What Makes Your Characters Tick?

[Unknown Hero James]

What motivation do your characters have? Why do they act the way they do? What are their lives like when we don't see them? Do they progress as the story goes along? Are they stereotypes (in the literary sense, not the modern vernacular)? Are they just vessels for the jokes in the comic? Do they even freaking matter?

P.S. By stereotype, I mean a character that doesn't progress in any way regardless of what s/he experiences in the story. But if your character really does represent a modern dialect stereotype, like a methed-up skin-head or an pink haired anime girl in a japanese school uniform, then go ahead say so.

[Perk_daddy]

I try to keep my characters as far away from stereotypical as I can; I try to get my characters to behave as much as real 'tweens' as I can. What motivates them? That's something I always try to focus on. Most kids are worried about what their peers think of them and want to fit in, they're excited and scared by the opposite sex, and, when around the object of their affection, commit every action through the prism of what that person will think of it.

Although my problem at the moment is figuring out how they'd act around space aliens. Sigh.

[Cope]

They're just bad and awful and horrible.

[Legendary]

Leander seemed nice.

edit: I read today's comic; I take it back.

[Mo]

What motivation do your characters have? Why do they act the way they do? What are their lives like when we don't see them? Do they progress as the story goes along? Are they stereotypes (in the literary sense, not the modern vernacular)? Are they just vessels for the jokes in the comic? Do they even freaking matter?

That's an awful lot of questions... My characters (IMO) are supposed to be fairly realistic characters with some quirks and flaws. Their motivations... basically every human's desire to find their way in life, I guess.

The characters are in different stages of their lives, some in their 20s, one of them is a teenager, and older characters will appear in time, so motivation and goals naturally vary - from the desire to find romance to career and self-improvement, social networking, travelling, gaining independence and the respect of others, financial troubles...

Eh, quite ordinary people.

The characters start out as sort of stereotypes, but will in the course of the story progress and be shaped by the things that happen in their lives, hopefully that will make them more and more interesting and real to the reader.

Why they act the way they do... well, I suppose because I made them that way. I do plan on revealing more of the characters' backgrounds in time, but I don't see any good in spending too much time with exposition or flashbacks.

My comic is largely character-driven, so they definitely do matter. However, the cast will change as the story develops... The only character that will always play an important role in the comic is Imogen.

[Mvmarcz]

all of my characers are driven by the love of something

[Linkara]

Mostly the desire to do right for all my characters... with Hannah, though, I'll need to come up with something else...

[Sasjhwa]

Hmm. Good Question.

Audio Bear is motivated by duty and the prestige that being Audio Land's national superhero brings. His life revolves around his work and so he is less likely to make deep relationships with people and will likely go along with authority figures even if he might feel they are wrong. His character will likely remain fixed unless something tremendous breaks his whole world view.

Audio Man was a normal kid who was given incredible powers and a nifty mask. He is really motivated by a sense of dress up and fun. If things aren't fun he gets depressed very easily (see the recent storyline for example) and so he tries to avoid sad things and keep the fun going. He is quick to bounce back from his depressive moments and will likely stay in the same general personality range. The only thing that would likely change him is being confronted with something that forced him to grow up very suddenly.

Audio Babe really wants to help the world. She is sensitive to people's needs and so seeks out opportunities to be there for others. She is happiest when supporting others, which is why she has been content to stand in the shadow of her more colorful male allies even though she is likely more powerful than either of them. She is at a point where she is being forced to grow up a bit and will likely harden a bit for at least a while until she learns to trust people again.

[Dburkhead]

I remember a line from the movie League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (yes, I know, but I'm a big Sean Connery fan so....)

"What are you?"
"I'm . . . complicated."


You see, on one of the comics newsgroups I was following the idea came up that Batman had to be a raving looney-tune because that's the only thing that's "realistic." My own thought was that using "he's nuts" as the reason he dresses up in a bat-motif and runs around beating up bad guys is not so much realistic as easy. Making the character plausible without having him nuts is a lot more difficult. It requires far more complicated motivations than just "revenge" or whatever. It requires careful thought as to why he doesn't take more conventional approaches if he wants to fight crime. IOW, it requires some pretty in-depth character development. Instead they go with the easy answer </rant>.

I've tried to take the more complicated approach with my main character.

One of the things about my main character is what he thinks his motivation is, and what his motivation actually is, are two different things. Part of that complication I was talking about.

And that's about all I can say without revealing plot points that I haven't gotten to in the story yet.

[Alschroeder]

It's sort of funny; how my characters take over the story, and insist on their own way of thinking; for instance....

I personally am against the death penalty; I know how it is no real deterrant, doesn't work. Yet I allowed Mindmistress to effectively kill a child molester/killer while reviving a dead child....because it's the way SHE would have decided. I'm contemplating Lorelei paying a visit to prison, to see someone she knew as a child, similarly mentally retarded, but who grew up to become a killer---and see what SHE would think of the defense of mental retardation excluding one from being truly responsible for her actions---and realized Lorelei wouldn't buy it, that the very idea would insult her. That dogs and cats realize when they do something wrong, and so would a human being, no matter how mentally handicapped they are.

