 Hello, my name is Jackie and welcome back to my channel. If you are new here I'm an aspiring writer who is currently doing a plotting experiment where I'm trying to plot out three different book ideas with the anatomy of story by John Truby. Voila! If you are not new here, you'll know that this is a slightly different location to usual. My husband and I are on holiday in Cyprus this week. Someone is hammering something nearby. I don't know if you can hear it. Anyway, my husband and I are on holiday in Cyprus this week, so obviously the number one priority is to relax, but I have had a rather challenging couple of months at getting this done just because of lots of other priorities, so I'm hoping I can catch up this week. So I've already looked at the premise chapter and the structure chapter of this book, so if you're curious about that process and would like to see how I went, I will include the links to those videos in the description below. And this week I'm looking at character. Now, character is a very challenging chapter I suppose, so premise and structure were fairly straightforward in that you had a straightforward set of steps in order to finish the chapter, whereas character has a lot of content and a lot of different steps, and sometimes it feels like you're trying to do the same thing from different angles, which is challenging, especially as someone who's tend to be more plot oriented than character oriented in her work. I did try rereading this chapter before I started any of the exercises, and there's so much in here I can't remember, so I'm just going to flip through and tell you what we need to do in order to flesh out our characters based on John Truby's method. The biggest conceptual thing he starts with is the idea of a character web rather than your protagonist and maybe even antagonist just sitting there in this world with no one else, and one of the things he says is the single biggest mistake writers make when creating characters is they think of their hero and all other characters as separate individuals. Their hero is alone in a vacuum unconnected to others. The result is not only a weak hero, but also cardboard opponents and minor characters who are even weaker. To create great characters, think of all your characters as part of a web in which each helps define the others. To put it another way, a character is often defined by who he is not, so we can see that this isn't going to simply be a list of character profiles figuring out who each of the people are. We're going to figure out how they work together, which is something I've never done before, so I'm nervous and excited. When it comes to the projects I'm going to be working on, one is a book I've actually already drafted. I originally wrote it when I was 19, lived in my head for over 10 years, and then last year for Camp Nanorimo I attempted to rewrite it. The second one is an idea that I plotted out for Nanorimo last year that I didn't end up writing, and since starting this exercise I've realized that the main reason I didn't end up writing it was because I didn't actually have that much in the outline, so I'm basically starting from scratch, and then there's a third idea which I am completely starting from scratch. Codenames for reference, first one I'm going with fantasy hot mess because there is so much in there and I don't know how to make it work and I cannot distill it down to a single statement. Second one is happily ever after, it's about a villain who ends up in hell and wants to take over heaven, and the third one is DID mystery, so it's a murder mystery from the point of view of someone with dissociative identity disorder and all of her altars are trying to figure out who the killer is. For the rest of this video I'm going to be attempting each of these exercises for each of these books. In my time I'm going to be going through the entire chapter for each book. In your time I think I'm going to edit this so I have clips from each exercise for each book in the same section so we can look at each exercise as a single unit. So let's get started. Exercise one is figuring out who all of your major characters are and he has two approaches to start this. One is based on their function in the story, so function might be they are the hero or protagonist, the opponent or antagonist, an ally so the hero's helper, fake ally opponent, this is someone who appears to be a friend but is actually an opponent, and then a fake opponent ally so someone who appears to be an opponent but is actually helping the hero and a subplot character. The second approach he has for figuring out who your characters are is listing them by archetype and he lists a few archetypes as examples here however there are far more archetypes beyond this if you like this approach. So the first one is king or father, queen or mother, wise old man slash woman slash mentor slash teacher, warrior, magician or shaman, trickster, an artist or clown. I think I'm going to try both approaches but I prefer the idea of looking at a character based on their function in the story rather than an archetype just because I feel like my characters are, my characters are too complex to be archetypes, not that I'm a great character creator or anything but I do tend to have very grey perspectives in life. I, in the past I've had fairly grey characters and it's very hard to slot them into one particular role whereas function in the story whether someone is like the hero or opponent really just depends on the point of view as opposed to whether they're queen or warrior or so on. So exercise one was figuring out who the characters are and obviously that is easier for the book I've already written. I mentioned when I was going through the steps that I preferred the function approach rather than the archetype approach and this was definitely true for this book. The main challenge I had is that I'm not sure who the hero is because I have, when I originally wrote this I had four point of view characters, now I have three. One is the opponent and the other two are like the heroes of the story but if I want to commit to one being the protagonist I'm not sure because I've been going back and forth on it a little bit and one of them morally is a better protagonist for the antagonist because they are on two sides of like the moral issue of the book but the other one as far as the MacGuffin's concerned is a better protagonist because he and the antagonists both really want the MacGuffin so it's a little challenging so what I've been doing is approaching the exercises from both angles. So for the function approach the hero is either Perry or Aubrey, the opponent is Jaredan, second opponent varies depending on who the hero is, the ally is obviously each of the heroes depending on who the hero is so if Perry is the hero Aubrey is the ally and vice versa. The fake ally opponent Perry has one which is Madara who's her best friend who's actually Inca Hoots with the opponent but oh I was going to say Perry doesn't know that until the end but the thing is in the book I wrote she does know that so I really if you've been watching these videos you'll know that I have this book that I wrote and every time I do these exercises it highlights all of the reasons why it didn't work so I haven't really figured out a good way to approach these exercises yet whether I approach it as if I'm drafting something from scratch or whether I approach it trying to make the book I have work and one of the ways I keep approaching this is like it's a puzzle and if I just stare at all the pieces long enough I'll find a way to make them fit and what I'm worried about is that it's five puzzles and I've just dumped all the pieces onto the table and I'm trying to make them all fit but they're not going to fit because they're different puzzles. This is what I'm worried is the situation so I've sort of been doing half half like I've been starting with what I have and then either finding out the problems are and going okay future Jackie can figure that out or trying to do it again to address the problems and I haven't quite found a solution yet but