As an author, I've often wondered about what it is exactly that makes a character compelling; what it is that makes us empathise with a character and want to follow every last one of their adventures. Well, I think I've finally ascertained that final magic ingredient that makes a character leap from just good to excellent, and you, you lucky few, are gunna be the first to find out what it is.

However, before I can start explaining that, I need to lay some groundwork (as usual). After all, this is a complicated theorem and I'm not gunna be able to explain it right off the bat. First I need to get a bat, which requires going to the store to get it, and the store's a looong way away so first I have to get in the car and DRIVE there, which requires getting a driving license and (I think you get the picture)

Sooo, groundwork. As followers of my work may (or may not) know, I am an ardent fan of the poet Keats, and as such am familiar with several of his casual letters. He had several theories about the formation of that vast and complex being, the human, one of which was the 'Vale of Soul-Making', as he referred to it. Let's see if I can find the original quotation... *pulls out book*

-HALF AN HOUR LATER-

...WHA-? Ooooh... sorry. Um. Yeah. Ya see, thing is, whenever I start reading any of Keats's stuff, I can't help but continue on with it. Well, I have at least GOT a quotation I can use: Keats sometimes gets rather confused in his letters, which is extraordinary considering he's habitually a verse-poet. Lessee here... oh yes: 'Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where a heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!' (GAWD but he had some weird ideas about capitalisation...)

Anyway: this is the central idea upon which my thesis is based. Keats's philosophising led him to believe (or, so I interpret) that we all come into this world like blank sheets of paper. Sure, there is something there which could be said to be a soul, but it is as yet empty, and therefore not properly a Soul (or Intelligence; as I said he gets rather confused at times) as Keats would have had it. Therefore, it needs to be filled up with something before it can be said to be a proper human soul.

But what with? Well, Keats was part of the Romantic movement, and I'm something of a romantic too, so we're both in agreement on this one: to come to terms with a reality in which abstract concepts cannot possibly exist, one must learn that they cannot through a process of suffering. Basically, learning from mistakes - but this is not an intellectual process, it must be stressed. The mind is a thing of intelligence - the soul (or the Heart: Keats REALLY needed to get all that sorted out before writing about it) is a thing of emotion.

To grow as a person, one must suffer. It is inevitable. As anyone who has watched Little Miss Sunshine will know, the French writer Proust once said that, near the end of his life, he looked back on his whole life and decided that only the bits he'd suffered had actually been at all useful to his art. Obviously you need to be happy, but if you're not depressed every now and then you're never going to grow. Suffering is a sign that you're up against something that you find difficult to deal with, and you're never going to develop unless you have to deal with a challenge - it stands to sense.

Obviously it would be rather difficult for us to study this in reality - however, that's not what I'm talking about. If you scroll back up the page to the beginning of this post (man, that seems like such a long time ago) you will recall that I am in fact talking about how this applies to fictional characters, so I shall set about applying this with my usual vim and viguour, and with the aid of two characters that happen to be particular favourites of mine.

First off - Doctor Johannes Faustus, as portrayed in Chrisopher 'Kit' Marlowe's masterpiece Doctor Faustus. Anyone with intimate knowledge of the play (i.e.: anyone in my English Literature class who has actually DONE THE WORK) will know that Faustus begins the play with high aspirations: he wants to learn about the universe so he can impress people by telling them fancy stuff and have rule o'er all the elements and bladdah blee, bladdah bloo. However, during Acts 3 and 4 he kinda loses his trail a bit and, instead of all the high-minded stuff he said he'd do, basically goes on a grand tour of the world to play base tricks on people and cheat them out of various things in a very petty way.

Now, you might ask, what is there about this character that could possibly recommend itself to me? Well, I'll tell you. During the fifth and final Act, Faustus's debauchery finally catches up with him: the deal he made with Satan is finally up, and after twenty-four years of cavorting about pointedly not doing the things he said he would, he must now render up his soul. This, ladies and gentlemen, is where the true beauty of both the play and this character lies - when Faustus is reduced a fear-stricken (but still oddly articulate) wreck, and desperately tries to worm his way out of having to pay the ultimate price of ETERNAL DAMNATION (!!!) for his sins. It was at this moment that a merely good play became, for me, truly great.

The odd thing is, I went for quite a while thinking that the middle acts were crap. The fourth Act is almost definitely penned by some inferior hand (save for that beautiful soliloquy in Scene Um), and I thought that the middle Acts merely brought down the tone of what was otherwise a quite excellent play. HowEVAH (I have GOT to stop using that word), in time I came to realise that this was in fact a contributory factor to the play. If Faustus was merely a superhuman character with no perceivable faults, we wouldn't empathise with him nearly as much when his inevitable end finally comes.

And that's kinda the point. A perfect character with no flaws (or, on the other hand, a completely flawed character with nothing noble about them) just is not realistic. We all like to see our heroes fall - not permanently, of course, otherwise they won't be able to get back up and keep coming back every week for another thrilling episode, but nonetheless we like to see our heroes challenged by a darker, altogether more seamy side. To illustrate this point, I will refer to the second character I promised you. What, you hadn't forgotten about her, had you?

Namely, Nausicaa, of Hayo Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. (Note: there's meant to be a little umlaut over the top of the last 'a' of her name, and also over the first letter of 'umlaut', but I have no idea how to do those things on here. Curse you, LJ!) Trust me: the 'of the' bits sound a lot better in the original Japanese (Kaze no Tani no Naushika, if you're wondering). Why do I bring her up? Weeerll, (I keep using that rhetorical device!) she undergoes a similarly character-shaking/-shaping experience in which she faces her darker side.

Ya see, her father is murdered by enemy soldiers, and when she arrives on the scene and sees him lying dead, she immediately FLIPS out and murders all the soldiers responsible. We might not think of this as such a big deal if Nausicaa were a guy, but it's exactly because she's a sweet nature-loving tree-hugging whatchamacallit that it's so shocking. (I mean, seriously. Her hair rises like an angry cat's.) This is completed by a scene soon after in which she confesses to her mentor Yupa that she's afraid of her anger and doesn't want to kill anymore. If I had to name a particular point in the movie (yes, I know it's originally a manga, but *I* have only seen the anime-movie) in which I felt a connection to Nausicaa, it would be in that scene.

And that's the point, really. Characters that are mostly noble and yet still are troubled by character traits normally belonging to evil characters seem somehow more real, and therefore make us much more likely to identify with them. Most heroes/heroines are far too one-dimensional, in that they're just good in the beginning, good during the middle and good during the end. Where's the development? Where's the conflict? Where's the ANGST?

This is a device I intend to use in future character-creation, so if you find yourself absolutely adoring any of the characters in my novels-yet-to-be, this is probably why. Oh - and yes, you can use this for yourself, if you absolutely MUST. But I'm still gunna be more famous than you. And with more money. So there.