Major Revisions Required

A Blog About Writing Techniques, Roleplaying, And Wisdom

[majorrevisionsrequired]

How To Avoid Demon In A Bottle Syndrome In Your Writing

So far, I've mostly focused on characters and their traits; and in that regard it's mostly about not feeling pressured to turn every character into a deeply complex person to the point that the whole story you're writing falls apart. But this time, we're going to talk about a writing urge that I don't see talked about much, which I've coined 'Demon In A Bottle Syndrome.'

So what is it?

First, I'm referring to the Marvel story 'Demon in a Bottle' which turned Iron Man into an alcoholic. Yes, this was the comic that added that aspect into the character.

But here's the thing: Demon in a Bottle is a single issue comic that introduces the alcoholism, has him deal with it, and then overcome it.

In other words, a long standing part of the character was introduced seemingly at random and then dealt with immediately, and then it was just kept by other writers. And this isn't the bad part. Sometimes you come up with an idea, and it just becomes part of the character, because people really like it. But the key to this is that it wasn't intended to completely change the character forever.

Thus, Demon In A Bottle Syndrome is when the writer intentionally tries to change either the character or the setting entirely, far too often.

You see this a lot in comics and anime, where every new writer tries to reinvent the wheel or change the reality of the universe forever every time they pick up a pen. The result is that it never actually changes, because the only consistent thing is that things keep changing. The Marvel universe, for example, is not revolutionized and will never be the same every time there's an event comic, because that is the base state of everything. You can't change it all forever if the base state is change itself.

Now, I know what you're thinking: I don't write for a comic company, how does this effect me and my personal writing for my original characters?

And into this we should, perhaps, look more at anime. Take Dragonball Z. Most people focus on the power creep, and that's understandable, but also notice that the series can never sit still and let anything become established. It has to constantly reinvent everything. Goku isn't a weird monkey man, he's an alien from another planet! And then there's time travel! Robots! Demons that blow up planets! The series tries, over and over, to restructure the entire universe every time it adds a new plot point.

Now, it should be pointed out that Dragonball Z does this better than it's sequel series, where this gets worse, and it has to keep inventing more and more things. But that's a different problem I'll write about some other time, called Bigger Scope: Bigger Problems.

For now, we're focusing on characters.

Normally, when a writer of their original character suffers from Demon In a Bottle Syndrome, their character stops feeling consistent and develops and almost schizophrenic quality to them. One day they have these character traits, and then the next day they have these other character traits! One day they're deeply against the patriarchy! The next they're pining to be a tradwife!

You often see this in tandem with the sudden onset of a tragic backstory. Where suddenly a writer will realize that things aren't as developed as they want, so they'll introduce substance abuse, mental health issues, or child abuse. Now, that on its own is not inherently bad. The issue is that the character will then move on from that as soon as the next thing arrives, because the writer becomes inherently terrified that the character is getting stale.

In other words, the writer begins to go 'if I don't add new things to them, if I don't change everything, they're boring!'

This stops being character development and instead becomes more like cancerous reproduction of character traits; things just mutate and develop and never have any staying power.

Let's go back to anime for a second. In anime, there's the concept of the 'filler episode.' This is often where things happen, but they can't have any bearing on the main plot or story. Which means lots of times characters develop new traits, habits, phobias, or obsessions like they've always had them, and then they're never mentioned again. In something the audience knows is filler, this isn't an issue.

When it happens within the main story, it's a problem.

Another example of what this looks like, or what it feels like, is the stereotype of soap operas, where in the space of one scene a character reveals that they're pregnant with their partner's evil twin brother's child who has never been mentioned before.

A bunch of things happened that are designed to change everything but then in a few episodes it's entirely moved on from. Because the writers aren't interested in actually like, building anything.

Imagine that a character is a room. Inside the room you have painted walls, furniture, all kinds of stuff that represent them. But when a writer develops Demon In A Bottle Syndrome, they can't just let the place look lived in or develop naturally. They're constantly replacing the furniture, adding new things, repainting the walls.

If you want an extreme idea of what that looks like to people who don't have it, it's the guy in Bioshock going 'this one, too thin! This one, too tall! This one, too symmetrical!' They don't know what they want, only that they don't like what they have, and so they won't stop changing everything.

And again, this plays into what I wrote before about finding a character's voice; it's really, really hard to write in a consistent voice when the character's base aspects look less like a solid foundation and more like a shoggoth from Lovecraft's work.

What usually causes this, is as I said, the fear that the character isn't 'right' or that they're 'boring' or that they need to constantly change the status quo or the character forever or they'll be boring and undesirable.

