Character Diamonds

By Mishell

Using Diamonds on Your Profile

Here's a quick bit of code to add your diamond to your character profile. Place this at the top of the Personality section and fill in the four trait fields with your diamond traits.

[[include Diamond trait1= | trait2= | trait3= | trait4=]]

As a writer, there will always be times when the muse seems to have ghosted you. At times like these, it’s helpful to have a bag of tricks that allow you to continue writing with no inspiration, creativity, or talent whatsoever. One of these tricks is known as the Character Diamond.

I have found this trick so useful over the years, and in so many different contexts, that it’s actually worthy of more than one post. This first post is going to focus on how to distill an existing character into a diamond, which works essentially as a “cheat sheet” to allow you to write that character with the perfect blend of consistency and complexity even if you aren’t “feeling it” at all when you sit down to work.

First, credit where credit is due. The term “Character Diamond,” and the basic application of the technique, comes from the screenwriting workshops of David S. Freeman. I, however, am happy to teach you this technique without subsequently posting bouncers at every exit and segueing into a lecture on Scientology. Other aspects of my take on this technique come from Jack M. Bickham’s Writing the Short Story. Reading that book twenty years ago vaulted my writing game to the next level, so I will always remember it fondly.

When Do You Need a Character Diamond?

Well, you never NEED a diamond, or any particular writing technique. But here are the situations in which a character diamond can be most helpful.

1. You have a ton of characters. Look, it can be HARD to keep everyone straight, much less make each person seem real and consistent and yet different from each other. Having character diamonds on hand for each speaking role makes this process much tidier and offloads some of your brain space to other things.
2. It’s important your characters “mesh together” in certain ways. By this process you can engineer characters’ strengths and weaknesses to interlock with absolute precision.
3. You’re just “no good” at character. Okay, first of all, that’s b.s., but setting that aside, for many people, writing vivid and interesting characters is a struggle. This technique is one of the most excellent ways to fake being naturally amazing at character development.
4. You need a role in the story filled but are out of character inspiration. A character diamond can be like the “random” button on a character creator in a video game, allowing you to roll the dice and see what tumbles out. It is actually possible to create a character who SEEMS lovingly drawn and complex (or even eventually becomes that way) but is in reality nothing BUT a more or less randomly generated diamond.
5. You are using the character for tabletop or real-time online roleplay. I have never found a better way to react in-character on the spot than having a character diamond handy. Under pressure it’s all too easy to react as YOU would rather than as your character would, and a character diamond is an excellent shield against this tendency.

Different people will be writing this character at different times. The character diamond allows the essence of a character to be preserved no matter who is writing the scene.

What IS a Character Diamond?

In short, a character diamond is four adjectives — traits — that completely encompass a character’s temperament. By “temperament” I mean those permanent, unchanging aspects of a character’s personality that make them who they are.

Fewer than four traits, and the character may not be complex enough. More than four, and you may be trying to do too much or edging into “Mary Sue” territory. Real people have more than four traits, but fictional characters are not real people and do not serve the same purpose.

Part of what makes a fictional character “well-constructed” is an illusion of realistic psychological chaos, but in truth what makes a reader love a character is an element of consistency. People get attached to and even write fanfic of characters because they can predict how that character might react to a certain situation. Diamonds help you create just the right amount of predictability while still embracing complexity and inner conflict.

Also, keep in mind that these four traits are not quirks, backstory, temporary weaknesses, opinions, or psychological baggage — but instead permanent, unchanging character traits that have affected the person’s actions, speech, and sometimes even physical appearance their entire lives and will never change. Flaws or quirks can be overcome — that’s what character arcs are all about — but Diamonds Are Forever.

How Do I Turn an Existing Character Into a Diamond?

For this, I’m going to use an example of my own: the character of Trianna Mornsong, an elven priestess in World of Warcraft. I use roleplaying games (both tabletop and online) as a way of keeping my creative muscles limber, and so I tend to give the creation of these roleplay characters as much attention as I do the characters in my paid work.

Step One: Describe the character as currently conceptualized

Make a list of words and phrases that describe your character. Use whatever comes to mind; don’t think too hard about it at this stage. Don’t worry if you contradict yourself. Just get it down. Try to distill it, as much as possible, to single words or short phrases. Doing this for Trianna gives me something like this:

Perfectionist Prudish Apple-polisher Kind Generous Sensitive Caring Feminine Pure Spiritual Judgmental Modest Submissive Self-Punishing Intellectual Hyperfocused Naive Sheltered Ingratiating Disciplined Self-Controlled Rigid Bossy Fragile Righteous Awkward Determined Overachiever Know-It-All Balanced Logical

Step Two: Sweep Words into Corners

As you can see, this is kind of a mess. So the first thing I do is start to move some of the words around so that the ones that seem “related” to each other are clustered together. This is a good way to check for self-contradiction and start getting at those core traits that drive everything else.

