Spoken like a gentleman
In an honest, fair, but stinging criticism of one of my early novels, Mr Stuart complained that all my characters talked like me. Sandra, in her post today, moans that she was once told all her characters 'run and jump the same way.' How we define our characters, how they differ from each other and how they react to the events of a novel is way to big a subject for a blog post, but I'm going to share some of my thoughts anyway.
Some writers create complex biographies for each of their main (and sometimes not so main) characters. These can be long studies - I've heard of combined character backstories that are longer than the finished novel. I don't do this. Some writers base their characters on people they know, or combinations of people they know. I don't do this either. Taking aspects of your friends and family, or people you interact with regularly, and incorporating those aspects into your written characters is all very well - it adds a sheen of believability to them - but it is just a sheen, a veneer. The hero is like my friend John* - he's a straightforward, no-nonsense guy; he uses words a certain way; he treats women a certain way; drives a particular kind of car. These are labels. They're ways that I see John. They're useful quick ways of identifying my hero. But they're not John, and they're not what makes my hero. My hero is likely going to take the whole book (or maybe series of books) to even begin to develop into a fully understood character. Maybe he'll always be enigmatic.
I guess it's part of the 'seat of the pants' writing style my laziness has forced me to adopt, but I like to develop my characters over the course of the book. Putting too much time and effort into establishing just who they are at page one (even if it's only in my own mind), strikes me as a misguided effort. Simple stereotypes are best here, otherwise your characters will be hard to identify with, and harder for your readers to remember (especially in an ensemble piece, where a lot of new faces jostle for your attention in the first few chapters). Those initial broad brush strokes can be built upon, adding in the details as the story develops.
It's the same in real life. Bad though it can be, we rely on our prejudices, generally using a few useful stereotypes to categorise people when first we meet them. As we spend time with them, get to know them better and remember their little foibles, mannerisms and so on, so we constantly update our mental picture. Their character grows.
In fiction, we have to manage this process, and cheat to make the reader want to keep reading. We are magpies, picking bits from here and there to build up a believable, engaging character. But do we have to know their history in great detail? I don't think so. In fact I'd say that the less you know about your characters the better. At least up to a point. It's useful, for instance, to know their name, and what sex they are (though not always - I got halfway through a novel before deciding that the main baddy would be much better as a woman than a man).
For example, my hero might be cruel and driven. He might react in a harsh and cynical way to the events unfolding around him as he works his way through the plot. This much I can decide before I start to write his story. But do I need to know that the reason for this is that he was beaten by his father when he was a child? Not unless he's going to end up either beating his own child, or (more poignantly) going against type to save another child from a beating. Likewise he might have a stutter, or a gammy leg, but unless both details are crucial to some aspect of the plot, I don't need to know them before I write the story. It's enough that he's a bit of a grump, I certainly don't need to know his shoe size or the grades he got in high school.
But I do need to know his voice, and this is where the real character development comes in for me. In my last SF book, one of the characters is an old Scottish engineer by the name of MacBride. He's a minor but pivotal character, and I just couldn't get his dialogue right. I wrote it fairly straight at first. Then I tried to do it in a broad Aberdonian accent, which was so bad I blushed with embarrassment when I read it through.
Finally I resorted to Stuart's tried and tested method of reading the dialogue out loud (which confuses the dachshund). Then I realised the problem: he was saying too much. This man was in hiding, in fear for his life. He never wanted to draw attention to himself, so his answers should have been monosyllabic, and he should rarely have initiated a conversation. Drawing him out should be like pulling teeth. His speech should have reflected the conflict between this years-long conditioning and the fact that he was also drawn to the main character - the son of the man who wanted him killed. He wanted desperately to know this boy, to try and save him from turning into the same man as his father. Tinkering with his accent was just peripheral to the whole dialogue tuning.
So, you say. You should have drawn your character more thoroughly, gone deeper into his backstory before you started writing him. What you've said earlier about making it up as you go along is a load of mouldy old dogwank. Well, yes and no. If I'd sketched him more thoroughly before starting, I would have invested far too much personality in a character who was not that important in the whole scheme of things, tempting me to make his part in the story bigger than it needed to be. And building him up beyond his core character description - old engineer, former friend and shipmate of {main baddy}, faked his own death to escape assassins, now hiding on Mars - wouldn't really have helped me to understand his speech patterns. I could only really do that once I'd placed him within the confines of the story itself.
And this perhaps is the point I'm trying to lumber towards, like some three-legged elephant in musth. You can't rely on combinations of your friends and acquaintances to give your characters depth - you'll only get mannerisms from them, little visual ticks that are like name-badges at conferences. Sure they tell you the name of the person talking, but they don't really tell you who they are. Neither can you go so deep into a character's soul that everything they do is mapped out, every response absolutely predictable. They're meant to be people, not robots.
To get your characterisation right, you need to grow your characters. You need to build up your understanding of them as you would any new acquaintance. And you should try to do this within the confines of the story as much as possible, rather than getting to know them intimately before you embark on the adventure. Otherwise you run the risk of analysing them to pieces, of needlessly complicating your plot so that you can demonstrate how well-rounded and explainable they and their actions are. You run the risk of knowing them so well that you forget that your readers don't know them at all.
I expect a lot of people to disagree with me. Most of them will be successfully published authors and you should listen to them, really.
And there's no prize for guessing what word I want to appear prominently in my next blog cloud (should I ever be moved to do one). It is a poetically descriptive word that I think more people should use in everyday conversation.
