Category Archives: Characters

Mar 10

Nuffin’s Tougher than a Hufflepuffer

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Hufflepuffs can be hard to write.

Witness what happened to Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which, though not written by J.K. Rowling, did involve her. While not going into spoilers, let’s say that he ends up acting very out of character with how he’s portrayed in Goblet of Fire, for what seemed to me inadequate cause.

Let’s take a step back, though, and ask: what do the four Hogwarts houses represent, anyway? People who take the online Sorting Hat test often seem to think that they are human archetypes, like Myers-Briggs types, the Ennead, the Four Humours (and its variations), star signs, or any other made-up way of describing human difference. None of those things have much psychological rigour, if any at all, though they do correspond to some realities of the way human characteristics clump together.

I’d maintain that, although there’s an aspect of truth to the “human archetypes” idea, the houses are also story archetypes. Very broadly, Slitherin is the antagonist (scheming and ambitious); Ravenclaw the advisor (eccentric and knowledgeable); Griffindor of course the hero (courageous and of good intent); and Hufflepuff the sidekick (reliable and honest).

Hufflepuffs can be hard to write, or at least, hard to write interestingly. They’re even harder to write as the protagonist, because we’ve been conditioned to think of our protagonists as flashy, dramatic, angsty. It’s as if you tried to write Lord of the Rings with Sam in the Frodo role.

At the same time, the more I see of the world, the more I’m convinced that without Hufflepuffs we’d be in a lot more trouble than we are. They’re the people who just turn up and do their job right, whether anyone’s watching and applauding or not (and usually they’re not).

Again: hard to write that interestingly. But it can be done, and I’m committed to doing it.

One of the ways in which it can most easily be done is in a romance. There are a number of different types of romantic hero, but one of them is the Reliable Guy. Romance is largely (certainly not entirely) written by and for women, and the Reliable Guy appeals to many women who’ve been disappointed by men–often men of other romance hero types, like the Ambitious Bastard (Slytherin), the Impractical Self-Absorbed Loser (Ravenclaw), or the Flashy, Angsty Dude Who Thinks It’s All About Him (Griffindor). The only downside to the Reliable Guy is that he’s not very exciting, and if you can overcome that issue, he’s romance dynamite.

One good way to overcome the not-exciting issue is to make the Reliable Guy a competent protector against an external threat. I’ve just been reading a couple of books by T. Kingfisher, Swordheart and Paladin’s Grace, both of which feature romance heroes who are Reliable Guys with a military background who can, and do, physically protect the heroines (women who have previously had unsatisfactory relationships with a Vague Loser and an Ambitious Bastard respectively). Both books are primarily romance, with a sword-and-sorcery B plot providing the complications so necessary to a good romance. But also, both go beneath the surface of the Reliable Guy to show that he does, in fact, have a good deal of angst and trauma going on, he just doesn’t let it keep him from doing his job. This is a remarkably effective approach to the Reliable Guy.

I’ve written a couple of Reliable Guys myself. Patient, the romance hero in Hope and the Patient Man, is a craftsman who takes pride in his work, and just the kind of gentle, kind, persevering Reliable Guy the brilliant and capable, but haunted, heroine Hope needs to get her through her issues. Perse (short for Perseverance; people in my setting are largely named for admirable qualities, and the naming is often, though not always, accurate) in Underground War is also a craftsman of a sort, a baker, and is, again, just the kind of solid anchor that the brilliant and capable Precision needs in order to overcome her trauma. Both of them have their own issues: Patient has a simmering anger that, in a later book, bursts out unexpectedly, and Perse has experienced rejection within his family and his culture over his choices, something that Precision can also relate to. They’re not simple beasts of burden (as the Rolling Stones might put it). There’s conflict and struggle going on under the placid exterior.

And this, I think, is a significant part of the secret to pulling off a Hufflepuff hero. He has layers. He’s no longer just a sidekick, uncomplainingly backing up the hero like the bass player in a band that’s named after the lead singer. He’s now in the centre of the narrative, and as such, he needs–and can easily have–a backstory and some struggles and losses. What makes him the Hufflepuff is that he’s never going to give you up, never going to let you down, never going to run around and desert you. What makes him the hero, though, is that the author is going to pound on that quiet determination as hard as they can, taking special care to hit the spot where he was wounded.

I’ve been talking as if women can’t be Hufflepuffs, which is obviously not true. I personally gravitate to both reading and writing about competent, pragmatic women who will just get on with things with a minimum of outward drama; I can’t be having with princesses. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have plenty of internal drama, imposter syndrome, worry that the Reliable Guy won’t respect you if you show him your vulnerable side, doubt that he could possibly like you (especially if he finds out the ways in which previous men have told you you’re inadequate and don’t matter and you somehow believe them despite knowing that they’re lying bastards…) A question that seems to come up a lot for Hufflepuff women is “What if I disappoint people? That will be terrible!”

It also comes up for men, though in a slightly different formulation. The hero of Paladin’s Grace says at one point: “She can’t rely on me, all right? And being reliable is all I’m good for.”

