Tips for Developing Characters

If you want to develop characters based on different personality types, then you could choose lack of courage, lack of intellect, and lack of a heart like the three main characters in the Wizard of Oz. I read somewhere that this was what the writers did to develop the characters in the Hangover films.

In Star Trek, Kirk represented courage, Spock intellect, and Dr. McCoy represented heart. So in this example, three characters would respond to stimuli based on one of these three categories.

If you have multiple characters, you can use the seven deadly sins, so each character represents a different sin:

Gluttony
Greed
Wrath
Envy
Lust
Pride
Sloth

You could demonstrate gluttony by showing a character always willing to eat, but for some miraculous reason they have a slim or fit physique. Jughead from the Archie comic books fits this mold.

An interesting thing would be to have protagonists based on the seven deadly sins, and antagonists based on the virtues.

Virtues:

Prudence
Fortitude
Temperance
Justice

This goes against prevailing wisdom, but could lead to interesting results.​

Scott McCloud in his book Making Comics discussed basing the character in his Zot! Comic books on Jungian archetypes. This ensured that each character would respond to a given situation in a different way. McCloud suggested to his characters crashing the Oscars, and each of the four characters reacted in a different but predictable way, assuming you knew what Jungian archetype each character was based on.

Here is a quote from that book:

That’s what I did in the early 80s when I partially modeled the four main characters for my first comic book series Zot! After Carl Jung’s four proposed types of human thought.

Zot: intuition

Jenny: Feeling

Peabody: intellect

Butch: sensation​

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Another tip is to base the personality of a character on someone you know. If you know someone who is a jerk, they might make a much more interesting antagonist than a character’s personality that you might try to conjure up out of whole cloth. Just change their physical appearance and don’t use their real name. If you’re enemies with a white supremacist, make your antagonist a Mexican guy or a black guy with the same character defect. They can be from a world where their race is in control.

A comic book writer named Geoff Johns based the personality of a DC comics character named Stargirl, whom he co-created, on his deceased younger sister Courtney, who was a victim of a plane crash.

It helps if a group of characters don’t all get along. There was a show in the 1960s about a group of people exploring space, and there was a scientist among them who couldn’t always be trusted. He was vainglorious and capable of betraying the others in the group. This is a much more interesting dynamic than a group of characters who all get along.

Another example of this type of scenario is “The Odd Couple” which was originally a play by Neil Simon. It involves a neat freak becoming room mates with a complete slob. The possibilities for conflict in this scenario were seemingly endless.

One final thesis about characters who don’t always get along is this: in reality, if we worked with a group of people it would be great if we all got along all of the time, or at the very least, most of the time. But for a comic book or television show, that would be completely boring. Instead of a girl who was well mannered and polite, it would be more interesting if she was kind of sassy and had an attitude; not to the point of being a bitch, but somewhere close to that borderline.

If you read a story or comic book about a girl who was polite and never argued with anyone, and another comic book about a girl who was sassy, in ten years, you might not even remember the story about the polite girl. But you would always recall the story about the sassy girl. Characters with attitudes who get into conflict will always be more interesting and memorable than goody two shoes characters who always get along.