Jodie Brownlee
Jodie wanted to be a genie when she grew up. Then she discovered they could spend centuries locked in a bottle and decided to write about them instead. The result is the Ruby series:
The Magic Carpet
The Traveller’s Telescope
The Doomsday Curse
When she’s not writing about Ruby’s adventures, Jodie is off having adventures of her own. As a traveller, she’s crossed the Rajasthan desert on a camel, plied Asian rivers on an elephant, driven a tuk tuk in Sri Lanka, dined in a haunted Scottish castle, climbed an active volcano on a tiny Pacific island, swam horses in the sea, dived with sharks in Sydney Harbour, parachuted from an old Cessna biplane, visited witch doctors in Africa, and explored overgrown temples in Cambodia, underwater caverns in Jamaica, and bat caves in outback Australia.
TIPS ABOUT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
Characters are the most important part of your story. Without them, there would be no story. But what exactly do we mean by character?
The dictionary definition of character is “the complex of mental and ethical traits marking a person.”
MORE THAN APPEARANCE
When creating main characters for your story, you need to think about more than their appearance. You need to know what kind of person they are. Do they stick by their friends at all costs? Or do they run away and hope for the best? Are they honest? Sneaky? Stong-willed? Fragile?
When the plot in your story unfolds, how will your main character react? The way in which he or she reacts will affect the plot. Plot and character are the two drivers of your story.
SHADES OF GREY, NOT BLACK AND WHITE
First, let us agree that no person is 100% good or 100% bad. We all, even the most saintly of us, have some small vice or moment of weakness.
Mother Teresa has become a symbol of virtue for selflessly feeding the poor. But when she started she had no income and had to resort to begging for food and supplies. Teresa experienced doubt, loneliness and the temptation to return to the comfort of convent life. She has been criticized for refusing to give painkillers to those in pain because she believed that suffering brings one closer to Christ. Like us all, she was only human, but in spite of her vices, she dedicated her life to feeding the poor, and in our eyes, that makes her a saint.
On the other hand, villains have traits that could be considered positive. The joker in Batman had a sense of humour. Dracula had good manners (when he wasn’t biting your neck). Long John Silver may have killed those who wouldn’t join his mutiny, but he was also brave, likeable and a natural leader of men. The white witch from the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is proud and cruel. She is also very beautiful.
So, when you’re creating a villain, (also known as the antagonist) don’t give them 100% negative traits. Give them a positive quality as well – high IQ, intelligence, beauty, an enthusiasm for music, athletic prowess, or kindness to their pet cat for example.
When creating your main good character (your protagonist) give them a weakness to make them real. Their weaknesses are obstacles that prevent them from reaching their desire. Obstacles are needed to make the story interesting.
If Mother Teresa did not encounter self doubt, loneliness or temptation on her journey towards her goal of feeding the hungry, her story would not have been as interesting. It is the struggle within each character that makes a story.
Here are a few questions to get you thinking about your own characters.
DESIRE
What does your character want? To win the basketball finals? To get the popular Mindy to notice him? Does your character want to keep her parents together? Does he want to save his little sister from aliens, or the school bullies? Or is your character trying to save the world from destruction?
EXTERNAL OBSTACLE
List some external things that can get in the way. The coach doesn’t like your character for some reason and didn’t pick them for the finals. Your character is too quiet for Mindy to notice him. The parents are not listening to each other enough to mend their relationship. The aliens or bullies out number you. Time is running out for your character to save the world.
CHARACTER FLAW
List some internal obstacles, in other words some character flaws that might get in the way of your character achieving what they want. Lack of physical height, self-doubt, shyness, bad temper, fear, temptation, inability to communicate well…
You can include both an external obstacle as well as a character flaw if you want, but you don’t need to. Just do whatever makes the story interesting. Sometimes having more than one obstacle works, sometimes focusing on just one obstacle is more interesting.
CHARACTER STRENGTH
Now that you’ve identified your character’s flaws and the obstacles that will prevent them from reaching their desire, you will need to give them a strength to overcome them. Determination, a strong sense of justice, intelligence, a sense of humour, a knack of winning people over with their likeable personality, courage and bravery, a special talent…
Examples
The basketball player who was not selected for the team might have determination. This means he practices basketball every spare minute until he becomes highly skilled. When one of the players is ill, our main character fills in and becomes the basketball hero, winning the final.
