Star Wars Writing: Your Characters Should Make Consistent Choices
Continuing our series (you can see all articles here), we’re going to look at what we can learn from Disney’s failure to write compelling, motivated characters so none of us make the same mistakes in our own writing.
Once you’ve set up your new story in a way that makes sense and you know your readers can buy, you need to continue it in a logical direction. In order to do that, you’re characters need to make choices that both make sense in terms of the setup you’ve created and in terms of what we already know of these characters. Remember, if you’re revisiting a series or plan on writing a series, your characters need to be consistent. Yes, character development will happen (and if it’s not happening, there’s something wrong with your story), but the reader needs to go on that journey with your characters to truly understand and appreciate how he/she got from where they are in one story and where you plan on starting them in another story, especially if a time jump is involved.
Easily the biggest problem in the Disney Trilogy is the characters. Characterization problems plague this new trilogy like a gangrene-infected leg, which is really bad. Most people can overlook some inconsistencies and even a weak story or forgettable themes if they can really enjoy or relate to the characters. If your characters are compelling and highly motivated, your audience won’t care if they’re good guys, bad guys, living in a world that doesn’t always make sense, or even learning lessons you don’t necessarily care about. You screw up your characters, you’ve lost a lot of your audience.
Don’t Reset Your Characters
Your first rule should be that you don’t reset your established characters’ development. Just because you liked the role a character was filling several books back doesn’t mean they need to be there again unless you have a very, very good explanation for it. Deciding you liked a character better before their experiences changed them for the better or worse is no excuse for deciding to hit reset. You can say, “Well, my next book takes place X number of years later!” but that just creates a bigger problem for you. The audience won’t forgive you for not filling them in on what happened to make those characters regress, and it’ll take a lot of time to come up with a reason compelling enough to justify it.
For my examples, I’m going to zero in on Han Solo and Leia Organa. These characters have been through a lot by the time we hit Return of the Jedi. Han was a smuggler, rogue, and all around bad boy. He didn’t much care for anyone outside of himself and Chewbacca, and is used to cutting his losses and running if push comes to shove. Because of this, he owes a substantial amount of money to a very dangerous crime lord and takes up a job to escort an old man and a farmer to the planet Alderaan just to keep himself from becoming a target for bounty hunters.
Leia was a senator and princess who was secretly (although it seems to be a fairly open secret) Rebel sympathizer. When she comes into possession of the technical plans for the Empire’s new super-weapon, she races back to her home planet on Alderaan only to be captured by the Emperor’s right hand man himself, Darth Vader. Having been imprisoned and tortured, Leia decides to give false information to the trigger-happy general to keep her planet from being destroyed. Unfortunately, it happens anyway because said general is too trigger-happy.
By the end of the story, Han has developed a relationship with Luke and Leia. Having only decided to go along with Luke’s plan of rescuing the princess to recoup his losses from the failed Alderaan mission, he originally leaves our heroes to try and destroy the Death Star alone. Thankfully, his character development kicks in and he returns to rescue Luke, the only pilot remaining on what seems to have turned out to be a suicide mission. Flying in totally unexpected, he takes out the remaining Tie Fighters so Luke can take down the super-weapon. He goes on to become a well-respected general and war hero in the Galactic Civil War.
With no planet left to govern and the Senate dissolved, Leia becomes a full-blown general in the Rebel Alliance, channeling her newfound hatred of the Empire and Darth Vader into her military endeavors. She’s a strategist, a survivor, and, to some extent, a hunter. She retains her diplomatic character, but there’s a sharpened edge to it, like a blade that been plunged into the fires of a forge and hammered out. She becomes a capable fighter and turns out to be a powerful Force-sensitive whose power is still untapped when the story ends.
Both she and Han are clearly in love despite their seemingly contrasting personalities. Some people call them the greatest couple in cinema.
According to The Force Awakens, Han and Leia got married, which is a natural progression for their characters. They had a son who was strong with the Force, which also makes sense. Said son turned to the dark side, joined a gang, and defected to the First Order. That’s not totally unheard of, so long as there’s a compelling reason for what made him admire the First Order and want to harness the kinds of powers the Jedi are opposed to. After all, people do stupid things all the time, and all people are tempted by different things. If you have no temptations, whether it’s drink, drugs, theft, bragging, etc., then you just don’t exist.
Believe it or not, people have even gone into North Korea believing that their Juche philosophy is truly the supreme one. I can totally see Ben Solo falling for them hook, line, and sinker. I wouldn’t have named him Ben Solo, though. Luke was far closer to Obi-Wan Kenobi than either Han or Leia.
Anyway, the film then resets their characters back to smuggler and general. There was an off-screen divorce that we didn’t see, all of which apparently happened because their son’s stupid life choices drove them apart from each other and back into their former roles. The excuse is that they both decided to go back to doing what they were good at, and that’s not a good reason to reset your characters.