in any case even if I don't find the solutions I think it's still helpful to go through the exercise because all of this is forcing me to think about the book in a way that I haven't thought about it before and even if I get to the end of anatomy of story and still don't have the answers at least I've done the thinking and then maybe I can I know maybe then I've got like the gunk out and I can go back and do it again like with more of a clean slate. Anyway if some of the things I say with this book don't make sense that is why. So yes Perry has a fake ally opponent who's her best friend but it turns out to be working for the bad guy. Aubrey doesn't have a fake ally opponent and neither of them have a fake opponent ally. One of the things John Truby talks about in this chapter is if you have multiple heroes multiple protagonists and if he recommends choosing one of them because that's best for having like more forward momentum in the story whereas if you have multiple protagonists and they each have their own desire line that can really damage momentum because you start moving forward with one and then stop because you've got to visit another one. So one of the questions he asks is if you need to choose one is which one has the strongest desire line and I think that's Aubrey because he wants the MacGuffin which sets the plot in motion but when it comes to the moral question which is supposed to be the big thing of the story like I said that's more Perry and Aubrey isn't so much a part of this world he just ends up coming into like the world which is the university slash town where the book is set for the book. So it's a bit of a conundrum. When it comes to the archetypes one I did start this and then it just wasn't working so for the king or father archetype there's Rain who's like the headmaster of the university slash ruler of the town. For the other archetypes there wasn't really anyone like there was a potential person who could be the mentor or teacher a potential person who could be the trickster but yeah it was it didn't really work for me so I think functions is the way I'm going to go. For the character web exercise of DID mystery I did a little bit differently because as you know the anatomy of story has either approaching it by story function or archetype but with DID there are actually certain I don't want to use the word archetypes there are certain roles that the different altars often take in the system so when I say system that is the group of altars that live within a body and the altars are the different like personalities if you want to use the multiple personality terminology. In more modern literature I believe altars stands for alternate states of consciousness so it's basically the different people who are sharing this body and those altars do take different roles so I actually started this by thinking about what are the common roles they take and which ones would have a place in this story because there are a lot that you can have it's not uncommon for people with DID to have tens maybe even hundreds of different altars which isn't going to work for the purposes of this book because each altar is basically a separate character it's not one part of like the main personality if you like it is a completely distinct person but then there's not going to be room in a single book for a cast of characters that large so when it comes to the different roles I'm going to be using the first one is the host that is the one who most frequently uses the body it may be the person who was originally born into the body so before the personality was fragmented however that might not necessarily be the case. For my book I'm thinking it'll be the person who's born into the body but to be honest it doesn't really matter that much so we're just calling them the host role. The next role is protector so protector is someone whose role is to like protect the system and its altars there may often be different roles of protectors so verbal protector physical protector emotional protector and sexual protector and these people protect the system from different types of abuse. The next role is a persecutor so persecutor is someone who actively harms the body this isn't necessarily because they're evil so much it might be because they're trying to protect the body they might believe that if they can control the system they'll prevent external abuse from happening or if they hurt the body then no one else can hurt them like more or worse so that's another role we're going to have there's a memory holder so that's an altar that holds certain memories usually memories of trauma there's a gatekeeper gatekeeper is similar to a protector in a sense but it's more this altar controls access to the front so when someone's at the front that means they're in control of the body and if you have a system with dozens of different altars and all of them are trying to get to the front that can obviously be a bit chaotic it's going to be difficult for the body or the system to live out a normal life so the gatekeeper controls access they are often very close to the front because of this so they're often the only altar that witnesses everything that's happening to a system so in most cases an altar comes to the front and they're experiencing life through the body when they're at the front but when they're not at the front they don't know what's happening with the body um so they're living in what's called the inner world the gatekeeper because they're controlling access they're often aware of everything and then finally I also want to have a little a little is a child altar and before going on with the exercise if you are interested in learning more about DID there are a number of awesome channels on youtube um dissociated is one that I love she hasn't posted in a while at the time and we're recording this video due to personal issues and taking care of the system that she has a debunking DID series as well as um all about altars series which are really helpful um multiplicity and me is another one that I like that there are plenty of them out there so in general it's far better to learn from the people who are actually experiencing this than me who's trying to learn it secondhand so if you are curious please check them out oh and also um there are far more roles and functions and types of altars than this but these are the ones I think I'm going to have in this book so once I went through that list and went okay these are the different altars I want to have then I went to the story function exercise so the hero is the main difficult role here because if the point of view is continually switching between different altars I'm not sure if any one of them is the hero or if there's a way and I can't really position the system as the hero because they are distinct characters and I know I definitely don't want them working together or in much communication early in the book so for now I've just um made the hero the host altar but that might change um the main opponent is the murderer obviously and then there are a few external characters outside of the system relating to the murder mystery so the opponent is the murderer um there's second opponent who's a police investigator who I think might be the fake ally opponent role I'm also going to have like a psychologist just because I think it would be helpful for explaining like some of how all of this works if we have that sort of interaction the psychologist is the character I know the least about at this stage and then other than the murderer police investigator and psychologist all of the characters are the different altars that might change as I start writing but for now I feel like that's I think that's eight or nine characters that's enough to have the core cast decided exercise two is individualizing them and this is when we start to draw on some of the stuff we did in the structure chapter so to individualize or flesh out your characters you need to write down what you think is the central moral problem of your story compare your hero and all other characters based on these parameters weakness need desire