I’m at 90,000 words, and it keeps improving and slowly growing – even though I’m taking things out. The Pale Folk have become the Painted Folk, and they have gone from a race of small pacifist craftsmen to a race of tinkers, rogues, and miners. I’m changing some names from some long-held placeholder names to more of a final form, which is exciting – if not a little confusing even for myself. It’s getting closer!
Category Archives: Character
The Lycanthropes…
…have arrived!
Check out the tab above titled “TIRRAN LYCANTHROPES” and tell me if it wets your appetite.
Sometimes there are just too many possibilities to decide what to do. This is still a rough graphic, but I think you get the idea.
The Lycanthropes are coming!
And I don’t mean those cheesy Twilight wolves or the werewolves from Underworld. I mean 3 different tribes of peoples who can (painfully) change from an animal form to human form and back at will.
Yes there are humans and other races around. These three tribes of peoples were created by a magical accident thousands of years ago. They are misunderstood, maltreated, and more importantly they have a long history of distrust between the tribes.
More details coming soon!
Inside out? Outside in?
Character creation. Some people love it, and some writers struggle with it. Remember this: the most excellent plot in the world, if it has no characters, is just an outline. A really good character study is a good read all by itself.
Most writers that I’ve mentored, taught, or reviewed seem to have an outside-in view of how to write a character. The character description in an email might read something like…
He has a little limp because he was injured in a fishing accident and nearly drowned when he was a kid. He has a really sharp white streak through is hair on one side – just because he was born that way and folks think he’s either blessed or cursed. He’s nearly 6′ tall, and weighs about 200 lbs. He likes to wear boots, and has a dog named Sam. He is easily upset and some people say he has a nasty temper.
Great. But what is the man really like? I usually get blank stares when I ask this. Look, you can’t judge a book by its cover, so why should I judge a character by a physical description? It tells me nothing about what he is inclined to do in any given situation, except somehow he might be hotheaded. Maybe.
Peel the skin off the onion. What kinds of reactions do people display in every culture, every language, every book you’ve ever read? There are universal constants you need to know about your character. What are his thoughts on politics? If he hears people discussing political questions is he more likely to roll his eyes and keep walking, or is he going to go on a meandering rant in an effort to try to persuade the people talking? What are his thoughts on religion? Is he really claustrophobic, or does he just say that in order to get out of doing stuff he doesn’t want to do? Why is it that he is described as a nobleman, yet he swears like a sailor (and how did that happen?)? Why? When? It’s all in the backstory, whether it needs to be expressed in the story you’re writing or not.
Another approach is to play it by the numbers. Literally. Some writers have attempted to write based on dice rolls as if they were playing a roll playing game (Dungeons and Dragons, and any other of the similar RPG nature). Is he going to turn left and try to find his friend, or is he going to go back to his room and order in a dinner? *dice roll* He goes back to get dinner. Why? *dice roll* Uhhh, I dunno. With a method like this you end up with a random series of misadventures, but decidedly not a plot. No thanks.
My approach to character development is inside-out. When I start considering a character, I literally put part of myself directly into the middle of an unfamiliar situation. You might call it daydreaming. I call it the act of just letting my id off its leash. Yeah, my id. Save your ego for the editing phase. Look it up (*footnote).
Let’s say I’m having a frustrated day. I may explore that a little bit and decide that I’m feeling angry, for instance. I let myself ponder what adventures an alter-ego angry guy would do. Why he’d start off pounding a half-bottle of whisky and then rolling downtown to see the mayor, that’s what he would do. And then he would try to get into that radio station to talk some sense into that disc jockey that just won’t shut up. And then he would go back to his hovel and print up lots of fliers on his computer (lots of them!), and then to hand these to everybody who hesitates just a moment too long on the sidewalk. Hell yeah, in front of City Hall, of course!
