Making Characters: By Beliefs

Suppose you came across a notebook. There was no name or marking that would indicate who the author is. Inside, you found all of the pages were filled with declaratory statements. This notebook is a collection of the author's beliefs, like a bible or a manifesto. If you read through this notebook, you would probably have a good feeling for who this person is.

People can be defined and understood by their personal beliefs. You can therefore create your characters by creating their belief system. This is not necessarily easy. In fact, trying to understand a person's beliefs is one of the hardest things to do (unless you can ask them and they feel like sharing and they have also thought about it). Of course, if the first thing you create is a belief system, then it will be very easy to understand that character's thoughts and actions.

The reason that creating belief systems is so difficult is that all the easy ones are boring. Lex Luthor has a simple belief system: power and money, and lots of it. Superman also has an easy system: no hurting the innocent. These characters are also flat and boring if those are their only motivations.

Most people have conflicts in belief. A classic example is when a person believes that fighting is wrong, but if personally attacked, will fight the attacker. It should be impossible to believe that all life is sacred, but also support the death penalty. However, these people do exist. Such people's belief systems are far more complicated than Superman's.

People tend to rank their beliefs. Stealing may be wrong, but condoning murder is far worse. So if a person could save a life by stealing something, it would be done. With conflicting beliefs, the question becomes which belief is stronger.

There are several ways to go about creating a belief system for a character. The first is to just throw a handful of random beliefs together and then try to figure out how they could work and what would cause those beliefs. For example, a character loves to play with children, enjoys making wines, and thoroughly hates the game horseshoes. Who is this person? What does he or she do? Why are those specific likes and dislikes? Does this ever cause conflicts?

If you wanted, you could create a character who specifically has conflicting beliefs. A character loves playing with children, but refuses to have any with his wife. A person loves going deer hunting for the meat, but has a pet cow that he refuses to kill.

Consider your own beliefs? What are the most important things to you? How come they are so significant? What would it be like if you had totally different important things? Would that person be an interesting character? Try writing a day in the life of that person and see what happens.

Like I said before, this is by no means an easy method. But if nothing else, it is great practice in understanding how beliefs work and realizing how vast and complex a real person's system of beliefs are.