Archive for the 'Characterization' Category

Love Letters

Kate Elliott September 2nd, 2006

Many - most - maybe even all of us here at Deep Genre write character-driven fiction (I qualify that statement only because while I would like to presume to speak for the others, I can’t quite).

For myself, I can say that every one of my novels has its genesis in a vivid, visual, scene of a Character in a Situation. The landscape and the plot grow out of that original image and emotional tone.

Sometimes characters emerge organically out of the evolving narrative, sometimes they walk in from my unconscious and hit me over the head demanding to be included, and sometimes I will “build� a character who is needed due to the exigencies of the plot. In general, though, characters are who they are; in a perfect world, they are discrete individuals whose lives are intertwined with the landscape they “live� in.

Some among us now and then may invest a character with a bit of wish fulfillment. I’m not immune to this urge, and at times I indulge it cautiously and with (I hope) restraint. At the extreme, this is called writing a “Mary Sue� story, a subject that has been discussed earlier on Deep Genre here and here by Sherwood.

But there’s another kind of personalized character development that I want to call “The Love Letter.�
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Revising characters

Carol Berg August 21st, 2006

In the midst of finishing the Flesh and Spirit sequel by a totally impossible deadline, I am developing a workshop called “Writing Characters That Live� for the Surrey Writers Conference in October. And, of course, as I develop a new workshop, I rummage through other presentations I’ve done in search of “good bits.� So, I was reading the notes for my “Joys and Pitfalls of Revision Workshop,� and these bits fell out:

Now that you have completed a draft of your story, look at your lineup of characters, and ask yourself some questions.

For each major and secondary character

  1. What do you know about the character now that you didn’t know in the beginning? Allergic to water, deeply averse to killing, hankers after men with big feet? Often we add such details to explain or enrich some plot element. You can feed these new learnings into the earlier scenes so that the detail will be grounded and not seem like just a convenience (even though it was.) Your characters will be richer.

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6 More Things I Could do Without in Fantastic Literature & I don’t plan to use except to make fun of

Kevin Andrew Murphy August 14th, 2006

Just read Scott Lynch’s Eleven things I will serve my best never to put in a fantasy novel unless I am trying to undermine them, and in fact could do without entirely from now on, thanks.  It’s a great list and I agree with all the items on it.  But there are some I’d like to add, at least for myself:

1. Monsters that don’t eat children.

I’m sorry, but I have to ask–what’s not to like about children?  They’re small, tender, slow-moving, and are easily lured into gingerbread houses–how hard can it be?  Yes, fate, in the form of the author, may conspire against you, but that’s no excuse for not offing at least one child, even off stage in the past.  This goes double for horribly evil dark wizards who lead reigns of terror across the countryside only to have it all blow up in their face when they try to kill even one baby.  (Yes, this means you, Lord Voldymort, and tell the so-called “Wicked Witch” I said “Hi”).

Same problem, different day, with ancient evils, devils and demons who seem to be fans of The Godfather, starting out on their reigns of terror by killing family pets, then boring family retainers or dull recluses who no one would miss much anyway, then working up to the adults and still never quite getting around to the kids.  Hello, you’re supposed to be the Forces of Hell, not uptight Italian Catholics still vaguely concerned with getting into Heaven.

When the average nursery bogey has a higher bodycount than you, how do you expect anyone to take you seriously?

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Defining Story

Laura J. Mixon August 5th, 2006

Greetings, all, and thanks to the web hosts and my fellow authors for inviting me to play in this great sandbox. For my first contribution to this forum, here is an essay I recently wrote on the nature of story.

At its simplest, a story can be defined as a character in a setting with a problem. These are story’s subatomic particles, if you will. You’ll find exceptions, as storytelling is a highly subjective and idiosyncratic artform, but stories without a character, a setting, and a problem are about rare as anti-hydrogen.

Good stories both entertain us and have characters whose problems we care about. Great stories linger in our minds long afterward – because they strike a chord that resonates with us. That chord that rings in us when a story moves us — that gut-deep feeling, that “aha!” when we have read or watched something that just feels right somehow — is tied to its theme.

A theme can be expressed by a single sentence — a truism or cliche, even — that summarizes what the story is about. “Love conquers all.” ‘The best laid plans go oft awry.” “You can’t take it with you.” “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Chris likes to give the example of the Eensy Weensy Spider, a thirty-eight (!) word story whose theme is “Perseverance furthers.” A story whose theme can’t be summarized in a single sentence has no clear theme, and I can pretty much guarantee you that it’s a story that flounders. (Don’t worry if you don’t know your theme when you start out, however; writers often don’t know what it was about till after they’ve finished it…but if you have a completed or mostly completed work, it’s a useful exercise to see if you can work out its theme — or take some of your favorite works, and see if you can boil their themes down to ten words or less.)

