Character Analysis Framework

I have done three character analyses so far and have used this framework, which I call the Character Pipeline, as part of each. I will also continue to use it as I believe it is a beneficial tool in understanding how a character is created and humanizing them so that it becomes easier to analyze them in that fashion.

I want to dedicate this post to explaining where it comes from, exactly what it is, how to use it, my intentions with it, and how I use it.

I feel that the best place to start is where it comes from. I compiled information that I learned from watching Brandon Sanderson's creative writing lectures that are on his YouTube channel as well as knowledge found and acquired about identity. In Sanderson's lectures, he talks about the importance of handicaps, flaws, and limitations (which I will call limiting factors from now on) for a character and how those create motivations. He also discusses the backstory and how the aforementioned characteristics should be born out of it. Whether you create the backstory, the limiting factors, or the motivations first is irrelevant, however, they must be linked as if you started with the backstory. Everything after motivations I compiled myself after a look at science and living through some of my formative years as a human.

Now that you understand where it comes from, let me explain exactly what it is. The Character Pipeline is a framework that I use to outline characters and reassess them over the course of the story. The first part, which consists of the parts that I pulled from the Sanderson lectures is knowledge that I create before I even start writing a story. These are foundational to any human and therefore any character. Of course, we lived through our backstories and didn't have them written for us after we lived through them but it ends in the same result nonetheless. The second part is a loop that you go through after each foundational decision, or, if you're feeling like you have extra time, every decision, that occurs in your story. For each iteration of the loop, you should reevaluate motivations and the limiting factors to see if they've changed in any way.

Understanding what it is makes it safe to discuss how I use it and how you could use it. I have already touched on this a little bit but I will go into more depth here. For my current WIP (tentatively called Born to Serve) I created my cast of four main characters very similarly. I started with an idea for each: assassin full of rage, sheltered noblewoman, insightful priest, and lovesick bartender. I next brainstormed the themes I wanted each to convey through their character arcs which led me to their limiting factors:

• Assassin full of rage: blinding rage, close-minded, etc.
• Sheltered noblewoman: limited experience, doubtful, reluctant, etc.
• Insightful priest: close-minded worldview, clings to harmful things, etc.
• Lovesick bartender: selfish, addiction, etc.

With these limiting factors you can go backwards or forwards, either way, both need to be done. From these, you can build a backstory that could be tied to their desired character arc, for instance, if you want a character with a revenge character arc, it might be wise to put something that motivates that into their backstory. Building the backstory first can give you a better grasp of their character and could make the process of building motivations easier. If you're not ready for the backstory yet, then you can go forward with the motivations (just remember that you can always change or edit anything you make).

Once you have all three of the starting components, you should next, if you haven't already, come up with the desired character arc. This could be unnecessary if you are not an outliner like I am. If that is the case then you are ready to use these characters in your story but feel free to continue if you don't feel ready. If you are an outliner then it would be beneficial for you to continue. The character arc could be an established one such as redemption, revenge, or tragedy, or you may create one of your own. As long as it's compelling in some way, you should have no issue with making your own. More than likely any one you create will fall into an existing one or be adjacent to an existing one. You should also make sure that you are familiarizing yourself with popular examples so that you can do the same things correctly.

Now that you have a vision for your character's path and development, you can chart out, alongside your plot outline, what events will occur on this character's timeline. You may also have a vision for where you want the character to end but not anything between the start and the end, in that case, you have some guidelines for what the events between should look like. As I said before the second half is a repeating loop that starts with any decision that the character makes. Nearly everything that happens to them will involve at least one decision so ensure that you are being thorough. For example, a character may be tasked with killing someone for a large sum of money that they need to survive. In this case, you could say it's not much of a decision but at the end of the day, they still must make the decision where both outcomes have extreme implications. Each of these decisions also likely has plot implications that will help make the characters feel inextricably intertwined with the story.

Each of the decisions that they make creates a memory and gives them experience. Whether these memories and experiences are foundational to who they are now that that event has occurred is up to you to decide, but your decision should be made with the understanding that the significance of the event will likely have the most say in how it affects them. Decisions made in both their backstory and throughout the story will, given time and repetition, create their morals and ideals which could be created beforehand but will likely change just like their motivations will. From there you can package everything together and create their identity which is pretty much already complete if you've gone through each of the steps thoroughly. I would like to remind you that each iteration through the decision loop should also prompt, at least, a brief look over how the motivations and limiting factors change, if at all. You now know how to use the Character Pipeline as a tool for creating characters from scratch and tracking how they change over the course of your story.

From here, I would like to discuss the greater implications of building your characters in this way as well as my intent for it. As I have already mentioned, building your characters in this way makes them feel human because of the relation to real human identity that it has. Since it makes them feel human they are already more relatable as long as you can properly convey these things on the page but that will come with critique and practice. Additionally, with proper use, this will allow you to explicitly define who your characters (static or dynamic) are as they change (or don't) throughout the story. Especially, for pantsers, I think this is a great tool, specifically the loop part, that will help you keep track of where the character is at a given point in the story. For outliners, it is just as beneficial, just in a different way. For us, it creates an excellent framework to lay out the progress that they will make over time and connect all of that to events that would logically produce those results. The aforementioned are both greater implications and how I intended this framework to function.

For all of the reasons mentioned here, I use this to both analyze characters and build characters. I use it to analyze them because it lets me break them down into a story device which makes their writing, purpose, and intent more clear. Of course, that is not the only thing that I use to analyze them but it does make up the majority of the analysis.