Ah, good. Angry guy has an agenda. What does he look like? Well, he’s just pounded a fifth, so he isn’t ready for ballroom dancing. He may walk with a limp because he bruised his leg last weekend when he got tased by a cop. His left boot also has an orthotic in it because it straightens out his leg a little better – but all it seems to do is to make his foot hurt, which makes him even angrier. He has a shock of white hair down the left side of his scalp because he used a chemical accidentally instead of a shampoo when he was a child. He hasn’t been able to trust shampoo since, unless he bought it himself. He’s been wearing the same blue jeans since Thursday because he can’t remember to buy laundry detergent when he walks by the store.
I really like angry guy. Now all I have to do find something for him to see in the mirror so I can draw the rest of his face, and figure out the rest of his crash pad. I think I’ll call him Mitch. For me, Mitch is a nemonic for ‘itch’, which is clearly what angry guy can’t quite scratch. Maybe he’s going to sober up long enough to run for governor. That might be entertaining! What has he done that he regrets? Probably nothing. What has he done that will not help him get elected? Oh, plenty….
(*) One of the best books ever for developing male characters is Iron John – A Book About Men, by Robert Bly. The allegedly educated sophisticates will pooh pooh the book, saying that the Ego and Id are discredited psychological constructs. Balderhockey! This book is a goldmine for jumpstarting a writer’s creativity. Read the book, and release your id.
Yeah, really.
Characters or Plot – which is more important?
I have to thank @kmweiland for getting me noodling along these lines again. Her tweet was asking just this question, as a question of the day.
My response (in more than 140 characters this time) is that a really well considered character study can still be a really fascinating read. I love writing back stories for people I see randomly in restaurants or in the stores.
Why is he limping? Why does that kid seem sick? Geez, how MANY bags of potato chips do you really need? When you ask yourself those questions, there are two things to do – either ask them out loud (which may garner some funny looks) or write them down and come up with your own fictional rationale for what’s going on a little later.
A really good plot on the other hand, is really just an outline. It might be a wonderful plot, never before seen by the mind of man, glistening with new promises of movies or maybe a broadway production. But without characters to develop, the plot is just… a framework. It’s the skeleton of the story without any of the meat.
So, I think it is sort of like a sandwich. The bread holds the good stuff inside. That’s the plot. It’s full of promise, but you really don’t want to taste just the bread. Sure, there are different flavors of bread and I love them all – but that’s not enough to make me sit up and take notice. Well, unless it’s fresh out of the oven, but that’s a different story. The good stuff is inside. The characters. And it is how those characters react to the plot (which must be somewhere in the mayo and mustard layers) that a really good sandwich is formed.
Yeah. I’m hungry. Sorry about that. But I like my analogy. =D
Where do you find characters?
I've taken a nearly 30-day hiatus from this blog while I got heavily involved in this writing project. I don't always multitask well, so I felt it was better to streamline the number of pots I was putting my fingers into in any given day.
I even abandoned Twitter for the duration, which was actually kind of a relief.
But that's not what you're here for, is it?
Characters: Where do you find them?
For today's thought, let's think about Serendipity.
I often go people-watching. I go with a purpose – not just to kill time. Most recently I was in a coffee shop / restaurant, and decided to grab a large coffee and sit for a bit. There were not many people in there at the time, so I selected a group of older women as my eavesdropping target and sat three tables away. They had scrunched three tables together, and were chatting away animatedly with gales of laughter and titters of giggles. This should be good, right?
I estimated that these ladies were in their 50s or so. For all I knew it was the leftovers of a church prayer breakfast, a community social, or maybe an extended group of long time friends.
I was fully expecting conversations about kids, grandkids, husbands, jobs, the economy, politics, or the weather. The bits of conversation I got initially were kind of confusing. I stared out a window so that I wasn't looking at them, letting their words draw pictures for me in the sky, listening to the banter and the occasional giggles.
"Well, when I got busted, it was not like that at all!"
What? These ladies were comparing arrest records and cop stories! I listened longer. There was a brief debate about some court procedures, and then the subject changed to an event they were planning. I had missed the meat of the conversation.
But it got me thinking, I certainly would not have expected that conversation – which brings me to the power of surprise. How many times have you written your fiction so that your characters always seem to be doing exactly what you would expect a person to do in that instance?
Real creativity lets you break out of conventional expectations and surprise people. It should be just as full of surprises as life itself.
