Well it certainly has been a while, I don’t recall the last time I posted to here and that’s been a mixture of laziness and not reading/watching anything of story value. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had any interesting ideas, but since I hadn’t written them down I have forgotten most of them.

One concept I didn’t forget about though was thinking about how comedy/humour should play a role in my story if at all. If I recall correctly, I decided on an adventure/mystery hybrid where the story is a persons path on something with some mystery element involved in one book or throughout. With that being the idea I’m not sure how to tackle humour. I’m sure I’m not clever enough to do something like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but the idea of a story completely absent of humour or mostly absent doesn’t interest me either. I’m somewhere in the middle but where exactly do I want to draw that line?

Marvel tends to include jokes depending on the characters in the scene, despite how serious the scene is the characters will crack one liners often if that is their archetype, and vice versa. Even in the most light-hearted of scenes the serious characters stay serious. So do I want my MC to be a jokester or not? If they are a jokester will they still crack jokes in serious situations? I’m not sure this is really worth putting thought into but it is something I’m trying to understand. There’s a shell of a character in my mind in what I’m trying to portray but I’m just not sure the way to go about it.

Another big obstacle is growth. It’s very important for a character to learn as the story moves along, and it’s important that these lessons have a significant impact on the characters future decisions. Especially with the way that I’m envisioning my story, I think knowing where my MC will start is going to greatly help with the direction of the story.

We’ll leave comedy on hold for a bit and explore more about growth because I think this is really where characters really show their stripes. One dimensional characters tend to be very boring and uninteresting as you can’t really empathize with them in any real sense over a long period of time. So how exactly do I want to show growth? What aspects of my character do I want to change? Stay the same?

I watched video about how when the FBI tries to disguise someone, their goal is in the hypothetical scenario that someone were to observe that person and report what they find, everything would be wrong. Their weight, height, eye colour, hair, gait, scars, clothes, even gender sometimes all of that is “supposed" to be intentionally misleading. Now obviously that wouldn’t work for growth from a story stand point, but the idea of being completely unrecognizable does interest me. Is having my character significantly change due to something happening to them a good idea or a bad one? Surprisingly I’m still not sure, but I think the best way to implement this is to make the change neither benefit nor detract from their overall character. Noticeably not in a way that is unimportant where it is irrelevant that it happened, rather where there are serious positives and negatives to the change that make it ambiguous as to whether or not it is a good thing.

I think that ambiguity is better than either bettering or worsening their character as I have significantly more ideas on how to implement that in an interesting way than the other options. It’s worth mentioning that this change doesn’t happen all at once, but there can be a catalyst to spark the change in the beginning. I do also like the idea of the main character learning the “wrong" lesson as well.

This is more complicated than I thought, I wrote a long paragraph explaining a convoluted way to achieve me goals of ambiguous goals that are the wrong lesson to learn and I confused myself too much. I think I’m just going to call it here and think more in this for my next post. Thanks for reading! I’ll come out with another post next year probably so should be quick.