Tag Archives: fantasy novel writing

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Thinking HARDER about characters

After writing last night’s post, I felt pretty good about the place I thought I’d gotten to. However, when I woke up and checked my Facebook, I noticed a nice little bit of feedback on my post. It pointed out that my conclusion about what change my character will undergo, is not a change. It’s an accomplishment. The offending bit from last night’s post reads:

It’s just a matter of understanding what the change ought to be. The main character starts out the book avoiding his innate magical skill. By the end, he has managed to learn how to harness some of the most powerful aspects of this magic. It’s pretty straight forward.

As an aspiring writer who did not spend a lot of time taking literature classes in college, I can’t tell you how hard it is to differentiate between “The change, growth, development for the character comes with the mastering of some internal turmoil, deep rooted assumptions, or personal landscape*” and some sort of personal achievement. These are very related things. Personal accomplishment, I think, is part and parcel of the broader character change.

So, the real question to answer is: How do the character’s motivations change over time? Then on to the question, How does this effect his personality? An accomplishment, on it’s face, isn’t likely to affect a change in the character’s motivation or personality. Although, it certainly could. To go back to Dune as an example, Paul Atreides becomes the kwisats haderach. There is accomplishment here, but the more important thing to note is that Paul becomes a different character. He reacts to things differently, thinks about things differently and sees them differently.

Another example, this one from the world of YouTube, (and if you’re a big enough nerd you should totally go and check this out), is a comedy web-series, now concluded, called the Guild. At the beginning of the series the main character is a total wreck. Uncertain, addicted to gaming, and her life is falling apart. By the end of the series, she has gotten control of all of this. She is sure of herself, has a steady job, and turns off the game (drops the addiction). From the perspective of a writer who is still developing skills, it could be easy to mistake this real change for accomplishment, thus applying the approach incorrectly to my own character development.

With all that rambling out of the way, what do I do now? As it turns out, I think I can still use the magic angle as the underlying impetus for the change. I’m not totally sure where the change will land him. I think I do actually need to finish drafting the work first before any decisions can be made. It’s going to be something more along the lines of coming to understand and accepting his new found role in the world and going on to embrace what it means. It’s going to take a lot of work and revision to get there and I will very likely be changing my mind on some of this once I get moving on it.

* This is a quote from the feedback I got.

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Thinking about characters

A week or two ago, I decided to focus on finishing the first complete draft of the book* instead of going back and strengthening the main character. I’m trying like hell to stick to that approach, however, I’m still trying to work out the main character as I do. As he’s present in these chapters, it’s pretty much unavoidable anyhow. Plus, it gives me the opportunity to put that character though different scenarios and see what works and what doesn’t. After all, I do have an idea about how I want to revise him, even if it isn’t the current focus of my energy.

With that in mind, I’m asking myself “How does one write a compelling character?” My book does have a few fairly well done characters, so I’m pretty sure my problem isn’t that I’m terrible at writing good characters. On the whole, I think I’m doing pretty well on that score. It’s more a question of why one character is not done well, but another is.

One thing about the main character I’m struggling with is how he changes through the book. How should he grow? What is the change he undergoes? As a writer who is still really trying to master the craft, this is a pretty daunting pair of questions. Lacking the skill and experience to tackle these, I simply omitted certain personality details and worked to bring those out in later chapters. It’s not that I realized this is what was happening, if I had, I wouldn’t have done it that way. It’s only upon reflection that I’m able to see I was attempting to use omission of personality as a proxy for real change. Now, it’s not that my problem isn’t fixable, it’s just a matter of understanding what the change ought to be. The main character starts out the book avoiding his innate magical skill. By the end, he has managed to learn how to harness some of the most powerful aspects of this magic. There’s the change. I can make it big, and it’s pretty straight forward.

Another problem I had with the main character is that I started out the concept with two characters, friends and war-buddies. One of them I imagined as a free-wheeling, drinking and womanizing ruffian. The other, was more of a buttoned-up noble-born stiff. Early on in the project, I made a major change to the back-story. I gave the noble-born the ruffian’s back story and made it the beginning of the book. This was actually a break-through change for the story as a whole. It gave the thing a starting point and some conflict to ignite the larger fight. However, I made a mistake, which was that when I dropped that back-story on to the noble-born, the personality traits associated with the original character had to go with. Since I chose not to do that, I ended up with a mis-matched and incomplete personality coming through on the page.

