Making characters compelling

1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. You know the deal. And it’s never truer than when you’re developing character designs. Here’s just a peek at the process we went through for Mirabilis...

In very early versions of the comic, we started off with Jack in a more modern style of army uniform. As you can see (left), that really wasn’t working. Possibly it would have been more historically accurate in a story that nominally begins in 1901 but, as Emerson said, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." The flamboyant hussar’s uniform that we eventually settled on is much more in keeping with Jack's romantic streak.

The very first pages of Mirabilis were a prototype pilot episode that Leo and I did (Nikos wasn’t on board yet) for The DFC’s dummy issue. The experience was… eye-opening. It wasn’t just the clothing that was wrong. Jack and Estelle needed to be way more attractive. So we opted to give Estelle a look that modern readers would find more relatable. She cuts her own hair – that was part of the character description from day one – and she does so with garden shears, so that gave us a legitimate excuse to avoid that off-putting Princess Leia hairstyle. Tom Fickling, son of David Fickling (the “DF” in DFC) put it succinctly: “Give her fit bird hair.”

Jack also looked rather too young and unathletic (even podgy) in the dummy episode. Partly that was to get the gig, because we had to please David Fickling and his initial brief was a comic for 7-10 year olds. At 10 I was reading Daredevil and Spider-Man, but that’s not how publishers see kids today. In fact the age of the strip was something that we and the Mezolith creators had to fight for all the time the The DFC was running.

Anyway, when we knew we had a green light for the series, Martin and Leo got to work on giving the characters a more dashing look. Martin even got out a camera and started snapping some action poses to give the comic panels a bit of vim. The dashing uniform he came up with shows off Jack’s heroic figure and incidentally shows that he is in the same regiment in which Coleridge briefly enlisted: the 15th (Elliott's) Royal Dragoons.His version of Estelle (bottom of this post) is a lot more engaging than the original "dowdy granny" look.

The striking poster image that Leo drew of Jack (top of this post) makes a great piece of concept art, although I don't think it will end up being an actual scene from the story because the giant lion is a touch too Narnia. But that doesn’t mean that he won’t be astride something with wings in the Spring book.

All this development work takes time, and even though it may seem blindingly obvious that the finished version is better, it isn't always that clear when you're groping your way through the maze of creative choices. Good creative development is a matter of trying things out and learning from your mistakes.

Apart from the character’s appearance, there are several storytelling tools that the writer can apply to make readers care about a character:

• being resourceful 
• being brave 
• being clever (not the same as merely resourceful) 
• doing a good deed ("save the cat") 
•  being unfairly treated (“kill the cat”) 
• standing up against unfairness or injustice 
• doing something we can relate to - especially if funny, but can be as simple as cleaning teeth, having breakfast, if made into an interesting bit of business 
• being in a relationship we can connect with - even two apparently despicable characters start to become relatable if we see a friendship forming between them
• in a situation we recognize - stuck in the rain, needing a pee, late for a meeting, etc 
• being interesting - this is how an audaciously badly-behaved, rude or even evil character can be made very compelling: what will they do next?

Next time you’re reading a story or watching a movie, take a look and see how often those tricks are used right from the start.

A glimpse in the crystal ball

Now that Leo, Nikos and I are hitting our stride with the first issues of Mirabilis season two, there's a daily temptation to show what we're working on. The spring is here, the comet looms large in the sky, and magic isn't hiding in the shadows anymore. That means lots of spectacular locations and fabulous new characters. At the same time, I don't want to spoil the fun by showing too much too soon. It's the biggest dilemma since Sir Lancelot was dying to tell his best pal about the hot chick he'd just been banging.

As an entire page of the next issue has appeared on Facebook, I guess it's okay to trot out one little glimpse here. I say "trot out" mainly because of two of our new characters. That's Withers on the left and, on the right, Cannonbone. The fellow in the middle is an old acquaintance from Mirabilis: Winter, last seen climbing a rope into the wild blue yonder, while the lady shall remain anonymous for now.

In comics and movies it's pretty hard to make a centaur character like Withers work. The hindquarters are out of scale for everybody else in the scene, as you'll know if you've seen The Philosopher's Stone or The Lightning Thief, so I'm going to do a post on how we designed Withers with that in mind. But that's for another day.

Here you can see how our art process works from my thumbnails (below) to Leo's pencils (above). I obviously drew the girl on a whole other level from the other three. She's actually supposed to be sitting in front of them, not (as in my sketch) waist-deep in the ground. Luckily I have Leo to fix my mistakes!

Is it a story about me?

“Once upon a time there was a handsome young prince…”

“Was his name David?” Or (having the art to conceal one’s interest even at a tender age): “Did he have blond hair and a red pedal car?”

