Chapter 1. A Being That Breathes Fully: A Character as a Human Being, and Who Is the Producer?

For a moment, call to mind one character you have liked for a long time. They may be the protagonist of a book, a person in a film or drama, an NPC (short for Non-Player Character: a person in a game moved by the system rather than directly controlled by a player. Shopkeepers, passersby who give directions, and companions at your side all fill out a world. One well-made NPC can remain in memory longer than a protagonist) from a game you have enjoyed for years, or a minor character from a comic you happened to read. Choose just one.

Once you have chosen, remember one more thing: a small action that person took in a particular scene. Perhaps they paused, raised a hand, and smoothed their hair as if caught in a photograph; perhaps they held two beats of silence before answering a casual remark; perhaps they opened an umbrella with great familiarity on a rainy street. One small habit is enough—something the writer may not have spent much time considering while making the character.

There are countless cases in which one such small habit has brought an entire person to life.

Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men flips a coin before harming someone and tells the other person, “Call it,” asking them to choose heads or tails. That action and sound alone complete the chill of the person who entrusts fate to a single coin. (Cormac McCarthy novel; Coen brothers film)
Shinji Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion listens to the same track again and again on an old cassette player when the world frightens him. The feeling of a boy who wants to run away is all contained in that habit of a finger that barely moves.
Vito Corleone in The Godfather, shortly before his death, puts orange peel in his teeth and pretends to be a monster while playing in the garden with his grandchild. This single joke, shown at the end by an old man who has harmed people all his life, returns him to being a grandfather. (Francis Ford Coppola)
Ki-taek in Parasite reveals his social position through the ingrained smell of a semi-basement home without a word. In the moment Mr. Park unconsciously covers his nose, the distance between two worlds is measured without dialogue. (Bong Joon-ho)
Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock brings his palms together to his lips when his deduction is blocked. It signals that he is searching the library in his mind.
An even sharper example is Amélie in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie: the minor sensory habits of plunging her hand deep into a sack of grain, cracking the surface of crème brûlée with a spoon, and skipping stones on a canal. Without a grand history, the “list of small pleasures” itself becomes one person.

I sometimes feel something strange when I look closely at such moments. That person was plainly made by someone. They are unmistakably fictional: written on paper, drawn inside a screen, or existing as data beyond a monitor. Yet one small habit gives us the sensation that they truly live somewhere. Even after the book is closed and the screen turned off, it feels as though they may be somewhere raising a hand to smooth their hair in the same way, holding the same two beats before replying, and opening the same umbrella.

The same principle is used in acting. Giving a person a distinctive hand habit or walk is called “business.” Dustin Hoffman’s repeated actions in Rain Man and the habit Heath Ledger gave the Joker in The Dark Knight of licking his lips with his tongue are examples. In comics, the same thing is fixed as a character’s signature pose or verbal tic. The media differ, but the idea is the same: carry the person inside a small movement.

This book concerns how that sensation is made. Across fourteen chapters, we will unfold, one stage at a time, the work by which a character comes to stand as a person from zero. In this first chapter, we will set down the stance we bring into the work, who possesses that stance, and with whom that person works.

Close-up · Paterson in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson Paterson, a bus driver in New Jersey, has no notable events. Every day he wakes at the same time, eats cereal, drives the same route, secretly writes poetry at lunch, walks his dog in the evening, and drinks one beer at the same bar. The film draws an entire inner life only through these repeated small habits. It is a quiet and exact illustration of this chapter’s proposition: events do not make a person; the minute texture of every day makes a person alive.

A Character Is Not Data

People beginning this work often bring a familiar format: a single table called a character sheet, with fields for name, age, gender, height, weight, appearance, hobbies, special skills, and trauma. Filling in that table gives the impression that a character has been made, and when every field turns black with text, it can seem as though a person has been completed.

Let us think of people who go far beyond one line on a character sheet. Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables begins as no more than the cold datum “convict no. 24601, who spent nineteen years imprisoned for stealing bread.” Before the bishop who forgives him for stealing silver candlesticks, however, that number expands into an entire lifetime. Javert in the same work begins with the one-line conviction “law is justice,” yet grows into a tragedy that ends with him throwing himself into the river when that conviction collapses. No ability-score table has a field called “the Seine.”

This does not mean we do not use such formats. We use similar formats too. We simply do not believe the table makes the character. The table is a place to arrange someone after they have been made; the making happens in a different territory from filling its fields.

Two people may fill in the same table in exactly the same way, and one may produce a living person while the other produces a paper doll. The table is the same, so the amount of information is the same. The number of words placed in its fields is similar. Yet one lives and the other does not. Once we begin asking where that difference comes from, we arrive at the fact that a template does not make a character.

