Personal Character Development

Before you can write about fictional characters with any real depth or substance to their personalities and their life experiences, you have to be able to write about yourself. I mentioned before, that in a way every character you will write about is an extension of you as a person. This is something that new writers tend to struggle with because it is inevitable that you will have to create characters that will serve as antagonists. Whilst understanding another person's point of view can be difficult without living through their life experiences, what is harder still is to open your mind to the darker parts of your own character, to explore the depths of just how sinister you as a person could have become in another time.

Creating an antagonist that is based on the parts of yourself that you hate the most, or that serve the greatest psychological adversary to your mental stability is not an easy task. In order to go to that place you need to give yourself permission to think and feel things that you would never think and feel and accept that those sentiments exist somewhere inside of you. To be clear, this is different to the problem we have already discussed where we spoke about considering points of view we don't agree with, this is about accepting the prejudice that exists within ourselves, knowing that we are not embracing it for ourselves, but rather that we are aiming to channel that negativity into something material.

To give an example, I am a gay man, and as a gay man there are many forms of discrimination that I have experienced and likely will experience again at some point in my life. If I want to create a narrative with an LGBT character that experiences this discrimination then there are three ways to approach it. The first is to base the story on my own experience of it, this will have the most potential to accurately depict the feelings of the victim because I have direct experience of their mentality in that moment. The second is to base the story on the experiences of others, which as I have discussed before is limited by language and the ability to articulate emotions and relate what is experienced in the moment. This second approach has less potential to accurately depict the victim's experience, but it does have a greater potential to depict the adversary as your own judgement of the person recounting their experience will inform your attempt to understand the adversary in a way that we generally don't try to do when we are a victim.

The third approach is to try and place yourself as we said before in the shoes of the antagonist, that in itself either requires you to see their point of view which we discussed before, or it requires you to reflect on your own thoughts and mine the depths of the darkest regions of your mind in an attempt to find an answer to the question "Could I ever do that?" in other words you have to ask yourself what it would take for you to become that adversary. This is uncomfortable, which is perfectly normal, if you weren't feeling uncomfortable then I would argue what you have convinced yourself is true all along was nothing more than denial and the darkness you find easy to embrace is your true nature. That is what most of us fear when we venture into this realm for the first time, we fear that the darkness we confront will be seductive, that we might come to feel their point of view is more compelling. To put it another way, we fear that we will corrupt ourselves if we confront the darkness within.

Before you can really begin to explore this path and use it for character development I think the most important thing is to reiterate the point, you need to be open to the idea of accepting the prejudice that exists within ourselves. Before you can write about an antagonist that is racist, bigoted, homophobic, or aligned with an ideology you wholeheartedly reject, you have to be willing to accept that those are things that you could have ended up embracing if a few things in your life had been different. I do not want to open up a debate about nature versus nurture right here, because that is an extensive topic in itself, but I think what we can agree on for now is that some prejudices at least are learned. They depend on the environment we grow up within, and they depend on our reactions to certain situations. Two people can go through the exact same thing, and come out the other side with polar opposite views of the experience, this I know as someone with close friends who have political opinions that are wildly divergent from my own. You can argue that it is their nature, but I have seen the path they took, and I have seen their ideology grow and develop with age which has given me the ability to recognise just how easily I could have ended up in the same "camp" as it were.

It is this point that needs to be reiterated, as much as I have come to despise the author of one of my childhood literary adorations, one quote is relevant to paraphrase here "It is our choices that define who we are" - knowing these prejudices exist within us does not mean we have to embrace them, it is our choice whether we want to make it or not. Accepting this is crucial as it will enable you to create not only an antagonist that accurately depicts that prejudice, but to also create a protagonist that is able to resist and overcome.

Spoilers ahead for one of my novels 'The Fifth Wall'

The main story of 'The Fifth Wall' one of my novels deals with the journey of self discovery taken by one of the main characters. They struggle to come to terms with the darkness within, their resistance ultimately fails but in the end what they realise is that their ability to confront the darkness is hindered by denial, that only through accepting what is a part of you can you have any hope of controlling it and gaining the strength and determination to stand by your beliefs, even when the darkness within tries to push you away from them. This novel is a story that I wrote when I was going through one of my lowest points, my depression was deep and there were ideas coming to mind that I had to constantly push away. I am a survivor, I have been suicidal at the darkest points in my life but the reason I am still here and still alive is not just because of luck, it's because in those moments where I had nothing left to lose I've been able to accept that death is a doorway that is always open to us, at any moment we can walk through, it takes a lot to bring you to that threshold but always in that moment the question comes back to me, if I truly have nothing left to lose, then what do I have to lose by trying again? If death is the ultimate consequence of failure, and you are willing to accept it, then what threat does failure pose if you want to try something else?