Tips for Web Serials - Building Characters by Angie Capozello

In my last blog about writing web serials, I said it was better to forget about world-building and focus on making engaging characters.  The world will build itself around them. But that begs the question, how do you build characters that will keep your audience hooked?  The answer is a lot easier than you think.

Pick a physical trait, or a habit, and make it an issue for them. Exaggerate it, make it their Achilles heel.  Then, once you’ve picked a trait to work with, decide how it affects them. If that sounds a little too simple, think about it - classics like Pinocchio and Cyrano de Bergerac were built around a nose.

For our example, we’ll make our character a wiry little guy. This gives us a wealth of information about his personality. He was probably picked on as a child, and either ended up the class clown, or a real scrapper.  Maybe a little of both. Odds are he’s had a nose or a finger broken. He’ll be touchy and have a hot temper, especially when someone tries to push him around.

Okay, we’ve got a personality, and a good idea how he’ll react when he gets his buttons pushed. (Which you, as a writer, need to do. No story without a conflict, right?)  The next step is where the world begins to build around the character.

How much money does your character have?  The amount of money a person has and how they got it tells you everything you need to know about their world.  A rich man will live in a castle, or a penthouse, or a luxury space-liner depending on your genre.  Did the money come from family, hard work, or crime?  That tells you the kind of people they associate with and the places they frequent.  Other characters will react differently to them based on their level of wealth. A rich character will have access to places a poor man can only dream about.  The quality of health care changes, as does the food, clothing, etc., etc.

Our tough guy will be constantly short of cash, due to a gambling problem. So where does this put him? A bad part of town, with bookies and street gangs.  Grafitti and reeking alleys, broken windows and grime. A sense of hopelessness and a furtive way of walking, if you’re not one of the local toughs. Maybe there are a few decent souls, like a young doctor running a free clinic. Or a beat cop who tries to get the kids out of the gangs.  There are bad guys too, the crime bosses and crooked cops.  Where do they live and work?  The spot along the docks called Death Row, where all the bodies wash up out of the river?  An underfunded police station, or the back of a warehouse?  Figure that out, and you have whole host of locations for your character to move through.

What does your character want?  The physical trait and the money will tell you that too.  Our guy wants respect, he wants a steady cash flow, and he’s willing to break a few heads to get them.   All you have to do is decide who and what is keeping him from getting what he wants, and you’ve got yourself a plot and a world to set it in. Our character would feel at home in any of Bogart’s gangster films. :)

So there you have it, a quick-start guide to building characters and their worlds. As always, I hope you found this helpful, and I wish you the best of luck in your writing!

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Angie Capozello writes the weekly fantasy web serial, Nox and Grimm.  You can also catch her on twitter @techtigger or on Google plus +Angie Capozello