What makes a great character?

One of the panel discussions I attended at Nine Worlds Geekfest last week was titled 'the architecture of a great character'.  The discussion was fascinating, with lots of pointers to writing characters readers will remember,

First, a character must have agency.  They must have the freedom, and the motivation, to act.  And it helps if they're in deep trouble and have to get themselves out of a tight situation.  You might want to make your main character a little screwed up.  We find it difficult to empathise with perfect people, but if they're too screwed-up we can't understand them either.

We want to see a main character who's passionate about something.  Nobody's going to go on a long  and difficult journey unless they have a burning desire to achieve something at the end of it.  Frodo  Baggins is dragged out of his comfortable Hobbit life to drop the One Ring into Mount Doom because, if he doesn't, he won't have a comfortable life to go back to.

Characters need a life beyond the story world.  They have jobs, friends, relationships, and a past history.  As writers we bring characters into our stories fully-formed, with beliefs and values, loves and hates and desires, and who they are is also shaped by the societies and cultures they live in.  

The world of a story and its characters are inseparable.  They build, change, and modify each other. Think big, but write small, in other words, make characters and worlds come alive with some well-chosen details.

And it's not only the good guys who need rich lives.  Antagonists do too.  By showing how they arrived at their beliefs and values, we build sympathy, or at least, understanding, for the bad guys.

Characters need goals to pull them through the action.  And in every chapter characters need some kind of mini-goal to strive for.  The story is always in someone's viewpoint, and that viewpoint allows the writer to reveal the character's goals and motivations.  A great character is one in action, and motivated by his or her beliefs and influences to achieve a goal.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.   Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com