values power status and ability and how each faces the central mob moral problem in the story when making these comparisons start with the most important relationship in a story so between the hero and the main opponent and then four after comparing the hero to the main opponent compare the hero to the other opponents and then to the allies finally compare the opponents and allies to one another so this is when it starts to become a web so you're basically building on each of the characters you've listed by creating a mini profile and then comparing and contrasting them with each other the first thing to look at was the central moral problem which for this book is the idea of destruction and the name of progress so the world in which this book is set is one where there was a history of magic but that's really been stamped down there was a war slash genocide both I guess between about 30 and 20 years before the book started and they really tried to eradicate magic particularly this one race which was very powerful and they wanted to bury that and focus on science and industry so the book I don't know if it's actually going to be steampunk but I originally wanted it to be bit steampunk so it's sort of supposed to be like industrial revolution focused and knowledge above I suppose parallel in our world is knowledge above spirituality so the age of rationality if you like but the problem is they've obviously done really bad things to get to this point yes they're making progress yes the world is wealthier but they've destroyed a race of people in order to do this and there are still people presenting with magical powers today who are sort of seen as outcasts so it's like yes progress but at what cost so that's the central moral question or problem then I needed to go through each of my characters and figure out their weakness need desire values power status ability and how they face the central moral problem and we're not going to go through all of them because I'm sure you don't care but for this book I had one two three four five six seven eight nine nine different characters to look at and what was interesting is that of those characters there are I'd say seven I know really well and it was quite easy to find those things for everyone there were a couple of question marks so Aubrey who was one of my potential heroes like he doesn't really have any interest in the central moral problem other than the fact that he is part of the royal family so I suppose he is interested in upholding it but not really because he wants to escape type of thing so he isn't really engaging with the moral problem whereas all of the other characters are the other thing I found though is that I have these two characters where one I couldn't answer any of these questions other than where he stood on the moral problem but weakness need desire values power status nothing like all I know is that he has a cool outfit and his intimidating and like that's really it he had a cool scene where I introduced him when I was rewriting it last year and I didn't really know what to do with him after that um and another character was actually one of the point of view characters from the original draft and I feel like he still needs to be in this because he's pivotal to the start of the plot he's involved in like the McGuffin which sets everything in motion in fact he's the one who steals it and ends up in possession of it but other than that he's sort of just there and I'm not sure what to do about it so I've got these pages where like everyone's written in detail and then you've got these where it's just sort of the points on one side of the page and then blank blank blank blank so I obviously need to think about that a bit even though that's just heartening though that is really helpful because I knew I had a problem with these characters when I was trying to write this last year and I didn't know what to do about it and now I know why because I don't have any of this stuff so that obviously needs to be dealt with in more detail um there's some coming through above me there I think that's better no uh so ah that's really annoying anyway once I've been through all of those character profiles I needed to figure out where they all stood on the moral issue and what worked for me rather than having like this person deals with it in this way I had more of a continuum with where everyone is so who's on which extreme so one extreme you've got tele technology slash progress at all costs and on the other end you've got no magic history like that sort of let's protect and bring back what was and so you've got the antagonist at one end which is defending the past and what was at the other end you have one of the characters who isn't the main character um but is sort of responsible for the world as it is today and then you have all of the other characters are sort of on this continuum and what's interesting is that Perry who's probably going to be the hero because of she has something interesting to say about this um she is very much at the end of technology and progress above all else but she starts to understand the antagonist and realize that there are costs and not all costs might be worth paying um by the end of the book so I think that's really interesting I like that transition I'm not sure what that does for the antagonist protagonist dynamic though like do they still need to be opponents if Perry starts to understand his point of view so again flaws with this book so exercise two for DID mystery I was really worried about because I know nothing about these characters I've just created a bunch of roles but it actually went surprisingly well the most difficult thing was figuring out what the central moral problem of the story was because if we're looking at the anatomy of story and you're at that bit in the chapter it goes list the central moral problem of the story and if you've done the premise work you should already know this and I was like I don't remember what I did for this book so I went back to my notes to look at the premise work and I left it blank so no wonder I don't know what it is what I'm struggling with here is the word moral because you know this is a murder mystery book we want to catch the murderer we want to prove the main character's innocence so I don't really know how to create a moral dilemma beyond that um there is a central dilemma which is around the idea of um like connecting with and working with her altars but I wouldn't call that a moral problem so I'm working with that at the moment that I'm also going to keep that in the back of my mind in case there is a more moral angle I can take but one of the points John Truby makes is there's a central moral problem where the hero needs to make a moral choice and that shouldn't be an easy choice such as where there's a clear positive and negative so in this case it would be turn in the murderer or let him go free it's like that's not a difficult choice obviously we want to turn in the murderer so it needs to be a choice between either two positive options or two negative options so it's really difficult and he said the options you're choosing between should be as equal as possible so it's a true dilemma for the protagonist so because I know like I want the internal conflict to be around the host dealing with the idea that she has altars and really resisting that I thought the choice could be around basically losing herself or protecting herself which isn't necessarily true like there are plenty of systems that have this healthy level of communication and collaboration between the altars but from her point of view she feels like if I like give in to my altars if I surrender to the system then I'm going to lose myself yeah so the choice is between like losing herself and giving into the system or potentially going away for a crime she didn't commit because she like doesn't have the memories of what happened then because she wasn't one in the body when the crime was committed so I feel like again not a moral choice but I feel like that's a pretty good you know negative negative scenario so that's what I've