But, there are two other ways this can come about too. Let's go back to the room analogy again. Sometimes, a writer will panic; they think the character isn't right so they'll start trying to remove traits from them. They'll just keep removing furniture from the room, paint the walls something inoffensive, keep sanding down those edges, because they need to make them 'better.' The result in this case, in them trying to constantly change them, is a bland, uninspiring character. This happens a lot with antiheroes, where they aren't really anti-heroes, they're just heroes who might be shown doing violence occasionally. The author feels like they need to keep removing things, more and more things, lest the character not be liked or accepted!

The other way this happens is in the other extreme. The writer keeps adding more and more character traits or events to keep the character in a constant state of flux. In the analogy of the room, they're adding multiple layers of wallpaper, filling the room with as much stuff as possible, until it looks like a storage locker. The character isn't even really a character anymore; everything is so disjointed and has been through so many retcons and reboots that no one knows where their core even is anymore.

As a writer, the thing you need to know, at all times, is who your character is and what they're about. You need to know their core, and you need to know their voice.

What you should not be doing is constantly trying to fundamentally change your character on a constant basis, because at some point the audience will clue in that it's not that you're getting off track, it's that you've never heard of a compass. You've got no idea where you're going, and they can tell.

This is not about characters never changing. It's about avoiding the desire to change them constantly on a fundamental level.

[majorrevisionsrequired]

All About Characters: Round, Flat, Self Inserts, And More!

So last time I talked about flat versus round characters and how a writer trying too hard to make a character round can make them flat. This time, I'm going to go into what makes good characters, and what makes bad characters.

And no, it's not flat or even self inserts, or even mary sues. We'll get to that later.

First! What is a flat or a round character?

A round character is a fully formed, three dimensional character. Think Naruto from Naruto or Sailor Moon from Sailor Moon. Most protagonists are round characters. They are fully formed and have backstories and dreams and goals they are defined primarily by their actions.

In comparison, flat characters are usually defined by either their personalities, their relationships, or their abilities. They are usually defined primarily by say, one or maybe a handful of traits. For example! In Naruto, basically every character not on team 7 is a flat character. In Sailor Moon, all the other senshi are flat characters.

At first.

And this is because it becomes very easy to write into the story flat characters, and then gradually turn them into round characters. In fact, many people love this, as writers and as readers. Many times the flat characters are people's favorite characters; no one says they're bad. No one is really like 'Sailor Jupiter isn't a good character at first because she's a flat character.' No, you introduce them in a role and then you let them expand beyond that as the story requires it.

See, many writers stumble because they try to introduce too many round characters all at once, right out of the gate. Imagine if in Naruto, in order to introduce every character, we needed as much backstory and build up as the protagonists. Imagine if every single Sailor Moon character had that much plot in the introduction.

It would be dense, hard to follow, and confusing. Many writers who try to write longer things, who swap between too many points of view, have this problem.

But, if you're not anime focused, let's use Lord of the Rings. Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Gollum, and Aragorn are all round characters. Gandalf, Gimli, Legolas, Sauron, and Boromir are all flat characters. Does that make them bad? No. In fact, what makes them fun is that we can enjoy them without being treated to their entire lives first.

Last time, when I talked about voices, I mentioned that it can be easy to write a flat character's voice, and hard to write a round character's voice, if you cannot grasp how they sound in your writing. Flat characters usually force you to create a voice, or they become generic. Round characters force you to get a voice, or they become what I'll talk about later.

Now, Self Inserts. This is, in my opinion, a case of misattribution. What do I mean? I mean the thing that causes a self insert to fail, that people complain about, is not the self insert itself, but the fact that the self insert has no character or any kind of understandable mind beyond whatever the writer was thinking. This is separate from writing a true self insert, where they're a character that can be followed.

The same is true with Mary Sues. Ash Ketchum is a mary sue, as is Goku, as are plenty of other perfectly popular characters who always win in the end and are lavished with endless amounts of praise and everyone who ever wrongs them is always wrong. Lots of people love Mary Sues. They just don't call them that. They call it character centered morality. I don't recommend writing them, but they are, at least, characters. They have specific traits, they have defined features. They are characters, even if they aren't always good.

No, the worst kind of character, in my view, is the author stand-in. This is not the same as a self insert. A self insert is a character. They exist with understandable motives and actions and thoughts.

An author stand-in by contrast, has none of that. What does the character think or feel? Whatever the author happens to feel that day. It's often unclear! In some cases, they become entirely incomprehensible.

Many self inserts do end up as author stand-ins. That's true. But they are not the only ones! Last time when I talked about how trying to make a character round can cause them to be bad characters? This is how.

See, imagine a writer that keeps adding to the character, to make them well defined, giving them all kinds of backstories and traits, but in truth, it's entirely arbitrary. The character, in truth, has no personality or traits or beliefs beyond what the author is thinking of at that moment.

In other words, you're not reading or roleplaying with a self insert. You're reading or roleplaying with the author wearing a mask of that character.

