Writing: The In-depth Approach

Chapter 1: Characters

The cabin door slammed open. The axe murderer stood in the doorway, his breathing a bubbling gurgle sounding deep in his throat. Outside, lightning lit up the forest. The man's shadow stretched long across the floor. Thunder rumbled above, rain coming down in sheets, spatting hard on the windows. Brittany whimpered, huddling behind the couch. The power had gone out with the storm. The darkness was suffocating.

The axe murderer stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. Silence. Nothing but his rasping breath, the dripping of water from his soaked overcoat. He crossed the room, his boots thunking on the floorboards. He stopped at the lounge.

Brittany bolted. The axeman lunged, swinging the axe. The heavy-handed blow swiped her clean across the back. She gasped, staggering. Her foot caught the edge of a rug. She fell, hitting the floor. Her whimpers choked out to a high pitched sob. The axe man stood over her. He raised the axe. Brittany dragged herself across the floor, blood soaking her tank top.

He swung the axe. The blade sliced through her neck. Brittany's sobbing cut out. She gurgled, choking on hot, thick blood...

This is a typical horror movie scene, slasher movie style. A group of college kids retreat to a cabin in the middle of the woods. Isolated, no phone reception, sinister noises in the woods, teen hormones, alcohol and recreational drugs. Now throw in a bloodthirsty axe murderer and you have one hell of a party.

In a slasher movie, characters are often built around a number of stereotypes. So in most of these movies you can usually pick out who is who; The jock, the intellectual, the brainless beauty, the joker, the virgin, etc. On the screen, we don't care too much for most of the characters. They are made to be expendable. They are indistinct characters, characters we don't really care about, or don't know well enough to sympathise with or identify with. So in the example above, we don't know much about Brittany. At the beginning of the narrative, we find out she's a beauty therapist. She had sex with Chad in the shed out the back (where after a flash of shameless, gratuitous nudity, Chad was hacked to pieces by the axeman), she looks great in a bikini and she loves drinking vodka straight from the bottle. This is about as much as we know about Brittany. So when the axe murderer kills her, we certainly we won't cry about it. We won't set up a shrine in the attic and light a candle for her every night. We might cringe, or even laugh. But we won't care. The character is two- dimensional, a stereotype recycled from film to film.

For writers striving to create believable, three-dimensional characters, limiting your protagonist or/and your antagonist to a stereotype or a stock character can be harmful to the narrative.

Every genre has stereotypes and stock characters. In the paranormal romance genre, we have the dark, mysterious stranger. In the wild west/western genre, we have the gunslinger, the lone ranger, etc. As a writer, it is sometimes unavoidable to base our characters off standard stock characters found in the genre. But when this happens, a writer should express caution. If you limit the character to the stereotype, you might pump out a character like Brittany in the example above. Someone we don't care about or identify with. In the final product, the characters might come across like cardboard cut outs, two dimensional and undeveloped.

A writer needs to produce characters that we can identify with and sympathise with. Characters the reader can care about. So how do we take a tired, cardboard cut-out stereotype and turn it into something fresh and original? How do we give a character depth and dimension?

Creating Three- dimensional Characters

When creating believable, realistic characters it helps to think of the character as a real person, someone you could bump into on the street, or meet in public. If you met your character at the bus stop or in the case for fantasy and sci-fi, on their planet or in their magical realm, what would they be like? Would they talk in a strange way? Would they be more dominant in the conversation, or more submissive? If you had an argument, would they agree to disagree or would they try to kill you? It all depends on the character.