In-depth discussion on the character setting in novel writing skills

In the novel, it is the protagonist of the story who "creates" other characters. Therefore, the design of supporting roles must focus on the protagonist's goal.

Every role has its own reasons for existence, and every supporting role has to assume a different role. If two roles are found to have the same function, they should be merged.

Generally speaking, the characters around the protagonist can be roughly divided into these categories: family, partners, mentors, opponents and enemies.

The role of family members is to form the protagonist's character.

A character's character must be produced by her family environment. Therefore, according to the protagonist's personality setting, we can set up some family members for her to strengthen the reader's impression of the protagonist's personality formation.

Then the partner.

They usually help to push the protagonist towards his goal. At the same time, there are many girls' private words, which can only be exchanged among friends. Therefore, in the general setting, the partner's responsibility is to promote and encourage (similar to the matchmaker).

Then the mentor.

The life prototype of such characters is all kinds of teachers. They guide the characters in a certain direction, encourage them to move forward and correct their mistakes. Some qualities of teachers. So there are two kinds of mentors:

One is the clown class, which magnifies the reader's bad impression of the teacher;

The other is the friend type, which satisfies students' fantasy of the ideal teacher.

opponent

Refers to a person who has a competitive relationship with the protagonist. Generally, only one person is strengthened. Generally, this kind of people will urge the protagonist to pursue his own goals with an almost negative force (blow). Therefore, such people generally have the ability and gas field far stronger than the protagonist. Provide the protagonist with an immediate goal that can be pursued all the time except the big goal.

Villains.

They set the strongest resistance for the protagonist's goal. The conflict between them and the protagonist constitutes the strongest dramatic conflict in the novel. When the protagonist's goal is "love", he must do his best to stop the two from being together; When the protagonist's goal is to "achieve some success", they will hinder the protagonist and stop her from moving on.

The villain can be portrayed as a simple villain, that is, to make readers hate it, they must read the whole book and see what will happen to her. A tried-and-true example is the queen in various costume dramas.

There is also a Japanese cartoon that is very good at shaping and has complex internal conflicts. Generally, most of these characters are men, and even if the characters in the youth campus are simplified as much as possible, they will become male protagonists.

In each type, you can set multiple auxiliary roles. So, how to set up these supporting roles is reasonable?

First of all, the most basic point is that different supporting actors should have different attitudes and positions on the same thing (especially the core event of the novel).

For example, I want to build two families for the protagonist, father and mother. Then, when my parents face my important decision (such as taking part in a competition), they should give different responses. In this way, the novel has a broader development space. On the contrary, then one must be deleted. Only the father (or mother) is created, and other roles can be passed.

For partners, it can generally reflect different positions on the protagonist's love. Generally speaking, works with relaxed style can make the protagonist have 2-3 partners; On the contrary, for relatively depressed works, the protagonist should not have too many partners. Generally, 1 is enough. Even if the author is strong enough, he may not necessarily set friends for the protagonist.

It is advisable to have one mentor and one opponent, not too many.

The villains can set more. But a simple "queen" villain, one is enough. If there are others, they can be packaged as "men" to sell. There can be one or more complex villains. Once you want to create more than one, you must arrange a tragic past for everyone (my brother lost his temper and killed the whole family, etc. = = b), and weave a convincing reason to make him a villain.

Secondly, the supporting role should be distinctive and iconic.

Because too complicated characters will usurp the role of the host and rob the protagonist's play, which is not allowed. In order to highlight the distinctive personality, you can set some details for the role. These details generally need to be put forward at the beginning of the character's appearance to enhance the reader's impression of the character.

For comedy characters, there are some particularly stubborn points, such as foaming at the mouth when you don't get the first place in the exam to enhance the comedy effect.

Character setting in novel writing skills

Writing Skills of Characters in Novels Part I: Characters

What is the basis of all novels?

It is a character, and the core of all novels lies in how to create attractive characters, especially the protagonist, which is the key to the success of the novel.

In fact, we can define novels and short stories: describing a character in the form of prose and trying to solve a problem. Novel: Describe several characters in the form of prose and try to solve several problems. Of course, characters should have their own themes and times, and problems should be big and small.

In science fiction and thrillers, there are many kinds of characters, which can be real people, robots, bionic people, animals and plants or terrible unknown aliens from outer space. But I'm afraid most of the characters can only be people, occasionally there are clones or bionic people, and there are some ghosts. But no matter what the protagonist is, he must act like a real person.

Readers read novels mainly for fun, and they don't want to listen or teach. If the novel is about a machine, a tree and a bird, if these protagonists have no human characteristics, readers will soon get bored. On the other hand, if we consciously let the characters in the novel face a problem, such as survival or love with obstacles, and let the protagonist try to solve this problem, readers will be attracted.