So what does that look like? Do the test I described last time: remove the names and read the dialogue. Can you tell who is talking? Then take multiple characters and do this. Do they sound the same?

Then ask: do these particular characters often seem to express the same viewpoints and ideals as the author?

If you want an extremely blatant version of this, basically every young adult novel about a young female who is pure and good and then spends the entire book slut shaming other people? Yeah, that's what I mean. That's not a character. That's the author wearing a character mask.

Or, in another good example from literature: Starship Troopers. The book, not the movie. The movie turns it into a parody. The book plays it straight, complete with long, long speeches by the protagonist about how men in the 1950s weren't manly enough and how they should all be more fascist.

Or, you could just read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, a book that has long speeches by the author I mean main character about things.

The reason these characters are bad is because they are not characters. They are stand-ins for the author to say whatever they want. Sometimes this means that the author is trying to live vicariously through the character. Sometimes, the author is just trying to do the bare minimum to hide their personal views. Sometimes, it's just because the writer is incapable of writing anyone who doesn't think or act like them.

That last one, I find, tends to be common in roleplay spaces, more than books. Lots of people will take up a character to write, and the character will be exactly the same no matter what name they put to them.

This often happens with particularly popular characters, which start round and get flattened in the name of being round. Some popular examples I can think of: Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, Lucifer, Batman.

Characters that get popular, lots of people write, and never really find a voice for, but just end up writing themselves wearing the mask.

Now, writers do this too. Popular writers in fact. One is Frank Miller, he who wrote both Holy Terror about a psychopath who believes he's a hero for killing Muslims, and All Star Batman and Robin, where Batman says 'I'm the goddamn batman' and asks if Robin is the r-slur.

In other words, just Frank Miller himself, wearing a Batman mask.

Now, most cases are not this blatant or offensive. They're not! But from a writing standpoint, they're worse because they're not writing characters, they're writing themselves as the characters and thinking that they're writing the characters. And that's different from writing yourself as a character, or doing it knowingly.

Put it like this. If you take a character and go 'this character thinks like me, believes everything I do, and has the same moral code as I do' you have not captured that character's voice, you are speaking with your own voice.

And again, as I said in my last post, I consider a character's voice to be the single most important part of writing a character.

Anyway, that's all for now. Remember: think of characters like they're other people. They can be complex, they can be simple, but none of them are exactly like you.

[majorrevisionsrequired]

The Single Most Important Lesson For Writing Characters

So, when I sat down to write this first post, I thought what I would be writing was a discussion on the nature of 'round' versus 'flat' characters. Namely, because trying to make every character into the former just tends to make them worse, and it's something that trips up a lot of new writers.

But then I did some thinking, and I realized that a theme I saw with both writers and roleplayers was that many, in trying to make them round, make them flatter than any flat character could be.

As such, I'm going to give you some advice that is probably going to help you improve your writing by leaps and bounds. You ready?

The most important part of writing a character is capturing their voice.

Take that and brand it onto your brain, because it's something that very few people actually understand. In fact, I didn't grasp it myself until I did a lot of trial and error. But we're going to get into it, so buckle up.

When you think about your favorite characters, both from a consumer perspective and a writer perspective, what jumps out at you? Probably the way they carry themselves, the way they talk, the way they react to things. You can visualize how this character can uniquely respond to things because they are unique as an individual, in the same way that you will react differently than your friend will.

You know what doesn't jump out to you? Their Wikipedia page. Their endless backstory points. Their 'canon.' No one goes 'my favorite character is x because in episode 55 this thing happened to them.' They go 'my favorite character is x because in episode 55 they did this thing.'

These are different things.

But let's put this in perspective. Multiverses are pretty popular again, so consider this: what makes a Spiderman or a Batman who they are?

It's not a certain set of plot points. It's not a backstory. It's not even a race or sex or gender. There is nothing concrete that makes them who they are as characters. What defines them, as a character, the thing that will make someone go 'that feels like Spiderman' is their voice.

What do I mean? I mean that when you sit down and write Spiderman or Batman or whoever else, you can tell whether or not they feel 'correct' not by their canon or their features or even their abilities, but by whether or not the voice being conveyed to others is correct.

What this means is that writing a character 'correctly' is not a matter of having memorized their entire backstory and being able to regurgitate it on command. It is whether you, the writer, can convey their unique voice to the reader with words alone.

This is as true with original characters as it is with 'canon' characters. A character, like a person, does not sound like every other character or person. A CEO does not use the same 'voice' as a pauper. A thug does not use the same voice as an assassin. A dock worker does not speak with the same voice as a doctor. A meek person and a brash person do not sound the same, do not behave the same, and you should be able to immediately grasp this in the writing.

