How to Build Your Perfect Character

This post is not about the top ten techniques for creating catchy characters. You can read that here, here, here, and at other sundry locales on the Interwebs. This post is about your perfect character.

First, a story.

A while back, I was watching Into the Wild and wondering why the hell my stories are not as beautiful as the ones I'm always falling in love with. (Yeah, I ended a sentence with a preposition. I'm feeling rebellious today.) I grabbed the closest notebook and began to list my favorite stories--not books, but stories: books, movies, tv shows, what have you. Here's what it looked like:

Jesus's Son
A Room With A View
LOST
A Moveable Feast
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Tao of Steve
The Catcher in the Rye
"Fat"
The Virgin Suicides
Atonement
Pump up the Volume

I stared at those titles for a long time searching for similarities. Here's what I found: They all focused on deeply flawed characters. More specifically, the characters were sensitive souls, outsiders by nature of their eccentricity, hurt big time by someone they should have been able to trust: a parent, a sibling, a lover, themselves. As a result, they've been driven to extreme loneliness, the kind that only thrives if one cultivates it. In these stories, desperate characters crawl through the muck of extreme loneliness to emerge in a better place, or not.

These are the characters I identify with, and the sort I want to write about. These are my people.

Here is where my story morphs into your perfect character. What are your favorite stories (not books)? Jot them down. Stare at them for a while until you identify their similarities--not just character similarities. My favorites stories are set in strikingly beautiful, colorful locales. Their love interests represent a break from the constant fakery of the world. When I stare at my list, I see a very clear representation of my aesthetic*, and that helps me create stories closer in beauty to the ones I love.

Have you jotted? Are you staring, contemplating? What similarities emerge among the stories you love? What have you learned about your aesthetic*? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

*Aesthetic is a word used a lot in grad school even though nobody knows what it means. I've been using the word for nine years now, and I just started understanding it (I think). Merriam-Webster defines aesthetic as "a particular taste for or approach to what is pleasing to the senses." Those stories you love and write: they mean so much to you because they fit your aesthetic.