Fiction, like any form of entertainment, should be able to attract and keep the attention of the audience. Moreover, novels have incomparable advantages over other forms of entertainment. Novels can directly stimulate readers' imagination with words, and the author can lead readers to travel to a strange land with only paper and pen.

But novels also have their weaknesses. It is impossible for a writer to directly explain or solve all the doubts of readers. A writer must write down everything he wants to say, hoping that readers can hear, see, smell, feel and even taste everything the author describes in his novels.

Therefore, as an author, your job is to make readers live in your novels. Let your readers forget whether they are sitting in front of the computer or reading in bed, but let them believe that they are living in the world you imagined and the world you created. He is rescuing patients in the emergency room. He is standing by the sea in despair, waiting for dawn. He is climbing the snow-capped mountain. On the other side of the mountain is his lover in danger.

In short, it is to ask readers to live in your story. One of the easiest ways is to provide someone he wants to be.

Let the reader imagine that she is a protagonist, struggling with lust and yearning for freedom, and being tightly bound by another. Or because of injury, I can't see hope, and slowly slide into the darkness of death but I am eager to be saved.

How does the author do this? There are two things to remember.

First of all, the novel basically describes the literary style of the protagonist to solve the problems he faces, and the choice of the protagonist must be very careful. A character should have a unique attraction, give him a difficult problem to solve, and let readers care about the future fate of the character. The protagonist in the novel is also called an opinion figure, and the story is told from his perspective. In other words, the protagonist must be able to bear the story.

Choose a hero with strong ability but obvious weakness, and then he will solve a difficult problem.

For example, the author can imagine a protagonist who is wise, calm and strong-willed. Judging from the past wars, he is an outstanding strategist, but he sometimes falls into confusion. Under the hard shell is a fragile heart, which participated in the country's war of independence because of the pursuit of freedom, and then was forced to leave the motherland because of the bondage of freedom. If Levin leads an army and manages the country, he will accomplish it easily, but the problem he faces is not to test his advantages, but to expose his shortcomings, so he meets another protagonist, a predatory figure who is stronger than him in appearance and strength, and he takes away his freedom. Not only that, everything he experienced was beyond his capacity, which also greatly hurt his arrogant self-esteem.

In addition, when describing characters, don't reveal the hero's belief in winning. If the protagonist is convinced that the problem can be solved, what can the reader worry about?

There must be suspense in the story, and this suspense must be kept until the end of the story. In other words, the hero can't grasp his own destiny, just like walking on the edge of a cliff, stumbling, and strong winds and storms may destroy it at any time.

In a novel with high writing skills, unless the hero makes great sacrifices, it is impossible to overcome the problems he faces, that is to say, the hero will inevitably lose his talent and gain, and readers are eager to know what the hero will lose.

The most important thing in the novel is the calm and all-round characters. They are boring, rigid, unreliable and meaningless.

An excellent writer is like an excellent architect, and each novel should have its own unique creativity, including distinctive characters, background suitable for the story and ideas revealed in the article.

Observe the people you contact every day. How many fixed patterns can you see? Get to know each of them deeply, and you will find that everyone is an independent individual, with different personalities, habits, hobbies, joys and sorrows, and everyone faces different problems. What are their advantages and disadvantages? We should focus on describing their distinctive features, imagine which problems can best expose their weaknesses, and then start writing.

The second point about describing characters is that the narrative of the whole story should start from the perspective and feelings of the protagonist. Even if the novel uses the third-person narrative technique, everything written on paper should be the hero's personal experience, which is a constraint on the author.

There must be a protagonist in every scene, and the author can't write something that the protagonist doesn't know. But only in this way can the story told by the author be true and can be directly told to readers. When the protagonist is confused, the reader will be confused: if the protagonist is in pain, the reader will feel pain, and if the protagonist wins, the reader will feel the joy of victory. In other words, readers live in novels, not just reading words on computer screens or printing on paper.

You can also write novels in the first person. In the story told by the first person, "I" is the protagonist, which gives readers a greater sense of bringing in and is conducive to establishing a virtual world in their minds. However, due to the limited perspective of "I", it is sometimes inconvenient to describe, but it is more convenient than the third person in setting suspense. Of course, if the author has to tell the reader something that the hero doesn't know, it's best to use the third person.

Some people write in the third person and the first person. This method is relatively difficult to achieve good results, and it is easy to produce confusion in perspective, which confuses readers, but it can overcome the shortcomings of narrative in the third person or the first person.

There is a way to test whether the hero can perceive the real world. Look at every page of your novel and see if all five senses of the hero have played a role. If only the vision and hearing of the protagonist are used in a page, then the page will be rewritten, and the final effect is that the protagonist of the story should not only see and hear, but also smell, taste and touch. This method makes the narrative effect of the story lively.

