Surely you have at least once encountered works where the hero
- primary or secondary - described in great detail, but it remains a flat picture. It looks like a cardboard figure performing a set of prescribed actions but does not at all resemble a living person, and therefore does not cause any interest or sympathy. In other books, on the contrary, we sometimes know almost nothing about the hero's appearance, voice, and how he moves, but we immediately catch the hook and eagerly follow him to the last page.
What to do if you are planning to write a novel, but are not sure how lively and voluminous your characters turn out? It's time to check it out!
So, for starters, we will divide all the heroes into three categories:
- main
- minor
- shortcut heroes (those that appear only to perform a specific function)
The number of details and individual features will decrease from major to minor and further. But there is the most important thing that absolutely all heroes should have - desire.
Desire is what living beings experience. And the fact that sometimes does not even require an explanation for readers. Desires are clear to us on an intuitive level! It is enough for us to read that the hero wants to free himself from captivity, acquire his own house, or write a book. We already unconditionally believe him, even if in life we have no such aspirations.
The desire of the hero - this is his primary motivation to begin his journey, and therefore to move the plot. The desire of the hero forms the goal to which he goes throughout history. His underlying desire should not change from beginning to end. It can grow with additional small desires or change colors, but in the end, she will lead the hero through the story. Have you met such novels in which the plot seems to fall apart? At first, the book seemed to be about one thing, then suddenly it becomes completely different, and in the end - about the third? This happens precisely when the wishes of the main characters are not formed, and the author blindly wanders after the characters in a maze.
Desires need to be endowed with all the heroes, even the shortcut ones. The purest desires like "satisfy your hunger" or "go on vacation" will be the last, but they should still be read.
Desires can be divided into three broad groups:
- possession (the hero wants a beautiful house, a lot of money, power, a rare witchcraft artifact, a magical gift or marry the widowed queen)
- deliverance (leave the country, free oneself from captivity, exit self-isolation, escape from an abuser husband)
- revenge (take revenge on the killer of parents, become the best student in the class, teach a traitor a lesson)
Desire + obstacles to its fulfillment = conflict
This is the basic formula for plotting the plot. So the hero gains the goal. The goal, by the way, like desire, must also be specific. For example, if your character wants to rid the world of evil, but does not know which one, then his goal may be to search for absolute evil in the world around us, and then we get a reflecting philosopher who analyzes the whole book with any act, but never gets up from the couch. If the character wants to rid the world of evil, and his goal is to throw the ring of omnipotence into the bowels of the Fatal Mountain, then we get Frodo, who, despite everything, goes to Mordor. In the first case, our hero will be hindered by abstract formulations and generally the ambiguity of the world, in the second - crowds of orcs, Nazguls, and the ring itself.
As an exercise, you can trace the desires of the heroes in the works, you know.