Aside from the fact that Satoshi Tajiri's starter pokemon was Charmander and not Pikachu...
The characters make the story. The characters move the story from setpiece to setpiece. It does you no good to have a ton of really well-developed setpieces if the characters aren't interesting. No one will read a book with boring characters because the characters drive the story.
also saskue was a bad example. Because the whole of naruto has underdeveloped characters. I personally dislike suske as well. He kinda seemed like he was on his period the entire series. Like what was orichimarus snake not long enough for him? he had to get back with his brother? and than go fuck up naruto over no reason other than fan service.
saskue was just a hormanal teenager that couldnt keep his sword in his pants | |
Most of the time I don't start with the characters or the story. I have a rough idea of the story I want to write, and a rough idea of what kind of character the MC is. As I fill in, the characters tend to drive the story. Of course, they tend to drive it too hard. If you're any good with characters, they'll tend to drive the story in their own direction. The only thing you can really do sometimes to steer them toward a goal is to put obstacles in their path where you can predict how they'll react.
Lugia319 wrote: The characters make the story. The characters move the story from setpiece to setpiece. It does you no good to have a ton of really well-developed setpieces if the characters aren't interesting. No one will read a book with boring characters because the characters drive the story. I dunno, it worked for Hemingway. Never could stand his work myself, but gads could that man paint a picture. | |
Lugia319 wrote:
Aside from the fact that Satoshi Tajiri's starter pokemon was Charmander and not Pikachu... You're suggesting that creating a story by... starting with the basic story idea first guarantees you'll have horrible characters, which doesn't make any sense. Before you have characters, you need a world for them to exist in, a reason they're important. We don't care about Mario because he's a plumber with an Italian accent. There's plenty of plumbers with Italian accents. We care about him because he fights Bowser and saves the Princess, AKA the story, the thing that gives Mario a purpose to be an entity in the first place. You need characters to drive, but until you know exactly where you're going, you're just wasting gas, bruh. And gas is creeping up to $3 a gallon again, ain't nobody got time for dat. | |
Lummox JR wrote:
Most of the time I don't start with the characters or the story. I have a rough idea of the story I want to write, and a rough idea of what kind of character the MC is. That's pretty much what I was saying. Before I wrote anything, I came up with the simple concept of "I'd like to write a story in which the world must be destroyed, and it's actually the hero instead of the villain who's trying to do it." | |
Granted, you usually do need a story, or at least a seed of one. But I don't think you can have a strongly developed story before you have strongly developed characters, or they become one-dimensional puppets moving through the world--essentially actors following stage directions. I think you can start out with a very very rough outline and let the characters fill in the particulars, and try to nudge them to hit the right plot points.
Of course if you're writing for a long-running series you don't necessarily need a specific story to start out so much as a setting. In those cases the characters matter infinitely more. | |
What gets me is that ET is quoting games as examples of good story, but really Mario and Pokemon don't have good stories. Especially Mario, have you ever actually read the story behind Super Mario? It's like 2 paragraphs long. The followup cartoon also had nothing going for it.
Naruto has a strong story (even if it's a bit idealist) and the characters in Naruto (past Shippuden) are interesting especially since they get fleshed out. It's less "X is trying to rule the world" and more "These individuals are living a life where X is trying to rule the world". I mean even Obito has a tragic story that we can all understand and share in the pain. While the story's basis and the character basis might be laid around the same time, the character's basis has to be fulfilled first. | |
I never said they were good stories, I was pointing out the fact that their stories and the worlds they exist in are why we like them and are what gives them importance.
Let's use an actual good story example then. Star Wars. George Lucas started off with the idea to make a better Flash Gordon movie. He was a poor writer apparently ( he didn't even know basic punctuation at first ), and the initial drafts of his story were awful. However, even in these early drafts, he had characters, but because the plot and story was so incomplete, he actually ended up totally changing his characters around. The first "Luke Skywalker" was an "old Jedi general who looked like he was in his 60s". He didn't become the Luke we know today until the story was fleshed out, because before a story is made, you don't have a solid foundation to work with, so things become inconsistent. You need a stable idea and world and then you branch everything out from there, rather than just whipping a bunch of random characters out of thin air and expecting them to all come together and fit into a story perfectly. This proves you may as well start with the story first, because even if you do begin with a bunch of character ideas, you're going to change them around completely anyway so that they complement the world you're about to throw them into. If you begin with a basic story idea, it becomes easier to know exactly what you need. As I mentioned before, I wanted a hero who needed to destroy the world. This allowed me to immediately realize that I was going to have to create a world that was corrupt so the hero would be justified in destroying it. Then I wanted him to use wits rather than strength, so I knew I could make him a sneaky hacker. And then I knew in order to make it so that a hacker had the power to literally obliterate the world, I could make the entire world one big virtual program. Do you see how everything falls perfectly into place once you begin with the idea? Or you can go the George Lucas route, design characters, and then change them 2 or 3 times to make them work with the story you're going to have to inevitably write anyway, because a character is just a useless sack of details until you give them a reason for existing. | |
A story is just a useless sack of setpieces until you give us a reason to look at it.