been working with for the character profiles for the character profiles again I was very nervous when I was going through this and I was surprised by how much I came up with given that like I was just making these people up off the top of my head what's interesting and what I think will work really well is that a lot of the weaknesses needs and desires and values they are similar between the different characters so there are themes of like control predictability security order and chaos that come up a lot so for instance the host who's the first character we're going to meet her value you know her weakness is she is a bit of control freak she's trying to keep everything in control and she's afraid of her altars and blacking out i.e. losing control so her values control predictability security when we get to the murderer though like he's in the same position he values the exact same things but he's in the position of power and he's trying to control her then when we get to the investigator his values are more around like everything being order you know everything like having clean lines and boxes around everything everything having its own categorization and label and that works well because he thinks like she's making up DID he thinks it doesn't exist like she's just putting on an act when she switches in front of him and then when we get to the gatekeeper altar she's similar her values are control and order she's controlling who gets to the front she believes that if the altars get access to the front whenever they want it will be chaos in fact she is very much at the same point of view as the host in that she doesn't think collaboration is possible because you know if everyone's just screaming to be heard nothing will get done so i found it really interesting how these you know mirroring values and weaknesses and needs and desires naturally came up the only real exception was the protector altar because he's the one who actively wants collaboration and thinks they can be a healthy system but everyone else is like no walls up walls up control security predictability we want everything to be measured and managed so again it was really uncomfortable going into this exercise especially because when i compare it to my fantasy hot mess i already knew all of this information going in and i was just trying to organize it and admittedly i was figuring out what all the problems were but i had a lot to start with and here i didn't have anything and it'll be interesting to see how closely i stick to this when i'm drafting but it was interesting that coming at it from nothing the themes that naturally came out were you know were consistent and were reflective so i don't know if that's part of the way the exercise is designed or if i just had a stroke of genius who knows probably it's john truby not me but yeah it was very pleasantly surprised my memory card ran out of space so if the angle is slightly different now that is why the only character i really had difficulty with in this exercise was the psychologist and i think the reason for that is because the psychologist doesn't really have any impact on the main plot so maybe they could be like an expert witness for the police do cops need expert witnesses or is that just when you go to court and it's something lawyers need anyway if police need expert witnesses maybe they could be part of the plot in that way but in general the reason i originally thought it would be nice to have a psychologist is one it would be nice to have another character outside of the system and two if we have a psychologist it might create some space for conversations about the disorder and three i thought it would also be interesting to have someone else who has a different moral or different stance on the moral problem in which is that this is someone who believes that a healthy relationship with your alters is possible and that's a fairly unusual stance in this book given that pretty much everyone except one of the alters either thinks it isn't real or wants to control everything so all in all i'm really happy with how much progress i made then there is a whole section on creating your hero which involves one meeting the requirements of great hero so they need to be constantly fascinating you need to make the audience identify with them you need to make the audience empathize with them and you need to give them a moral as well as a psychological need now i don't know how much of that i'm going to do here to be completely honest because i feel like a lot of this you know make your character fascinating make the audience identify with them make them empathize with them that happens in the writing process and it feels a little bit artificial to me to go okay i'm going to make people like this character because they have this trait or this interest whereas i feel like if your motivations are clear enough then and the writing is good enough then your audience will identify with the character like it's i think what i'm trying to say is it's hard to establish this in advance it comes through in the writing so yeah i might skip that one we'll see how i go now this is only step one of creating the hero step two of creating the hero is character change so basically how they um how they change throughout the book what's their transition from the beginning of the book to the end creating your hero step three is desire and then creating your hero step four is the opponent so this comes back to the idea of it being a web how does your opponent reflect your hero so what he says is you need to make the opponent necessary make him human give him values that oppose the values of the hero exercise three was around building out your hero and that exercise had a number of sub steps so the first one was making sure your hero met the requirements of being a hero which was they need to be likable your audience have to identify with them their audience needs to empathize not necessarily sympathize with them and they need to have a moral and psychological need now i'm going to skip this and i'm pretty sure i'm going to skip it for all the books because as i mentioned earlier i think this is something that it comes up in the writing like i can't just say at this stage people are going to like my character because she's clumsy or quirky or whatever like it'll come through in the writing and how everything is expressed so that brings us on to step two of developing your hero which is about character change and i'm still approaching this first book from the perspective of i'm not entirely sure who the hero is out of the two characters so i've looked at both of them john truby actually lists a number of typical changes heroes can go to so if i look at the book there's the child to adult transition or the coming of age story adult to leader cynic to participant leader to tyrant leader to visionary and then a literal metamorphosis so someone turns into like a different character like jekyll and hide or something like kafka's metamorphosis where the guy turns into a bug and so on so i think for this story both Aubrey and Perry they're like university students so it's a child to adult type of change for both of them i think it's about going from certain rigid beliefs about the world to understanding that things are more nuanced than they originally thought and then that leads to them having new moral beliefs by the end of the story as i mentioned earlier Perry actually moves from being at the extreme of progress at all costs continuum to understanding where the antagonist is coming from even if she's not going to go all the way back to let's restore the past the next thing is the desire line and this is something i've struggled with for this book but i think i struggle with in general because it came up in powerless where the desire at the beginning of the book was different to the desire at the end of the book like at the beginning of the book hannah wanted to prove herself she wanted to be accepted by her father she believed she needed powers to do that so then she wanted powers then she discovered that her father's a bad guy and she needs