Blog for Bristol Services Intl.

Generic Characters - the Death of a Story
Often I receive manuscripts with generic characters, for instance, the generic mother, father and two kids. None of them really has any personality. Yes, events happen that turn their lives upside down, but in the process everyone just does and says the right things at the right times — be it mother-like, father-like or kid-like. Whether you write for adults or children, your characters need to feel real.

Sadly, no matter how active, dramatic, traumatic, triumphant or death-defying the author makes their situation, if these people remain just generic characters, the author will not really have a strong story. This is one of the hardest lessons for a writer to learn.

Ask yourself what traits make each of your characters different from any other mother, father and kids? If there is no distinction, they simply won’t feel real to readers. The reader will have little invested in caring for them even though they are in dreadful peril.

How to Develop Characters:

• A characteristic needs to be something special, though not necessarily highly unusual.
• A character trait needs to be an inherent part of the person. I don’t mean just a limp or a wart. ( I had one writer who told me all she could think of was a limp or wart and she didn’t want her romantic heroine with either of these. I agreed!)
• You can use physical things (like being overweight, underweight, tall or freckled) but it is more important to find ways of speaking, attitudes that are obvious to others, like fears, shyness, boldness, habits, or any quirkiness.
• Ideally, that trait should end up playing some small (or large) part in the plot itself.
• Even better yet, it might be a trait that helps the character grow as the story progresses

Examples
Maybe your young child character likes to hum (lots of kids do this kind of automatically). It is a little thing she isn’t even aware she is doing and it irritates her older brother. Which gives him a trait: being easily irritated at little things. Later that hum of hers could end up getting them in trouble when they need to be quiet to avoid danger. Or maybe it ends up as a comfort to the brother when he is separated from her and he hears her hum, and therefore knows his little sister is still okay. Or maybe her humming causes both of these things: one problem, one good thing.

And in the process she learns there are times she must be aware of this trait and control it. And the brother learns that little traits in those we care for are not worth being upset about but are actually endearing. See how such a little thing like a habit of humming can play into the plot later? This small trait is special (not everyone does it) yet not highly unusual. It is persistent (it comes up are various times, keeping the trait in readers’ minds). Plus it ends up being an integral part of the plot. And it even helps in character growth (or lesson learned, as some call it) for not only herself but for another character too!

All this just for the price of finding some little character trait that makes her special, recognizable and a person in your story whom readers will care about. Now there is a happy tune for authors to hum!

A writer recently wrote, asking me: “When I started the story, I was worried that it might be too similar to other stories. One person whom I talked to about the plot said it was sort of a ‘tired and predictable’ idea. Since you’ve read a lot of things, do you think I have to worry about originality?”

The question is a common one and one that needn’t worry an author. How you write the plot, the road the plot takes, is what makes any story fresh.

Per various “authorities” there are only 20 or 32 (depending on the authority) basic plots at all. Period. So what makes any plot new or fresh? The execution of it. How many “children possessed by the devil” stories and movies have you read or seen? How about “boy meets girl, loses her and must win her back”? Tried and predictable? Yeah! Even if the boy is a robot and the girl an electric toothbrush, the plot is the same hackneyed plot. So are all the other stories you’ll ever find. In fact, most times when my husband and I watch a movie or TV program we announce to each other, within the first few minutes, what the plot is. This is true for many writers who analyze books, movies and shows as they watch. We may not know how it will play out, but we know the outcome, the basics of the plot. But we still read or watch it … if it pulls us in with interesting characters, good dialog, twists and turns.

My husband and I just watched a CSI Miami last night and knew Horatio would finally nail the bad guy and the general way it would be done. That was the obvious plotline. But how could H pull it off? He needed a specific method to get to that point to arrest the culprit. He was thwarted at every turn. We were captivated and only minutes from the end the truth was revealed. The “plants” or clues of how he could achieve the goal–how he’d fulfill the very plot we already knew by heart–had been deftly woven into the story all along and we had that “Aha! We should have seen that!” moment that makes ANY suspense story worth the time. Not the blood or screams. Not the weird limp or scarred face of a character.

Memorable and fresh story plotting requires interesting variations, storyline twists, and personal interactions that remind us of ourselves or others in poignant ways that make stories worth reading. Plots still worth reading even though we have, in fact, read that basic plot dozens of times before.

So don’t worry over the plotline itself–make the story zing with sharply detailed characters, zag with events twist, and snap with great interactions and you’ll have a strong story!