Create Amazingly Developed Characters with SHADE

S.H.A.D.E

(Like making a two-dimensional pencil drawing jump off the page through contrast)

1. Strongly Characterized - The character wants something specific. 
   • Like a character on a stage, communicate to the reader: “This is what this character wants, and this is why they can't have it." Convey the tension this character is feeling right at this moment. 
2. Highly Developed - The character’s backstory reveals their internal drives.
   • Well-thought-out stats and deeply developed backstories are vital for main characters. Delve deep into their history to know what made them who they are, why they want what they want, and how those things are relevant to their current choices and actions. 
3. Archetypal - The character draws on and taps into universal archetypes. 
   • The Innocent, The Caregiver, The Lover, The Sage, The Every-man, The Explorer, The Creator, The Magician, The Hero, The Jester, The Rebel, The Ruler: show what they draw on.
4. Deeply Inspirational  - Hook into the reader's own motivation systems. 
   • Use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: physiological needs, safety and security, love and belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization.
5. Exhibits Identifiable Human Flaws - The character displays frailties everyone has.
   • Reader don't bond with perfection, they bond with frailties we all share and hope they'll overcome

The Five Marks, Explained

A further explanation on each, for anyone who wants the reasoning underneath the list.

1. Strongly Characterized - Real Wants, Real Obstacles

Your hero or villian starts here. Before the plot, before the world, before the first line of dialogue, there is a specific person in a room who desperately wants something that they can't have. Get that right and your story will very nearly write itself. Get it wrong and practically no amount of action will save you, because you will be pushing your people around the page like moving so much furniture, and readers will feel shoved even if they cannot name it.

The word that carries all the weight in the sentence above is specific. A generic character who wants happiness is a nobody. A character without definition who wants to be loved is everybody. Characters without definition are wanting what every human being on earth wants and is standing in the same weather. However, a woman who wants her mother’s ring back out of the pawn shop before her sister comes home on Sunday so she won't know she pawned it, is somebody who has definition; a real story. You know her age, roughly. You can guess her circumstances. You sense something may have gone badly wrong, and you feel, along with her, what Sunday is going to cost.

Specificity did not narrow her; it opened her up to you and made her interesting. That is the thing many writers have backward. They reach for the large and abstract themes because they seem universal, but in that abstraction their character vanishes into the abyss of the banal. A concrete want is the door the reader walks through into everything larger. The ring is about the mother. The problem is about the debt. The debt is about who this woman has decided she is going to be. But you do not get any of that unless you start with specifics.

Your characters have wants, needs, and obstacles, and these need to be shown. A want with no hurdle is boring. There has to be cost and a possiblity of failure. The greater the chance of failure, the higher the stakes. What makes a character really live is the gap between what they want and what stands in their way, and your reader has to feel both of them at once, in the same breath. This is why I have said for a long time that action is secondary. Action is what happens when a person's wants collide with something immovable. Stand inside your character, feel what they feel; the longing, the dread, their self doubts, and the pen that writes the sentence virtually moves under its own power. Stand outside, arranging the plot, and it always shows.

Think of it the way you would think of an actor walking onto a stage. That actor has perhaps a couple of minutes before the audience decides whether to care about their problem, and there is no narration to help them "get it". What does a good actor do? He does not explain himself. He wants something, visibly, right now, and something is in his way, and the wanting leaks out in how he stands and where he looks and what he does with his hands. Your reader is that audience. Your prose is that body.

Here is a truth:

“A character is not who they are. A character is the sum of what they want, and what it costs them to want it.”

So when you sit down to write a new chapter, ask three questions: What does this person want in this room, at this hour, in words concrete enough to photograph? What is stopping them? And what is the tension of that doing to them right now, on this page, in their body, before anyone speaks a word?

Answer those and the reader will follow that person anywhere. Fail to answer them and it will not matter how beautifully written the sentences are.