To take this discussion further, I hit the books to see what might be learned there. I’m not talking about books on writing or writing characters, I’m talking about other fiction I’ve read and what struck me as being a particularly good example of characterization. There are a number of good examples, but my first thought was Dune. It was a book where I was blown away at how strong virtually every character was, from the very moment they walked into the scene. A good case example is Dr. Yueh. Over the course of six pages, Frank Herbert manages to introduce and draw Yueh as a tormented and unwilling participant in the Baron’s plans to utterly destroy the Atreides. What’s super interesting about this approach is that Herbert basically tells the reader what’s coming. Yueh is cursing himself for what’s coming, without directly or explicitly saying what that is. The Doctor acts and thinks in terms of the context he’s in without holding back. Nothing is muted to protect that bit of information from the reader until the writer is ready to spring it on them. Now, this is the important point. Because Herbert is not trying to hide what Yueh is up to from the reader, it allows him to more completely draw the character, highlight his anguish at being thrust into this situation.

The takeaway in this? When it comes to characters, don’t hold back.

For my situation, I think the solution is to make the main character’s evolution much more targeted, focused on the magic. He is not an uncertain person, and should not read that way. I know the context and history and so it shouldn’t be a horribly difficult task to write the character using that context as a framework. Just like the Dr. Yueh example, this will give a much more natural feel to those situations where the character reacts in a particular way, which is explained by his back story, but isn’t quite known by the reader.

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* I have to call it a book now because it’s so close to being a full draft, I couldn’t rightly call it a story. Besides, I’m planning at least two more after, and in my mind, that’s the ‘story’.

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Thinking about the information dump (#3)

This is the last of my thoughts on the information dump, at least for a while. There is a third kind of info dump that you can land yourself in, again not bad or wrong, but it can be difficult to manage properly. This example tends to be strongly associated with fantasy, and has prevented me from being able to really get into a number of different books. Some of which came to me highly recommended and are, in fact, quite good. As a reader though, I just couldn’t get past the issue.

What I’m talking about I’ll call the ‘family’ info dump. There’s more to it than that, but that seems to be a common way you see the problem. What I’m talking about is in the beginning of a story, right off the bat, the author introduces half a dozen characters and tries to explain how their all related or not. There’s one example spinning through my head, but I can’t seem to dig up the reference, so instead I pulled a book off the shelf. Lo-and-behold, it’s got an example of what I’m talking about. Once again, I want to point out that having an information dump isn’t a deal killer, it can be done well, but it can also be done horribly. The sample I pulled is from a book called The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay. I never made it past the first chapter. As a reader, I actually need to be hooked by a main character in addition to the conflict, it’s just a quirk of mine, so books that start out with an ensemble generally don’t hold my interest long enough to get past the first chapter or two. That said, I have it on good authority this is an excellent book. My example starts on page 9 of the paperback copy I have, here is a quote:

“Dave Martyniuk stood like a tall tree in the midst of the crowd that was swirling like leaves through the lobby. He was looking for his brother, and he was increasingly uncomfortable. It didn’t make him feel any better when he saw the stylish figure of Kevin Laine coming through the door with Paul Schafer and two women. Dave was in the process of turning away- he didn’t feel like being patronized just then- when he realized that Laine had seen him.
“Martyniuk! What are you doing here?”
“Hello Laine. My brother’s on the panel.”
“Vince Martyniuk. Of course,” Kevin said. “He’s a bright man.”
“One in every family,” Dave cracked, somewhat sourly. He saw Paul Schaefer give a crooked grin.
Kevin Laine laughed. “At least one. But I’m being rude. You know Paul. This is Jennifer Lowell, and Kim Ford, my favorite doctor.”

The first thing I want to say about this is that it’s well written, packed with examples of good approaches to stuff, and if you must do an info-dump like this, it’s a good example of how to do it pretty well. That said, Guy Gavriel Kay is an excellent writer, and for folks like me, who are still trying to become excellent writers, introducing six characters in the span of less than 150 words is probably not going to go well. In the interest of full disclosure, I did have a difficult time with this.
First off, we’re introduced to Dave Martyniuk, which is a difficult name to pronounce in my head. I am stumbling on it right now. This made it hard for me to follow to begin with. Then we’re immediately introduced to Kevin Laine, interchangeably called Kevin, Kevin Laine, and Laine. That may be a neat trick in helping the reader to remember Kevin Laine, but it’s a lot of information when taken in context. So, I’ve been introduced to six characters and I’ve already forgotten three of them. When I get on to the next few pages, I’m not going to remember which one of the women are doctors, and whether or not it was Laine or Paul who had the crooked smile. So, if I’m not going to remember it all, then why give it all at once?
For me, personally, I approach my stories in such a way as to avoid the hell out of stuff like this. Maybe someday when my writing is a tight as this author’s, I might try to pull off an ensemble from the beginning of chapter one. For now, I pretend the reader is like Beorn in the Hobbit. I try to introduce no more than 1 or 2 characters at a time. In a single scene, this might get me up to six, but it’s spread across a chapter to give the reader time to digest the introduction. Ironically, in the Hobbit, Tolkien introduces thirteen characters all at once. Same end result though, you never get to know most of those Dwarves.