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xaeneron · 5 years

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A Smol Nerd Talks about Backstory and Character Development

Hello frens,

I had someone ask about how I write character backstories, but since they included their discord information in the ask, I thought it might be better to answer that privately and put up this as a public post because the more I wrote, the more obnoxious it got. And because I thought it was interesting! I don’t claim to be an expert at any of this, especially since this is purely a hobby to me, but I do absolutely love character design and development and it makes me happy that the characters that I’ve put time and effort into are encouraging others to develop their own. So this is absolutely a post to skip if you’re not interested, but read on if you’re curious as to how my weird little brain works.

Essentially: Bits of insight into how I write character backstories, which blends a lot into character development and creation. Not really a step by step process, more word vomit.

...under a cut because holy fuck it got long. I’m sorry, I talk too much ><

Visualizing Characters

I’m not sure there’s really a starting place beyond “I would like this character to exist,” but I think it’s important to first stress how I view my characters in perspective to myself. No one method works for everyone, but it is kind of relevant to my own process.

My friends in undergrad made fun of me for this constantly, but for me, characters sort of...how do you put it, take up space in the mind. Even though they are functionally me since I created them, they’re...not? They exist as their own entities, telling me what they like and don’t like, what they’d like to do next, etc. Ive, who has dominated this space for years, has a tendency to claim any music that I listen to as his own (so I associate it with him), throws parties, and wants to play and write more stories when I want to sleep. I get that this is a really weird way of looking at characters because I’m essentially blaming myself for keeping myself awake, but I think it’s the best way to describe how I see the characters that I create. They’re friends that talk, and they develop their own opinions instead of me dictating what it is that they say (even though...well, I am. I’m sorry this is really fucking weird LOL).

Obviously I’m not saying that this can or would work for anyone, but it’s just how my brain works. It helps me visualize them, along with details like how their voices sound, the facial expressions they tend to make, the tone that they take when saying the same phrase as someone else, etc.

Assembling Personalities...

I know the original question was essentially just about backstories, but backstory writing and character creation bleed into each other a lot. Enough that I don’t really think you can do one without the other, and why as a result I’m kind of writing about both.

So that being said, when assembling those characters, I tend to go piece by piece and let things happen, instead of distilling in all the characteristics I want them to have. That’s a pretty surefire way to make a Mary Sue, and I have plenty of experience with making Mary Sues. A lot. It’s embarrassing. ;A;

Let’s take Ive, for example. His initial personality when I first made him was a happy-go-lucky, debonair, massive flirt without a care in the world. He waltzed through life, never getting attached to anyone or anything. A fairly simple and shallow character base. As I played, pieces just kind of came together - some from the Commander’s in-game characterization, and some from my own ideas. I let him pick up different facets of his personality over time, some good, some bad.

This works because Ive’s personality wasn’t set in stone from the get-go and changed drastically as time went on, but if you do have a personality you have your heart set on, then make sure your character responds to new challenges accordingly. Consistency is key, and the way they act in the present can also help you road map their past, figuring out how they got to where they are. And who knows, if you take another look, they might surprise you.

...Including the Weird Shit

Sometimes the tiniest quirks help make characters memorable to you, and help shape who they were and grow up to be. One of my OCs, Beck, is an obfuscating idiot who legitimately knows his way around a blade and is insanely clever when he wants to be. He also has a random deadly allergy to mangoes. Does he have a story that he (somewhat) fondly looks back on where his adopted daughter chases him around with a mango in retaliation for making fun of her? By golly yes he does. Is it important to the overall narrative? No. But does it establish more of his relationship with his daughter, even when she’s an adult? Yes. It also is the sort of anecdote that can snowball - what was he saying that was bad enough for her to chase him with tropical fruit? How did she even get a mango in the first place? Does she have a crush on someone? What sort of person is that? Is it someone new in town, or is it a stranger? What makes them different? Is Beck just assuming, and if so, is it because he’s dense or because he’s just trying to be a doting father? Even little things count, especially when sometimes it’s the anecdotes and sides stories that help make the world and characters you’re creating feel more real.