2. Highly Developed - Know Thy Character

I enjoy developing the backstory of my main characters to, some might say, a ridiculous extent. Why do I do this? For my process, if I know my characters right down to what was their favorite food when they were young, writing them in any situation flows naturally, because I know them so well, I know what they would do and how they would react. This creates believable, consistent characters.

You must believe enough to actually do the work. Not a paragraph of notes. Not a name and a hair color and a job. I mean going far enough back into a person’s history that you know what was said to them at eleven that they have never repeated to anybody, what their father’s hands looked like, what room they will not go into, what they are still trying to prove to the world and to themselves. You are not filling in a form. You are a literary archeologist and are digging until you discover everything that explains why this person wants what they want, because a want without a root doesn't seem real, and readers can tell the difference.

That is the whole purpose of the excavation of character. It is not mere decoration. Not richness for its own sake. The extent of the backstory you create earns its place where it reaches forward and touches a choice the character makes on any given page. A childhood spent in a rectory is worth nothing to the reader as a cold fact. However, it is a great deal more interesting the moment it explains why this man cannot bring himself to lie, even when the lie would save him, even when everyone he loves would believe him. That is backstory doing its job.

The other half of all this character development it is the one some miss: having learned this music, you must cease to concentrate on it and simply play the song.

I know that sounds contradictory after I have just told you to dig it all up. But consider what happens if you spill it all on the page. Your reader now knows everything, relaxes, and there is no longer any mystery. The pressure goes out of the character the way air goes out of a balloon. What made them interesting was the way they were being pushed, and you could feel the pressure without being told where it came from. Explain away the pressure and your reader won't care anymore.

Picture the proverbial iceberg. The seven-eighths beneath the water is not wasted, it is ballast. Your extensive character dossier is preparation that keeps your character true no matter what your story throws at them. The weight of your character, all those things you know about them, is the entire reason your character is believable. A character who has a history that only you know, but affects every decision they make, reads differently on the page than a protagonist of which you know nothing or even of an antagonist about whom you know everything.

Here is a truth:

“You do not expose much of the backstory. You let it stablize and influence all the character does.”

So the instinct you may have felt, that pull to leave something unexplained, to let a reference go by unpursued, to end the chapter without telling us what happened in that house, is not laziness. It is craft - trust your gut.

3. Archetypal - The Magnificent Twelve

There are shapes that a human being recognizes without being taught, and they are older than civiliation. The Innocent. The Caregiver. The Lover. The Sage. The Every-man. The Explorer. The Creator. The Magician. The Hero. The Jester. The Rebel. The Ruler. Twelve of them, more or less, depending on who is counting, and they turn up in every culture that has ever told a story.

I take that very seriously, and I do so for a practical reason rather than a mystical one. When a character sits down in one of those shapes, the reader arrives already doing half the work. They know the terms of engagement before you explain anything. The Caregiver walks in and something in them leans toward her and also braces, because they have met her before in a hundred stories and in their own kitchens, and they already suspect what she will sacrifice and what it will cost. You did not build that. The whole resonance was there before they read the words, ready to fire when they recognize the archetype.

An archetype is a beginning, a foundation. What you build from there can go a thousand different ways. A character who is only his archetype is not a full character at all; he is simply a costume with a voice coming out of it. The Hero who is heroic, the Sage who is wise, the Jester who jests: these are not people, they are tropes, and a reader will put that book down without ever being able to explain why they did.

What makes the archetype live and breathe is tension between the shape of who they meant to be and the shape of the person they truly are. It is the Sage who is right about everything except his own son. The Caregiver who is quietly furious about what caring has cost her and has never dared to say so. The Rebel who wants more than anything - and in a way he would rather die for than admit - to be let back into the fold and belong. That is where the archetype stops being a template and starts being an interesting, complex person. A reader recognizes the shape, expects what the shape usually does, and then watches a real person strain against it. This recognition draws them in and the friction is what holds them.

Here is a truth:

“The archetype is what the reader recognizes. The deviation is what they'll remember.”