First of all, Star Wars is a nice movie, but its story sucks. It follows a cookie cutter pattern and just has nothing good going for it. Second, starting with the story first leads to one dimensional characters. For instance, in that Star Wars story you quoted, only two characters have any kind of real being, Luke and Anikin. Everyone else could be replaced by virtually anyone. Except C3PO and R2D2. Those 2 jokers are the audience, the reader, the whatever. Han Solo? Generic badboy pilot. Leia? Leia is actually interesting because she presents a go-getter princess but because that's her only feature - boring. Obi Wan? His purpose is to die so as to re-enforce the "call to adventure". In fact, Star Wars might be a prime example of why you shouldn't create the story first. No one really cares about the characters and most of its hype comes from it as a movie, not as a story. In fact, I might go as far as to say Tolkien committed the same crime. There were 13 dwarves and we cared for none of them. We just didn't care, they all got lost in the masses. Even if there were 13 distinct races of people, we wouldn't care because there are so many. Follow a small party, not a large one. But let's take a better example, the detective novels. Detective novels might seem like a contradiction at first because it seems like the setting is the important part because that's where all the business goes down, but they're not. People will love Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Nancy Drew, whoever, no matter where they are because its their character quirks which make the setting come to life. Doyle could put Holmes in a locked room with not much in it and the characters would speak for themselves. Setpieces don't matter, it's the reasons why we're there that do. | |
I think along with listening to music I'll try defining a character's needs. And then what that character has to do to meet needs.
Then define the environment based on a concept. From there I can use the character's motivation to drive the story? I might have to watch Heroes again to get some ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_(TV_series) | |
The fact that you just admitted to the characters in Tolkien books being worthless contradicts everything you've been saying about characters being most important. With the success of Tolkien's work, you are forced to admit that story was most crucial.
You're right, the dwarfs were garbage. But it doesn't matter. All the characters came together perfectly to accomplish the one thing we DO remember: the story of Middle Earth. No one goes to the movies to see a dwarf. They go to the movies to see the conflict the dwarves had gotten themselves into, and the epic conclusion of it all. | |
The Hobbit could not have worked without Bilbo. It's not the adventure that people care about, it's the actual hobbit. Bilbo was supposed to be the reader, always quick to write off anything that might seem fun because it's easier to just sit around. But Bilbo's important because he shows us that even the most normal of people can live an interesting life. Bilbo's astounding character of just being so... human (for lack of a better word) is what drives that story. The setpieces mean nothing if Bilbo was just another boring dwarf.
I mean, even Gandalf was just "that guy" in the Hobbit. You don't even get a character out of Gandalf in the entirety of the LotR series. He's just... Virgil. He doesn't get any kind of a character until you read the supplemental books. | |
Actually I gotta give Lugia points on this where the Hobbit is concerned. Most of the dwarves were very cookie-cutter, but that story was also written primarily as a children's story and I don't see most kids keeping track of that many distinct personalities. Thorin and Bombur stand out, and a few others, but otherwise they do feel very same-y.
The Lord of the Rings takes character to a very different level though, yet still tells a compelling story. If I had to say whether that was story-driven or character-driven I'd have to say the story mattered more, but we cared about it more because of the characters. | |
Stop giving Lugia points, Lummox.
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EmpirezTeam wrote:
Stop giving Lugia points, Lummox. A blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. | |
Kats wrote:
EmpirezTeam wrote: I thought Lugia was a giant psychic bird-dragon thing. | |
1. Hated God: A story about a hated god amongst where the main character goes through trials and tribulations through horrors. My main story I've written.
2. I have A Big Sword: was a story about a man with a big sword. A comedey action, where he made sexual jokes towards his sword while slicing people and getting people off. The story was about how his sword was so BIG he couldnt handle it. It would end up just exploding and making a mess everywhere.
3. Unluckiest: A story inspired by kumagawa misogis character. Was going to be a bunch of short skits about the man who was so unlucky time and space would reform itself on the fly to make sure that his goals were never met. If he wanted to off himself he couldnt even do that. As his luck would always cause him to live.