It is the same principle by which two actors given the same script create completely different people. In theatre and film acting theory, the script is only a starting point; the person is born from the inner intent beneath the dialogue—its “subtext.” A TRPG character sheet or a comic’s character-setting book is likewise not a finished person but a vessel in which a person is written down. The vessel may be the same, but the person inside differs.

We treat a character as one person. We work by placing them not as a bundle of data but as a being fully alive and in motion. That stance decides how the table will be filled. Even when the same word enters the same field, the result divides according to whether the hand placing it there is aware of the weight of a person.

This stance of attending to that weight—of treating a character as a human being—is the first pillar of this lecture.

With Affection, Not Anger

When I make a character, I decide one thing in advance: what will power this work? Will I use anger, or affection?

Villains who are hard to hate are almost without exception made with affection.

Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke is the person who burns the forest, but she is also a leader who takes in and feeds people with leprosy and women with nowhere else to go. Hayao Miyazaki draws her not as “a wrong person,” but as “a person with a different justice.”
Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War seeks to erase half the universe, yet believes it to be mercy. The weary expression just before he snaps his fingers carries the weight of the conviction the writers gave him.
Vice Mayor Bellwether in Zootopia is a sheep who has always been small and dismissed, so when she gains power she tries to repay it in the most twisted way. A human motive—an inferiority complex—lies at the root of her malice.
Elsa in Frozen was a villain in early development. The production team kept asking, “Why does this child use ice?” until the person who might have become an antagonist became the protagonist.

Anger is quick. Anger at someone, at society, or at oneself can spill out strong sentences in a short time. Those sentences strike a reader’s heart at once on the first reading. But anger is volatile. It cools after a few days, and cooled anger makes it difficult to carry a character to the end. You can write one scene in a person’s life out of anger, but if you shape their entire life from anger alone, they become a person who lasts only a few days. By the next book, it is difficult to remember who they were.

Affection is slow. To grow affection for one person, you must seriously observe who they are and look at their small habits, petty contradictions, and blemishes. That takes time. But affection grown in this way lasts. It can carry the person into the next book, the next episode, and the next season, and let the writer feel that they are still alive somewhere long after the writer has left the desk.

Acting theory holds the same principle. Among actors there is a saying: “No character considers themself a villain.” Acting training since Konstantin Stanislavski teaches actors to find justification from a villain’s own point of view even when playing that role. To stand in the place of affection as a writer means entering the inside of a person as an actor defends their part.

We recommend beginning with affection. Even if you begin in anger, you must eventually move to affection for the person to survive; it is therefore more efficient to begin from the place of affection. Look at the character with the same attitude with which you have looked at a family member, lover, or friend. Ask seriously what they like, what makes them feel small, and where they feel at ease.

This stance determines the answer to small conflicts that arise during the work: which aspect of this character to preserve, which to cut away, what decision to let them make. From the place of affection, even the part cut away has a reason for being cut; from the place of anger, cutting becomes punishment. The results of the two kinds of work differ in subtle ways. Throughout this fourteen-chapter lecture, we look at characters from the place of affection.

Start Flat, Then Inflate

Even a person who holds this stance is initially troubled. They want to make a person dimensional, but if they try to draw a dimensional person from the beginning, their mind stops.

Chihiro in Spirited Away is an ordinary girl in the opening scene: slumped in the back seat with a pout, close to a “timid complainer” if reduced to one phrase. After experiencing her parents turn into pigs, she becomes stronger one layer at a time, and in the end becomes a person who can do her part in the vast bathhouse. Hayao Miyazaki did not draw a hero from the beginning. He only breathed, one sigh at a time, into one flat word and let it grow.

We work in reverse. At first, we deliberately make a character flat and compress them into one word: an idealist, a cold survivor, a quiet witness. Such a one-line name does not show even half of who they are. We make it that way on purpose.

Then we put flesh onto that one word. We add one line at a time: whom they loved, what they regret, which part of themselves they hate most, what they do last before falling asleep. One word becomes one paragraph, one paragraph becomes one page, and one page becomes one period in one person’s life.

Do not try to draw a round balloon from the beginning. Breathe, one sigh at a time, into a shriveled balloon. The balloon’s shape is determined by the texture of the breaths you put into it. Which side grows more and which side grows less creates the texture of a person.

Other creative fields work in the same order. Drawing begins with a rough sketch that catches large masses and silhouette before detailed rendering; sculpture enters detail only after carving the large form. In fiction craft, a one-sentence logline gradually gains flesh into a synopsis, a treatment, and a first draft. The common point is that no one tries to render finished detail from the start. Detail is laid on after the skeleton stands.

This back-and-forth is the essence of the work. Make one area flat once, then inflate it once; make another area flat, then inflate it once. This movement repeats until the fourteen-chapter lecture ends. Making one person from zero is the accumulation of this movement.

