Heroic characters have a wide range of possibilities for fiction writers--from the fairy tale prince to the borderline villain/vigilante. When creating a heroic character, there are a few basic steps you need to consider that you can adapt for your particular story. In this article, I'll show you some of these starting points.
1) First of all, you need to get a good feel for the main core of the character--when your hero is faced with obstacles, what is going to come out of them?
A great visual is thinking of the character like a tube of toothpaste--you can have whatever you want on the outside as far as appearance, but what's going to drive the plot is what happens when the character is squeezed.
2) If you're going for realism, your hero is going to need at least one major flaw (just as you can have a villain with some redeeming quality).
Often you can take their greatest strength and have some element to it that can also makes it a weakness. There are also personality flaws--insecurity, arrogance, pride, etc. Keep in mind if you're doing a longer work such as a novel that you can take your hero from where they are and have them overcome or at least address their flaw by the end of the story.
3) Make an effort to make sure your hero and villain are at least evenly matched, and when in doubt make it a harder fight for your hero.
If you make things too easy, you're not going to have a sharp enough conflict to drive your story forward.
4) Consider how the other characters in your story view the hero--like anything in real life, perceptions are going to vary.
Great examples of this are comic book heroes, who almost always have someone who sees them more as a villain even when they're not.
Additional Tip:
- Taking the time to break down fictional heroes that you like in books, movies, and TV shows is helpful. I like watching character-driven movies multiple times--the first time for entertainment and the following times focusing on story and character elements.
Personal Examples:
In the prologue of the sci-fi novel I'm working on called Legacy (second book in the Hannaria Series following Out of the Gray), one of the main characters in the series named Jernard is asked the question if he knows what separates a hero from a villain. This is his answer:
“A hero has a solid moral line that guides him,” I replied, hesitating for a moment because my voice sounded childlike as well, “He can push himself to that line—get right to the edge of it—but if he crosses it, it will wreck the very core of his identity.”
How he answered that question defines a lot of who Jernard is as a character--he feels like he has to walk a moral tightrope to protect the people he cares about, but at the same time he fears his potential of being driven to a point he can't come back from. Given the situations he finds himself, this is a legitimate fear.
The friend who asks him the question makes this comment:
“A villain however doesn’t need to worry about crossing a line he doesn’t have—unless he creates one by choice.”
Paronis starts out seeing himself as a villain who just doesn't like the idea of being evil--there's an arrogance and pride in him that he can do things better than a traditional hero because he's not hindered by any moral rules or boundaries. Many of his actions and intentions are good--it's the core of him that has the flaw, and his self-destruction into insanity and evil is more gradual and tragic because of it.
It's been interesting to have these two characters--arch-enemies in the original short stories I did in 2006--be friends in the novels. I think it's made both of them much better characters, and though it wasn't my original intention the whole theme of this novel is becoming based around the "hero/villain" question.
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Other Novel Workshop Articles on Gather:
- Tips on Writing a Novel in 90 Days
- How to Create Motives for Your Fictional Characters
- Tips for Writing Natural Dialogue
- Basic Fictional Character Development
- How to Create a Believable Villain
More Writing Resources and Related Links:
- Fictional Character Development Template (Free Online)
- The Writer's Library (More Writing How-to Articles)
- Web Writer Central--More Resources for Online Writers
You can read Legacy in rough-draft format here on Gather beginning at this link:
The Hannaria Series Book 2: Legacy--Prologue and Chapter 1
The story will be available in paperback and ebook formats in November.
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Feel free to add any tips you want to share that have helped you as well. Have a great day!
Tricia
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Comments: 8
Good advice.
Excellent article, Tricia. Thanks for posting. As a fellow author, I'm sure you can appreciate that we love our characters so much, we can't always see how others view them. So I'm glad you wrote that a hero's greatest strength often contributes to his greatest weakness. My main character's hero fits that description and your post gives him validation. It's always good to justify with rationale what was created by instinct.
Excellent tips. Thanks for sharing!
Great article. Thanks for sharing with READING BOOKS ONLINE!
Thank you so much for this. I was actually just about to begin work on a Superhero novel, so it's cool that I found this.