Home: Writing for Comic Books: Chapter Three - Character Development: Character Biographies

Chapter Three
Character Development
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CHARACTER BIOGRAPHIES

As we develop our characters, we have to ask ourselves what role they provide in the context of the story. With that in mind, it is useful to build a biography. Although the material you create for the biography may never be shared directly with the reader, it will be helpful for you as author to understand what drives your characters. The more you know about their histories, the more realistically you'll be able to portray their reactions in any given situation.

Often we start with the externals--what does the character look like? How old? How tall? What gender? What race? What body type? Hair color? Eye color? How do they dress? What is their educational background? Socio-economic background? Are they an introvert or an extrovert, happy or depressed, easy-going or tense? Etc. These are questions that are driven by individual, personality, self-image, family, geography, and time period.

Then there are the internals--their desires and motivations--built around "Who are they?"; "What do they want?"; and "Why are they here?"

Where were they before they first appeared on the page? The history that precedes the character's appearance in a story is the character's backstory. Where did they grow up? What were their families like? What kind of childhoods did they have? What are the significant events that shaped how they relate to the world?

What are your characters' hopes and dreams? What are their fears and blind spots? What are their likes and dislikes? These are things that every reader can relate to--maybe not the specifics, but they are elements of the common human experience.

How does your character speak and move? Slowly and deliberately? Fast and impetuously? How does the character relate to other people? Shy? Forthright? Again, ask yourself why they act in these ways. Build that into the character bio.

Give your characters interesting personality traits: do they have a propensity for rocky road ice cream? Blind jazz musicians from New Orleans? Do they trill their r's? Give them some defining traits that will make them unique and interesting. It's a good idea to have some idea where those traits came from in the first place.

All of these elements will dictate how the character acts and reacts.

In studying all human behavior, we come to the question of nature vs. nurture. How much behavior is genetically predetermined and how much is learned is something that can be debated at length. In the long run, for writers, it doesn't matter one way or the other as long as you know why your characters respond the way they do. You created them, so you have the option of setting whatever rules you wish.

I will caution you about one thing: when you are dealing with serial fiction, it is a good idea to leave yourself some wiggle room in the character biographies. If you have planned out every minute of any character's life, then there may be no room for surprises or improvisation. Leave some gaps in the timeline so that you have room to introduce new elements as time progresses.

Several years ago, I co-wrote a stage adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The first thing I did was to write the character biographies. These were a page or less long, but they created the blueprints I needed in order to work out the details of the plot. I started by reading the source material and pulling as much information as I could out of Robert Louis Stevenson's original story. As there is no way the story could be adapted to the stage without making significant changes to structure, I approached the job as a matter of interpretation than strict adaptation.

The director/co-writer had already conceived a number of original characters for the production. What I did was to take all of these characters and figure out how they related to the theme of the story and to each other. I wrote a biography for each, explaining who and where they were in their lives up to the moment that the curtain rose. I laid out what each character wanted and why, how they related to the other characters physically or thematically, and what role they played in the overall theme of the story. I treated the biographies as living documents. As I developed the outline of the plot and began to write the actual script, I sometimes had to rethink the characters in order to move the story along. That's perfectly acceptable. Don't treat the biographies as written in stone. Up until the story is in print or produced, you can alter anything you want or need in order to construct the best possible piece of entertainment.

How much of the backstory do you share with the editor, artist, and/or audience? As much as you need to in order to convey the story at hand. The editor needs the most information so that he or she can help make sure you haven't left any important questions unanswered. The artist will need enough information to convey the character you have in mind, but I purposely try to leave some elements sketchy so that the artist can have input into the look and feel of the character. My general rule of thumb is that the more important the character is to the story, particularly their physical attributes, the more description I give. I let the artist have free hand with the secondary characters. When it comes to the reader, I try to give the audience enough information so that they can understand the conflicts and the characters' stakes in the course of the action, but I try not to overwhelm them with unnecessary detail. Leaving a few well chosen holes in the character bio (and sometimes the story, but not in the plot) can give your audience the chance to become active participants in the story being told by allowing them to exercise their own imaginations to fill in small gaps.

NAMING YOUR CHARACTERS

One of the hardest things for me is coming up with names for my characters. You want something that sounds right for the race, time, and underlying concept for the character. It should be memorable. It should be pronounceable. It should be original. That's a tall order, especially if you're trying to come up with a "code" name for a costumed character. Where can you get ideas for names?

For average, every day civilian characters, one of the best resources is a metropolitan telephone directory. Of course, you never take anyone's full name. Treat it as one from column A and one from column B. I find phone books particularly useful for ethnic names.

You could go the Charles Dickens or Chester Gould route and try to invent names that reflect the inner nature of the characters. This can be an interesting device, but it's a difficult balance between effective and artificial. The name should at least sound vaguely realistic (unless you are dealing with a world where artifice is the rule).

Code names are much harder because it feels like all the good ones have already been protected by copyright and trademark. It's hard to come up with cool new superhero or villain names, especially for title characters. There are some places I regularly turn for inspiration:

• The Dictionary and the Thesaurus--I sometimes just browse the dictionary, reading random entries, for inspiration. Animal names, words from science, and synonyms can be good places to start.

• Foreign Language Dictionaries--these can be particularly useful for stories with international casts like The X-Men.

• Books on Mythology and Folklore--these can give you inspiration for character names and stories.

• Books on Science--these are very useful for writing superhero stories and Science Fiction.

One thing to be careful about, which I touched on at the beginning of this section is to make your characters' names pronounceable, particularly if the name is also the title of your comic book. If the name/title can't be pronounced, it's hard for a customer to ask his or her retailer for the book. I created a character while working on Quicksilver. She was one of Magneto's Acolytes, a short, gray-skinned, horned, winged French woman. I named her Gargouille, the French word for "gargoyle" which she was designed to resemble. Neither my editor Mark Bernardo nor my co-writer John Ostrander ever got the pronunciation correct, their versions ranging from gar-gool to gar-ghoulie. Oops. If the people working on the book can't pronounce the name, then it's hard to expect the audience to do so. (For the record, the pronunciation is gar-gooey.)