Write What You Know

This is pretty common advice, but it’s also pretty solid advice. It’s also something that I do often. None of my characters are straight self-inserts (arguably), but many of them have one or more facets of my personality, which makes it much easier for me to write them. Anyone who knows me personally will attest to this, particularly when you begin to note the amount of deadpan snarkers that my cast contains. My primary OCs (who don’t show up much here unfortunately) range from politely snarky to full on deadpan. Ive and Etiery are prime examples of this, while Richter also has his moments. Sharing traits with you helps writing their dialogue and motivations more organically, because again, it’s not what you want them to do, it’s how they would react as a living individual. If you’re not a naturally sarcastic person, it’s going to be harder to develop and accurately write a sarcastic character, etc. (Flashbacks to when I was a kid and my attempt at sarcasm and wit was “Go home old man, nobody needs you.”) Not impossible, of course, but something to keep in mind.

It’s not just personality, either. Rayne (one of my OCs) and Etiery are a chemist and engineer respectively because that is what I am. Part of the way their brains work stems from the fields that they choose to specialize in, and as someone in that field, I do have a certain amount of experience in thinking from that perspective. It’s okay to base characters on yourself or people you know, or take bits and pieces from people here or there. Again, it grounds you, and if you can write a realistic personality, you can write a more fleshed out backstory for said character, taking into account their motivations and decision-making.

Balancing Story vs. Personality

Part of storytelling is, well, getting across the story that you want to tell. In that, characters are instruments to help you move that plot forward. But if you’re fleshing out your characters, you also want the plot to be a vehicle to help them develop. Really, it depends on the story you want to tell and how you want to tell it, but if you’re like me and you focus first on characters, then my mindset is probably more applicable.

Essentially though, find a balance. You might need someone to do something for the sake of the plot, but think about if the one you’re picking is a good candidate for it, or if it’s better suited for someone else. If no one fits, maybe you need to take a look at the story step you’re making, or at the characters you’ve created. Remember also that although it’s easy to look at things objectively as an author and say things like “that’s so obvious, they shouldn’t go that way,” a character may still make that choice in the moment. Judgment - present, past, or future - can be questionable as it happens.

Pay Attention to the Timeline

This one’s pretty straightforward. One of the easiest things to mess up is to make your character too old or too young to be doing the things that they’re currently doing. Check and double-check. If you’re writing into an established timeline like GW2′s, make sure your character’s timeline fits with the established lore (unless you are very specifically breaking it for some reason). Ive, for example, is not one of the older generations of sylvari, but he is older than the sylvari protagonist in-game to account for his extra time spent training to compensate for his lack of eyesight. Keeping track of when events happen, often simultaneously, will help you decide how characters act and react - Etiery would not have been so kind (relatively speaking) to Ive had she met him before her fallout with her father, and as a result, they might never have become best friends, or friends at all.

Look at Things from All Angles

It’s important to look at a character and ask where they got certain characteristics from - are they naturally this kind/sarcastic/flirty/angsty/mean/etc., or did something happen that catalyzed that? If you’re writing backstory to explain that, take a look at the world you’re in or that you’re building - does the story you’re telling fit reasonably? Really challenge yourself to stay within your (universe’s) rules, instead of being tempted to bend them to make your character (and their story) exactly what you want. All universes have rules, and unless it is a specific plot point to break them, make sure you follow them! Making impossible loopholes to make sure your character has a degree by age 12 or can resurrect someone perfectly when the magic is explicitly stated to not exist can weaken your story and your character!

Richter is a good example of my personal thought process, being a glasses-wearing necromancer whose backstory is a street rat. He’s tall and awkward as an adult, so it’s not unreasonable that he was once a tall and gawky kid, the kind of kid whose arms are too long and everyone picks on. How does a kid like that survive on the streets? One of his major traits is the fact that he’s a bookworm: if he was orphaned, where did he learn to read? If he had parents long enough to teach him rudimentary reading skills (which he did), how much practical experience did he lose out on since he spent less time alone on the streets? As someone with a strong moral compass, Richter had to find a way to justify committing crimes to survive. A child like that would probably be too frightened to ask Grenth’s clergy or anyone at the schools in Divinity’s Reach (which he could not afford) to teach him in necromancy. How does he learn as a result? Is he afraid of his powers? Do people treat him differently because of them?