The big fear for a Hufflepuff is falling apart, failing to do your duty because of your issues. This makes them emotionally guarded. They come across as unemotional, because if they let themselves show emotion they might not be able to stop, and then who would keep the important wheels turning?

But if they’re a protagonist, if you get inside their heads, you see that vulnerability alongside the toughness. And it’s this play back and forth between the inward chaos and the outward order, along with that order being slowly imposed on external threats, that makes a Hufflepuff interesting.

Griffindors are easy to make interesting, because they’re interesting on the outside. You don’t even need to go below the surface. They’re the kind of people that everyone looks at when they walk into the room, and they expect to be looked at. That can be a trap for authors, who think that casting a Griffindor (handsome, athletic, courageous, charming, and probably wealthy) as the hero is as much work as they need to do, that character development is unnecessary because they’re pretty to look at, and that readers will easily forgive them being self-absorbed, high-handed and willing to let the costs of their bad decisions fall on other people. Or that casting a Griffindor princess (beautiful, intelligent–or so we’re told, though very seldom shown–dramatic, and special) is likewise adequate, without giving the reader any other reason to like or respect her, such as having her make good decisions or treat other people with consideration. For me, as a reader, seeing characters like this in the lead roles of a romance is a guaranteed fail.

But give me a good pair of Hufflepuffs mortally afraid of disappointing each other, and we’re off to the races. Lindsay Buroker is good at them, too (particularly in the Emperor’s Edge novels, but really in all her work); so is Lois McMaster Bujold, on occasion. For me, it’s a winning formula, and one I want to explore more in my own work.

Mar 03

Characters are like onions

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According to Shrek, ogres are like onions. They have layers.

But that’s not just true of ogres. Characters in general have layers, and how many layers we get to see is correlated–or rather, should be correlated–with how important the character is in the story.

Let’s dive down through the layers and see what we find.

0 – Background Characters

In a movie, these would be extras, hired cheaply for the day to stand or move around in the background, doing completely predictable things that don’t influence the plot at all, simply in order to make the world seem populated. In a Peter Jackson movie, many of them might be procedurally generated by a computer to perform the same function. They don’t say anything (unless they are a mob chanting in unison); they have no individuality; they are essentially human (or human-adjacent) scenery. In a book, they’re likely to be mentioned briefly with a collective noun, or even implied by a phrase like “the crowded streets”.

1 – Incidental Characters

These are the people who, in a movie, might be credited (if they’re lucky) as “Thug #2” or “Woman in Hat”. They have just enough individuality to mention in one or two sentences in a book, but they don’t have names, lines, or much in the way of plot function except as a brief hindrance or help to the more important characters, if that. Like the background characters, they do things that are predictable, completely in line with their type of character. Thug #2 will loom menacingly, draw a weapon, and get taken out by the hero in a second. Woman in Hat will go to cross the street just when the runaway bus is bearing down and provide a moment of extra tension as the hero snatches her out of danger. Or similar levels of interaction, depending on your genre and story needs.

2 – Speaking Incidental Characters

The movie makers will have to pay these characters union scale, because they have a line or two. They’re still fully predictable, with nothing to them that isn’t from either their character archetype or their role in the plot. Their lines will be unremarkable, conventional, and serve no more purpose than to move things along, giving the main characters a minor bit of information or a brief hindrance to their pursuit of their goals. They probably don’t get a name, just a brief description that assigns them to a type, and they would be interchangeable with any other character of the same type.

3 – Minor Characters

Here we reach the point where a skilled writer can start to shine. Someone like P.G. Wodehouse, Charles Dickens or Roger Zelazny can, sometimes in the space of a sentence or two, give us a minor character who is both a recognizable type and also an individual. You get the sense that they have opinions, a point of view, things that they want and care about; these might or might not have some direct impact on events, but they will drive the character’s behaviour. These aspects of their character are usually still entirely conventional–they’re like Tolkien’s description of the Bagginses at the start of The Hobbit: you can know what their opinion will be on any subject without going to the trouble of asking them. But in the best case, that’s a tribute to the skill of the writer in summoning up a character who is much less like a plot point and more like a person, rather than a reflection of the fact that the writer has just written a stereotype.

This level of characterization, then, is where you can start to tell the skill level of the writer. Some writers won’t show the ability to go any deeper than this; even their main characters won’t have anything to them that isn’t part of their archetype or necessary for the plot, and that makes the characters feel flat and predictable.

I’ve been reading a lot of early Wodehouse lately, and honestly most of his main characters don’t get a whole lot more depth than his minor characters, but his minor characters get more distinctiveness than most other people’s minor characters achieve; they’re instantly memorable. Usually, they have something particular about them, something that individualizes them within their type, whether it’s an oddity of their appearance, a mannerism, a skill, a preoccupation, or even a thematic association. For example, in Sam in the Suburbs (link is to Project Gutenberg, where you can read it for free), Mr Cornelius, the house rental agent, is introduced as follows: “He was a venerable old man with a white beard and bushy eyebrows, and he spoke with something of the intonation of a druid priest chanting at the altar previous to sticking the knife into the human sacrifice.” This druid imagery recurs each time Mr Cornelius appears. It has no relevance to his role in the story, which is to let Sam a house and also be the occasional backgammon partner of Sam’s neighbour and boss, and a secondary witness to some events, but it enriches his character and makes him memorable.

