Character

"Character is revealed through the choices a person makes under pressure." — Robert McKee, Story

A character's hair colour, job title, nationality, and backstory are characterization. They're the costume. What a character does when something is genuinely at stake — when the comfortable choice and the right choice diverge — that's character.

This distinction matters because characterization is easy to write and character is hard. Most flat characters have plenty of characterization and no character at all.

Want vs. Need

The most important distinction in character design.

Want is what the character consciously pursues — their external goal. Get the money. Win the girl. Defeat the villain. Escape the city. This is what drives the plot.

Need is what the character unconsciously requires to become whole — the internal gap they don't know they have. To learn to trust. To let go of control. To accept that they are loved. This is what drives the theme.

The dramatic engine of most great stories is the tension between want and need. The character spends the whole story chasing the want — and only gets what they need when they stop chasing (or fail to get) the want.

In Toy Story, Woody wants to remain Andy's favourite toy (want). What he needs is to understand that his worth isn't defined by being chosen (need). The story denies him the want until he accepts the need.

In tragedies, the character gets the want and destroys themselves, because they never found the need. In Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane gets wealth and power and ends up alone. He always needed love; he only ever pursued control.

When want and need align — the character achieves the external goal and the internal transformation — you get the most satisfying resolutions.

The Wound and the Ghost

John Truby (The Anatomy of Story) calls it the ghost — the wound from the past that the character carries into the story. It's the psychological damage that created the need. It explains why the character has the flaw they do.

The ghost doesn't need to be told to the audience directly (and usually shouldn't be — backstory dumps are one of the most common amateur mistakes). But the storyteller must know it. The ghost is what makes the character's fear of change specific and believable.

A character who is emotionally closed off doesn't become that way because the writer decided it was interesting. They became that way because something happened to them. The story doesn't have to show the event — it just has to show the wound.

Character Arc

A character arc is the transformation — or resistance to transformation — that a character undergoes over the course of the story.

Positive arc: the character overcomes their flaw, fulfils their need, and emerges changed for the better. The majority of satisfying stories use this. The character at the end is recognizably the same person but fundamentally different in how they see themselves or the world.

Negative arc: the character fails to change, or changes for the worse. Tragedy. Macbeth, Walter White, Anakin Skywalker. The character had the opportunity to change and chose not to — or chose wrong. These stories are about the cost of refusing transformation.

Flat arc (or steadfast arc): the character doesn't change — the world around them changes, or other characters change, because of who the protagonist consistently is. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Sherlock Holmes. The character's unchanging quality is tested against a world that wants to break it, and holds. This requires an exceptionally clear, strong characterization — the audience must be deeply convinced that this person would not change.

Every character decision the writer makes is a decision about what the audience will feel. Sympathy, empathy, identification, antipathy, fascination — these are the tools.

Sympathy is caring what happens to a character. You earn it by showing the character is good, competent, in undeserved trouble, or (Snyder's "save the cat") doing something generous early.

Empathy is deeper — feeling with a character, not just for them. You earn it by making the character's desire recognizable, even if unfamiliar. You don't have to be a Danish prince to feel Hamlet's dilemma.

Identification is the deepest — the audience seeing themselves in the character. Not sharing the character's circumstances, but sharing their fear, desire, or flaw.

The most powerful characters are those the audience both identifies with and is disturbed by. Breaking Bad works because we see ourselves in Walter White for long enough to be horrified when we realize what we've been identifying with.

Secondary Characters

Secondary characters exist to serve the protagonist's story — not to have their own. This isn't to say they should be shallow. It means their role is structural: they create pressure on the protagonist, they reveal aspects of the protagonist that wouldn't otherwise be visible, or they embody the theme in a different register.

The best supporting characters have their own clear want (even if it's never the focus of the story) and challenge the protagonist. They should push, not just exist.

The mentor gives the protagonist a tool or belief they'll need later, then gets out of the way (or dies). The ally tests loyalty and offers a mirror. The love interest represents what the protagonist fears losing or hasn't yet found. Each has a structural function.

Character and Theme

Characters don't just carry the plot — they embody the argument of the story. The theme is not something stated; it's something demonstrated through what happens to the characters.

In The Godfather, the Corleone family embodies competing answers to the question of what it means to be a man of honour in a corrupt world. Each brother represents a different answer. The story's argument is delivered not through dialogue but through what happens to each of them.

Every significant character should exist as a facet of the story's central question. If a character can be removed without affecting the theme, they are probably not necessary.