It’s kind of what I mean when I say pieces start falling into place. Start with a detail that you want for sure, and build up from that while maintaining its feasibility in the world that you’re working in.

And Don’t Ignore the Random

Seriously, I think this is my favorite part. Sometimes the things that you don’t expect sneak up on you and make it in. Fun fact for anyone fond of Ive: he originally wasn’t blind. OG Ive had nothing physically wrong with him. One day I was showing my friend my GW2 characters, including Ive in his full Rubicon set. I was nervous that she wouldn’t think it was as cool as I did, so I joked (although I would have anyway) that I didn’t know how he would see with the brim of the hat pulled so low. She replied, “Well, what if he has the hat pulled so low because he’s blind and it doesn’t matter to him?”

I chewed on that idea for the next day and a half, and suddenly a lot of things fell into place - why Ive and Eet get along as well as they do, more justification for Ive’s growing, below-the-surface jaded personality, an obstacle for him to overcome. I drowned in feels and texted her, and to this day it is still very much her fault that Ive can’t see.

His lack of vision is now one of the central pillars of his character, and it’s something I hadn’t even considered before my friend mentioned it in jest. So don’t ignore random inspiration!

#xae replies #anon ask response #character development #backstory #a lot of word vomit under the cut #i'm sorry in advance #I think about this shit a lot #lolol #I also love talking about my characters #so #ask away #conversation is welcome!#thanks if you bothered to read all of the vomit LOL

