Reactions to the Unknown?

I'm writing a fantasy story with humor/satire as a sub-genre, and it's starts off with five people being introduced to magic by a silly witch. Afterwards, the witch finds out the five are human and that she's made a huge mistake. I'm trying to make their responses to this as realistic as possible, while still in-character and not too long.

There's a quiet, impassive, and persuasive person.

There's a headstrong, straightfoward person.

There's a polite person who is rarely provoked and usually thinking about something.

There's a reckless, slightly cowardly fool who can be serious if the situation demands it.

There's a logical yet open-minded person.

The witch is a bubbly, naive girl who makes mistakes often but tries her hardest.

I would greatly appreciate it if someone could help me with even one of their reactions, since I'm having problems with their emotions.

It's still really difficult to help you, because those traits you listed are, well. Traits. Traits don't actually dictate as much of a reaction as you'd think, especially for something unexpected.

What you want to do instead is find out how they react to situations in general, then keep going in the character building.

- Put them in different emotional situations, both alone and in a group, or even fractured off into mini groups within the group. If you put the quiet person with the reckless person, how do they play off each other in comparison to the quiet person and the logical yet open minded person? Do they react the same? Different? How different?

- Do they go out of character when faced with certain types of emotions? For example, does the straight forward person beat around the bush when faced with, say, massive trauma they have to relay? Does the coward get brave when somebody's threatening something they love? Or do they show the trait more extremely, basically becoming even more of what they are normally?

- How do they express emotions in general? "Quiet" does not mean "stoic", and "stoic" does not mean "emotionless". "Logical" also does not mean "stoic", and you can be very logical while crying in anger. "Headstrong" can be brash and bold and loud, or it can be quiet calculated stubbornness. These traits don't actually tell us their emotional responses.

- What is the context for them finding out? Have they run into a bunch of weird stuff already, or is this the first sign of fantasy they encounter? If they have encountered weird stuff, do they brush it off or believe it?

- Are they naturally skeptical or go with the flow for random things?

- Are they more likely to explore every single possibility, or do they just take things at face value?

Asking yourself these questions and, in general, just writing the characters existing in different situations will help you a lot in figuring out how they react. Don't limit yourself by length, either! Some people take days (or weeks, or even years) to fully process single events, while others can adapt relatively quickly. You have to figure the reactions that make sense for the character's whole emotional tapestry instead of just what you want to happen.

Though I'm not an expert, I'd like to help you with the story given the fact that I'm very familiar with the genre.

Basically in "realistic fantasy" you pick a larger-than-life topic/theme and place it in a realistic world. In realistic fantasy, satire/humor is the chief genre and fantasy takes a back seat once the plot kicks in.

As Rosendorn said, you shouldn't predefine your character's traits. The traits should come out smoothly through actions and dialogues. Even if you want to work with pre-defined traits, you should have a well defined plot.

I'll demonstrate an example here (this is usually the way I write realistic fantasy)

"The witch is a girl from future. It is 2115 presently and the world is on brink of extinction due to terrorism and civil wars. This girl has somehow travelled to 2015. She is now on the quest to understand where exactly have we as a human race gone wrong in these hundred years. During her journey she meets 5 different personalities. She has to understand their mindset, ask them bold questions and change their perspective towards life in order to alter the future."

You see, the theme here is larger-than-life. Yet, you have ample room for realism, profound philosophy and mocking satire. It really depends on how you handle the plot. While my idea was just a cliched one, the aim was to tell you the importance of a well-defined plot. When you know where to take the story, without exactly knowing "how to" you can actually create interesting characters and laugh-out-loud situations. In short, you can pull off a mix bag of genres.

So the important thing is to be clear in your mind as to what exactly are you trying to say or where exactly do you want to take the story!

Hope this helps. PM me if you need any help! Thanks. Keep writing.

As Rosendorn said, you shouldn't predefine your character's traits.

