Your Character's Moral Compass

Build your own system of right and wrong, and then violate it. A lot.

A good moral quandary is the sticky stuff of compelling fiction. But — not to go all Chidi Anagonye on you — to build the quandary from the ground up, the writer must decide what or whose morals to start from. And how often the character will violate their expressed moral framework.

It seems at first that the new Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is doing a simple inversion of basic Christian values — following Satan instead of JC, saying, "what the heaven?" instead of “hell." And the show might be trying to upend the whole framework when the coven casts off Satan as their big boss. But the older generation merely seeks a new deity. It’s the kids who really break out.

Let’s look at Sabrina, who combines an anti-Christian upbringing with the heedlessness and impulse control of a teenager. Her moral code is something else: as often as she saves the world, it's never quite about the greater good, much less a higher power.

Sabrina serves herself first and that leads her, at least some of the time, to commit brave acts that benefit other people. She doesn't have compunctions about the usual sins — murder, say — and will (literally) trade one life for another. She'll do anything to help her friends, but she’ll also put all of existence at risk to create her own double and solve the age-old problem of ruling hell while also being a cheerleader. 

Even as Sabrina’s morality diverges from most viewers’, she remains mostly sympathetic as a character. She still does good things, brave things (as judged by the target audience’s assumed Western moral system). She still helps people, mostly other sympathetic people. But her different code also means she can surprise us, even as she remains authentically herself. 

I May Destroy You is a show about consent, a different way of organizing a moral code or framework. Simple enough, right? But the show constantly problematizes what counts as consent. What if you think your threesome is spontaneous but later find out it was planned without your knowledge? What if you agree to sex with another person, but something important about their identity is withheld? The framework of consent smashes into one concerned with transparency and things get nicely messy.

In Pose, where the characters, through necessity and desire, create a blended moral system of loyalty and competition and community care, Elektra rises as queen. She’s a nominal villain who can be interpersonally cruel and dismissive. She’s also willing to steal, to get in bed with the mafia, and to hide the body of a white john who overdosed in her dungeon. If the story were based on another moral framework, her powerful sense of vanity and high worth might result in a fall. But here, Elektra remains fundamentally loyal to her community and her sisters, and she closes out the series as a millionaire, getting away with every damned thing — and to viewers, it’s a triumph, a poetic justice. 

Examining the moral frameworks, the loyalties, and responsibilities (or lack of) can be a great way to get deeper into your characters. It can also make really interesting things happen in your stories when different frameworks clash. Do your characters’ codes differ from the story’s moral code? How do you create and hold that tension?

Prompt: Start with a character you’ve been working with and think about their values and their loyalties. Figure out how they make moral decisions and especially the ways their own framework diverges from your own. Now write a scene that pushes this character to violate their own moral code. Can you make them do it? Either way you’ll learn something about the character and you just might make something interesting happen plot-wise, too.

Bonus step two: So you’ve worked out a basic moral framework for your character. Now come up with a different framework in opposition to it. Basically, you had a character that you invented intuitively. Now try to do this backwards—see if you can come up with another system of loyalties,  motivations, and morals that is very different from the first one. You don't have to invent a whole character yet, but see if this method inspires one. If not, notice how it clarifies the framework you built for your first character.

Recommended Viewing/Reading: Wynona Earp, final season; Mare of Eastown; The 100; Chilling Adventures of Sabrina; I May Destroy You; Pose; The Good Place; “Some Foxes” by Helen Oyeyemi; "Tony's Story" by Leslie Marmon Silko; "Tender Thing" by Therese Marie Mailhot

Reflection: Certain genres have a built-in opportunity to examine moral frameworks — apocalyptic/survivalist narratives like The 100 and police dramas like Mare of Eastown come to mind — where a society’s expressed moral code can be judged from a new vantage point, under emergent circumstances. Regardless of your chosen genre, how can your characters’ moral framework reinforce or question the moral code of your readers, or your readers’ society? How can your characters make decisions that complicate your readers’ understanding of good or bad — or, better yet, help your readers start asking where those ideas of good and bad came from in the first place?

Send us your prompt responses and we may even share an excerpt of our favorites on Twitter & Facebook!

Minneapolis Storytelling Workshop is a joint project from writers Allison Wyss and Erin Kate Ryan. MSW celebrates the tiny weirdo inside you, and elevates your love of television and film into a literary endeavor.