Characters

I have tried my hand at writing when I was fifteen, because at fifteen you are convinced you have all the life experience necessary to write something halfway decent. However, because I have problems creating a plot, characters people actually like and even writing itself, that idea quickly (and probably thankfully) fell by the wayside in pursuit of more productive pursuits, such as playing video games and picking my nose. My main problems were twofold; I was fine at writing a scene, but not great at making it fit within the overall scope of the story because I am easily distracted, and I was far more proficient at killing my characters than actually creating one you'd care about.

Of course, writing up characters people care about is extraordinarily difficult. I think this explains why video game developers and movie studios have pretty much tossed out the idea of being original in lieu of constantly regurgitating the same characters that we already showed with our money that we liked, until we throw bricks through their windows in a desperate plea to get them to stop because we would like to maintain some shred of respect for the characters we used to like (this unfortunately did not save Indiana Jones from George Lucas, but Lucas may be better at killing his own characters than I am).

On a complete aside, am I the only one who is amused that the title character in the "Lord of the Rings" never actually makes a tangible appearance in the story?

Anyway, back to the main point, the problem with creating a character is they have to feel real and yet make sense being the subject of a story. If they are too perfect, no one can relate to them. On the opposite end, villains that are pure evil simply for the sake of being evil (a la Sauron) tend to be uninteresting. If I have one complaint with "The Lord of the Rings," besides my distaste for Tolkien's writing style, it is that Sauron was portrayed as so obviously evil and wrong that it made me want him to win. Take this with a grain of salt though, because I tend to root for villains in books and movies (but not in video games; Sephiroth may be one of my favorite characters of all time, but I still wnated to kill him). I think that is because in a book or movie, I feel far more detached than in a video game, where even if in a linear game, I still feel far more involved.

The reason creating characters people care about is because no matter how amazing a story is, the characters need to be interesting, or no one will care enough to get involved. In fact, I believe good characterization to be more important than a good plot. One of the moments that really stuck out for me growing up was playing Final Fantasy 7 when I was ten or eleven, and having Aeris get murdered. I was still new to video games at the time, but even since then, I can not think of very many games where a major character who you used constantly was killed a little less than midway through the game. That stuck with me, because it was completely unexpected, and because Aeris was a really good character. Even when I realized (years later) that she had to die so she could be the female version of Obi-Wan (she even dies at the same point, at the end of the first of three discs), it still stuck with me.

I could write a hundred stories and kill a thousand characters, and yet none of their deaths would have even a shred of the weight that Aeris's death did, simply because she was a well-created character.