The most common difficulty I hear from people making their first character is, “I do not know where to start.” The source of that difficulty is the attempt to draw a dimensional person from the beginning. Dimensionality cannot be held in the hand, but a one-word naming can. The first movement of this work is to begin with what can be held.

Keep Presenting the Wrong Direction

There is one thing to say in advance. People shaping a character easily want good things to happen to that character: for them to be happy, for their love to be fulfilled, for their efforts to be rewarded. It is natural; the person was made by their own hands.

But the stronger that wish becomes, the flatter the person becomes. A person who is only happy does not change, and a person who does not change no longer lives and moves. For a person to live and move, there must be change; for change, conflict; for conflict, what they want must be blocked.

Story theory says the same thing in one voice. In Story, Robert McKee says that a person’s true character is revealed only in choices made under pressure; John Truby sees a strong antagonist as the tool that allows a protagonist to grow. A game-design difficulty curve and the convention of concentrating ordeals in Act Two of a three-act screenplay share the same principle: keep putting obstacles before the person.

We phrase the work in reverse: keep presenting the character with the wrong direction. Block the road they want to take, shatter the lie they believe, and threaten what they are most afraid to lose. Only then is there a moment in which they must decide, and in that deciding moment their real self appears.

When what a person wants is blocked, their real face emerges.

Woody in Toy Story fears losing his place most of all, so when the new toy Buzz appears, he responds with petty jealousy and lies. That pettiness is exactly what makes Woody lovable.
Faced with the command “avenge,” Hamlet does not draw his sword; he hesitates and questions himself without end. That delay is Hamlet himself. (Shakespeare)
Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, facing the truth that the homeland to which she meant to return is already gone, does not collapse. She turns back and chooses to fight. That one scene, which turns despair into a decision, becomes the person’s spine.
Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle suddenly becomes old under a curse, and precisely because of that speaks and acts with a boldness she never had when young. It is the paradox that a constraint sets a person free.
An even clearer instance of the same proposition is Mr. Kim in Lee Hae-jun’s Castaway on the Moon. After attempting suicide, he is washed onto Bamseom Island in the Han River; only after becoming trapped by the absurd constraint of a deserted island in the middle of a city does he begin to live. The single-minded desire to make one bowl of jajangmyeon with his own hands changes the listless man into someone entirely different.

Because we love a character, we deliberately put them in trouble. It sounds contradictory, but in the work of shaping characters it is ordinary life. Without this stance, one person cannot survive for fourteen chapters.

The work of deliberately enlarging a character’s flaws, deliberately exposing their trauma, and deliberately placing the person closest to them under threat lies at the center of Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of this lecture. In those chapters we will look closely at the fact that a soft-hearted stance alone cannot shape a character. For today, it is enough to give notice that this stage is coming soon.

That is the stance we bring into this work. From the next section, we turn to who has that stance and with whom that person works.

Not an Author, but a Producer

There is one point we considered separately when choosing terms: whom are we teaching, and what should we call the reader we hope to meet?

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D): the representative tabletop role-playing game (TRPG), introduced in 1974. Participants sit with paper sheets and dice, act out people they each take on, and make a story together. It is commonly regarded as a root of role-playing games as a whole.

The D&D character sheet, made by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, is dense with values such as race, class, strength, and dexterity. But the sheet is only a starting point, never the character itself. Given the same “human fighter with Strength 18,” one person performs a hearty, drinking mercenary and another a silent avenger. The values match, but the people seated at the table are entirely different.

“Author” seemed the most natural term: someone who writes, makes stories, and shapes characters. It is all the work of an author. The term is familiar in Korean and in the English words author and writer alike.

Yet one thing held us back. In its narrower sense, an author is someone who writes text directly: someone seated before paper, unfolding each line by hand. That is the customary image of an author.

The person we want to teach is broader than that. They are the person responsible for one character from seed—a handful of idea—to output: a finished sheet or finished prose. They may write every line by hand; another person or tool may produce a first pass for some lines while they only review them; they may outsource some lines and receive only the result. In every case, one person decides that character’s final passing line. We needed a name for that person.

We call them the producer.

The difference between author and producer is narrow but deep. An author writes text directly, an author in the narrow sense; a producer is responsible for one piece of content from seed to output and integrates the use of tools, materials, and outside work.

Film, television, and games already distinguish these roles. If a film director handles the direction on set, the producer bears responsibility for the whole work from planning to completion. Animation’s director and executive producer, and games’ director and producer, hold the same relation. The producer in this lecture is closer to the producer responsible for a character from beginning to completion than to the person who writes every line directly.

One person can hold both names at once. If they write every line with their own hand while also taking responsibility from seed to output, they are both author and producer. A person can have only one of the two as well. Someone who does not write directly but decides the character’s final passing line is a producer, not an author.

The process taught in this lecture is designed around a producer’s stream of consciousness. It asks not, “How shall I write one line beautifully?” but “How shall I take one character from zero to output?” The two overlap, but they are not the same. Where an author’s work and a producer’s work divide, this lecture follows the producer’s side.