@DivineFool I did not say that. I did not come close to saying that.

I said that character traits were not emotional reactions. Character traits are just fine to predefine, and can provide a good basis for who the character is. What I said was that they were different from emotional reactions and didn't dictate what the characters' emotional reactions would be.

More character building work needs to be done on the character in order for us to know how those traits are expressed emotionally, because there is a large variety of ways those traits can manifest.

But no, I did not say you should not predefine character traits.

Thanks, guys! This advice is pretty useful; I'll think it over while revising my story. I'm rushing it a little bit for Camp NaNoWriMo, but once I'm done, I'll write lots of stories revolving around these characters to help me figure out their personalities.

I can now move on to the actual story, now that I'm done with that awkward intro!

... I don't really have a proper plot... Oh well!

So... my main issue now is how the witch reacts to finding out they're actually humans. It would be the most realistic to have her freak out and erase their memories, but since that would ruin the plot, I can't have that happen.

The witch is a bubbly, easygoing girl who does things without thinking. Because of this, she's revealed the ultimate secret and faces capital punishment if the higher ups in the supernatural world finds out. She's optimistic and easily influenced, though.

Somehow, the five humans need to avoid the memory wipe, and be taken along on the girl's quest to find some stray mushroom fairy queen. The witch originally came to get their help, thinking they really were wizards/sorcerers/witches, and that's how the secret is revealed in the first place.

Anything else that needs to be said?

*Points to previous posts about how traits are not emotional reactions* The things you've given us are, again, mostly traits.

Right now, you have one emotional reaction, fear, but no real motive for her to want to keep the humans from getting a memory wipe. Does she need help? Do they convince her they can help her? Does she not care about the potential repercussions that much? Does she care for them and not want them to get hurt?

You've told us how she is but not how she feels. How she feels is important, because that's the driving force for the character.

To illustrate what I mean, here is an example:

My character's dominant traits are that she is protective and stubborn.

The way my character's feeling is she gets angry. If you stand in her way or threaten to hurt somebody she loves, she will utterly destroy you and never let go until you're no longer a threat.

However, my character could alternatively feel fear. She wants to protect others and when they're threatened she tries to hide them away and make sure nothing can hurt them. She drags them along to more and more obscure hiding places because she wants them safe and refuses to let them not come along.

So one set of traits expressed two different ways, based on what the character feels. Both of these will result in very different stories and very different reactions to threats, but still be the same traits. Unless you figure out the feelings, the traits tend to fall flat because they don't actually shape the character's actions.

How a character reacts emotionally is the driving force to plot. Plot is basically how a character emotionally reacts to a situation, the choice they make as a result, and the resulting mess. Repeat until the story is finished. So figuring out the characters' emotional reaction and dominant feeling is critical to understanding how the plot will unfold. How they feel will reflect what choices they make, which will in turn impact the future choices available to them.

You can predefine both, but you do have to make sure you execute them. And don't worry about getting it perfect on the first draft— characters change and develop on their own. Just make sure the emotions make sense in later drafts.

There's also how you seem to be breaking internal consistency to have your plot work. Internal consistency is very important and you really have to figure out why it works the way it does. I'm not saying your plot can't work (It can, so long as you have an equally realistic reason why they don't get wiped), but I am saying that if you can't figure out a way to make it work, then the plot needs to change. If something doesn't make sense, it shouldn't happen. That's unfortunately the bottom line. As Mark Twain said, "The truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."

I would also remember your genre. You're going for humour/satire, so you do have some wiggle room to creating funny reactions that are also realistic. Some comedies only make sense because their internal consistency is "the screwball character is right", and you can basically set up the world that ridiculous antics work. That is, if you're going for more slapstick type. Witty comedy will take on a different type of reactions and what works in a screwball comedy will not work in a darkly sarcastic piece.

Hope this answers your question!

Thank you ) Well, I'm finally, completely done with that. Now I can move on to the silly one-shots.