4. Deeply Inspirational

This is the point I would suggest you don't shy away from as a modern writer, because it is the one that readers actually care about in the morning.

Readers want inspiring, or well-drawn, or interesting heroes. A reader cares because something the character needs is something the reader aspires to, and the reader recognizes it without noticing that they do.

Maslow laid the ladder out plainly enough, and I use it as a checklist. At the bottom, the body: food, warmth, sleep, the absence of pain. Above that, safety: a locked door, a wage, a world with rules that hold. Above that, love and belonging: to be wanted by somebody, to have a place at a table. Above that, esteem: to be respected, to be good at something, to matter in the eyes of people whose eyes you care about. And at the top, becoming who you actually are: that which most people never get near and almost everyone aches for.

Every reader who picks up your book is standing somewhere on that ladder with a rung they want to reach for. That's not a sad observation; it is simply our human condition, and it is one of the most powerful tools you, as a writer, have to work with. When your character wants something from the same rung the reader is reaching for, the reader stops observing and starts wanting it alongside them. That is the moment the book grips them, and it is not a trick, because it is a real need with excitement.

Notice that this operates well below the level of taste. A reader may have no interest at all in your setting, your period, or your genre, and still be unable to put the book down, because a lonely person is reading about someone trying to be let in, and the longing beneath their opinions has taken over. You tap into their needs and they are hoping beyond hope that their hero shows them the way. They want their character to overcome until, in whatever way it does, it all works out in the end, because that gives them hope for themselves.

Here is a truth:

“The reader does not follow the character. The reader follows their own need, wearing the character’s face.”

5. Exhibits Identifiable Human Flaws

I have left this one for last because it is the one most often misunderstood and done badly.

Somewhere along the way, writers were taught that a character needs a flaw, and a great many of us went out and issued flaws the way the army issues boots. He is clumsy. She is stubborn. He drinks too much coffee and cannot keep a plant alive. None of that is a flaw. Those are quirks, and a quirk is just a decoration you hang on a person to make them look furnished. It costs the character nothing and it changes no decision, and it is often bland to the reader.

A real flaw is a place where a person, at the moment it matters most, does the wrong thing, and does it for reasons you understand completely. Not a weakness they overcome in the third act to thundrous applause. A true flaw is weakness that is genuinely theirs, that has cost them dearly and will do so again, and that you feel lurking inside yourself as you read.

That last part is the whole test. The flaw must be wrong, but understandable given the circumstance and something the reader might be tempted to do themselves: a foolish pride, which will not let a man ask for the help that would save him tons of trouble; a silly fear, which keeps a woman silent in the one conversation that would have changed everything; the small daily cowardice that allows an otherwise decent person to walk past a door God told them to knock on; self-deception, which is the most common of all and the least often written honestly, because to write it well you have to have caught yourself at it.

Here is why this matters more than the other four, in a sense. Strength does not create intimacy. Nobody has ever felt close to somebody because that person was competent and complete. We bond to people at the point of our shared fraility, and it is the same in fiction as it is in life. Your reader may admire your character’s courage, but they'll forget it by Thursday. However, your reader will remember the moment your character lied to keep from being truly seen, because they did that very thing themselves last week, and nobody has ever put it into words to make them face it before.

One note worth considering. Write your characters flaws with mercy. There is a way of exposing a character’s frailty that stands above them and points, tempting readers to close your book. There is another way that stands beside them, allowing the reading to feel: I have done this too, and I know exactly how it felt from the inside, and I am not going to judge. That is the register that earns a reader's trust, and once they trust you, they will follow you into much harder places than you could otherwise take them.

Here is a truth:

“The reader does not fall in love with the character’s strength. They fall in love at the place the character breaks, because that is the only part of them they recognize.”

Recommended Reading

1. The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass
2. The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.9 Part 1) (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung) by C.G. Jung
3. Crafting Dynamic Dialogue: The Complete Guide to Speaking, Conversing, Arguing, and Thinking in Fiction (Creative Writing Essentials) by Writers Digest Books