to take him down so i feel like there's a clear evolution in what she wants but i don't know if that meets john truby's requirements for a clear desire line because it's similar with this book actually because the desire line for both of them is to like find the macguffin initially the quest for the macguffin leads them to see what the opponent is doing in that he wants to basically stage a revolution and destroy everything the current destroy what's been built over the last 20 years and then ultimately i'm not sure what they want beyond that like once they stop the opponent what are we next i think it's too simple for them to want to defeat the opponent and then preserve the world the way it is now because both of them do become older and wiser they realize that the world they have today has come at a very large cost and that's probably not the best way of doing things so i'm not sure what their ultimate goal will be having said that this is just for this book and for this book they need to get rid of the antagonists so maybe it's not something that i need to figure out now it's more that if there are sequels and this is one where i always imagined it being a trilogy like i need to figure it out for the next book the fourth step in creating your hero is creating your opponent because your hero is defined in opposition to your opponent so the opponent then had four separate steps you needed to look at the first one was to make him necessary and by being necessary the opponent is the one who is best able to attack the weakness of the hero this is a little challenging because and again it's a reason why this book didn't work because ultimately other than sort of being annoyed by her the opponent in this book doesn't really have any personal beef with the hero geriden does not have any like strong issues with perry but she sort of represents his nemesis she is the daughter figure of his nemesis reign so he can attack her as a way of getting to reign i don't know if that's enough though if there needs to be something personal between these two so this then raises the question of are these the best heroes for this book and or should rain be the hero of this book and i'd say no because i feel like rain and jordan's story is what happened in the past it's what happened 20 to 30 years ago maybe there's a pretty cool trilogy if i ever get this one written but it does create a problem now where the opponent isn't actually attacking the hero he's attacking the system or the world which the hero's father figure built so i don't know if that works or if i need to completely take it apart so this is going to be very similar to the premise video where i asked if you've done the anatomy of story if you have a good understanding of character and how character should be approached how opponent hero dynamics should be approached please let me know if you think this works or if it does need to be a direct confrontation between the two the next piece is simply to make the opponent human which i don't think i have a problem with i don't think i've ever written a character who's you know all powerful so by and by being human jump ruby says the opponent has certain weaknesses that are causing him to act wrongly towards others so yes in this case the opponent just has so much anger about the past that he is it's clouding his judgment like the hero he has a need based on those weaknesses yes he needs to be able to let go of that anger in order to like have the potential for a fulfilling life going forward because at the moment he is consumed by this and his need for revenge and or justice as he calls it he must want something preferably the same goal as the hero here things get a little bit awkward because they both initially want the macguffin at the beginning the opponent wants it because it's a powerful tool because it's a macguffin the hero wants it because she gets given it and then loses it and doesn't want to get in trouble so they both want the same thing at the beginning the opponent gets the macguffin and then wants to use it to stage this revolution which you can position as wanting to like take over the city own the soul of the city um whereas the hero wants to protect that so you could argue that they're both i suppose they're both fighting over the rule of the city so even though the hero doesn't personally want it for herself they are fighting over the same thing but again this is where you get into well the opponent is really the opponent of the hero's father figure as opposed to her opponent so does it work or i don't know it's just like maybe the opponent should have a son or something and they can go against each other but that's good just getting into really bad disney sequel territory where the characters from the first movie have children and the children enact the same story as the parents did so we're not going to do that but i need to figure out if it works or if we can have something personal between them see one of the challenges with this and with any craft book actually is i find i get so focused on doing the exercises themselves and just answering the question that i don't have the time to go away and do this thinking because this thinking isn't always like i can't come up with an answer to this question whether it's the best answer is debatable but because i'm trying to go through this list of things that need to be done i don't take the time to go off and think about all of these other questions that come up so yeah interesting not specific to the anatomy of story but something to keep in mind if you're new to craft books step three of the opponent was give him values that oppose the values of the hero and this is where we get into that progress at all costs versus preserving the past in history and magic that is the continuum they're on the hero it does actually adjust and learn to be more moderate the opponent doesn't that's why he loses so i think that works the opponent needs a strong but flawed moral argument and i think yes he does have this so Jared believes that rain was wrong to lead the genocide 30 years ago that stamped out magic he wants to restore majors and magic to their former glory the flaw is that he wants to destroy everything rain has built and the progress the world has made since then so what's a little bit ironic is that the reason the world's in this position is because you had this group of people who believed in progress at all costs and they need to stamp out the past and they sort of used this group of majors as a scapegoat then you got this guy who wants to preserve the past he wants to prefer return things to the way they are but he's also taking on that we've got to do it at all costs mentality as opposed to compromise um so strong argument these guys were in the wrong not arguable but this guy is going about punishing them and restoring the past in the wrong way then there are certain similarities between the opponent and the hero so i think both of them have a certain rigidness in their thinking they're both very righteous they both believe like of this continuum they both believe that their side is right they both have a love of daromon which is the town slash university where this is set um jarrodin loves the historical daromon it was actually something his family built whereas perry loves it currently because it's a home it's all she's ever known as an engineer and someone who loves progress it's also like the leading place in the world to be if you're building trains and exciting things and then the final thing you need to do with your opponent is keep them in the same place as the hero and this is fairly easy because they're both in this like university town jarrodin is there because it's his family's legacy he's never going to leave perry's there because like she's studying she doesn't actually have any family outside of the town so there's no real nowhere for else for her to go not that she's actively looking to go anywhere so they're naturally in the same place as opposed to being stuck in the same place i've been doing the hero exercises for my d id mystery book and i've run into a