by Youngbear Roth

Created on: March 17, 2010

Empathic judgment allows us to characterize an individual.  Evolution imbues us with judgment.  Writing characters in a way that requires our audience to judge them – an aspect of subtext - we involve our readers on a meaningful level.  We offer audience and characters an empathic lifeline.

Memorable characters are those with whom we've felt a bottom line empathic link.  The effect of a bottom line is that it strongly dictates a reader's judgment of our character's horizon, their dynamic line.  Why dynamic?  At any moment we live a bit more and different than the sum of our experiences.

Imagine we are astronauts.  We've experienced what it is like to not be the center of the universe.  We've floated into an infinite cosmos owning no center, no edges, nothing defines it!  When we splash down to earth, we will never exist as we once  were.  We are transformed.  As writers, it is our job to discover and emphasize the dramatic differences between characters.  Some have traveled space, and others not.  Some characters live as earth beings, and others as universal beings.

Characters that leap off the page possess an ability to surprise us.  A character demonstrates its arc through gradually being challenged to become available to all creation.  Writing characters, we describe a dynamic availability process.  Memorable characters are a combination of what we know about them and their ability to realize unknown potential through overcoming conflict.  

A character exceeding her conflicts demonstrates a strong arc.  Pro-active characters own strong arcs.  Reactionary characters own flat arcs.  The elements of memorable character are:

1.Establishment of reader/character empathic lifeline.

2.Audience anticipation of character's bottom line, and what such a character's horizons are likely to be.

3.Audience surprise - character exceeding her bottom line;  demonstrating new horizons.

4.A new bottom line – arc complete.

What tools help us construct this arc?  The tools are narrative description through exposition, dialogue, action, and environment. 

Dialogue that a reader sees into rather than just reads sculpts a character leaping off the page, challenging our sense of values, forcing our search for answers. 

Francis Phelan, a family man with a home, wife, and new baby boy, was not much of a character until he accidentally dropped the baby. 

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