Battle Reportification Part 11 - Character Development

Do you want to know how to craft a scene specifically for Character Development?  Do you even know why you want it for that reason?  Find out here, right after the jump.

Yaaaaay!  This is the 32nd blog post, so essentially a full month of blogging daily has passed!  Yippee!  Cries of joy!

And moving on to the blog post because no one (including me) really cares about these stupid anniversaries.  With all that hullabaloo about dedicating a scene to plot its time to give you the exact same thing but for Character Development.

Why you want to have a scene devoted to developing your character(s) involves elements of realism, interest, and planning.  Very few characters in any situation are static, and very few movies/books/etc. have people that are fully dedicated to their actions and never change in personality or methodology (this is what makes those few that do so special.  Plus they are hard to pull off while maintaining how interesting they are).  By developing a character you are proving that this is someone who has someplace to go and that the audience should be invested in them because they could become something so much greater.  The readers will (hopefully) become captivated by the possibilities and will thoroughly enjoy sticking with characters through thick and thin, watching how they change as a result.  Many people find that the characters are the best parts of novels because of how they relate to them and the ability to see a favorite character through to the end of the adventure.  Sometimes it feels like being robbed if the tale neglects the characters, and much of the build-up for a story requires the audience to know how grave the situation is through the characters and their feelings on it, without these scenes much of the weight of it vanishes because of the lack of perspective.

Of course it is just plain realistic for someone to change as things happen around them, no matter how dull or insignificant given enough time.  And the more the event affects or aligns with the priorities of the character, the more that they are changed or reinforced in their beliefs.  People who read your story are going to be willing to accept the unreal in your story so long as you have a degree of reality; this portion can manifest itself through your reasonable character development that will also serve to entertain them and provide them with a story that can be good for more than just a plot.  Finally the portion that I mentioned about character development being good for planning: if you decide, before your Battle Report, where you want to head with this, specifically keeping in mind the theme that you had decided upon to pursue, that will help you to set yourself with some ideas for where to take this.  The form of a scene for character development is just another aspect of setting up that theme to best represent the message you are trying to tell your audience about the state of your universe (show how grim dark it is or if there is any hope, whatever you already decided upon).  In a way, developing your character(s) is just setting yourself up for wherever you want to take events later on, this will elevate your story telling skills tremendously because of how everything fits together.

Now onto how to actually develop a scene for purpose of Character Development.  Keeping in mind everything that I just mentioned you are going to want to pull out all that work you hopefully already did on your characters as per the post I gave you earlier.  So where did you envision taking that character in the future?  How did they fit within the universe that you are sculpting/narrating?  How might that definition that you have in your mind change so that it becomes something else that really reflects what your universe is all about or some special instance that is significant but not the norm (in other words something that you want to see in your story but is not supposed to be the big idea, just a cool concept from your head)?  Questions as always are the answer to solving this issue, the more that you can come up with, the more that you utilize the other resources that you have already created the better the result should end up.  Make sure to not lose sight of your theme and try not to combine too many elements of your story so that it becomes too confusing to follow.  You can always test this out by giving it to a buddy to read if you don't trust your own judgment.

Hope that the blog post was good, another post right after this one, the next one being actually Monday's scheduled one.