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topicprinter · 7 years

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My co-founder wrote a really great post on the telltale signs of someone who's great at sales. A lot has already been written here, but he takes his personal experience as a sales leader in the trenches and spins out some unique insights.Some of the quotes are hard learned lessons that come straight from customers mouths, such as this one:Respond to my questions with certainty in-the-moment and you’re 10x more likely to earn my business. Let those concerns go unanswered by an hour and you can cut that probability in half… by two hours half it again… by one day half it again…and so on. It shows me that you don’t know the answers, which challenges your believability… or shows me that you don’t care enough to address them.I think Reddit might enjoy this. You can read the post on medium here: https://medium.com/@dooly/selling-trust-6b2c712cde8d , or if you'd like, enjoy it just below the break.Let me know what you think!Selling TRUSTDreamforce — Marc Benioff’s crown jewel in his ever growing SaaS empire and the epicentre of all things related to Salesforce. 140,000+ people looking for the next big thing, the deal(s) that will make their year, or, let’s face it, a chance to get your company to pay for you to go see a “free” Green Day/Red Hot Chilli Peppers/U2 concert! Dreamforce also happens to be an epicentre for all things connected to sales. I was at Dreamforce a couple of years ago as a guest speaker on a panel where the discussion quickly pivoted down a very interesting path.The original topic was relationship selling and how to leverage the network of your peers during the sales process. The plethora of platforms out there right now that help you figure out who you’re talking to, how to get to them, who in your company can point you there, etc. made this a pretty obvious conversation. It’s clearly far easier to talk to a prospect that you’ve been given a warm introduction to or at least a prospect that you know a thing or two about from their Twitter history. In today’s selling arena, let’s call this table stakes (or steaks as I used to think it was spelled — a far more delicious connotation).Back to the pivot in the conversation… Once we established that you can leverage your network to find out pretty much anything about anyone, right down to their opinions on politics and their favourite soup, we got into something more to the point.We can give them all the tools in the world, but what are the telltale signs that a salesperson is simply ‘good’ at what they do? How do I identify the rock stars and how do I best support them?Now, for a bit of colour on this, I’ve hired a fair few sales people over the years…fired a few too. You get to know what to look for and, if you’re reasonably adept (or honest) at introspection, you can probably figure out what makes you decent at what you do as well. For myself, I used to think that I was lucky — that luck literally followed me around from deal to deal. To an extent, that’s true, but it doesn’t explain repeated success. Luck may get you your start, or the occasional “bluebird” deal, but it doesn’t allow your sales trajectory to ascend to great heights.The reality is that there isn’t one right answer to what makes someone great at sales, but you will always find a few common threads between them. We’ve all heard the expression, “people buy from people they like.” To an extent, that’s correct. But the core compound to likability that catalyzes every good relationship is TRUST.Aside…my eldest son is in Grade 7 right now and my school days are a few years back in the rearview mirror, so I’m being re-educated on everything from Algebra to Science right now. The genesis for this post is actually much to his credit as he asked me to help him understand the distinction between an element and a compound. After explaining the difference between salt (NaCl) and sodium (Na), he was well on his way to figuring it out!Inspiration!In the context of selling, T-R-U-S-T is a compound made up of 5 key elements, talent, resilience, understanding, stories, and timing. You build TRUST with your prospects and clients by possessing parts of each.TalentThrough my years in selling I have become more and more convinced that the best sales people simply cannot be manufactured without having certain raw skills, talent being the foremost on the list. Now, talent is a pretty vague descriptor, so let’s break it down a bit further. Talent goes beyond the ability to craft a beautiful powerpoint deck or a proposal that sells itself. What talent really implies (at least in this instance) is an aptitude for being relatable to your prospect. I once explained it as “being a better chameleon.” My hope isn’t to encourage sales people to become fake or untrue to their own values — it doesn’t quite work like that. As sales people, though, you do need to be adaptable to the person that’s in front of you. After all, you’re not asking them to change who they are in order to do business with you, you’re asking them to have faith in you as a person. Personability, ‘the gift of the gab’, being able to read the room, the ability to connect with another person and making it seem easy — talent in this context is the first stage of building TRUST. My wife often says that this is how I duped her into marriage — proof that it works!Resilience…and while your job is to make it feel easy for your customer, know that it isn’t always going to be the case. Nobody on this planet is universally liked (cute babies excluded) and connecting with some people can take time. A brow-beaten, over-solicited buyer likely has a lot more on their mind than whether or not your solution is going to solve their problems. The best sales people are also the ones that can handle rejection delivered a million different ways. We’ve all heard the expression, “thick skinned,” and the best sales people personify this.Of course, resilience and preparation go hand-in-hand. Think about what you can do to handle the barrage of objections a customer might put before you. How can you minimize the time between a knock-down punch and your ability to get right back up and keep throwing? Tenacious resolve — that unfettered desire to win — isn’t genetic, but we all know people that are better at it than others. If you’ve ever done any work in New York, you’ll have a far greater appreciation than most on the impact of resilience in creating TRUST!UnderstandingWhile this somewhat ties in to the idea of being relatable, understanding is unique enough to stand on its own. Relatability is how you convey your understanding of a prospect, but the art of understanding requires something different, “empathy.” A huge part of sales is human psychology — which really boils down to the ability to put yourself in the shoes of the person across from you, process what they’re going through and then go about helping