That stage doesn’t last long. As we get older, we stop expecting to be cast in the starring role, but we do want to be poured into the skin of the main character. No longer an avatar of our everyday selves, they become a persona we adopt. A channel for us to vicariously live another life.

The first thing an author has to think about, ahead of making a lead character likeable (which is overrated) or interesting (which is underrated) is to make him or her relatable. Without that, we can’t identify with his predicament. And if we’re always watching from the outside we’re never going to care.

Humans empathize, but they also fear otherness – a paradox for the writer. To make an interesting story, you must take the reader on a strange journey, in the company of the kind of character who would undertake that journey. Yet we need to see enough of ourselves in him or her to start with, or we won’t connect.

Does that mean the lead character has to be exactly like us? There certainly are Everyman figures in some of the most powerful stories. Think of Neo, too frightened to get out onto that window ledge. Or most of Hitchcock’s hapless heroes. But most of the time if a writer starts off with a character who’s just like the audience, it's with with the sole intention of whisking them out of Kansas as quickly and rudely as possible.

Interesting stories deliver their relatability in unexpected forms. In Essential Killing, Vincent Gallo plays a Taliban insurgent. What’s relatable about that? He’s running for his life! Another movie starring Gallo, Buffalo 66, introduces his character in a way I can guarantee everyone on the planet will relate to. If you haven’t seen it, take a look.

A story begins with something we can relate to and takes us towards a place we aspire to be. From farm boy to Jedi Master – or Man of Steel. Few of us prefer stories where the hero stays exactly like us throughout. Mostly we're willing to make some kind of imaginative leap to get into the character’s skin. Chances are plucky young Luke Skywalker was just a bit too much of a sap to be your hero of choice. Many found the bad-boy sneer and beat-up charm of Han Solo more to their taste. There was a hero in need of redemption. And more importantly he was cool.

Relatability means not just like us, but like we’d like to be.

If your audience is small and has very specific interests, you can trade on their fear of the Other to create a strong identity they will eagerly embrace. For mumblecore fans, the world is divided into twentysomething, white, middle-class slackers – and then there's everybody else, but they don’t count.

Yes, that’s a shockingly unfair and sweeping generalization just to illustrate a point. Here’s another: for sci-fi geeks, the hero simply needs to be an elf, vampire or hitman. Preferably all three. And clad in black leather. That’s all they're going to need. Cool is their revenge on the world that’s excluded them, and it’s sufficient to provide the hero with all the relatability he or she needs. Writing for that audience, you may not even need what Blake Snyder called a Save the Cat scene designed to ease us into empathy. A bar full of lowlifes, the door smashes down, and the vampire manhunter comes in with shotguns blazing – with that first scene the geeks are hooked, their popcorn forgotten. These are folks that don’t need any foreplay.

If you’re not an urban fantasy geek and what I just said makes you feel smug – don’t be. The rest of us are just as shallow. Often the only ingredient necessary for a character the audience wants to relate to is to make them a handsome prince or beautiful princess. There’s a reason that movie stars get paid a tenth of the production budget, and it’s not usually because you’d kick them out of bed. A recent movie review criticized Luc Besson for casting too beautiful an actress in the part of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Oh, wake up and smell le café. That would be valid only if the intended audience was a tiny hardcore of bande-dessinée fans (like yours truly). Monsieur Besson didn’t invent our preconceptions, he just has to cater to them. Personally I prefer the characterful and far from fragile Adèle of the comics, but I can see why a director with his eye on the broader market can't afford to think that way.

In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman describes how he accidentally stumbled on the importance of relatability when he was asked to write an opening credits scene for his movie Harper. It’s a masterclass in making us care about a hero.

Now get what I’m saying. They don’t have to be likeable. Remember the parable of poor, well-meaning, young Luke Skywalker and shoot-first-and-never-mind-the-questions Han Solo. Jack Ember, the hero of Mirabilis, has a chip on his shoulder. The scene early on where he gets promoted, he is basically being as mouthy as hell and deserves everything he gets, good and bad. I see Jack as a young John Lennon. That way, he feels more real and hopefully you find his flaws make him more relatable. If I’d made him passively hard-done-by, a sentimental working-class hero wringing his cloth cap while gazing in envy at the uncaring privileged – well, ugh.

Of course, I didn’t write myself a memo: “Must make Jack relatable.” I prefer writing him that way. But I did stop to consider that the reader doesn’t know anything about my character to start with. I can’t just assume you’ll empathize with him. It’s my job as writer to create some scenes that show you why you should.

You may say, “Oh, but I just write for myself.” Sure, so does every writer worth reading. But unless you’re writing fanfic, you want to reach out to an audience of people who aren't necessarily like you. You aren’t just preaching to the choir. A craftsman finds a way to connect, not to willfully seal themselves in a niche and damn everybody outside. If you do that, you’re not an artist, you’re a cultist.