So how can we find a hero with a unique personality? How to make it solve any problem?

To sum up, the hero written by the author is, to a great extent, the product of combining himself with other people he is familiar with. Many writers often advise novices to write about people and things they are familiar with, which is really the experience of successful writers. No author will write something that he has not experienced personally, which is really impossible.

Is that really the case? Looking at the novels around me, I'm afraid none of them are the author's own experiences. It is impossible to raise historical novels, and it can't happen in a dynasty that doesn't exist. So, where did the author's personal experience come from?

The characters in the novel are familiar to the author, who has lived in his mind for a long time. Before and when writing, the author mobilizes the memories that usually exist in his own mind, designs the images of the characters in the story, what they look like, how they are tempered, what friends and enemies they have, how they react to the outside world, what are their differences from others, what are their advantages and disadvantages, family situation and so on.

In a sense, writing a good novel is directly proportional to the amount, scope and understanding you usually read, and also depends on the amount of relevant information collected.

All this can be regarded as a kind of "personal experience". But it is not enough to have personal experience. The author also needs the ability to stimulate the trigger of imagination. Imagine if a man who loves freedom but is betrayed by his comrades wandered among the stars, and one day he was suddenly imprisoned by another strong man, stripped of his disguise layer by layer, and finally his freedom of thought was taken away. What would you do?

The above is the key to writing a good novel.

There are many characters to be described in a novel, and each character faces his own problems.

Please note that the protagonist has to face many problems, which is the main difference between the protagonist and other characters in the novel, and one protagonist is more important than the other, and he faces more problems.

A famous writing teacher once told the author in class that they can imagine the problem faced by the protagonist as a simple equation: one emotion versus another. For example, this is freedom versus fear, pride versus conquest, loyalty versus friendship.

But when you start to conceive characters for novels, even minor characters can use this simple formula to set the main character of the characters.

If your character can't fit this obvious pattern, then you haven't conceived the role well at all. The basic conflict of the novel, that is, the motive force of the plot development of the novel, is the emotional conflict in the protagonist's heart. All conflicts in the novel develop from this basic conflict.

The author needs to add an external, physical and intellectual problem to the internal and spiritual problems faced by the protagonist.

They are intertwined with the main problems facing the protagonist. Every time a problem is solved, another problem appears, which forms an interconnected problem chain, also known as an interconnected expectation chain. Because every question and question the author puts in front of readers implies the solution or answer to this question or question, which makes readers expect to continue reading. Therefore, the author should constantly ask questions and questions in the novel.

The novel should have such an emergency. As an author, you should put the protagonist and your readers in this emergency to test, so that readers are as miserable as the protagonist and are in a dilemma. At this time, you have carefully proved to the readers that the hero is a praiseworthy person regardless of his shortcomings and problems.

In the novel at the end of comedy, the hero often makes moral choices, and he would rather give up everything he cherishes. Although he lost everything he cherished, he stood the test of fire, so he was rewarded and happiness finally returned to him.

In a novel that ends in tragedy, the protagonist chooses an immoral solution, and what seems to be happiness is a tragic fate.

In some novels, the hero made the right choice, solved the difficult problems he faced, but lost his life. This is the classic definition of "tragedy".

The last thing we should pay attention to in the description of characters in the novel is that the protagonist must change. No matter what happens to the protagonist in the novel, no matter how the novel is written, the protagonist must have a fundamental change.

The key to every novel is to write about the change of the protagonist. In order to find out the key changes of the hero in emotion, morality, body and heart, the author must write about these changes.

Character setting in novel writing skills

For the protagonist of the story, her (his) setting has two necessary conditions: empathy and desire.

The first is empathy. This means that the protagonist must give readers a sense of identity, that is, he feels that this role is very similar to "me" or people around him. In this way, readers can "transfer" their feelings to the protagonist and experience the development of the story with the protagonist. In other words, the protagonist must be "real".

There are some common techniques to describe the empathy of characters. There are two main types:

The first is to focus on depicting some shortcomings of the characters.

The second is to emphasize some habits or hobbies of the characters.

Third, it is a strong desire. This is an indispensable plot feature of the protagonist. Because the protagonist's "desire" directly determines the main line of the story. For example, in inspirational stories, the protagonist's "desire" is to achieve goals and realize dreams; In a romantic plot, the protagonist's "desire" is to be with the person he loves. The protagonist may also have potential desires, that is, actual real desires. For example, the apparent desire of the hero is to completely defeat the hero, while the real desire is that two people love each other.

