I think that authenticity and realism is the thing that uh makes her books uh shine. Uh, when people put down a Robin Hobb book is because um there's so much of that that they don't feel that the story is moving the way that they would want. Um, and you know, every book is going to have things that appeal to some readers and not others. Uh, but if you like Robin Hobb's uh writing, and I do, and I think, uh, she is fantastic. Um, I would say make us feel that the car that things are authentic. She does put her characters through a ton. They do make terrible choices, but because their motivations are so well-established and who they are is so well-established and those motivations feel real, um, then they feel like our friends who are making mistakes rather than a character in a film who's doing uh something stupid, if that makes sense. So, uh, yeah, you can definitely uh spend a lot of time studying Robin Hobb and I would recommend you do so. Uh, particularly kind of the later Fitz and Fool books um and just kind of showing how a character grows up and changes and how daily life can be fascinating. She's very good at that. So uh, there you go. Uh, there's your uh Q&A on uh character. Thank you so much. I realize there's a bunch of them we didn't get to. Um, but uh hopefully this will give you some springboards into finding some of those answers on your own because of course the answer to most questions is practice a whole bunch. See how professionals have done it, try it yourself, and uh work your way through it, and hopefully that will bring you your answers. And again, writing advice isn't one-size-fits-all. I um I have one perspective. I try to give lots of perspectives, but it's all going to be clouded by the way that I uh write books. So, if you have advice to people that has worked for you on any of these points, um please put them in the comments. Uh, get us a different perspective. Let us know what's working for you. Uh, answers to these questions that might give a different perspective from the one that I've given um so that people who ask the questions can dive in and uh see what is working for other authors who are writing like they are. Uh, we will do the worldbuilding Q&A next. So if you haven't left your questions on the uh last worldbuilding lecture, go do so now and we will pick say 10 of them and do another one of these.