Original subtitles

Ask yourself what you would know about a person

after 30 seconds in an elevator with them.

You can observe what they look like.

You see how they're dressed.

Do they speak briefly?

Do they speak in a comfortable way?

Are they comfortable with you?

All of these things feed into your outer-life perception

of that person.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

As I mentioned, since my background is primarily

from psychology, psychology tends

to inform a lot of the ways that I put pretty much everything

together, including character.

And there's a really popular psychological theory

or model that I like to refer to called

Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

You may be familiar with this if you've

had a therapist that's talked about it at any point

or if your own background includes this.

But with Maslow's hierarchy, basically,

what he's talking about is the things

that are needed to make a person's life complete.

And at the bottom of this model are

some basic things, the absolute stuff

that you need to survive-- food, shelter, basic needs.

Then you get into security.

And then as you progressively go up the pyramid,

as you get more and more of these basic things

that you need, as you secure those things

and you don't feel like something's

going to come and take them, as you're able to pause

and breathe and think a little more,

you're able to be more creative.

You're able to pursue goals that are maybe loftier than just

survival or getting by.

This is one of the reasons why I've put together a character

model that is similar.

In my character model, we start with the very basics

about a person--

their demographics, their age, their race, their gender,

all of the very simple things that either you can maybe

glance at a person and know or a writer can just

do a one-line description, and you'll know all about it.

Then we start to move into things

that are a little less visible, the things

that you can observe about a person

if you know them relatively well,

and you can at least guesstimate what their background is,

is the person's outer life.

You can guess by looking at a person's clothing

or how they present themselves or by listening

to their accent.

You can figure out what their class or background

might be in a lot of cases.

That's what those role performances are about

that we talked about in the world-building section.

But you can, in a lot of other cases,

guesstimate what they're trying to do if you see what

behaviors they're undertaking.

Or if you understand what their day-to-day job or role is,

you know a little bit about that person,

enough to form some very basic assumptions about them.

That's their outer life.

The things that you wouldn't necessarily know about a person

without speaking to them or being maybe related to them

or growing up with them or living with them,

that's inner life.

That's their goals, their wishes, their fears,

their weaknesses, the things that

make them personally a more complex person.

And so if you're able to suss out this person's outer

and inner life, then we are able to create character arcs based

on that.

[ETHEREAL MUSIC]

Now that you have thought out the world that this person is

coming from, the culture that this person is coming from,

you've figured out what kind of person you want to center

the story on, someone who's--

you figured out their basic power dynamics--

now I want you to pause for a moment

and just think about the basic demographics

of the kind of person that you want to write about.

What is their gender?

What is their race?

What is their age?

And this is per the world that you've developed so far.

So if you've decided that you want

to focus on a group of people who live as water people

in a world of nothing but sand and sun,

then you need to decide, are these people

from the edge of the water, or are they

from the center of the water?

Are they human, or are they amphibian people

that you came up with?

Based on all of the stuff that you came up

with in the world-building macro and micro exercises,

then you've got their basic demographics.

So you can start to come up with their basic demographics.

So choose the demographics of this person

and write down a single sentence about their demographics

right now.

[CLASSICAL MUSIC]

Identity is a subset of demographics.

Demographics just talks about the characteristics

of that person and nothing more.

Identity is the characteristics of that person

and what those mean.

If you're going to explore a character's identity,

you need to understand how identity

works in our own world.

And think about the ways in which

we granularize human beings, which is effectively identity.

So are we talking about people who are--

we're all people, but are we talking about people

of a particular gender?

Are we talking about people of a particular race?

I am a Black woman.

I am cishet.

I am able-bodied.

I was raised Christian, but I think of myself as an agnostic

now.

All of these are things that feed into who I am as a person.

They don't dictate my personality.

There are lots of other Black women, agnostics out there.

But they influence the personality

that I've chosen to develop or that I've

developed in response to the environmental factors

around me.

So I know, for example, that if I engage in certain behaviors,

people are going to make certain assumptions about me,

positive or negative, because they

have these pre-existing feelings about what

people like me look like, act like, sound like, and so on.

I've chosen my own interpretation of what

those things should mean.

They have different values for me

than they might to another person,

but that is my identity.

And how I have chosen to interpret

it is what's most important.

[ETHEREAL MUSIC]

The next step is to come up with this person's outer life.

Outer life is, again, only the things

that you can observe about that person, that you as an outsider

would be able to figure out just from looking at this person

or talking to them for a few minutes.