• Perfectionist, Self-Punishing, Disciplined, Balanced, Self-Controlled, Overachiever
• Prudish, Pure, Modest, Spiritual
• Judgmental, Rigid, Bossy, Righteous
• Apple-polisher, Ingratiating, Submissive
• Kind, Generous, Sensitive, Caring
• Fragile, Sensitive, Naive, Feminine, Submissive
• Intellectual, Hyperfocused, Know-It-All, Logical, Awkward, Apple-Polisher

Step Three: Distill and Eliminate

Once you have a few groupings of words that feel right to you, look at them and decide which you like best, as well as which really belong in a diamond. Then squish each group of words into one that encompasses the entirety of that concept (at least for you).

I’m most attached to the “Perfectionist” grouping as the core concept of Trianna’s character — she came into being in my head as someone who was very tightly-controlled and obsessed with self-discipline. Whatever else I shift around, that has to stay.

I find I actually love the “Intellectual” grouping as well: the aspect of her that goes somewhat against the “elven priestess” stereotype and makes her so ripe for potential humor, so I definitely want to incorporate that.

But a Perfectionist Intellectual is absolutely unbearable without something to soften her, so I think I want to hang onto the “Kind” grouping as well.

The “Fragile” grouping really jumps out at me as a character arc thing, a product of her sheltered upbringing more than a permanent character trait. I think as she develops she will become tough, savvy, and capable. So I can strike that off the Diamond Contender list. Same with the judgmental/bossy/rigid grouping — not only does it seem like a flaw in need of fixing, but it goes against the “Kind” part of her.

So that leaves the “Apple-polisher” grouping as a potential field for our fourth diamond trait — but something about it doesn’t sit right. This is undoubtedly a part of her character, as it has already manifested strongly in her roleplay, but it feels like the surface manifestation of something else. After a while of using diamonds you start to get a “feel” for what is and isn’t a true “Diamond Trait,” and this one is ringing an alarm bell for me, so I need to look at it further.

What helped me in this case was looking at the other “character arc to be developed” groupings. Her judgmental side, her fragility — these seem like aspects of INSECURITY, which may be the core arc she needs to deal with, the axis of change. So if you remove INSECURITY from the apple-polisher, what do you have? Someone who deeply respects authority, but in a more balanced way. Someone deeply and psychologically LAWFUL.

After some thought, I decided that the best words to encompass everything I was trying to say with those other three groupings of words are OVERACHIEVER, COMPASSIONATE, and NERDY.

Putting Your Diamond To the Test

Once you have a first attempt at a diamond, it’s time to put it to the test by asking yourself the following questions:

1. Can a person be __________ without being __________ ?
   1. Do this with EACH pair of words in the diamond. Can a person can be an OVERACHIEVER without being LAWFUL? (All too often.) Without being COMPASSIONATE? (That one’s actually more likely to be a source of inner conflict!) Without being NERDY? (Think Olympic athlete.) A person can be LAWFUL without being an OVERACHIEVER, without being COMPASSIONATE and without being NERDY. And so forth.
   2. Remember to test both ways. Because, for example, a person can be INTELLIGENT without being NERDY, but cannot really be NERDY without being INTELLIGENT.
   3. If you find yourself answering “no” to any of these questions, it means that the pair of words in question needs to be squished into one that more broadly encompasses the trait. Remember, you only get four words to encompass your character’s entire temperament, so it’s okay for each to cover a lot of territory.
2. CAN a person be both __________ and __________ ?
   1. It’s okay if there’s some conflict. See “Compassionate Overachiever.” An overachiever is often callous, but doesn’t have to be. These two traits will serve to keep each other in check, which is actually a wonderful thing and gives the reader that feeling of complexity and inner chaos that makes for realism.
   2. If you find that two traits simply cannot permanently coexist, one of them can be relegated to the character arc and be eventually eliminated. This opens up another spot in the diamond to add an additional dimension to your character.
3. Is your character balanced between strength and weakness?
   1. Remember, not EVERY weakness will be overcome via character arc. The best characters have some permanent flaws that are just part of who they are, take them or leave them.
   2. It may be possible to tweak one of the words slightly to make it more positive or negative, if needed. In my first draft of Trianna’s character diamond, I had “Intellectual” instead of “Nerdy.” But an Overachieving Lawful Compassionate Intellectual didn’t sound too flawed (Lawfulness CAN present a problem in some situations, but it’s not on its face an insult), and also I’d left out a lot of the (to me) endearing flaws that I’d like her to hang onto her entire life: her hyperfocus, her slight social awkwardness. Changing “Intellectual” to “Nerdy” actually kept everything I wanted from “Intellectual” while adding in the color (and the flaw) I’d been missing.

Have Fun!

Well, I’ve already rambled on for pages, and there’s still a lot to say about character diamonds, but that will have to wait for another post. The main thing to keep in mind here is that character diamonds are a TOOL to be used if helpful, discarded if not. When the muse is flowing, sometimes we don’t need tools at all!

My hope, though, is that by the time I finish this little series, it will become clearer just how much heavy lifting a character diamond can do on the rough days, and that you’ll have one more thing you can turn to if you find yourself abandoned by your muse and needing a cheap dirty trick to keep the quality writing coming.