The distinction in this name will carry meaning throughout the lecture. The next section explains why.

AI Use Is a Premise

We have set the standard time for shaping one character at between eight and fifteen hours. Depending on how it sounds, that may seem long or short, but the number assumes not that a person works only with their hands, but that a producer works with an AI work partner.

AI work partner: a name for an artificial-intelligence tool that handles work such as first-draft generation, classification, and checking alongside us like a colleague. This lecture assumes a division of labor in which the producer makes decisions and judges the passing line, while AI handles rapid first outputs and repetitive work. It is closer to a picture in which the human holds the steering wheel while AI serves as navigation and an auxiliary engine.

In On Writing, Stephen King writes with one “ideal reader” always seated in his mind, imagining where that person will laugh and where they will become bored. For King, that reader was his wife, Tabitha. An AI work partner beside a producer is similarly close to someone seated nearby whose reactions can be tested. This is, of course, a metaphor; King was not speaking about AI.

I want to make this clear from the start.

We do not teach this as work one carries alone by hand. There are two reasons. First, this is not how we actually work. At every stage, we receive a first output with an AI work partner, review it, bend it, and use it again. Second, an AI work partner reduces time, and that reduction supports the practicality of this procedure. If carried by hand alone, eight hours becomes thirty, and a thirty-hour procedure is eventually not used.

Let us lightly map out which portions use AI and which portions are direct producer work at each stage.

At the seed-selection stage, we have prepared thirty kinds of seed cards in advance. Randomness shuffles those cards and draws five. The first answers to the keywords on the drawn cards are rapidly drafted with an AI work partner. Trying to bind those five answers into one person, discarding one of them, and compressing the result into a final line are the producer’s work.

At the mirror stage of self-objectification, first answers to thirty short questions are a portion for an AI work partner. Choosing two letters from the four-letter MBTI code and drawing out a one-word identity is direct producer work.

MBTI: a popular personality-classification tool that divides tendencies along four axes into sixteen alphabetic type codes. In creative work, it is safer to use it lightly as a reference frame for finding a person’s texture rather than as psychological diagnosis. Start only with a question such as, “Is this person a planner (J) or an improviser (P)?” and leave the rest to the person.

The daily-slice scenario is the stage in which the character writes themself as a 1,500-character short story. The first draft there is also written with an AI work partner. Reviewing whether that draft accords with the character’s tone and passing it over the line is the producer’s work.

Each stage works this way. The areas where AI use is strong are rapid first outputs, format conversion, and repetitive work. The areas where the producer is strong are decision, compression, and passing-line judgment. If the two are not separated, neither side is efficient. The fourteen chapters naturally guide this division in every chapter.

This text does not cover which model or tool we use. That belongs to the story of our internal tools and lies outside this lecture’s subject. Two facts do remain premises throughout: shaping a character is not done solely by the producer’s hand, and the producer’s portion differs from the AI work partner’s portion at every stage.

This stance is the second pillar of the lecture. If the first is treating a character as a human being, the second is the fact that a producer carries the work with an AI work partner. The fourteen chapters proceed on these two pillars.

A Map of Fourteen Chapters

Let us show the flow of the fourteen chapters ahead of time. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 establish stance and skeleton: Chapter 1 sets the stance; Chapter 2 traces the twelve-stage flow from seed to output; Chapter 3 covers hierarchy and five preparation modules. Full work begins in Chapter 4: Chapter 4 decides the seed (external seeds and thirty cards); Chapter 5 is the mirror of self-objectification with five scales; Chapter 6 rehearses a 1,500-character daily-slice scenario. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 make the character dimensional through cliché reversal and body anchors, flaws/lack/trauma, and the Want–Need–Lie three lines. Chapters 10, 11, and 12 handle relationships and output: five members of a cast, immersive embodiment operation, and output for five media (library, TRPG, screenplay, animation, web fiction). Chapter 13 addresses nontraditional characters (AI chatbots, VTubers, education, therapy, children), and Chapter 14 ends with five diagnostics and a final greeting.

Let us briefly explain unfamiliar terms already appearing on the map. Each is addressed in detail in its own chapter. Seed: one line of core idea that starts a character. Cliché: a setting or person type that has become familiar through overuse. Body anchor: a device that fixes an abstract personality into a bodily habit, scar, or sensation. Want–Need–Lie: three axes naming what a person outwardly wants, what they truly need, and the falsehood they believe. Immersive embodiment: work in which the producer enters the person’s point of view and directly speaks and acts as them.

Two lines run through all fourteen chapters. Shaping one character means making one human being fully alive and in motion, and a producer carries that work with an AI work partner. In the next chapter, we will unfold the twelve-stage flow from seed to output all at once.