Character Development — Part B
The reason I didn’t mention tertiary characters in the first part is that they are, simply put, not important enough. Those kinds of characters typically appear, at most, twice or thrice in a story and are in most cases the protagonist’s means to the end. Generally speaking, they are almost fully interchangeable.
Of course, there are factors that can’t be changed, like a female character in or from a place only accessible to women. But other than that, in all likelihood, it doesn’t matter if the woman has brown or blond hair. Or if her name is Paula, Hillary or Yasmin.
Tertiary characters are often just a little more than generic and accordingly don’t need that much detail as your other characters. Simply basic information like the name, age, gender, occupation and such are more than sufficient. Of course, characters can start out as tertiary characters and become secondary or even primary characters over the course of time. That, however, is very rare.
Character Creation with Character Sheets
So, as mentioned before, I, personally, use character sheets to plan out my primary and secondary characters. Those sheets include general information, physical and mental as well as emotional information and data about relationships.
General Information
Starting with general information, this category holds any kind of information that can be perceived in a first meeting, read on an ID card or doesn’t fit into any other specific category.
Those include but aren’t limited to first and last name, age, gender, birth date, current residence and so on. You can put down as much info as you like, especially if it’s about favorites (food, music, sports, etc.).
Physical Information
Following the general information is the physical information, so to speak almost everything that is perceivable by any of your five senses. Those include but aren’t limited to eye and hair color, body type, height, skin tone and anything similar. Work this category out in detail because, like with humans in real life, your characters will most likely be introduced and judged on physical appearance at first.
Mental Information
The third category covers anything in regard to your characters’ thought process, education and the like. Events and factors that have an impact on your character also fit in this category.
Those include but aren’t limited to any type of memory (happiest, saddest, clearest, etc.), personality types (introvert/extrovert, leader/follower, etc.), type of childhood, secrets and so on. Fleshing out these details might seem a bit exaggerated, but it helps add depth to your character and give reason to their actions.
Emotional Information
Emotional information is something that is almost unknowable to anyone other than the specific characters themselves. Most of this category can’t be perceived in any form from the outside unless your characters openly show or say what they are feeling.
Those include but aren’t limited to what makes them happy/sad/angry/scared, their biggest fear, their greatest desire, their idea of perfect happiness and anything along the line. This kind of information may never be revealed in your story, but it will provide you with a better hold on your character’s state of mind.
Relationships
As stated in the part about the protagonist, deuteragonist and antagonist, every character has some kind of relation to your protagonists. Defining your characters is a great deal, but setting the relationship those characters have with the protagonist or any other character in the novel, puts them in a comprehensible relation.
If you have a kind, a mean and an indifferent character, then it doesn’t tell us much about what they are to each other. Sure, by stereotype the kind one would be the protagonist, the mean character the antagonist and the indifferent one the deuteragonist. But let’s assume that the indifferent and maybe reluctant character is your protagonists. In that case, the roles' relationships aren’t as clear as you first thought they would be, right?
Example: The story starts with an indifferent, reluctant boy who has no motivation to go on his journey to save the world because that duty was pushed onto him by the council of elders from his village. Another boy from his village is seemingly kind but cunning and mean, who sees himself as the hero’s rival because he thinks he is much more suited to save the world.
However, over the course of time, he gets angrier and greedier for power – exceptionally mean, to put it bluntly – because the chosen boy went on the journey nonetheless and receives help from many people. And the situation escalates when a kind woman joins the boy, who seems to be the key to saving the world.
In this example, at first, the protagonist would be indifferent, the deuteragonist would be the mean and the antagonist the kind character. That changes throughout the story though, and the antagonist and deuteragonist change roles, giving birth to a deuteragonist that evolved from a former antagonist and a deuteragonist who slowly grew into the antagonist.
So the relationship defines the characters in a specific but different way than their roles do. Since character roles can overlap or even change throughout your work, a relationship illustrates the character’s positioning to each other in a more precise way.
