Character Reaction
I've taught extensively on the concept of interiority, which is fleshing out your character's inner life--thoughts, feelings, reactions, and inner struggle. We are talking about reactions today. Why are character reactions so important?
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Transcript for character reaction video
Thank you so much for watching my YouTube channel. This is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. And today, I have a quick video for you about character reactions. Now, if you have followed me for any length of time, you know that I teach the concept of interiority, which is sort of fleshing out your character's inner life. And I define it as your character's thoughts, feelings, reactions, and inner struggle. We are talking about reactions today.
So why are character reactions so important? Two reasons. One, if your character is actively participating in a scene, you want the things in that scene or in your plot to land on your character. And that means, when something happens, you want to give your character a reaction so that readers know, "Hey. This is important. This is creating emotions in your character. This is making them react." For example, a lot of people like to end a chapter on a cliffhanger. One of the things I like to say though is let's get a reaction shot because it's not necessarily the thing, the stimulus, that is the most impressive, or the most important, or the most sort of noteworthy in that cliffhanger, it's how the main character reacts. And so it's like, "Luke, I am your father." Boom. You end the chapter well. As a character person, character first, I am much more interested in "Luke, I am your father," or "I knew that. Bring it in for a hug." You know, how the character reacts tells me so much about the character and about how the plot is sort of landing with your character that I think it's a wasted opportunity to not give your character reactions in moments and places where a reaction would just take everything to another level.
Now, the other way that you can use reactions to really make your character more active in your story is when they are not necessarily participating in something. So for example, if I am watching two people fight and it's like a tennis tournament and it's like boring, boring...one person, next. Well, I may not necessarily as the main character be participating in that scene but I can certainly have reactions to what they are saying. For example, I work with a lot of writers where this is an issue in an important scene. It gets pretty boring to read a bunch of kinda back and forth when your character's not involved and so, how do we protect against that? Well, I would love to see the character, rather than just hanging back like a security camera and just recording the footage, I would rather see the character in their point of view, if we have access to them through first person or close third. I would rather see their reactions even if they don't open their mouths. You know, somebody over here in the argument could be saying like, "And I can't believe that you slept with Cindy." This is obviously not a children's book. And then your character can be like, "Oh no, she didn't." Yeah. Just give some kind of context, give some kind of framing, give some kind of reaction for what was just revealed and then we make the character, even though they're not actively participating in the scene, we actually put them more actively in-scene to sort of give some commentary as to what is going on.
We get this a lot with kind of worldbuilding sequences, where the character is sitting there in the galactic senate and like listening to people explain the world. Those tend to be really dry scenes until the character can be like, "Oh, this makes so much sense because of that alien that visited me when I was 5." You know, it just automatically sort of lends a little bit of context to what is going on in front of the character. It can make the character more active when we're like eavesdropping and we need to build stakes, and the wizard says...all my examples are fantasy today but the wizard says, "You know, we need warts of [inaudible 00:04:00] to make this potion as the sleeping potion that's coming for Cindy." And Cindy's there, eavesdropping and thinking like, "Aaah, they wanna do away with me," or whatever. Cindy is coming up a lot as well today. I don't know. The hard one's what it want s.
And so, I think, the sort of short and sweet point of this video is to remember to make your character active and proactive in their reactions even when they are simply observing a scene. I think this is a tip that I could give to probably every single scene-based manuscript that I've ever worked on, like, "Hey, let's get the character in there. Even if they're not participating, they can be reacting."
One of the problems that I see all the time is these kind of reactive characters, which is different, which means that they don't as actively participate in their own stories, which doesn't really earn them the mantle of the protagonist. Well, and confusingly, to keep them from being simply a reactive character in scenes where they are not proactive, you want to give them reactions. Are you confused yet? Okay. So reactive characters versus proactive, bad. We want our characters to be strong, active participants. When they cannot be strong, active participants in a particular scene, or when you need to get more emotional juice out of a scene and make them even more proactive, use reactions. Yeah, I feel good about that. Now, let's see if anybody else does.
This has been Mary Kole with Good Story Company and here is to a good reactive story.
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