McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

MC help needed

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Lanodantheon:
I may be just over thinking this, but I think I have a problem with my WIP's Main Character, MC.

I'm no good with creating/remembering names so I'll just call him MC for the time being.

To put into perspective, the Story itself is about a Young Man (My MC), who is around 17 by the way who finds out he is a Magic User of all things(There's of course more to it than that) but the twist is that he is Genre Savvy as TV Tropes calls it. Harry Dresden is Genre Savvy, he makes mention of other works of fantasy throughout his adventures as a Wizard, but he's already like that after he has become a Wizard.
My story shows my MC was Genre Savvy before he became a Magic User. I am not trying to clone HD or HP, my MC is his own man with more to him than I have mentioned here.

My angle is this: Most Main Characters who find out they are Wizards or whatever are swept off their feet by the magic stuff. HP for example is just in awe of everything around him.
My MC on the other hand is a kid with a sweet tooth in a candy store.


My 2 problems in particular are thus:


1. Every time I try to design my Main Character, he seems to become more and more like me. To be more specific, the character I want is a Bookworm who has read a lot of Fantasy before he became a magic user. A way to word it would be, "If I became a Wizard, I would..." But, I don't want an MC who is an embellished Author surrogate/clone of myself because that in my opinion is unbelievably lame.
See Anita Blake for reference on this matter in my opinion (For those AB fans reading this, you may ignore this sentence :P).


2. It seems like my MC is either too badass, powerful, ...infallible for his own good. I want him to be fallible. I want him to have the Sherlock Holmes moment at one point and be wrong (getting beat up for it as a result). But, if I beat him up too much, he ceases to be believable or likable since no one likes an MC who just gets beat up all the time and is always wrong.
On the other end of the spectrum, I don't want him to be too powerful and become "The Most Powerful Wizard in a thousand years who speaks a hundred supernatural languages in a short amount of time with little effort from a prophesy set in time centuries before..."(Complete with own Harem) because that sounds awfully like a certain 15 year Starfleet Captain a lot of us know and hate.

But, I also want his schtick to be that because he's something of a Pragmatist that he's a Generalist of sorts. The other thing is that part of his arc is that although he's geek of Sci-Fi/Fantasy, he wasn't a good student before the magic came. The magic and the consequences of it light a fire under my MC's butt. Edward Elric is kinda like this for his State Alchemy exam, hitting the books and turning into a learning machine. Ed was trying to get his brother's body back and my MC has a similarly strong motivation. But, I don't want MC to be a master of everything in a short time.


I am not setting out to write a wish fulfillment book that seeks to give my High School/College Career meaning and make me look like a genius. I have a story to tell and I determined this to be the best character for the job, but the character design parts of my brain are not cooperating.

I have tried to remedy these problems by distancing the main character from myself (Different interests, aptitudes, age, etc.) and to "Beat the crap out of him" so to speak. But, it hasn't been working on paper.
He keeps becoming more and more like me and I can't nail down a power level and learning arc.

So, I need help. How can I remedy these 2 issues without scrapping my MC and starting all over again?

blgarver:
Maybe you should stop trying to fight it and rebuild the character in your shadow.  It sounds like You are trying to come out and show yourself on paper, so do it.  Doesn't have to be 100% you.  Your MC can have traits similar to yourself and still be his own person.

And who says we don't like characters that get the crap kicked out of them all the time.  Harry Dresden?  John McClane?

And characters that screw up all the time?  Tim Allen, anyone?

It sounds to me like you're clinging to an original concept so concretely that you're stifling your MC from growing into his own person.

Let loose the reigns.  Let the guy go an see what happens.

That's just my opinion.  Good luck.

BLG

ballplayer72:
had the same problem with mine.  Very similar setup.  I got around it by giving my character a believable handicap, and making him a bit rash and prone to foot in mouth.

Starbeam:
When I first start a story, my MC is almost always based on some part of my personality, and then evolves from there to become their own person.  I find that better for me than to try to completely take myself out of the character, because then I'm not really in touch with how they talk, act, react, etc.  Plus the way the evolve is pretty much inevitably different than myself, just because the situations are going to be different than anything I've encountered.

thausgt:

--- Quote from: Starbeam on March 16, 2009, 05:37:54 PM ---When I first start a story, my MC is almost always based on some part of my personality, and then evolves from there to become their own person.  I find that better for me than to try to completely take myself out of the character, because then I'm not really in touch with how they talk, act, react, etc.  Plus the way the evolve is pretty much inevitably different than myself, just because the situations are going to be different than anything I've encountered.

--- End quote ---

Here's a thought, borrowed from a venerable RPGs "Character Quizzes" chapter:

Take a Devil's Advocate stand. Describe what you (the player [or writer]) hate about the character. What are the good reasons for other characters to dislike/hate the character? What little, minor bad habit does your character have that would annoy anyone after a while?
(A big ol' tip of the hat to anyone who correctly identifies the game.)

There's nothing wrong with using your own personality as a template for a character. It's part of the reason why it's a time-honored tradition among us ink-slingers to base characters on our friends/family/neighbors/etc., precisely because it's that much easier to get into the heads of such a character.

If you absolutely, positively must have some way to differentiate between "you" and "the character", try picking a relatively simple preference. I might write about a character who absolutely loves to catch and cook fresh fish (I can't stand seafood of any type except clam chowder), as an example. That can be the seed from which you build a whole different back story (my character's family often went fishing, my character learned to prepare and cook fish really well, etc.) A more interesting challenge might be to have your character take the opposite side of a political discussion than you. If nothing else, it could give you some interesting insight into how the opposition works...

Good luck!

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