How to Develop a Character Vibes-First
Have you ever written a three-dimensional character with complex psychology and a solid arc, but no distinct personality on the page?
Have you ever written a character who feels vivid and real, but struggled to pin down their motives?
Here I'll give you an alternative way to approach character creation that should avoid those problems. We'll start with how a character should feel to the reader, their flavor profile, then expand outward to explore both their psychological complexity, and their quirks and characteristics on the page.
But first, we have to understand the stumbling blocks inherent to a more conventional approach.
Two Ways to Write Characters
There are two common methods to approach creating a character: top-down and bottom-up.
Top-Down
A top down approach is what you might think of as the outliner's method of character writing. They start with the things about the character that have the greatest influence on who they are and the course of their life, and use them to inform the specific details.
Most of the best-known pieces of advice on writing characters fall into this category. A character's wants and needs, their core urge, pivotal moments in their backstory, all of these are top-level concepts. They're abstract ideas that you can use to inform how a character will behave.
Here's an example of how a top-down process might look:
1) First, we decide that our character, John, has low self-confidence, and tries to cope with it by surrounding himself with fans and admirers.
2) Next, we find specific methods that John can use to meet his needs. He'll be an Instagram influencer, flexing rented supercars and posting thirst-traps.
3) Now, we'll put John into a situation that puts pressure on him, that targets his vulnerabilities. He ends up accidentally convincing somebody that he's a real celebrity, and gets invited to an exclusive party with the Hollywood elite. Now he has to keep up appearances, or he'll be exposed and feel more worthless than ever.
4) Now, we can try to extrapolate how John's character would manifest, moment to moment, on the page:
He took a flute of Champaign from the waitress as she passed, casual as can be, then glanced around to see how everyone else was holding them and adjusted his fingers accordingly. A woman in dark glasses and a teal gown was walking in his direction. He pretended not to see her and backed toward the wall. It was safer not to talk to anyone, but damn it! He was wasting a big opportunity here! When would he get another chance like this?
Bottom-Up
A bottom-up approach is the opposite, a pantser's approach. It starts on the page, with writing out the concrete details of the character's appearance, behavior, speech patterns, etc. Then you work like a detective, using those improvised details as clues, and try to deduce the motives and psychology behind the character's actions.
Here's an example of how a bottom-up process might look:
1) First, we improvise a character on the page, establishing an interesting blend of details:
Jane nodded and snapped along to the music, her eyes almost closed. The client was yelling at her agent now, having given up on trying to get through to her, for the moment. She let the pictures from the evidence folder pass through her mind, a slideshow in time to the music. The blood spatter up the wall, the streak of mud by the door, the pattern of bruising on the body. Her eyes snapped open, and she reached out to shut off the radio.
"It wasn't the husband," she said.
"How do- whatever." Her agent sighed.
"Where's the client?"
"Our paying customer left while you were in your little trance, to take his business elsewhere."
"Oh! Shame on him. Well, let's solve it anyway. I'm on a roll now."
2) Next, we look at the details of the character and translate them into abstract traits: Jane is a private detective who has complete focus on her work, a mind that works in unusual ways, and no desire for her clients respect, or their money.
3) Finally, we can try to come up with a unifying explanation for those traits: Jane wants to help people, but learned as a child that the affection of others is intermittent and out of her control. Now, she works very hard to complete every job she gets, but sabotages her relationships with the clients, unconsciously preventing them from showing any gratitude, as a strategy to gain the control that she lacked as a child, even if it means living a lonely, thankless life.
The Advantages of Each Approach
Both top-down and bottom-up strategies for character writing have their benefits and drawbacks.
The top-down approach prioritizes creating a meaningful arc for your character in the long term. It begins with a clear understanding of causality. Working top-down, you can be certain to understand why your character makes the decisions that he does, and why those choices are good or bad for him. From there, you can figure out what a meaningful arc would look like, how to transform your character for better or worse.
The bottom-up approach prioritizes creating a vibrant, flavorful character on the page. It begins with a clear sense of the character's associations. What is this character like, and what is she unlike? How does she look? How does she talk? What little quirks color her presence? Working bottom-up, you can ensure that your character will feel like an individual, with the full richness of a human personality.
The Disadvantages of Each Approach
In the case of both top-down and bottom-up character creation, their disadvantages are the flip-sides of their strengths.
The top-down approach prioritizes a meaningful arc and a coherent psychological model of the character, and it takes work to translate those things into specific quirks on the page. Its blind spot is this: not all of a character's quirks are directly related to their core psychological traits. Given any top-down starting point, you'll be able to easily extrapolate down to some lower-level character traits, but not to others.
For example, take John. His need for external validation can be easily extrapolated into how he speaks and dresses. He wants to get attention, so he'll dress in flashy, designer clothes, and he'll try to project as much charisma as he can. But that side of John is just a facade. What would he wear if he were only trying to please himself? What are his genuine tastes? The top-down approach didn't give us enough information to figure that out, because those tastes don't come from his desire for attention.
For that reason, it's common to find top-down characters who feel flat on the page. Their writers aren't able to develop a strong associative flavor for them, or don't bother. The character becomes nothing more than a vessel for their arc. They have "depth", but no personality.
The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, can easily fail where the top-down approach succeeds. A bottom-up character starts out with a lot of complexity and nuance. When the character already feels fully-formed on the surface, it's easy to neglect the deeper levels of motivation and psychology.
The result is a character that has a strong personality, but remains static in the story, or suddenly acts in nonsensical, out of character ways when the plot demands a meaningful motivation from them. The writer neglected the causality that drives the character's actions.