them navigate their way to a better place.When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems. — Stephen CoveyEveryone in sales should have heard the expression, “two ears, one mouth” by now! Interestingly, top performers seem to have this skill innately engrained in their systems — the ability to listen more than they speak. It allows them to seem as though they can see around corners because the prospect, more often than not, will unknowingly paint the blueprint for the rep on how to close the deal if you just let them talk! Listen with your eyes as well as your ears and you’ll understand the whole story even better — you can learn a ton from body language.Last point on understanding…demonstrating appreciation of your clients’ needs isn’t enough — that merely shows that you’ve done your homework (your clients expect that much of you). Empathy is the ability to understand the impact of those needs, the personal stake someone has in a decision, and the payload associated with your time. It’s something I call Outside-In selling and have dedicated a whole other blog post to (stay tuned). Suffice it to say that without having the ability to see and feel what your prospect is going through, the third element of TRUST will be out of reach and your believability will suffer.Stories…and when they resist believing you, tell it through the lens of someone else! One of the biggest, most recurrent themes I’ve heard from one sales rep to another….heck, I’d take that further and say from one sales organization to another, is the gulf between what people are selling and the corporate treasure troves containing the anecdotal evidence, the wins, the ROI contributions, and the overall personal/business impacts of what is being sold.At my previous company I felt this problem profoundly. When I moved my young family from Australia to the UK to run EMEA sales, I found myself in a situation where we had reps all across Europe selling into local markets. With different buying cultures, different competitors, etc. we were faced with the real challenge of creating meaningful collaboration between the different regions. The consistent ask from reps, whether they were in Cologne, Milan, London or Paris was for the relevant stories and anecdotal facts that they could leverage from one another’s existing customers. We created a Google sheet of stories, asked the customer success teams to contribute alongside the reps and did a company offsite to try to proliferate those stories. The challenge we faced was that the stories were super personal and very situational, so it was hard to get a high degree of recall without being in-the-moment. If we’d cracked the code on how to share these stories, the result on sales cycles would have been profound!Prospects may believe what you’re telling them about the unmet pains and needs your solution will provide, but without a shadow of a doubt they will believe the stories you tell them of other customers in similar situations. It not only helps bring your product to life in a real example, but it helps disarm a prospect from thinking that they’re your first guinea pig in a market. I’ve too often seen the Powerpoint deck with the “customer logos” page, propping you up artificially in a sales process….if you’re going to put logos in your deck, you’d better know a story or two from each of those companies. You will be asked!TimingMost in sales will be coached on deal cadence — the ability to read the tea leaves in a deal and submit a realistic forecast for a month/quarter/year (the longer the timeline the more we all expect it to become nebulous, of course). What about customer cadence? Who is taught well on how to set the pace of a conversation, when to interject, how to build waves of follow-ups to bring an opportunity to a successful conclusion? How do you develop a good sense of timing?We’ve already established the “two ears, one mouth” rule which should hint at your conversational timing. Often, though, we scramble to keep up with a highly educated, well-researched buyer when it comes to answering their questions, responding to their needs, doubling down on their pains and eliminating objections from a deal, whether they be related to competition, legal, product or other.I remember a customer once telling me the law of diminishing returns on his likelihood to buy from vendors:Respond to my questions with certainty in-the-moment and you’re 10x more likely to earn my business. Let those concerns go unanswered by an hour and you can cut that probability in half… by two hours half it again… by one day half it again…and so on. It shows me that you don’t know the answers, which challenges your believability… or shows me that you don’t care enough to address them.Now, that’s not a universal law, but I think you get the point — you create a perception through your ability to respond. It’s much better to be prepared with the right information in the right moment than it is to say “I don’t know.” If you really don’t know, commit to a timeline to get the answer and stick to it — always better to come back with a good answer than to make up a bad one!When you’ve been on the sales roller coaster enough times, you get a sense of when key moments are coming and hopefully can become a bit more rhythmic with the twists, turns and undulations of your deal flow. It does take awhile to get there! That said, the sooner you can figure out your sense of timing on a few different levels, the better.The TRUST EquationSo what does all of this mean? Every sales person is going to be measurably different in their degrees of Talent, Resilience, Understanding, Story Telling and Timing Sense. This is by no means a prescriptive formula with exact ratios of each element! Some of these skills can be taught better than others and some really do need to be innate. Results aside, the best measure of any of these skills is to ask customers, friends and peers how a person measures up in their TRUST equation. What are their shortcomings? Why? I can say that in my experience, finding a natural is the exception to the rule and when you do find them….hold on to them!Sometimes you don’t know a gifted salesperson until you’ve already signed the contract! Not because they did anything wrong, but because you didn’t feel like you were being sold to at all.At Dooly, we’ve built our platform with an appreciation for how all of what we’ve said above impacts your relationship with your customers (and ultimately, your ability to close business!). We recognize that the smarter you are, the more in tune with your buyer you can be. There is no greater contributor to your deal movement than being in harmony with your customer from your offering through to your interactions. Our goal is to bring you the tools that will help you earn the respect of your customers in the moments when they are most needed. With this, we’ll help you earn their TRUST.Happy selling!

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