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Mary Sue, Heroes, and Protagonists

Sherwood Smith July 22nd, 2006

Discussing Mary Sue characters seems to bring out anxieties–as if a writer is somehow doing something wrong by writing stories featuring characters with aspects that are always attributed to Mary Sues, such as beauty, ability, smarts, etc. Not true! We come to genre because we like heroic stories, or least I know I do. So I’m coming at the subject from the comparison angle. These are not even remotely critical tools so much as thought experiments–ideas to think about when we evaluate that story we’ve just written, or are contemplating writing. Or evaluating a book that might have worked, or almost worked, or definitely didn’t work for us because of the main character.
So for purposes of thought (or discussion) here’s the distinction that I see:

Protagonist. This is the main character. The main character might not have any saving graces, or only an attribute (Madame Bovary is beautiful, but there’s little to admire in her else, and she doesn’t come to a heroic end, but what the 19th C considered a “deserving” one); the protagonist can meander through a story rising or sinking or just plain going nowhere. You’re not guaranteed any resolution at all with a protagonist as the lead. The guys forever waiting for Godot are great examples of protagonists. Any story in which the main characters appear to be constrained to helplessness, repulsiveness and pointlessness might be said to contain protagonists.  Anti-heroes are sometimes also protagonists.
Hero. The hero may or may not have gifts–ability, brains, beauty, powers–but will have to fight to achieve success, or will die heroically. Winston Smith is a hero. So is Frodo. Neither of these “wins” in any sense, but when we finish the books they belong to, we think about their heroic battles. They did make a difference to those around them. The hero is challenged, has weak moments, changes. The hero does not walk confidently through the story always on the high moral ground, he or she has to reach for the right choice, fight for it, perhaps even struggle forward, always in doubt. But at the end there is resolution, the hero has grown, and has made a difference in his or her world.
Mary Sue. Never leaves the moral high ground–he or she is perfect all the way through. Dangers might come along, but the right power or the right tool comes just when it’s needed. Mary Sue is never really shaken, and thus, never grows. How can perfection grow? Instead, she accretes more and more power, attention, whatever, but inside she’s basically the same as when she started. Acorna, at least in the first book, is a classic example. Beautiful, kind, powerful, she moved sedately through her first story (I never read any of the others) collecting a posse and powers with the confident serenity of one who was born perfect and needs no challenge or change.

Of course there are books where it seems the lead partakes of qualities of all three. One could say that Lymond begins as a protagonist, and afterward veers between hero and Mary Sue: he always has the long view in mind, triumphs over every adversity, though there are costs–heroic costs–though otherwise he’s got all the attributes of Mary Sue: beauty, grace, smarts, talent, and a subcontinent-wide posse who talks about him endlessly, considering every move he makes. Flashman could be called a protagonist-hero, though satiric characters don’t comfortably fit into any model but that of satire.

The Dread Mary Sue

Sherwood Smith July 20th, 2006

For those who know what a Mary Sue is, skip to the next graf. Long ago in days of yore–AKA late sixties, early seventies–Star Trek fanfic proliferated across the country. Most of it written by women. And many of those women had not written much before their Trek stories, so their early ones–especially those written by teens, for example many of my friends–tended to produce a story roughly like this: a young, always brilliant, usually beautiful, ensign is assigned to the Enterprise. Kirk and Spock fall in love with her during the course of her madcap adventures. Meanwhile the entire crew is fascinated by her, she may or may not be kidnapped by Klingons or Romulans, but one thing for sure: she will save the Enterprise single-handed, a few planets along with it (if not the entire Federation) and then she departs, or dies artistically, and Kirk and Spock are devastated. (Those were the very early days when delicately raised young ladies couldn’t quite imagine what happens past the first kiss…or else could imagine it fine, but knew better than to put it down on paper in case nosy parents or teachers found it. ’twas bad enough that they wasted their time on that stupid sci-fi stuff in the first place!) There were so many versions of this same story that eventually the publishers of the fanzines said, “No more Ensign Mary Sue stories!”