I like to use the example of Thor from the Marvel universe.

You know that Thor is this big, buff blond guy

from another planet where people have

superpowers or extra strength.

You know because he tells everybody

that he's the prince of Asgard, that he's the son of Odin,

and that he's got this great destiny.

You know that he carries a big, giant hammer

because it's really big, and you see it all the time.

So you know these things about him based on just observation.

So your sentence describing Thor's outer life

might be, well, Thor was a big, blond, buff prince of Asgard

who carried a hammer and was really

concerned about trying to become a good heir to his father.

Ask yourself what you would know about a person

after 30 seconds in an elevator with them.

If you're stuck in an elevator with another person--

you've heard of the elevator speech.

But when you just have a conversation in an elevator,

you frequently find out the basics of a person life.

You get their name because you introduce yourself.

You probably shake hands.

You say hi.

You get their name.

You can observe what they look like.

You see how they're dressed.

You understand the meanings of how that person has

chosen to dress.

You may be able to figure out things about this person's

financial background or relative so because you may

be able to look at, what is the quality of the clothes

that they're wearing?

Are they wearing anything with certain kinds

of brand names attached to it?

How do they speak?

Do they speak briefly?

Do they speak in a comfortable way?

Are they comfortable with you?

Why might they be uncomfortable with you?

You can speculate.

You're not going to know for sure.

But your speculation may be correct.

But at that point, you're starting

to segue into inner life.

But you can at least assess, how is that person talking?

What's their accent?

What language are they speaking?

Does it sound like they speak multiple languages?

All of these things feed into your outer-life perception

of that person.

So imagine yourself in an elevator

with your character, your proposed character,

for 30 seconds.

You're going down to the first floor.

You got 30 seconds to figure out everything you can about them.

Write that sentence down.

If I were describing myself and my outer life as a character,

Nora Jemisin was a 40-something heavyset Black woman who kind

of moved through life in a vague state of dream hoping that--

no, this is inner life.

Let's try that again.

Nora Jemison was a 40-something heavyset Black woman

who moved through life as an artist,

pausing periodically to stare at odd objects,

asking strange questions, frequently making jokes

because she felt uncomfortable, and it

helped her make other people feel more comfortable.

[CLASSICAL MUSIC]

To convey a character's demographics,

you can, of course, put a basic description of the character

into the story.

And you should do that at some point.

There are various methods and techniques

out there for how you can have a character either describe

themselves or be described by another character in a way that

doesn't feel unnatural or info-dumpy.

But one of the most important things

that you're going to be able to do,

or that you're going to have to do,

is to take into account those power dynamics and those--

the character's own awareness of their identity and power

dynamics, and use that to frame the world through that person's

reactions.

So here's an example.

As a Black woman, I'm aware of the fact

that it's not as safe for me to do some things as it

is for other people to do them.

I don't call the police unless I absolutely

have to because I know that the police can

be as much of a danger to me as whatever situation

I'm calling the police for.

And I don't necessarily have to do anything for that danger

to exist.

The danger exists because of who and what I am.

So it constrains my behavior in certain ways.

And if you were describing me as a character

and you wanted to convey that I was a Black person while not

actually saying she's Black, you could say,

well, she never called the police

unless she absolutely had to because she

knew that the cops were potentially a danger to her.

[ETHEREAL MUSIC]

A character's inner life are the things about that character

that no stranger is going to know.

No one's going to be able to figure out just

by glancing at them.

These are things that maybe only the character

knows about themselves or people who

are very close to that character would

know, like friends or family.

Let's go back to Thor.

In Thor's case, what we would know about him

by being a member of his family or a friend of his or being

him--

we know that he genuinely loves his brother, Loki.

We know that Loki is a pain in his ass,

but we know that he genuinely loves him.

He's very family-oriented.

We know that he wants his family to be unified

even though Loki may not necessarily feel

the same way at most times.

So this is a thing that you would learn about him.

And a sentence describing his inner life

might be, Thor genuinely loved his brother,

Loki, even though Loki had given him PTSD over the years.

That would be a good inner life sentence.

So now write an inner life sentence

referring to the character that you've decided to write.

Many people thought of Nora as an extrovert

because she enjoyed teaching classes,

but the truth of the matter is that she's a raging introvert.

And as soon as she's done teaching class,

she goes home to a nice, quiet place to recharge.

So that's a good example.