Therefore, from the protagonist's desire is simple or divided into superficial desire and real desire, we can divide the scriptwriting clues of the story into two categories:

The first kind is that the protagonist has a simple desire, and the hero pushes the heroine to realize this desire.

The second category is that the protagonist has potential desires. In this setting, the hero will generally be in a position to hinder the heroine from realizing her superficial desires.

The specific setting has three parts: overall setting, personality setting and goal setting.

Let's talk about the overall setting first.

The overall setting of the protagonist is divided into two parts: the first part is the background setting; The second is the real life setting.

The first is the background setting. The background setting includes the background of the protagonist. What's her family background? What did she go through before the novel happened? These contents are mainly outside the story, and of course they can also be used as memories or background explanations. Setting the content outside the story is mainly to make the protagonist's character more distinct.

Generally speaking, the background setting of the protagonist can be divided into three categories:

One is trauma.

The other is warm and considerate.

The last category is to seek a sense of existence.

Under the three background settings and conventional role models, people with different feelings can also cross and combine.

Real life setting is manifested in three states: professional life, personal life and private life.

Professional life: refers to the part that directly passes through the main plot of the story.

Personal life: including relationships with friends and family.

Private life: Most novels are inner monologues. This part is the part that can best reflect the deep personality of the characters.

The above three parts: professional life, personal life and private life, * * * isomorphism has become the characters that readers directly see in the novel. These three are indispensable, because the lack of some descriptions will greatly reduce the credibility of the characters and make the script look rough.

Using the above methods, we can build a multi-level character with the possibility of story development.

The background setting is to let readers know more about the inner world of the characters. However, as the principle of drama conflict, characters should have superficial personalities that are contrary to their hearts.

For example, if we decide that the character is essentially a lonely and quiet person, then her performance should be more sunny and cheerful. In this way, when she can't help crying alone, she will feel nervous.

In the shaping of the protagonist, we can't construct the characters in a conflicting way. Especially campus writing. Because the author's ability to control is limited, if the protagonist is regarded as a person with contradictory personality, he is likely to write neither fish nor fowl.

But in emotional stories, the conflict of characters' own personalities is indispensable.

On the contrary, when shaping the hero's character, the character setting often emphasizes the conflict of the hero's character itself, because the dual character is more likely to reflect the mystery. Therefore, a hero with a tragic past usually has a cheerful and lively face, as if everything around him is happy; And if a hero is indifferent, then his heart should be delicate and sensitive.

In the process of setting personality, there are some common skills.

One skill is to highlight the obvious shortcomings of the role; This can play a role in shaping a more lively role and enhancing affinity.

In addition, some details can also be set clearly, such as mantra, special hobbies, habitual actions and so on. But in general, for youth campus novels, the details should not be set too much. Too many details will blur the outline of the character. The setting of details needs to be consistent with the overall artistic conception of the novel. Generally, in the novels of youth campus, you can set some details to increase the relaxed and lovely atmosphere, such as you like to eat lovely desserts and have special collection hobbies.

The hero of the story must have a strong "desire", and realizing this "desire" is the main clue of the story. Therefore, the design of the protagonist's "desire" directly determines the direction of the story and the setting of other protagonists, villains and supporting roles.

Generally speaking, the protagonist's "desire" has two types:

One is the desire to realize a specific event.

The protagonist's "desire" can be elicited, which is generally a story that runs through the event, and the clues of the event are very easy to sort out.

However, an event-oriented story will soon face a very difficult problem-there is no emotion in the clues of events; In other words, the protagonist's emotional clues will be separated from the event clues, causing confusion in the story. The reason is that the archetype of stories that are generally oriented to events and suspense is not girlish literature, but a more masculine literary type such as mystery novels. In this kind of novels, emotion is only seasoning, and the logical structure of the story is the most important.

So the protagonist's "desire" must be related to another protagonist.

The other is emotional desire. For example, I want to change myself, I want to find spiritual support, and I want to stop being lonely.

If the protagonist has a strong emotional desire, he can clearly derive an emotional clue. For this type, the paragraph structure of the story is not very clear, and all the story bridges serve the emotional context of the characters. This kind of character "desire" is more common in urban romance novels.

Such clues are more likely to lead to loose story structure. The general treatment method is to focus on creating the protagonist's psychology, her inner needs, the background and relationship of the characters at the beginning. The key point of processing is to substitute the reader into such a psychological state. In the stage, strong event clues are gradually introduced to strengthen the rhythm.

In a story, two desires can coexist. For example, in the most common inspirational novel, the protagonist wants to be a successful person, and her inner desire is to change and find a more existing self. But there must be a priority between the two, so as not to confuse the article.

This article refers to the first platform of writing skills of http://www.momoo.vip/ Moho Resource Network.