Hey guys! I am so so sorry that I didn’t post yesterday like I usually do. My laptop is currently in the shop. Not only does it have a wacked out hard drive but the screen cracked in the left corner while I was touching the right corner. Explain that one to me. But anyway, I was going to write it yesterday on my mother’s laptop but I didn’t get around to it. But lucky for me my Mom remembered that I needed to use her laptop today even when I’d pretty much forgotten. So here we are with a day (almost two days) late blog post. But hey! I wrote it and that’s what matters.
Building Better Characters: No Such Thing as No Biases
I don’t know about the rest of you but I have a lot of biases and stereotypes. I do this all the time and sometimes I don’t realize that I’ve stereotyped people until I’m talking to someone about that person and I generalize them and then realize that I *whoops* stereotyped them again. I know people who stereotype others in all sorts of ways. Where I live the three high schools (back when there were only three) where stereotyped as the hicks, the rich kids, and the stoners. If you said that, then all the people I went to high school with could tell you exactly which schools those were. Personally, I know that I immediately have a bad bias against anyone who does sports and I always think that any guy who is really popular and attractive is just teasing me when they flirt with me and I generally mistrust them in all situation. These are unfair biases and stereotypes that the people I live around and I have. These are developed usually after meeting only a few of the people from a certain group or area.
So if every human on earth has biases, why doesn’t you character? I have recently (in the last four months or so) been rewriting one of my early stories. I’ve been doing it on the side while working on my real writing project. Because I’ve been writing this series I was trying to find the flaws in my character so that I could come up with an example of what a character looks like when they have no biases. And I found it. One of the characters from my early story Journey to Masilisk doesn’t have any biases. Normally I would say good for her. That’s something that every human strives for. But that makes her seem almost unhuman throughout the whole story. Because she doesn’t stereotype or make any biases my character is extremely naive. That’s fine at the start of the story but as the story continues she is constantly deceived by the same type of people and yet she doesn’t develop any biases. This goes from making my character naïve to making my character stupid.
No one wants to read about a stupid character unless that’s the point of the story. In an adventure fantasy novel no one wants to read a stupid character.
So what can you do to make your characters stereotypes more believable?
Well first off you might have to talk to some real humans. All people have their own sets of biases and stereotypes. You need to ask others what theirs are and how they came about. Who knows, this might give you some good ideas for what stereotypes your character should have.
Second, you need to understand that bias doesn’t always mean something bad. I can have biases about good things too. For example, my FMC (Female Main Character) in my current project is a mechanic. After being betrayed again and again she is constantly suspicious of all sorts of people, the aliens she’s forced to work under, the alien’s that had their planets destroyed like hers, even other humans. But there is one group of people that she has a good bias for. She is no suspicious of other mechanics no matter where they come from. If she meets someone and finds out that they’re a mechanic she immediately thinks nothing bad of that person.
To make a well-rounded character they need to have both kinds of biases and stereotypes. So now that you know the first thing to do is to analyze your character. And don’t be discouraged if you can’t make their stereotypes and biases obvious in the story. You reader won’t always notice all the tiny details when they’re reading unless their close reading and analyzing your book. But trust me, if you don’t have them there, your reader will feel like there’s something off about your character, they just aren’t always able to place it.
So that’s all the advice that I have on biases and stereotypes. I hope that this is another fun tip to help you build a better character. Next week I will try to be on time even if I don’t have my laptop back yet. And in case any of you are wondering, yes, I will be posting the week of Christmas. I love these posts so why wouldn’t I? And as always,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!