bit of a problem and it's not the problem i expected because originally i thought i thought i was going to struggle because there's no one hero because the book changes points of view so i thought for the sake of doing the exercise i might as well start with the first character we're going to meet which is going to be the host of the system um who i'm calling diana for the time being and again i skipped the first exercise about the hero being fascinating about people being able to identify with them about them being able to empathize with them and about them having a moral slash psychological need because the first three again i think they're going to come out in the writing and the last one sort of has already been done in the previous exercises so that brings us to character change and this change i'd already figured out in the previous exercise which is that you know she's scared of sort of losing control blacking out she doesn't trust her altars even though she knows she has this disorder and to try and avoid them taking control she maintains like rigid control over her life the problem is is that rather than giving her more control or putting her in a position of power this leaves her in a position of weakness because she is vulnerable to them and doesn't really know how to you know she doesn't know how to see the signs of when she's going to switch she has no connection or communication with them so she doesn't know what she might be missing when she's not in the body and so on in the context of this book this stops her from being able to catch the killer because different altars are getting different clues so by the end of the book the change is that she learns to accept and start to work with her altars and that gives her the information she needs to catch the killer so character change i think that works um desire is to catch the killer slash prove her innocence because she is going to be a suspect and then we get into the opponent section which is the final sub section of exercises under this developing a compelling hero section of the chapter so first the opponent needs to be necessary i think i'm going to make him they're going to have a personal relationship i think maybe uh maybe a stepfather the thing is i do have a tendency to make father figures my villains i've realized and i don't know if i want to do that with another father figure and i have a very good relationship with my own father in case you're wondering but at the moment i'm thinking he is someone she's known since childhood he is one of her abusers from when she was young so he knows how to push her he knows how to gaslight her making her doubt herself so i want to have this dynamic where he's making her think that maybe she is the killer and she just wasn't you know at the front she wasn't the one in control of the body when it happened yeah in terms of being necessary that means he needs to be the one who is best able to attack the hero's weaknesses which i think yes if they've got that historical relationship that is true the next one is the antagonist needs to be human and i think like yes because all my characters are very human but from the heroes or first character we meet point of view i think he's going to seem like infallible almost so i'm considering whether we have other characters aside from the altars have point of view chapters because i'm thinking the opponent could be a policeman or like some role in the police force um he's not investigating this case but he's connected to the investigator who is so perhaps if we can see someone else who has a relationship with this guy we can see his more human elements i need to play with that a little bit though where i ran into trouble was values because when i was doing the little character profiles earlier he and the hero have the exact same values so they value control predictability security the difference is that she sort of wants control over her own life whereas he wants to control others so maybe that's enough of a difference but the problem is when we look at the chapter in fact if i go back to the body of the chapter okay so make him necessary make him human then the value step is actually give him values that oppose the values of the hero so i don't know if like they're allowed to have the same values almost or if you know is it enough for them to have the same values but approach them in different ways or do they actually need to have different values because what it says here is the actions of the hero and the opponent are based on the set of beliefs or values these values represent each character's view of what makes life good in the best stories the values the opponent come into conflict with the values of the hero through that conflict the audience sees which way of life is superior much of the power of the story rests on the quality of this opposition so that implies that they should not have the same values and in fact the opponent and hero having different values is what causes them to lock horns so i'm a little bit stuck here and this i don't know if i've mentioned in this video in an or in an earlier one but one of the things i've often struggled with when doing character work especially when you're creating like general character profiles that have nothing to do with the story is that you create this person who has values and desires and goals and weaknesses and so on that are outside of the current story because they're a complete person they have a life out of whatever is currently happening the problem is in the narrow world of the story you're trying to tell all that might not be relevant and i'm worried that here i've tackled the values from two general a point of view rather than the focus of this story because the focus of this story is it starts with a dead body and there's a murder investigation so you know what they want from life in general might not necessarily be as relevant so yeah i'm not sure about that one of the challenges of this chapter specifically though is that there is a lot of information in the chapter that's not included in the summary pages at the end of the chapter which list um you know which list all of the writing exercise steps you need to take so unless you know this book really well i think one of the weaknesses is you can't go straight to the exercises at the end of the book because they don't cover everything for instance i was going through the exercises at the end of the chapter and i happened to jump back into the chapter to check a couple of things and one of the things you need to look at is the hero's character change that is in this list of exercises however in the chapter there's a whole section on the moment of revelation so the moment that change happens which is not in these exercises at the end so that's something i haven't actually done for either of the books that i've done these exercises for so far because it wasn't in the summary similarly with these values so what i just read to you was that the opponent and the hero should have opposing values that's what causes conflict here in the exercise it says opponent's values list a few values for each opponent how is each opponent a kind of double for the hero give each some level of power status and ability and describe what similarities each shares with the hero so this sort of contradicts what i just said because this says they are supposed to be similar so i'm not sure what to do i don't know if i need to change what i had in mind or just yeah sort of chalk this up to oh that's an interesting you know disconnect or minor inconsistency in this book and move on so anyway in the opponent exercises on values i got a little bit stuck because they're supposed to be in conflict with the hero so i'm going to think a little bit more i really like them having the same values though like both wanting control but you know him wanting control of everything and her just wanting control of her life like i really like that so we'll see the next thing with the opponent is looking at their moral argument so they should have a stronger flawed moral argument and i don't have one for this book