A Blended Approach
Of course, there's no need to stick to just top-down or bottom-up, but how do you bridge the gap between them? Here's one way to go about it:
We'll begin with something new, an element in the middle area between the top-level logic and the bottom-level detail. This will be a flavor profile. It's a set of associations that you want to be core to who your character is. You could think of it as their essence, or their nature. It will contain the elements of them that will be constant whenever they're present on the page.
Next, we'll create a top-level psychological model to figure out the causality of the character's actions. It can match the flavors we've established for the character, but it doesn't need to explain or justify them.
Now, we'll translate that psychological model into an additional flavor profile which can be used to augment the first. If that first set of associations is intended to be the core of the character, their nature, this second set represents their nurture, what has happened in their life to change them. As they progress along their arc, this flavor profile can change to reflect how the character themself has changed.
Finally, we'll take all of our flavors and translate them into the specific details that will color the character. We'll derive details for appearance, dialogue, body language, and more.
The Core Flavors
This is where we create the stable core of our character’s vibes. You can fill the flavor profile with any words or ideas that you want to color how your character feels in the reader’s mind. I'll start out our new character with these flavors:
Songbird, confidant, dream.
Each of those flavor words carries with it a set of associations, so just three will be enough to create a strong flavor profile. Exactly what those associations are is somewhat subjective, but that's OK; the audience will never see these flavor words directly unless you choose to show them.
The Top-Level Understanding
Now it's time to create a psychological model of our character to explain why they act the way they do, and to create a framework for their arc. At this stage, with only the core flavors established, you can still do whatever you want with their psychology. Inspired by my flavor words, here's what I wrote:
Julian is a courtier with a vision for a better future, but his passion to pursue it is in conflict with his fear of facing failure and the dangers that come with it. Instead of advocating for his beliefs himself, he manipulates others into doing so. But when they make enemies as a result, he abandons them, using the excuse that he needs to preserve his own safety to keep the dream alive. In fact, he has a deep belief that he is too weak to make it into a reality. As long as he finds other people to champion his ideas, he will never have to face that belief.
Second Layer Flavors
Next, we'll come up with a second set of flavor words that represent the main psychological issue that we introduced in the last step. These words or phrases can be metaphorical representations of the character's struggles and flaws. Here's what I wrote:
Porcelain, mirage, seduce.
In the case of these flavor words, I wanted to capture Julian's self-perceived fragility as well as his refined bearing with porcelain, and his tendency to manipulate and abandon others with mirage and seduce. Of course, they also produce an distinct flavor as a trio. If I were to write Julian's arc, these elements of his flavor would diminish and change as he moved toward facing his fear and weakness.
Translating into Specifics
Now, the final step of this method is to take the flavor words we came up with earlier and figure out how to bring those associations to the page. It's generally a good idea to find a handful of different ways that each flavor could be expressed, to keep things from getting stale.
Here are the specific details I cooked up for each flavor word:
Songbird
Julian dresses in a variety of bright colors, and always wears at least one eye-catching accent piece.
He's in the habit of singing to himself as he goes about his business, particularly when he's in a good mood.
In social gatherings, he flits from one person to another, always on the move.
He has some bird-like body language: when distracted by a sound, he'll quickly turn his head in its direction. When he's recovering from shock or disgust, he'll shake himself like a bird ruffling its feathers.
Confidant
He likes to be trusted by others, and will try to give good advice and a listening ear to earn that trust.
He tends to stand close to people that he likes, sometimes close enough to make them uncomfortable.
He's open about the things that are important to him, and shares them readily.
Dream
Boredom quickly gives way to daydreams for him.
He's also prone to nightmares when he's stressed.
He uses vivid imagery in his dialogue, and uses sensory metaphors to sway people's emotions.
He escapes anxiety by watching plays or operas and losing himself in fiction.
Porcelain
He's physically thin, and fine boned. He wears well-tailored clothes that make him look even thinner.
He collects fine china, but keeps it in a display case. (Later in the arc, perhaps he is forced to allow the collection to be destroyed. Throwing it, piece by piece, at an enemy, maybe?)
He doesn't show much emotional resilience. He'll play up his negative emotions to solicit sympathy.
Mirage
When things get heated, he'll disappear from the room.
He likes to wear things that glitter or shimmer, silk and jewelry.
He's willing to lie to appease people, but won't admit that he did it.
Seduce
He targets people's desires to get them to do what he wants, or what he thinks is right.
He takes good care of his looks, and uses them to attract people to him.
When he's talking to someone alone, he drifts into a quiet, conspiratorial tone.
Well, what do you think of Julian? Is his personality strong and distinct enough to work well in a novel? Do you think his arc would be satisfying?
Your Turn!
Here are the steps in brief, for your convenience:
1) Write out a list of flavor words to represent the core of who your character is, the things that won't change about them during their arc.
2) Come up with a psychological framework for an arc, using whatever method feels best to you. Figure out why your character acts the way they do, and how they would have to change to be better.
3) Write a second list of flavor words to represent that psychological baggage which will drive their arc. These flavors will be flexible, able to ebb and flow at various points in the arc. When the character expresses these flavors more strongly, it means they're deeper in their problems.
4) For each of your flavor words, figure out some specific ways that your character could express that flavor on the page. Think about their appearance, dialogue, body language, and the little choices that influence how they show up in a scene.
Wrapping Up
Thanks for reading through to the end. The character creation method I shared in this post is high-effort, definitely worth it for the protagonist of a novel, but a serious investment of time and energy if you're just trying to spruce up your skills. If you completed it, or if you're planning on doing so, that's great! You should comment about your experience with it.
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