DemonHanzo's Make Your Own Comic Book: A self Journey To Making A Comic Pt.5.5

Make Your Own Comic Book: Do I Have To Know Every Character Inside And Out?

The answer is no. But you still need to know enough about the character to be able to write them effectively. You can always flesh out minor characters later on as well, if the need should arise. You can use one sentence statements to keep track of you characters motivations.

For the most complex characters you don't have to give them back stories right away. You can always develop these later. You do need to know what your characters want and why they want what they want. That's it. If you know some ones motivations and why they are motivated to do it it becomes easier to write them.

Here's the motivation for a character in my "secret script". He's a minor character in fact he's a toadie.

Hunter J. Preston. Simply known as (HUNTER)

Wants to be accepted by his social peers and is not afraid of doing the wrong thing to get what he wants.

Motivation is all about wants. What does you character want and how will you character get it. That's what it boils down to. For instance many people want money. What are people willing to do to get it? It depends on personality of the character and their back-story.

Would an introverted person become a door to door salesman? You could force them to try. Most likely they might be nervous or in the case of Agoraphobic persons become extremely anxious every time they try to set foot outside their front door. 

Find a motivation(s) for your character and ask what will they do to obtain it. What won't they do? How do you know this?

Luffy for example wants to be the Pirate king. He also has some other motivations namely food and Nakama (comrades). He will not sell out his Nakama in any circumstance, not even to obtain one piece and become pirate king. We know this because we see instances of this throughout one piece.

Set up a free writing assignment to make sure you understand your characters motivations. Go for a couple minutes on the minor characters each. For the major characters you can go 15-20 minutes if you like. You can always develop them more later on. We just need to put rough ideas on paper.

This is all about getting you to make your own comic books and manga.

The tree sloths are rampaging about, I need to get back to work, so get your characters motivated.

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DemonHanzo's Make Your Own Comic Book: A self Journey To Making A Comic Pt.5

Make your Own Comic Book: Driving The story Forward With Character Motivations

Now that we have an idea on what our story is about, we need to develop our character motivations. This is going to make the writing easier when you make your own comic book. You need to develop characters that feel like the genuine article. They need to be well rounded. You need to know them so well that you can drop them into any situation and know what would happen. 

How do we do this? How do flesh out the characters so well that readers will know what they would do? The good thing about this is you probably already know a few characters like this. 

Let's take Batman as an example. Many of us know that Batman uses his wits to solve his cases.We know him so well that there are some things that don't fit the Batman persona. Let's use an example from the movie Batman An Robin. Yeah I can hear the groans already. Do any of you remember the Batman credit card? I do. I wish I didn't but I do. Why did that not read as genuine? Was it the fact that it was a lame joke? Batman doesn't make lame jokes. Was it the fact that Batman was spending an obscene amount of money? Batman doesn't spend money as such, Bruce Wayne does, but he does so in a way that it is never traced back to him being revealed as Batman. Batman is smart and the credit card reads as plutonium grade stupid.

Could you imagine what Batman really would have done? You probably could and there is no one right answer to the question, only wrong answers to that question. How can there be wrong solutions to a problem that has many solutions that work? Lets talk about tomatoes for  a second. One might use tomatoes in a salad, or in a soup or in a sauce. The same tomato has many uses. The same tomato however one looks at it, should not be regarded as a stain remover. We know the uses of the tomato, just as we know what batman is and what he is not.

The question now is how does this help to flesh out your characters? Well there is no one way to go about this, however my suggestion is to use a few writing prompts. There are many websites that offer writing prompts for you here's one

The key to this exercise lies in your ability to do the prompts as the character whose motivation you are trying to understand. The more you understand you Character the more you can drop that character into different Ideas and concepts. And they will read as genuine. You won't have to force your character to do anything they will do it themselves.

Here's a quick prompt:  Have your character write about deceit.

If we were writing about deceit from Batman's point of view we are almost guaranteed that he would write about the deceit that goes on in the criminal world of Gotham city. He might write about how the criminal mind is like a pack of rats devouring each other. They use the means of deception to gain a strong foot hold on their ascension into the ranks of Gotham's elite. Gotham's political system is full of deception. Crooked lawyers who use there silver tongues to keep the scum of the city on the streets. Crooked cops who are on the take who deceive the public they are sworn to protect. Judges who have sold their souls to achieve  worldly gains. All who deceive the hard working decent citizens of Gotham. It makes me sick to my stomach the lies served in the name of the people. And it oozes. It oozes like a pollution into the system. The system is ailing and needs some one to administer the medicine it needs. That medicine has a name. That name is Justice.

It doesn't matter if it's a little rough. Most likely you're the only one who is going to read it. But also don't be afraid to pull out a line or two you like and add it to a story. This exercise is to help you understand your character, that's it.

Now I must fend off the tree sloths before they attack.

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