Pebblepup's Writing Den

Character strengths are the traits that help your characters do what they need to do. Their strengths allow them to solve the story’s problems. Physical strength is only part of it. The choice of strengths in your character’s personality depends on what you want the character to do.

Courage is good. A lot of times a character needs courage to get through the story trials. All good stories have trials, make no mistake. Honesty and reliability are also strengths a character may need to survive to the end of the story. I would argue that flexibility in thought is a strength as well. A character can start off believing one thing and change its mind during the course of a story. That works quite well.

Say your character starts out believing its neighbor is a terrible person. Over the course of the story, the character gets help from that neighbor. This can have the result of changing the character’s perception. That neighbor is no longer seen as a terrible person to a friend. That’s what I mean by flexibility of thought. The character can hold beliefs that might change over the course of the story.

Character strengths are positive traits that make the characters likable. They also help the character to overcome the obstacles you, as the author, throw in its way.

That said, these strengths can grow over the course of the story. A somewhat timid character can find itself in a dangerous situation and rise up to overcome it. That’s based on the principle that we don’t know what we are capable of until we face problems.

A character could face what appears to be an insurmountable obstacle. The character could quit, in which case your story ends, or they can try something. It all depends on how much of the strength they need to overcome it, they have. The key here is that the character don’t have to know it has as much of that strength as it does.

There are lists on the internet of character strengths. You can use the search engine of your choice to find and download them. Then add in what you think your character might need. Then you can test those strengths and see how it goes.
No one can deal with everything all the time. Keep that in mind. If your character is too weak to overcome the obstacle, find something to help it do so. That’s what we do as authors. We craft our characters with the strengths they need to overcome the obstacles we put in their paths. Then test them. The testing part is what makes the story.

Our characters need to face tests. That is the heart of conflict. Conflict drives the story forward. Once your character realizes it has the strength to overcome the main story problem, they do sol. Then your story is over. So go ahead and hide their strengths from them until that final test. Your story will be better for it.