because like basically he killed someone and he's trying to frame someone else to take the fall i'm not really sure what moral argument there is there like unless they're really deluding themselves but i think i like i like my characters to have some self-awareness maybe i'm too self-aware like i don't really i struggle to identify with characters who are so clearly deluding themselves just because i don't do that even though like clearly it's a thing if it exists so much in fiction but i don't know if i could write a character who lacks so much self-awareness that he somehow convinces him that himself that i don't know he is sending this girl to prison for her own good i don't know maybe it can come from like he thinks there's a danger to herself and society because of the disorder but like that feels really weak to me and it's also not the message i want to send with this book so that's blank for now so question for the comments what do you think is a strong moral argument for a man who has killed someone and is trying to blame someone else to take the fall for his crimes what sort of moral argument can he make that he is in the right by doing that please let me know your thoughts below i would be curious to hear what you think and then the final piece is the similarities between the opponent and the hero which as i've mentioned they already have these mirroring values but maybe values is one of the areas where they're not meant to be similar so yeah i'm a little bit stuck on this because i was really happy when i realized that they valued the same things and now i don't know if it's the wrong thing hmm the final section in the anatomy of story chapter on character is about building conflict and the idea is that conflict makes a story more interesting so therefore we should multiply that by five billion which might be a bit of an exaggeration but basically john triby has this model where rather than having your hero and opponent in direct conflict with each other you create conflict between the hero the opponent and the minor opponents and then create conflict between each of those opponents as well so rather than the hero just being in conflict with everyone everyone's in conflict with each other so he calls this the four-corner opposition method where you draw out a chart and in one corner you have the hero in another corner you have your first opponent in another corner you have your second and in another corner you have your third and then you can draw lines between them representing the conflict between each of these characters and as i said it's not just conflict between the hero and each of those opponents but each of those opponents should have conflict between them as well in order to create this chart successfully you need to follow a number of steps the first one is that each opponent should have a different way of attacking the hero's weaknesses the second is all characters are in conflict not just the hero and the opponent third is the values of the characters should also be in conflict not just the characters themselves the fourth step is to push the characters into the corners of the chart so once you figure out what the values conflict is you give the hero an extreme version of the value and the opponent the opposite extreme of the same value so they're complete opposites and then the final step is to extend this approach to different levels of the world you've built so you might have this four-corner opposition within a friendship group or a family then you might have it within a company or institution then you might have it within the wider world so basically every sort of social structure you have within your book you should be able to apply this method to it this um has not been easy to be completely honest i've been working on this for a couple of weeks now obviously not consistently but i think i first tried this exercise about two weeks ago now maybe three but i have picked it up a couple of times since then and for my fantasy hot mess i'm really struggling to get anywhere because i can come up with a chart where there are people in each of the four corners but generally there will be one pair of characters on that chart where it doesn't make sense to have a line between them because there's no direct conflict between them so of the what one two three four five six different conflict lines in that chart i only have five and i've tried this with a number of different characters and it tends to be the same every time there's always one where one pair of characters are not in conflict so i'm not sure like most of the things in this book i'm not sure if me not being able to do it is a problem or if it's like okay like how big a problem is it if i don't have every single pair of characters in opposition and is it okay for most of them to be in opposition or do i really need to keep working on this to find a way to make these characters oppose each other so that's the biggest problem i'm having and i feel like until i do that then um i can't really do the latest steps so i need to have i need to figure out who the core conflicting characters are before i can then confirm their values and push them to the extremes and i need to have that done before i can go okay how does this apply to different like social structures within the book so what i thought i'd try as a brainstorming tool is to just do a list of each character versus each character and what their primary conflict is so perry versus jaden hero and opponent perry versus orbri so hero versus fake ally no fake opponent ally and so on so i did this for all of the significant characters and i've got i have 21 different pairings that i need to come up with a conflict for i'm not expecting i'll come up with conflicts for all of them but hopefully that'll tell me i mean one whether some characters should just be cut entirely but two which ones deserve all of the development that is involved in completing this tool um but yeah it's really like this is really challenging and i felt like i had already done a lot of good work i felt like i developed these characters a lot i had a lot of conflicts but yeah getting those conflict between the cast of characters and the protagonist that's fine because that's already been developed but trying to think about how each of these characters relating to each other that's um that's really tough i'm at the airport waiting for our flight and i'm trying to do this four corner opposition exercise again and i feel like i'm getting somewhere by focusing just on the different values i don't know if i'm doing it right what i'm doing is basically figuring out what each pair of characters conflict is so that means rather than just having like four extremes of a single value in a chart i have a lot so for example if i go with perry who's one of the potential heroes jaredon who's the opponent rain who's a secondary character like a secondary opponent or fake ally opponent and then madara who's a fake ally opponent on the perry jaredon opposition we've got magic versus science um the rain jaredon opposition is also magic versus science perry versus madara is like knowledge for the sake of knowledge versus knowledge to gain power perry terrain is obedience or even blind faith versus questioning and then rain to madara that's like the scale of oppression slash obedience to freedom i don't know if all of those things should be in the same table but i think it's working what this is highlighted though is that i do have a couple of characters who need some serious work there are two characters in particular who don't really seem to have any place in the book when it comes to coming into conflict with the others so i either need to think about how to generate some conflict around them or potentially try mapping out the book without them entirely and i'm not sure when to do that i think that's the biggest question i have at the moment is do i do that now while i'm working on character or do i just continue working keep this in the back of my mind and then when i get to the plot chapter later see how the story maps out with and without these