Narratives interest us primarily because of the characters they contain.
James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young, and Elke Zuern, Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame (2020, p. 8)
…narrative bends toward its characters and their habits of speech.
James Woods, How Fiction Works (2018, p. 28)
…in the folktale, character is a function of a highly constrained plot, the chief role of a character being to play out a plot role as hero, false, hero, helper, villain, and so on.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 20)
The essential triad of villain-victim-hero is important in most politics, but crucial for going to war. The order is decisive: a nasty action that has caused suffering, the allocation of blame to evildoers, and the arousal of a sleeping giant to action.
James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young, and Elke Zuern, Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame (2020, p. 134)
The names of the dramatis personae change as well as the attributes of each, but neither their actions nor functions change. From this we can draw the inference that a tale often attributes identical actions to various personages. This makes possible the study of the tale according to the functions of its dramatis personae.
Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale (1968, p. 20)
Character work hides—and is meant to hide—these complex combinations, teasing out one action or dimension to associate with an individual, making streamlined symbols out of messy flesh and blood.
James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young, and Elke Zuern, Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame (2020, p. 5)
Every character should have an outer problem to solve, something physical or external. They should also have an inner problem, such as becoming a better team player, forgiving someone, learning to be more responsible, breaking a bad habit, etc.
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2020, p. 95)
Characters are taken on a journey to acknowledge and assimilate the traumas in their past. By confronting and coming to terms with the cause of their traumas they can finally move on.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 146)
The inference is unmistakable: character creates plot, not vice versa.
Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (1942, p. 98)
And an old debate in screenwriting asks: what’s more important, character or plot? But this query also raises a false question. Because in visual storytelling it’s impossible to separate effective plot from character. We can’t declare either one more important. They’re two aspects of the same thing.
Eric Edson, The Story Solution (2011, p. 113)
If there’s a single secret to storytelling then I believe it’s this. Who is this person? Or from the perspective of the character, ‘Who am I?’
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 108)
So the vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character’s actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake.
James Woods, How Fiction Works (2018, p. 118)
Without conflict, there is no action. Without action, there is no character. Action is Character. What a person does is what he is, not what he says!
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 41)
True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 101)
Thus once again we come upon the phenomenon that the will of personages, their intentions, cannot be considered as an essential motif for their definition. The important thing is not what they want to do, nor how they feel, but their deeds as such, evaluated and defined from the viewpoint of their meaning for the hero and for the course of the action.
Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale (1968, p. 81)
While it’s possible for characters to get what they want and what they need…the true, more universal and more powerful archetype occurs when the initial, ego-driven goal is abandoned for something more important, more nourishing, more essential.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 12)
Since most of us play possum and hide our true selves from the world, we are interested in witnessing the things happening to those who are forced to reveal their true characters under the stress of conflict. … In conflict we are forced to reveal ourselves. It seems that self-revelation of others or ourselves holds a fatal fascination for everyone.
Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (1942, p. 191)
The conflict between how we wish to be perceived and what we really feel is at the root of all character.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 127)
Unpredictable humans. This is the stuff of story. For modern humans, controlling the world means controlling other people, and that means understanding them.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 35)
For many years we have been concerned with decentering the grand narrative. We have become romantic about the rootless, the broken, those without a voice—and skeptical about great men, dismissive of heroes. That’s how our enquiry into the human drama has evolved—first the gods go, and then the heroes, and then we are left with our grubby, compromised selves.
Hilary Mantel, “The Day is for the Living” (Reith Lecture 1, June 13, 2017)