Our dorky character is in love with Mindy but she’s too popular to notice a dork. He is determined to improve himself and decides to work out in private. He develops some muscles and strength. He is also naturally brave in the face of danger. When Mindy nearly drowns in a flood, our dorky friend takes off his shirt and dives in to save her. Mindy not only notices him (and his muscles), but loves that he is not a show off like the other boys, even though he has everything they have and more.
WAYS TO ‘FLESH OUT’ YOUR CHARACTER
Writers say they are fleshing out a character when they give the character substance and make them seem like a real person. Ways of doing this include:
Showing what they like and dislike.
In The Magic Carpet, Mrs Rosemont likes the colours beige and grey, she likes sharpening her pencils to a perfect point, and she likes to keep her footpath swept. She does not like magic, winged camels, or flamingo pink.
Ruby has wild curls, loves toffee-apple red, and ditches pencils in favour of painting – with her hands! What does this say about them?
Showing us how they present themselves.
Mrs Rosemont’s hair is a perfect curve from the crown of her head to the back of her neck. Her brown polished shoes, match her handbag, and she has a habit of picking lint off her blouse.
Isra’s violet hair hangs to her waist in a tumble of knots. A centipede crawls through it, appearing at intervals, and a spider abseils from her earlobe.
From this information you could probably think up a suitable pet for each of them. You might even imagine the sort of people they are, and how they might react in certain situations.
DAILY SCHEDULE
Unless your story completely disrupts the character’s life and puts everything in limbo (such as A Wrinkle in Time, The Hobbit, and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe) you will have to weave your story around the character’s schedule. It would help to know what their schedule is. The Harry Potter stories are woven into Harry’s schedule at school. The Charlotte’s Web story is woven into the schedule on the farm. The Anne of Green Gables story is woven into Anne’s daily schedule helping out around the house and going to school.
NAMING YOUR CHARACTERS
I am often asked by children during school visits, “Where do you get your characters’ names?”
I have a book of baby names which I have used but most of the names I use I make up by playing around with sounds like inkaperkle (a dried fruit Ruby uses to make a Healing Ointment in The Magic Carpet) and Polliwog (the dangerous flowers that threaten Mrs Pinkus in The Traveller’s Telescope). Here are the explanations behind some of the character’s names in the Ruby trilogy.
Granny McQuirky: Quirky means ‘having peculiar traits’ which Granny McQuirky certainly does.
King Fantasma: The definition of fatasma is ‘illusion-caster’. King Fantasma is the genie king.
Uncle Cumulus: Uncle Cumulus is a genie in the Charm Police Force. Cumulus is also a type of cloud. Genies are very light because they are composed largely of air with a small portion of water, just like a cloud. This is why they are able to transform, levitate (float), vaporise (turn into mist), and permeate (pass through solid objects). We humans, on the other hand, are composed of much more water than genies, which makes us considerably heavier with very limited shape-shifting powers.
Nimbus: Nimbus is another type of cloud. In the book, Nimbus is Cumulus’s son. Both of them are genies.
Sergeant Stratus: Stratus is a type of cloud which sits higher in the sky than a Cumulus cloud. Sergeant Stratus is a higher rank than Cumulus, so the name reflects this rank.
Ms Finkel: Finkel is the German word for finch, a small bird. All genies take bird form and tiny Ms Finkel takes the form of a finch in The Doomsday Curse.
Mr Swank: The word swank means ‘to behave in a way that you think will impress others’. Appropriate for Mr Swank, a genie with a big ego in The Doomsday Curse.
Horas: Horas (usually spelled Horus) is a god in Ancient Egyptian mythology who is portrayed in hieroglyphs as a man with a falcon’s head. Horas’s bird form is a falcon.
General Dreg: The meaning of the word dreg is ‘the most worthless part of something’. For example, the dregs of society. General Dreg in The Magic Carpet fits this description.
Mrs Pinkus: Mrs Pinkus is a fussy elderly woman who likes a lot of frills and lace. Her bathroom is described in The Doomsday Curse. ‘Everything in the bathroom was dressed in a layer of lacy pink frills: the toilet seat, the bag with the spare rolls of toilet paper, the bathmat and even the towels were edged in pink ruffles. Avalon was busy inspecting a frilly tissue box and screwed up her nose…’
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Warm regards!
Jodie