Well, since then, the term Mary Sue (and sometimes Marty Stu or other variants for the guy version) has been incorporated into general genre writing talk. My problem is this. I’ve seen writers’ workshop people label as Mary Sues characters who are beautiful, or who are talented at something, leaving writers wondering if they are to people their stories with ugly clumsy dolts?

To my view, a Mary Sue is not always the most beautiful, but she is always the center of the novel–the center of attention, the plot revolves around her, the characters seem to have her at the center of their lives, and they talk about, and think about nothing else. But that’s just the first half of the Mary Sue equation. The second half is that she’s got the “mark” on her, that is, she is the Special One. She might have come from an abusive family, or is an orphan (few Mary Sues have had normal home lives) but something, whether a super-intelligent animal friend (horse, dragon, leopard, wolf, cat who takes one look at her, their souls bond forever, and the companion tells her she’s The One), or a Wise Old Mage, or a ghost lets her know she’s It. Or else she is born with a mark, or she’s given a special thing by an old granny, a witch, or a passing knight who conveniently drops dead right after. Anyway she subsequently gets her mega-mind-reading talent, or her wowza magical ability, or some sort of secret knowledge is handed to her. She doesn’t have to train, she just has to wish hard enough before that “breakthrough” at the climax where her powers become exponentially more powerful, and the Dark Lord is vanquished at the end, no matter how many centuries he’s been torturing entire planets every day before lunch.

A really brilliant writer can make a Mary Sue story work–see Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles. Lymond is a total Mary Sue, but readers love him anyway. Most of the time the Mary Sue novel is going to be a fun, relaxing read, but we always know, from the very first page, when she finds out she’s the Special One, that she’s gonna win in the end, and everybody will love her even more.

There’s nothing wrong with Mary Sues. They are usually morally upright, kind to animals and hapless rejects, they are always inclusive and other-aware, in fact, though they be bratty, and will certainly be maligned and misunderstood, they never step down from the moral high ground, and they promise to use their powers only for good. But Mary Sue does have one flaw: she’s a tough character to fit into a deepgenre novel. Unless, of course, one is as brilliant as Dorothy Dunnett.

Men, Sex, SFF

Kate Elliott July 13th, 2006

Constance writes, of Steve Barnes: For one thing, he’s one of the very few SF male writers with the ability to write romance-sex scenes without turning ludicrous!

Her comment got me to wondering:
Can male sff writers write good romance sex scenes? If so, why? If not, why not? Be persuasive.

Craft: POV and Style

Sherwood Smith June 29th, 2006

Dani asked about an article on POV I mentioned. I backtracked through a couple of links, and found the original source, which did not forbid copying. My assumption on public boards is that it’s okay to repost, with full attributions.

This article is quite long, so here’s just the first segment, on third person limited, and when it’s okay to break the rules:

AWP: The Writer’s Chronicle — Essays, Interviews, Articles, Inspiration

 

 

 

The Writer’s Chronicle

From Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance & Point of View in Fiction

Writing

David Jauss

September 2000

In his story “Hills Like White Elephants,� Ernest Hemingway places us at a table outside a train station in Spain. Sitting at the table beside us are a man and a woman who are waiting for the train to arrive, and for the bulk of the story, we eavesdrop on their conversation, just as we might in real life. And also just as in real life, we cannot enter into their minds; we can only hear what they say and see what they do. This objective point of view is called “dramatic,� for it imitates the conventions of drama, which does not report thoughts, only words and deeds.

Like a play, Hemingway’s story consists largely of dialogue. At first, the dialogue is the smallest of small talk—the man and the woman discuss what they should drink, etc.—but there is some tension between them, something unmentioned that lurks beneath their trivial conversation, and our interest is piqued. Two pages into this five-page story, the man finally broaches, however indirectly, the subject that is causing their tension: the woman is pregnant, and she wants to have the baby and he doesn’t. Though the man says repeatedly that he is “perfectly willing� to go through with the pregnancy, he is doing his best to pressure her into having an abortion. Eventually, his protestations of selfless concern for her wear out her patience, and she asks him to “please please please please please please please stop talking.� The conversation over, he picks up their suitcases and carries them to the other side of the station, and we follow him there.