If anything, while their son’s troubles would have strained their relationship, Han and Leia are the type of characters who wouldn’t just shrug their shoulders, say, “Well, that sucks!” and then decide to cope by engaging in illegal behaviors and trying to snuff out the tyrants who seduced their child. Actually, if any relationships were strained, it should have been the one between Luke, Han, and Leia. After all, Luke was training him when it all went down.
We’ll talk a lot more about this in a jiffy, but you need to remember that your old characters need to be as compelling as your new ones, and that means moving them forward. They need to start this story off where you’d expect, even if you’d prefer to write them the way you think audiences found them most engaging. We’ll run into the opposite problem when we get to Luke, but for now, with the goal of becoming better writers by learning from others’ mistakes, we’re going to start on what I think is the easier mistake to make.
Everybody’s a Bit of a Fixer-Upper, and We Can Be, Too!
So, to fix this nasty problem, we need to think about where our characters were when we last saw them, how their lives have unfolded, and how that would affect the choices our characters made and continue to make throughout our new story.
Han and Leia get married and have kids. So far so good. The EU gave them a few kids, but we’ll just stick to Ben here. Leia is torn between Luke wanting her to train in the Force and become a Jedi like him (and we know he’s desperate for numbers!) and following her calling to become a senator.
She does some training with Luke and becomes a powerful Force user, but she ultimately decides that her calling is politics and that’s where she can do the most good, so once Luke gets some more students and there’s more than two Jedi, Leia joins the Senate. She doesn’t lose her job or become unelectable due to being related to Darth Vader! She’s way too well-known as being one of the figures who was most opposed to the Empire and fought just as hard, if not harder, than anyone else to bring an end to it.
Han has difficulty adjusting to a normal life isn’t driven by taking freelance jobs for criminals or leading a war effort, but he and Chewie have a good friend in Lando Calrissian, a man who made that adjustment long ago when he moved to Cloud City. The three of them go into business together and are happily making a killing with some scheme of Lando’s. Speaking of Chewie, why is his character so static? Why did he decide to go back to smuggling with Han? Did he ever quit? Did he stay with the military for a time?
When Leia gives birth to Ben, she and Luke realize that he’s strong in the Force. Luke’s Jedi academy is shaping into something very different from the previous Jedi Order, his new students becoming Jedi by choice and being able to live their own lives and be active and engaged with society as a whole if they choose to. In other words, they don’t have to swear off marriage and all attachments, for it was Luke’s compassion that redeemed Anakin Skywalker. This means that Han and Leia don’t automatically lose Ben when he goes off to train as a Jedi.
Han meets Rey and Finn on Jakku when he makes a refueling stop in the Falcon. The First Order is hot on their trail and he learns that they have the map to Luke Skywalker. No losing the Falcon or leaving it to sit, fully fueled, on a planet for years while he runs around smuggling again. We’re not dramatically rewriting his role in the story, just fixing some inconsistencies.
We’ll come back to Ben Solo when we explore the new characters. As for right now, we need to keep focused on Han and Leia and how they react when Ben decides to become everything they fought to destroy.
Han is crushed, but he doesn’t decide to become a smuggler again. It makes no sense for him to do so all of a sudden after more than a decade of running a business with Lando and Chewie. If anything, he would be campaigning for the Senate to move against the First Order. Leia is very vocal about organizing a way to bring down the First Order, even if the solution isn’t military. Of course, if the First Order makes an outrageous move, military involvement will become necessary.
When the First Order wipes out the government (our characters aren’t on any of the affected planets at the time), the allied planets scramble to reform the Senate. All Senators who were off-world return except for Leia. She plans to take the fight to the First Order and becomes General Leia once again. Han takes the initiative to plan an unofficial infiltration into the First Order to save his son before he becomes a casualty in the inevitable war. Finn is on his side since Rey was captured at Takodana.
I’m not opposed to Han being killed by Ben Solo, but I’d like to put off his ultimate demise until after we’ve had a chance to reunite Han, Leia, and Luke, so he’ll be sticking around until the eighth installment in our series. A little fan service never hurt anybody, so long as your entire book isn’t focused on pandering or your characters don’t do something completely out of line in order to give fans a little squeal.
How do YOU Write Characters?
Regardless of whether you agree with me or not on my particular take on the story, the point is that we can learn from the Disney Trilogy mistakes. You need to keep your characters consistent. The previous character development they had needs to pay off and affect their lives in some meaningful way. Your readers need to know why your characters are making the choices they are and those decisions must be aligned with who they are and informed by their experiences.
My word count says I’m already over 2,000 words into this, so I’ll wrap this up here. We’ll be tackling Luke next time, followed by how to introduce new characters that your readers don’t hate and actually wind up loving.
In the meantime, how do you go about writing characters? I personally start to get a feel for mine just through the process of writing. I start by asking a simple question, like, “Where are you right now?” and let the character just come to me. I get a good feel for their basic personality this way, and it’s a pretty fun exercise, as opposed to filling them out like I’m playing Dungeons and Dragons!
You can also let me know how you’d fix the character problems in the Disney Trilogy, or why you think they’re good characters that don’t need fixing.
Have at it!