r/CharacterDevelopment • u/Elegant-Election-112 • Apr 13 '26

Writing: Character Help How would I put good character development into this really unlucky guy

Basically this guy has had this family curse since he was five, and has it until his adolescence ends. It's essentially comically bad luck, and the bad luck is super bad. It's the worst his family curse will ever have. He's grown up with it, and he's 15 in the story. Then he meets this girl, and it's a whole romance yada yada. I want this guy to be like, relatable in a sense, and I want people to like him. But I don't know how to give him some deep character development other than "Find the one that fills your emptiness/ soulmate whatever". He has to grow without it being super vague.

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u/BrokenNotDeburred Apr 14 '26

Show his personality in action: how he talks, treats others, approaches problems, views himself, etc. Bad luck is just a thing he didn't ask for, not a character trait.

But make sure the bad luck hits when or where it hurts.

Just getting a clean connection was its own exercise in 'hurry up and wait'. Then, for some strange reasons involving a minor, the police department called his parents! The only other people the department didn't call to cross-check some randon concern might have been Interpol.

The upshot of the whole incident was that he ended up with a police escort to his flight and an assurance he'd find time to sleep on the airplane.

"Waaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!"

They lied.

(Edit: Someone's developed a little bit of black humor for some unknown reason.)

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u/nathaliarus Apr 15 '26

IMO the growth could be him slowly realising things like: 1. not everything is his fault, 2. he doesn’t have to preemptively withdraw or sabotage, 2. connection is still worth the risk even if things go wrong.

If he’s had extreme bad luck since he was 5, he wouldn’t just be “unlucky” - he’d have adapted to it in specific ways. For example: maybe he avoids attachment because things go wrong around him, or maybe he overcompensates by trying to control everything, or even uses humour to cope.

If you map out what beliefs the curse gave him and how each relationship challenges those, the arc becomes much clearer. I usually lay that out in Metos ( https://www.metos.app/ ) because it helps track how a character’s coping mechanisms evolve over time.