At this point in the story, Hemingway momentarily abandons the dramatic point of view and tells us the man “looked up the tracks but could not see the train.� In this sentence, Hemingway reveals something that cannot be externally observed—what the man was unable to see—and so moves us a little way into his mind, reducing the distance between us and him ever so slightly. And two sentences later, Hemingway completes the segue that sentence begins, taking us even farther inside the character and reducing the distance significantly. He writes that the man “drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train.� Notice that word reasonably. This word violates the objective, dramatic point of view even more than the statement that the man did not see the train, for it tells us not just what the man sees—or, in this case, fails to see—but the man’s opinion about what he sees. Just as Hemingway could have written “He looked up the tracks� without going on to tell us whether or not the man saw the train, he could have written simply “They were all waiting for the train� without conveying the man’s opinion that they were all waiting “reasonably.�

If Hemingway had done this, he would have maintained consistency of point of view, and according to virtually every discussion of the subject I have ever read or heard, consistency of point of view is an essential element of good fiction writing. But for my money, the word reasonably is the most important word in the story and Hemingway’s shift in point of view is the single smartest move in a story full of smart moves. In the context of their argument over the abortion, this word implies that the man considers the woman unreasonable, unlike the people in the bar—and, of course, unlike him. This implication complicates the story considerably and thereby rescues it from potential melodrama. How does the word reasonably complicate the story? Although it’s clear that the man is trying to manipulate the woman into doing what he wants—all the while absolving himself of any responsibility for the decision—it isn’t clear whether he is consciously doing so. If he is, he would be a relatively simple villain, and the woman, who agrees to have the abortion, a relatively simple victim. The story would veer therefore in the direction of melodrama, which thrives on the simple, knee-jerk emotions that result from the mistreatment of victims by villains. But if the man believes what he is saying, then he is a relatively complex character, someone whose behavior stems from self-delusion, not one-dimensional villainy, and the story immediately becomes too complex to evoke the simple responses of melodrama. It is essential, then, that the reader knows what the man thinks about himself and the woman. If Hemingway had maintained the dramatic point of view throughout, as most commentators on point of view would recommend, we would never know whether the man was a conscious, Machiavellian villain or a self-deluded person. But Hemingway wisely shifts his point of view, twice moving into the character to reveal, with increasing depth, the man’s thoughts. In my opinion, this is a brilliant example of how a writer can use the technical resources of point of view to manipulate distance between narrator and character, and therefore between character and reader, in order to achieve the effect he desires.

If anyone finds this helpful, I will post more. (Next is a piece by Chekhov, and then it goes into various levels of omni)

If anyone finds this helpful, I will post more. (Next is a piece by Chekhov, and then it goes into various levels of omni)

If anyone finds this helpful, I will post more. (Next is a piece by Chekhov, and then it goes into various levels of omni)

If anyone finds this helpful, I will post more. (Next is a piece by Chekhov, and then it goes into various levels of omni)

Stupid Writer Tricks: Cast Your Characters

David Louis Edelman June 26th, 2006

Here’s a writing trick that’s so simple and so effective that I’m surprised I haven’t read it elsewhere. (And if it has been discussed elsewhere, someone post the link so I can give proper credit. I’m too lazy to Google for it.)

The trick is: cast all of the characters in your story with recognizable Hollywood actors as you write.

Why? The reason is very simple. It’s the easiest way to keep track of the details about your characters from eye and hair color to voice inflection and mannerism. After you’ve spent a month or two following an alternate plotline, by the time you return to the main story you may not remember what color the main character’s hair is, or whether the viscount’s sister’s brother-in-law was supposed to be skinny or fat.

But chances are you do remember what Sean Connery looks like with your eyes closed. You could describe Kevin Bacon circa Footloose or James Doohan circa The Wrath of Khan without any mental strain whatsoever. You know exactly how sassy Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio was in The Abyss, and how her voice sounded, and you probably have a good idea of how she’d react when confronted with a robot rebellion on the fourth moon of Xigg. (Mary Elizabeth, incidentally, was the model I used for a character in Infoquake. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know who.)

My first reaction when I thought up this technique was that it would inhibit the writer’s creativity. On the contrary, it sets you free to focus that creative brain of yours on more important matters. It’s just a mnemonic device to help you remember details. And with the wide range of recognizable Hollywood actors out there, you’re certain to find someone that you can cast for every character in your book.

Is this going to spoil your readers’ imaginations? Not at all. Obviously you’re not going to tell them who you’ve cast. And I defy you to write a description of any Hollywood actor that your readers will be able to recognize, without being given the name. (Okay, I’m sure there are a few. Danny DeVito. Gilbert Gottfried. John Candy.)

So go write a casting sheet for every character in your novel or short story. Yes, every single damn one, major or minor. And don’t worry, through the magic of the imagination, you won’t even have to pay any royalties.

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