That Lorelei would be FOR the death penalty, at least in the case of someone who is mentally handicapped. Because she knows, first hand, how hard it is for mentally handicapped people to make it, and what such people have to endure.

(Am I previewing a future story? Yeppers.)

Characters, if they're decent characters, take on a life of their own. ---Al

[Killbert-Robby]

Videogames, alcohol, sex... I mean yeah they're all real people.

Oooh except for Emo Puppet (EP), he just wants to kill himself. Because he's the manifestation of my depression. But he can't. Because he's immortal....... I love this, I know how God feels now.

Then you have Agent Augustus (The pretty-boy secret agent) and Doctor Demonic (The German super-genius villan). Doctor Demonic wants to get rid of A.A. and take over the world. A.A. wants to stop D.D. It's all very simple... ooh hey I think my last update included them

[Joel Fagin]

Generally I just start writing characters, let them develop however they want and then have to figure out what makes them tick afterwards. Once I have, the story - and in particular, the climax - starts tailoring itself around them. Characters can be weird like that, as Al said. They define themselves and then go off and do their own thing, often surprising you in the middle of a climax or something by saying something which drags the story around into an entirely new direction.

That all said, I'm writing a character at the moment who has literally nothing that makes him tick. He's dead - walking around still, of course, but dead. His brain is also failing so he's left with a scant few neurons struggling to complete what is basically a computer program of his last intent before he died. There's no emotion in there, just instructions.

It's interesting to write, more so because it's a gradual process of his brain cooling on him.

- Joel Fagin

[Wp]

My comic is plot/story driven and based on a bunch of anime cliches. Is it odd that I don't particularly like any of my characters? Not that I dislike them. They just don't get much emotion out of me.

[Kemmy]

Yeah...characters do take over stories. I've noticed that in all my writing, actually. Even in WoB, which is relatively newish, the characters have been tugging at the story, forcing it to veer off in directions I never expected it to go.

My characters are motivated by various things; it's impossible to group them all together under a blanket definition. It's even difficult to go character by character; I would say that most of these people (possibly with one exception) are motivated by a myriad of quite ordinary factors to which they all react in varying ways.

The one possible exception is Casey, whose motivations I am deliberately keeping obscure. I don't want anyone to know what makes Casey tick...or not yet, at least. Part of the point of his role in the strip is that almost everything he does can be interpreted in two ways: the ordinary one and the completely freaking bizarre one.

Some of my characters have started out fairly stereotypical, but they're all in the process of developing (even Wendy). Marie is further along than most of them, but since she is the strip's protagonist, that makes sense.

[K-Dawg]

boobies.

[Siabur]

It all depends on which reality I'm in at the moment. But I've noticed that all characters are Me. What I was, am, will be, could a been and so on. SitCom is the most schitzo of all. Too much reality at times.

The other reality, is War From Peace. I've watched characters go from violent angry kill everyone they can, to doting father who will apprehend, to the vengeful sociopath that returns to old ways. It all depends on what is going on in their lives, world events, threats, family. It's interesting how they go from nothing to full fledged people.

[Black Sparrow]

It's sort of funny; how my characters take over the story, and insist on their own way of thinking...

...Characters, if they're decent characters, take on a life of their own. ---Al

Hear, hear. When this happens, I know I've written a believable, realistic character. A chararcter seizing control of his/her own existence from within the writer's head... it's just an awesome feeling. Like your babies are all grown up and expressing opinions of their own without help from their creator.

Some of my characters might conform to certain conventions, but even then, I try to make sure they're not shallow, and I try to make every one important to the story... which isn't usually a problem, especially when the phenomenon mentioned above occurs.

[EvilChihuahua]

Most of the main characters in my comic are pretty flat, and generally are just around to tell jokes.

My secondary characters, however, are a little more recognizable personality-wise. As for stereotypes, it's about half-and-half.

In my first story arc, for instance, the villan was a bumbling evil genius type of dude, which is pretty common. Then they'res Steve. While Steve is an interrogator, he's not a sadist. He's actually pretty cheerful and professional, with an exellent Iron Maiden-side manner.

[Moonshadow]

Character motivation was something my first author and I talked a lot about before we even started scripting and designing the characters, and still talk about even though he's not writing for me anymore. ^^ I also just finished up another conversation with the new writer on the motivations behind some new characters whose introduction time has finally shown up. Every one of them has reasons in their background that result in the way they are now, and the way they are now kind of resulted from the way we worked out backgrounds for them; it all just went hand-in-hand with the majority of them.

What's important in their backgrounds will slip out in the story itself, too, so I'm not actually going to MENTION any of them. But they're there, and I hope it shows in their characterization that they have reasoning and motivations...

[Keffria]

I figure out basic profiles - appearance (this is the hardest part), a bit of biography, some likes and dislikes and some potential reactions in hypothetical situations. Then I come up with a story and dump characters into it, and hope that they don't run away with it.