* No, not him. Never met the man. This is a different friend called John - an imaginary friend called John, used for the purposes of example.
Some writers create complex biographies for each of their main (and sometimes not so main) characters. These can be long studies - I've heard of combined character backstories that are longer than the finished novel. I don't do this. Some writers base their characters on people they know, or combinations of people they know. I don't do this either. Taking aspects of your friends and family, or people you interact with regularly, and incorporating those aspects into your written characters is all very well - it adds a sheen of believability to them - but it is just a sheen, a veneer. The hero is like my friend John* - he's a straightforward, no-nonsense guy; he uses words a certain way; he treats women a certain way; drives a particular kind of car. These are labels. They're ways that I see John. They're useful quick ways of identifying my hero. But they're not John, and they're not what makes my hero. My hero is likely going to take the whole book (or maybe series of books) to even begin to develop into a fully understood character. Maybe he'll always be enigmatic.
I guess it's part of the 'seat of the pants' writing style my laziness has forced me to adopt, but I like to develop my characters over the course of the book. Putting too much time and effort into establishing just who they are at page one (even if it's only in my own mind), strikes me as a misguided effort. Simple stereotypes are best here, otherwise your characters will be hard to identify with, and harder for your readers to remember (especially in an ensemble piece, where a lot of new faces jostle for your attention in the first few chapters). Those initial broad brush strokes can be built upon, adding in the details as the story develops.
It's the same in real life. Bad though it can be, we rely on our prejudices, generally using a few useful stereotypes to categorise people when first we meet them. As we spend time with them, get to know them better and remember their little foibles, mannerisms and so on, so we constantly update our mental picture. Their character grows.
In fiction, we have to manage this process, and cheat to make the reader want to keep reading. We are magpies, picking bits from here and there to build up a believable, engaging character. But do we have to know their history in great detail? I don't think so. In fact I'd say that the less you know about your characters the better. At least up to a point. It's useful, for instance, to know their name, and what sex they are (though not always - I got halfway through a novel before deciding that the main baddy would be much better as a woman than a man).
For example, my hero might be cruel and driven. He might react in a harsh and cynical way to the events unfolding around him as he works his way through the plot. This much I can decide before I start to write his story. But do I need to know that the reason for this is that he was beaten by his father when he was a child? Not unless he's going to end up either beating his own child, or (more poignantly) going against type to save another child from a beating. Likewise he might have a stutter, or a gammy leg, but unless both details are crucial to some aspect of the plot, I don't need to know them before I write the story. It's enough that he's a bit of a grump, I certainly don't need to know his shoe size or the grades he got in high school.
But I do need to know his voice, and this is where the real character development comes in for me. In my last SF book, one of the characters is an old Scottish engineer by the name of MacBride. He's a minor but pivotal character, and I just couldn't get his dialogue right. I wrote it fairly straight at first. Then I tried to do it in a broad Aberdonian accent, which was so bad I blushed with embarrassment when I read it through.
Finally I resorted to Stuart's tried and tested method of reading the dialogue out loud (which confuses the dachshund). Then I realised the problem: he was saying too much. This man was in hiding, in fear for his life. He never wanted to draw attention to himself, so his answers should have been monosyllabic, and he should rarely have initiated a conversation. Drawing him out should be like pulling teeth. His speech should have reflected the conflict between this years-long conditioning and the fact that he was also drawn to the main character - the son of the man who wanted him killed. He wanted desperately to know this boy, to try and save him from turning into the same man as his father. Tinkering with his accent was just peripheral to the whole dialogue tuning.
So, you say. You should have drawn your character more thoroughly, gone deeper into his backstory before you started writing him. What you've said earlier about making it up as you go along is a load of mouldy old dogwank. Well, yes and no. If I'd sketched him more thoroughly before starting, I would have invested far too much personality in a character who was not that important in the whole scheme of things, tempting me to make his part in the story bigger than it needed to be. And building him up beyond his core character description - old engineer, former friend and shipmate of {main baddy}, faked his own death to escape assassins, now hiding on Mars - wouldn't really have helped me to understand his speech patterns. I could only really do that once I'd placed him within the confines of the story itself.
And this perhaps is the point I'm trying to lumber towards, like some three-legged elephant in musth. You can't rely on combinations of your friends and acquaintances to give your characters depth - you'll only get mannerisms from them, little visual ticks that are like name-badges at conferences. Sure they tell you the name of the person talking, but they don't really tell you who they are. Neither can you go so deep into a character's soul that everything they do is mapped out, every response absolutely predictable. They're meant to be people, not robots.
To get your characterisation right, you need to grow your characters. You need to build up your understanding of them as you would any new acquaintance. And you should try to do this within the confines of the story as much as possible, rather than getting to know them intimately before you embark on the adventure. Otherwise you run the risk of analysing them to pieces, of needlessly complicating your plot so that you can demonstrate how well-rounded and explainable they and their actions are. You run the risk of knowing them so well that you forget that your readers don't know them at all.
I expect a lot of people to disagree with me. Most of them will be successfully published authors and you should listen to them, really.
And there's no prize for guessing what word I want to appear prominently in my next blog cloud (should I ever be moved to do one). It is a poetically descriptive word that I think more people should use in everyday conversation.
* No, not him. Never met the man. This is a different friend called John - an imaginary friend called John, used for the purposes of example.
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