Relatability isn’t hard. It’s what we all strive to project every time we meet someone new. It’s only in zombie films that the entire human race wants to shoot each other the moment legal restraints are removed. In reality we desire that spark of connection more than any other, so we don’t stand sulkily in the corner expecting to be liked. We reach out. We engage. Assuming you’re not psychotic or prejudiced against the other person, you’ll try to find common ground. And that’s all you need to do with your lead character – just remember they are meeting the reader for the first time. And first impressions are the ones that count.

National Graphic Novel Writing Month - part 3

Okay, enough chit chat. If you're taking on National Graphic Novel Writing Month then you'll have already rolled your sleeves up and got stuck in. So we'll be running some practical advice over the next week or so - starting off with how you make your lead character(s) compelling enough to keep the reader's attention through 48 pages or more.

There are several techniques you can use to make people care about your character:

• make them resourceful
• make them brave
• have them be smart and/or funny
• show them doing a good deed ("save the cat")
• show them being unfairly treated (“kill the cat”)
• show them standing up against unfairness or injustice
• show them doing something we can relate to

There's nothing wrong with a character having more than one of these qualities! Just don't get lazy and have the character merely be strong or lucky. A smart character like Odysseus has to convince us with his solutions to obstacles in the story, whereas if he just punched his way out of trouble like Ajax then we know that's at the arbitrary whim of the author.

My favorite example of the last bullet point on the list (simple everyday relatability) is the opening scene of the movie Harper, as described by William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade.

It's more important to make a character interesting than to make them likable. Very often you don't want them to start out likable because their redemption may be the point of the story. (Or even their downfall - think of Macbeth or Richard III.) Leaving aside stories, think about the people you know in real life. Isn't it true that you spend more time talking about the person who behaves outrageously or amusingly or unexpectedly or brilliantly, than you do paying attention to that really, really nice friend who is just a little bit boring? Come on, you can admit it - we're professionals here!

How do you make a character interesting? Simple. Show us the side of them that we can see will inevitably lead to conflict. The anticipation of that, and the desire to see how the conflict will play out, will keep your reader riveted to the page.

The illustration above is from my graphic novel Billy Graves, of which you can read the opening half of the first act online with fantastic art by Dan Strange. More about creating compelling comics characters on the Mirabilis blog. And there are truckloads of good general writing tips on Nail Your Novel.

Go ape

Another old post revisited today so you can see what Nikos and Leo made out of my sketch - see below - which seems incidentally to have been set on Eurostar rather than the Orient Express.

Inspector Simeon began with the toy orang-utan in a top hat and opera cape who my friend Steve Foster used to have sitting by his telephone. My Mum made the opera cape. Steve called him Zak. Zak had a good innings, but when Steve got married it was time to put away nerdish things. I hope Zak found a good home, but I doubt if he’s nowadays so nattily dressed.
The orang-utan in fancy clothing came about because Steve and I had both been tickled by the corny movie version of Murders in the Rue Morgue, particularly the notion of the killer leaving a strikingly clear outline, including flowing opera cape, after jumping through a pane of glass. Wanting to give Jack a “friendly adversary” to balance his not-always-trustworthy mentor, Gus, I switched Zak to the other side of the law and gave him a more distinguished name. So was born Inspector Primo Simeon of the Sûreté.

Somewhere along the way , Simeon lost Zak’s elegant sartorial sense and acquired more of an honest, almost bohemian, style with crumpled coat and floppy painter’s hat. And quite right too. You should never trust a fella who dresses too well.

Never fear, Smith is here!

Dr Zachary Smith on Lost in Space… I guess he was the first one I noticed. Then I started to pick up on them in literature. Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop. Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Mr Solon Aquila in Alfred Bester’s short story “5,271,009”. Loki, of course – he's pretty much the original template. Was Falstaff one? Maybe. And most of the classic, highly-flavored fictional detectives from Holmes to Columbo certainly fit the bill.

Disney movies have always featured them, from Baloo to Cap’n Jack, forever upstaging the bland hero and heroine of the story. But it’s in television dramas that you’ll spot them most often. Ben Linus in Lost. Rocket Romano in ER. T-Bag in Prison Break. Uniquely, Fringe has two: the magnificent Walter Bishop (obviously) but also the deeply sinister David Robert Jones, who was sadly wasted, in both senses, at the end of season one.

They are characters who emerge as larger than life. Characters who, through their unpredictability and eccentricity compel our attention. We know that whenever they appear we’re going to be entertained, and that the story is about to spin off in a new and surprising direction.

Very often they started life as secondary characters or just as guest stars, but the combination of script and performance creates a personality that steals the limelight. Ben was only supposed to be in Lost for a few episodes, but pretty soon he’d become the main reason to watch. Michael Emerson’s portrayal of the character has to get at least half the credit for that, just as – a generation earlier – the young Robert Hardy did such a show-stealing turn as Sergeant Gratz in the WW2 drama Manhunt.

