Our AI has analyzed the characters in {marlowe_title} based on their agency — what they seem to be doing in your story rather than based on their descriptions or backstory. Regardless of which type of novel you’re writing, the characters you create will play a crucial role in engaging the reader. Broadly speaking, there are two types of stories:

• Plot driven, in which the story is driven mainly by action — the characters serve to advance the plot. E.g., Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
• Character driven, in which the story focuses more on character than plot — the plot is a mechanism through which to develop character. Examples: Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote, Normal People by Sally Rooney.

After you’re finished with your draft, see what Marlowe says about the major characters and see if they need to be tweaked or some of their actions need to be reconsidered.

{m2_character_analysis}

{m2_character_dynamics}

{m2_character_arcs}

{m2_character_ideas}

{m2_pov}

You want to imbue your characters with urgent goals, understandable motivations, and tons of obstacles. After you’ve finished your first draft, see Marlowe’s suggested revisions above. Remember, these are recommendations for refinement that our AI has made based on your characters’ actions. “True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure — the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation,” writes Robert McKee, the author and story consultant.

Now, see if your characters need to be refined to emphasize the traits you think need to come to the fore. Does your main character show growth over the course of your story? Do your antagonists’ and minor characters’ actions make sense on their own or are they acting only to advance the plot? Revisit your manuscript and think about the following:

• Examine who’s doing what. Is your protagonist confident, bright, and level-headed (unless she shouldn’t be)? Does your antagonist possess qualities that make him up to the task of taking down your hero? Does your hero’s sidekick take certain actions that should be left to the hero instead? If your antagonist is supposed to display physical prowess, make sure that characteristic shows up, or you may need to beef up your bad guy.

• Look for differentiation. You should create characters with widely varying temperaments as a way to develop a gripping story. If your most prominent color bars are all the same color, strive to tweak your scenes to emphasize more distinctive behaviors.

• Make sure your main characters act. Weaker characters are often passive, more likely to respond rather than initiate, more likely to hope rather than act. Look for active traits in the list above. Make sure your central characters don’t just think and desire but take decisive action! Make them three-dimensional. The strongest characters in fiction appeal to the emotions, minds, and spirits of readers.

• Infuse your main character with a flaw. Marlowe won’t pick up on this (yet), but you’ll want to make sure your protagonist has a weakness, deep wound, or a real or imagined inadequacy. Perfect people are usually pretty boring. Readers delight in individuals they can root for. A flaw or blind spot at the outset gives your character the chance to achieve a goal – unknown at the outset – and complete a character arc in the story.

• Make sure your main character has a goal. Again, it’s up to you as the author to make sure your protagonist has a goal for each scene as well as an overall story goal. Consider her quest for her desired goal or object of desire, both external and internal. In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins is part of several subplots, but his unswerving story goal is to carry the ring out of the Shire and on to Mordor to be destroyed. 

A character arc is the journey a character goes on during the course of the story. The character will face adversity and challenges and will grow (or not) as the arc is resolved. As the experts at the online education platform MasterClass point out, character arcs “progress in tandem with traditional three-act story structure,” and most protagonist story arcs “start with the inciting incident, and that sets up the stakes and central conflict facing the character.”

In Write Great Fiction, James Scott Bell lays out the elements of a good character arc:

• A beginning point, where we meet the character and get a sense of what makes him tick
• A doorway through which the character must pass, almost always reluctantly
• Incidents that impact the character’s interior layers
• A deepening disturbance
• A moment of change, sometimes via an epiphany
• An aftermath that shows the resulting change.

Marlowe is not yet sophisticated enough to identify a character arc, but authors need to understand the concept. MasterClass identifies four types of character arcs:

• Transformational: The main character goes from being a regular person at the beginning of the story to a hero over the course of the story. This type of character arc is associated with epic stories and the archetypal hero’s journey story structure. Think Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Katniss Everdeen, Frodo Baggins, Walter White from Breaking Bad.

• Positive change: The character experiences positive change over the course of a story. Ebeneezer Scrooge, Heathcliff, Jane Eyre, Andy Dufresne from Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption.

• Negative change: A character starts out good or benevolent and descends into evil or ill fortune over the course of a story. Anakin Skywalker, Michael Corleone, Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.

• Flat or static: Less common and found mostly in action, mystery, and thriller stories. Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, Hercule Poirot, James Bond, Jack Reacher.

Choose the one that’s right for your main character(s).

Internal vs. external conflict

Whichever genre you are writing in, conflict is an essential ingredient to your novel. Conflict not only drives the narrative by creating drama but also enables your characters to learn and grow. Broadly speaking, there are two types of conflict:

• External: As the name implies, this is conflict wrought by external forces. This could mean anything from nature (a hurricane) to technology (SkyNet in Terminator) to your parents to another individual to a group of outlaws to an entire country.

• Internal: Internal conflict is the psychological or emotional struggle that takes place within a character’s mind or heart as he or she seeks to balance inner thoughts, feelings, values, and desires.The most famous internal conflict in all of literature is Hamlet’s struggle to choose between his desire for revenge against his uncle Claudius, who murdered his father, and his moral hesitation to commit such an act.

Ray Bradbury: “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”

William Faulkner: “It begins with a character, all I can do is trot along behind him trying to put down what he says and does.”

Ethan Canin: “Don’t write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.”

Anne Lamott: “Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, something is bound to happen.”

Stephen King: “I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”

Anthony Burgess: “A character has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure what he’s supposed to be doing.”

Elijah Bynum: “It’s not until you really throw your character into the story that you can genuinely understand who they are.”

Ann Charters: “Plot is what keeps you going when you read a story, character is what stays with you.”

Raymond Chandler: “The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.”

Dennis Lehane: “You create a bunch of characters and let them start bouncing into one another. That’s how a good story happens.”

Yiyun Li: “Your characters are like children. You give birth to these children, but you have to send them into the world and then they have to live their own lives.”

Rita Mae Brown: “Character is destiny. Change, growing from within and forced from without, is the mainspring of character development.”