Developing Comic Characters
Developing Comic Characters
Start with one sentence describing a problem your character wants to solve. Make it small, specific, and slightly ridiculous.
Example: "Margaret desperately needs to return a library book that's three months overdue, but she's convinced the librarian remembers her face."
Progress:
- Find the comic problem (one sentence)
- Test if it makes you smile/laugh
- Identify what the character really wants
- Create obstacles from other characters
- Examine your own shame/distance
- Ensure you can laugh at the character
1. The Comic Problem Formula
Look for problems that are:
- Small but intensely important to your character
- Slightly embarrassing or absurd
- Easy to state in one sentence
- Something you instinctively find funny
The smaller the problem, the funnier it becomes when the character cares deeply about it.
2. Create Character Wants
Once you have the problem, identify:
- What does the character desperately want?
- What are they willing to do to get it?
- Who stands in their way?
This creates natural dramatic tension: characters wanting different things.
3. Achieve Authorial Distance
Critical test: Can you laugh at your character on page 3?
If you can't laugh at them, you're too close. Signs of insufficient distance:
- You feel the character is purely a victim
- You agree with everything they do
- You're "trauma dumping" through them
- The writing feels earnest and humorless
Distance techniques:
- Make characters female if you're male (or vice versa)
- Give them flaws you recognize in yourself
- Examine your shame about the character's actions
- Pour your subjectivity into someone completely unlike you
Example 1: Input: Character wants justice for workplace harassment Output: "Janet obsesses over getting her coworker to return her stolen yogurt from the office fridge, convinced this small theft represents everything wrong with corporate culture."
Example 2: Input: Character dealing with divorce trauma Output: "Robert spends weeks perfecting the wording of his Venmo payment descriptions to his ex-wife, believing the right emoji combination will win her back."
Example 3: Input: Character with addiction issues Output: "Sarah lies awake strategizing how to eat her roommate's leftover birthday cake without anyone noticing, having convinced herself she deserves it after her terrible day."
Focus on essence over biography
- Skip detailed backstory, appearance, education
- Go straight to what drives them
- Fill in details as needed during writing
Embrace the trivial
- Nuclear launch codes = dramatic but not necessarily funny
- Overdue library books = potentially hilarious
- The character's intense investment makes it matter
Test your attachment
- If you can't bear to see the character fail, you're too attached
- Great characters are flawed in recognizable ways
- Your job is to love them AND laugh at them
Secondary characters are different
- They need only a few traits
- Their function defines their role
- Don't overthink them
Trauma dumping instead of character building
- Sharing your pain directly through characters
- Making characters pure victims
- Unable to find humor in suffering
- Complaining rather than observing
Taking characters too seriously
- Believing your character is always right
- Inability to see their flaws
- Writing from a place of personal victimhood
- Losing comic distance
Overcomplicating the problem
- Making stakes too high initially
- Choosing dramatic over comic problems
- Focusing on plot over character essence
- Overthinking character details
Remember: The goal is to create someone so completely not you that you can pour all of yourself into them. When you achieve proper distance, you see all their flaws, feel for them, and find them amusing—like having "celestial distance" from the character.