I’m intrigued by this type of character because it seems unlikely that the writer knew in advance what they were tapping into. You can’t really cook them up to a recipe, it’s more of a happy accident.

They are mostly aspects of the Trickster, of course: clever enough to initiate far-reaching schemes but rarely wise enough to look ahead to the consequences. Viewed in that light, Benjamin Linus and Sgt Gratz are uncustomarily sensible examples of the type. More often these fellows are wilful high-maintenance characters, stirring up continual trouble by reason of the very flaws that make them so interesting and that set them apart from the rest of the cast. Gaius Baltar, for instance – he’s a perfect Trickster figure: brilliant, selfish, careless, devious, capricious, craven. An absolute gift to a storyteller.

I’d love to create such a character in one of my own stories. Caelestis in The Chronicles of the Magi comes closest, but he’s at best a Topher, which is very far short of a Spike.

Anyone got any favourite Tricksters of their own?

Rounded with a sleep

Mirabilis has been my main writing project for almost two years now. In that time you get awfully familiar with your cast of characters. Now, as we're tying up the Winter book, I'm finding it a bit of a wrench to say goodbye to this extended family. If this was Marvel in the early '70s, I'd run a 5-page origins feature in the back of the book and give each of them in rotation a chance to tell their story. But space and time allow only these potted biographies from the Mirabilis site.

George Edward Sacnoth Meadowvane is the 9th Baron Deerdand, whose ancestral home is Dunsayn Manor near Dorking. On first meeting you'd take him for a typical bluff, whisky-nosed English aristocrat in leather-patched tweeds with a shotgun under his arm. But Lord Deerdand has a poet’s soul buried deep in all that upper-class upholstery. For years he has been the principal patron of the Royal Mythological Society, and after spending most of his money on them he is now in danger of having to sell the family estates. (You don't notice the autobiographical elements when you're dreaming these things up, honest.)

About Toby it is harder to say much, but I can tell you that I think he's probably a good dog at heart but has made a poor choice of mistress in the sour-spirited Miss Bodgkiss. A bit like Toad working for Magneto in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, 1970s vintage.

A cute couple

I'm getting to see the final batch of artwork for the Winter book this week, as Leo inks and the pages come swiftly back from Nikos. "Batch" in this context is a term denoting 5 episodes. We don't actually need to work in episodes as the DFC closed down months ago, but it's good to get into the habit of a major cliffhanger every 5 or 6 pages, so we stuck to it.

Anyway, these last 30 pages are absolutely stunning, but of course I can't show you a single frame without giving away the climax of the story. Even so, we do have over a thousand other glorious images, so plenty there to whet your appetite. I particularly like this one which shows, yet again, that great storytelling above all rests on having characters you care about. Leo's drawing has a warmth and depth of character that you rarely see in comics.

Btw when I say a cute couple, I'm referring to Jack and Estelle, not Leo and Nikos. Just to be clear on that.

Tip of the iceberg

It's 1% inspiration against 99% perspiration, as Edison famously said. Putting up some of those Fangleworths images reminded me how much work we did to develop the Mirabilis story and characters.

Early versions experimented with a more modern style of army uniform:
which we decided just wasn't working. Possibly it would have been more historically accurate (the story starts in 1901) but I always go by Emerson's advice that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." The flamboyant hussar's uniform that Leo eventually chose is much more in keeping with Jack's dashing (over-) romanticism.

As you can see, in that very early version Jack looked about twelve years old. As we worked on character development, both he and Estelle became more attractive. And we opted to give Estelle more of a look that modern readers would find relatable. She cuts her own hair (with garden shears, as a matter of fact) and that was part of the character description from day one, so we were able to avoid any Princess Leia grannified weirdness.

All this work takes time, and even though it may seem blindingly obvious that the finished version is miles better, it isn't always obvious when you're groping your way through the maze of creative choices. More on this here.

Only connect!

As Roz has been talking about her new writing tips site all week, I've been analyzing my craft a little more than usual.

Today musing on all the techniques you can use to make readers care about a character. You can show the character:

• being resourceful
• being brave
• being clever (not the same as merely resourceful btw)
• doing a good deed ("save the cat")
• being unfairly treated (“kill the cat”)
• standing up against unfairness or injustice
• doing something we can relate to – especially if funny, but can be as simple as cleaning teeth, having breakfast, if made into an interesting “bit of business”
• being in a relationship we can connect with
• in a situation we recognize – hot/cold, needing a pee, late for a meeting, etc.
• being interesting – this is how an audaciously badly-behaved, rude or even evil character can be made very compelling: what will they do next?

…& what DOESN'T work:

Making them merely strong or lucky. (Although boys of a certain age do grok power fantasies.)