characters all in all though i am happy with the progress i've made i've done two different four corner opposition tables based on the main characters in this book and i've left out the difficult ones i don't know if it's possible for me to do this with every single character given that some of them are quite minor or whether that just means those characters don't belong so i think i'm going to continue to mull over this but i might call this the end of the process for this book in this vlog because i have a feeling this is already getting quite long so i've tried doing the four corner opposition for my did mystery book and what's interesting is that the challenge i'm having here is completely the opposite the challenge i was having with my fantasy hot mess in that in this book it's actually fairly easy to put different characters onto the chart and see how they all come into conflict so i've got our hero the host of the system in one corner i've got the opponent slash murderer in the other corner i've got the police investigator in the third corner and then in the fourth corner i've got two characters because i think either of them work well so i've got the memory holder role in the system as well as the gatekeeper role and the reason these all work is because diana our main character and our murderer there obviously in conflict she wants to find the murderer he wants to frame her and get off scott free then we've got the police investigator so he is in conflict with our hero because he thinks she might have done it he doesn't believe that this d.i.d thing is a thing that he also without realizing it is in conflict with the murderer because his the investigator he wants to catch the murderer he doesn't want to be caught then in this fourth corner we have christine which is the name i'm working with as the memory holder so she is technically in conflict with the others because she holds the memory of the murder she saw what happened and like no one else knows because she is hidden within the system like yeah she's traumatized she's not coming out so she is in direct conflict with the main character because she has the information the main character needs she's in conflict with the police investigator because she has the information about who the murderer is and my brilliant plan is falling apart because she isn't technically in conflict with i suppose she is in conflict with the murderer because he's also the abuser and he's the reason that she's traumatized and has gone into hiding so there that works the other one i have in this corner is the gatekeeper one so she's the one who sort of has the most control and insight over the system and has a lot of control over who gets to the front so the gatekeeper is in conflict with diana because even though there it's sort of like a fake ally opponent situation because diana wants things to be in control she doesn't want people taking over but this is stopping her from getting the information she needs to solve the crime so if that's a conflict she's in conflict with the investigator because by controlling access to the front and the flow of information he's not getting information he needs to solve the crime and again this is one where the conflict with the murderer is a little bit shaky i suppose you know because of past trauma he's the one who created the situation um but anyway i think even if we remove the gatekeeper and just keep christine there i feel like that is all fairly solid like everyone's against everyone else so i was really happy with how easily that came together where i went into trouble was when i then needed to look at putting their values in conflict because as i mentioned in the last exercise they don't really have conflicting values they all share values there are a lot of similarities in these characters so i don't really know what to do for this whereas in my fantasy hot mess that was the easier part because there was sort of this continuum of the old versus the new where everyone was on this path and it was easy to see how they all sat on this spectrum if it makes sense whereas here we've got you know people who have the same thing so you've got the hero and the opponent both valuing control you've got the investigator and the gatekeeper both valuing order and i'm not sure what to do about that because if i look at the opposite value so for control i was looking at like vulnerability or even openness i could make that diana's value as in what she needs to aspire to get to by the end of the book which would put her and the um opponent in a values conflict but it's not really a conflict because you know she doesn't have those values at the beginning so it's not like they're each fighting to uphold their way of life like and when it comes to order down at this level like the opposite is chaos but it wouldn't make sense for either of those characters to want chaos so this is um um yeah really challenging and i'm not sure what the solution is because where i am now and admittedly this is obviously the beginning of the process i haven't written this yet so i can change everything but the thing is if i try to change this here that fundamentally changes these characters yeah i just don't see a way it would work like if we're going with and i think control and openness and order and chaos are the best values for this present discussion like if we suddenly introduce chaos into the mix like i don't know how we're going to have any time to get a story written so for this book i i mean i'll let it marinate over the next couple of days but i don't actually know if i'm going to be able to do the values part of this exercise because it doesn't make sense unless yeah it doesn't make sense like unless i want to completely throw out the original idea so we're still at the airport and i've actually decided not to continue doing the character chapter for my happily ever after book which is the one about the villain who tries to take over heaven and the reason for that is because i started doing the exercises and i still wasn't getting any more ideas on how to flesh out the story and who should be in it and it's kind of strange because when i was thinking about which three ideas i wanted to try this process on it i was originally deciding between happily ever after and the other one i plotted for nano last year so vampire board games and i was originally going to go with vampire board games one and then for some reason like in the first week of october i had some sort of idea that inspired me about happily ever after i went okay i'm going to do that one and then since then i haven't really been able to think of anything else so that's a bit of a shame but i feel like i've got plenty to work on in between my fantasy hot mess and d.i.d. mystery and i feel like because one's a brand new idea and one's already been written it does give me two different perspectives on how the anatomy of story process works so all in all i'm quite happy with that decision when it comes to the chapter on character i do feel like that was a really good one for me i think i was surprised at how easy the early exercises were when it came to figuring out who each of the characters were and individualizing them i found that it was really easy to start building people out the thing that was most challenging which i'm sure you gathered was the four corner opposition exercise and figuring out how to put all of the characters in opposition rather than just the and the opponent i'm going to continue working on that one concern i have about it is that if everyone's against each other how is anything going to get done like people do need to cooperate at some point in order for the story to move forward so i'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that how do you tackle everyone having some sort of conflict while driving the story forward other than that if you're doing an arino please leave me a comment to let me know how you're going give me a big thumbs up if you like this video remember to subscribe hit the notification bell and do everything that'll keep youtube happy and i will see you next time bye