What are Your Characters’ New Year Resolutions?
Happy New Year everyone! Time for fireworks, great food… and the dreaded New Year Resolutions.
I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of them for all the normal reasons. But this year my family were discussing their goals and it made me think. I’m not a big fan of filling out pages and pages of character profiles. I know that if I answer what their mother’s favourite food was, it will somehow crop up in the story even if it doesn’t need to be there, and that bothers me.
But New Year Resolutions? Perfect. A short, sharp, sweet way to:
- Get a really good look at your character’s motivations and character arc; and
- Demonstrate/reveal their weaknesses.
I think number 1 is pretty self explanatory. For there to be a story, there needs to be something going on. For something to be going on, somebody needs to want something. That’s what drives the events. So if you can sit in the head of your character and figure out what they would do if they were presented with a clean slate, that will give you a really good look at their heart’s desire, their wishes for the future, their concept of their ideal self.
Number 2 is where I think it gets even more interesting. Because once you figure out number 1, then you can throw in the darker side of New Year Resolutions. The side where most people fail really hard at them. That gap between who they truly are at that stage and their ideal self. Even the lies that they tell themselves.
So that’s why I’ll be writing out New Year Resolutions for my characters, including my antagonist.
How about you? What tricks do you use to flesh out your characters?