Before I mentioned 'flat' and 'round' characters. Basically, flat characters are ones that are not fully formed. Every side character in every series is basically this. They're usually defined by a single trait or a handful of traits. And they are also usually people's favorite character. Why? Because the audience can impose whatever thoughts or desires about that character onto them in a way that they can't with the main character, who is a 'round' or fully formed character.

But writers will often take a character, and in trying to make them 'round' in turn flatten them out. They will crush their voice until that character sounds and feels like every other character.

If you're a writer, you've undoubtedly read bad fiction like this, where if you removed the names you would have zero idea as to who was talking, because everyone sounds the same. If you're a roleplayer, you've undoubtedly encountered people whose idea of writing a character or an OC is memorizing their stats and never bothering to grasp the actual feeling of that character.

The example I like to use for how this works is Friends. Joey, Ross, and Chandler are different characters. If you put them in writing, you would be able to grasp that they were different characters because of how they speak and the voice they possess. Now, acting has levels of this; you have physical actions, you have literal voices, and of course, you have editing. But in general, the thing which separates them and makes them distinct is not their backstories nor what they've done. What makes them distinct is their unique character voice.

Let's put it like this: there are multiple Spider-Men. They are not the same. Peter Parker is not Miles Morales who is not Ben Reilly. They should not sound the same in writing. Their character voices should not be identical.

This is as true for animals as it is people. Do you think an old lazy dog would sound the same as a young, energetic puppy? Do you think a Labrador sounds the same as a Corgi? Then don't write them like they sound alike.

This isn't about traits. You can write the same character traits differently. You can write two old white men complaining about the weather and make them sound distinct and feel different to the audience. You can make every one of the girls in Mean Girls sound different and have different character voices.

The reason I brought up trying to make characters round is that when writers realize that their character feels or sounds bland and indistinct, they try to fix this by adding more character traits. They try to do what DragonBall did, where they just keep giving them new color hair, and think this counts as character development or uniqueness. It doesn't. It feels like what it is, which is just adding food dye.

Hair color is not a character trait. It can be indicative of a character trait. But it is not, on its own, a character trait. Everyone's first anime OC is a silver haired dude with red eyes and a tragic backstory. What does he like? How does he handle forgetting an umbrella? How would he handle not having his favorite cereal at the store?

These are small, pointless things! But they are also how you find a character's voice.

I've heard some people use what's called 'the tavern test.' Basically, take a character, and imagine them entering a stereotypical tavern in any fantasy story. Do not ask 'what is there.' Ask 'what does the character focus on?'

For example, maybe the bard looks around and notices the general mood and they start thinking about how they might be able to score with the cute elf girl at the bar if they play it right. Maybe the druid is disgusted by all the filth on the floor and the way it seems like the place is molding. Maybe the paladin is put off by how loose the morals are but is determined not to make a scene.

Same situation. Different focuses. That's what character voices are made of.

Now, stylistically, you would also tend to write characters differently.

Ugh. It's so fucking noisy in here. Do these people even realize what they're drinking!?! Can't they smell it!?! Wow, I wonder what this stuff is made of? It kinda tastes like sawdust. But... it's also sweet and reminds me of that time I broke a man's heart, in the most literal sense of the word. Oh. My. God. That guy in the corner is definitely looking at me. Play it cool, play it cool. Don't let it be like that time you brought a guy back to your room and woke up the next morning in the dungeon of an evil cult that was planning on sacrificing you.

Notice how this feels like three different people, even though I've given you absolutely no details about them, or their backgrounds, or anything else.

This, incidentally, is what showing not telling means. But that's a whole other bucket of worms.

For now, what you need to internalize is that conveying a voice is what makes character's distinct. It's what makes them memorable. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker should not sound the same in your writing. You shouldn't have two stick figures wearing Han Solo and Luke Skywalker masks on and call it a day.

This will also make it much easier to write your characters in any context. Once you know a character's voice, once you understand how they think, you don't need to think about it yourself. You can just write, because there's no what would they do? You just know. You can think and write in their voice the same as you write and think in your own.

And the first step to doing that is grasping your character's unique voice. Understand them as people, as individuals. They are not Wikipedia entries.

And, if you're unsure? If you don't know how to get better at it? Keep putting them in more absurd situations, or more mundane ones. You want to know how to write a character backwards and forwards? Put them in your favorite shows or movies.

You probably will never have to go 'how would Superman react to meeting Boba Fett' but if you can visualize how both would act and you can convey their unique voices in that situation, congratulations, you have mastered their voices, and you can now move on to understand their complex backstories.

But that comes second. Understanding their voices is the most important thing. Without this, it won't matter if you've written the world's greatest story or character. Why? Because no one will have any impression of them.

Hell, you've already gotten an impression of me, just by reading how I write. Do that with your characters, and you'll find that not only is it easier to write, but that you're a better writer for it.