Giving minor characters something, anything, that isn’t directly relevant to the story goes a long way to flesh them out and make them feel like people with their own stories that just don’t happen to be at the centre of this story being told right now. I’m thinking of the medical examiner in the TV show The Mysteries of Laura, or for that matter the medical examiner in Elementary; either one could have just been a functionary, a mouthpiece for forensic information that the main characters needed in order to pursue their investigations, but both were enriched with hints that they had a life outside of work, personal peculiarities that didn’t bear in any way on the plot. It only takes a sentence or two of dialog to establish this kind of thing, and you’ll get a lot of payback from those couple of sentences in your reader’s engagement with the character.

Matthew Mercer of the streaming D&D show Critical Role is a master of the minor character. At one point, one of the player characters, who has a magical necklace that lets her speak to plants, addresses a clump of crabgrass in a location where events have occurred that the party wants to know more about. Apparently out of nowhere, Matt improvises Henry Crabgrass, and in no more than three minutes of interaction (starting here; spoilers for earlier in Campaign 2), creates a beloved fan-favourite character. One of the cast even dressed as Henry for the same year’s Halloween episode, when all the cast members dressed as characters other than the ones they played. Part of the secret is Matt’s voice-acting talent; he creates a distinctive voice for Henry. But he also creates a personality, a being who insists on the importance of consent before touching and who has a sense of wonder about his own awakening consciousness. It’s a masterclass in how to make a minor character interesting and memorable.

4 – Secondary Characters

Secondary characters are not protagonists, but they often show a degree of agency that shapes events, hindering or helping the main characters. The story is not usually narrated from their viewpoint, even if the viewpoint shifts around; but it can be, especially if they do something or experience something important in a scene that the main characters are not present in.

Because they typically play an important role in the resolution of the plot, and because of their clearly defined relationship with the main character–sidekick, foil, minor antagonist, or whatever it may be–a danger with secondary characters is that they will, once again, be nothing more than their archetype plus their plot role. Giving secondary characters their own arc of development, change, or pursuit of what they desire takes comparatively little extra work; it doesn’t require whole chapters, just a paragraph here and there. If you give them a viewpoint moment, you can include some interiority, some reflection on who they are, what they want, what they care about, why they are helping or hindering the main character. You can also do that in dialog, of course.

The skills you develop in creating memorable minor characters are also applicable to secondary characters, but what is a quirk or a fun fact about a minor character should be more than that in a secondary character; it should get a bit of development, even if it’s just two or three extra mentions that add context.

Secondary characters can even have contradictions within themselves, something that minor characters usually can’t sustain. We see enough of the secondary character that we can perceive the underlying unity that lies beneath the apparent contradiction, and believe that Ron Weasley can be both an intensely loyal sidekick and someone who can abandon his friends at a key point in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or that Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities can be unable to improve himself for his own sake and yet will sacrifice himself for someone else. We see enough of the mechanism, the development and drive, the forces acting on the secondary character that we can tell why they would do two things that, in a minor character, would seem completely incompatible, and that gives us the sense, in turn, that this is a person and not just a cardboard cutout. Because people act in contradictory ways all the time; we see it in others and, if we have any self-insight at all, in ourselves.

That’s not to say that a secondary character can’t be completely consistent. Samwise Gamgee is only ever loyal; that’s his role (which makes it all the more powerful when Frodo, under the influence of the Ring, believes Gollum’s allegations that Sam has his own sinister agenda). Sam’s development is in what he is willing to do because of his loyalty, and what he believes himself capable of doing; from listening under the window of Bag End to fighting orcs and a giant spider and carrying his master through Mordor.

5 – Main Characters

Typically, we see main characters from the inside, at least to a degree; they have a viewpoint, either first or close third person, or (mainly in older books) the omniscient narrator shows us their thoughts, feelings, and motivations. That’s not possible in film, so main characters in movies have to have actions and dialog that clearly conveys who they are and why they do what they do, if the movie is not to break down into incoherence.

A main character wants something. They have opinions and preferences. Not every story will show them acting on those desires, opinions, and preferences in an effective manner that makes a difference to how things turn out (see my post on Genre Through the Lens of Agency), but if we’re to believe in them as if they were real people, we should see them making choices based on the interior forces that drive them, as well as the external events of the plot.

It’s perfectly possible, and in some genres (such as action-adventure) even expected, to write a main character without a lot of interiority. That’s not to say that characters from every genre are not enriched by gaining some interiority, and even some contradictions. I’m often disappointed when I read a book where the main characters have no more depth than a minor character, and less individuality than better authors’ minor characters; they’re barely described, any description is entirely conventional, and nothing about them departs from their basic character template. I sometimes dismiss highly conventional, completely expected books as “made from box mix,” and these characters are not only made from box mix but cut out with cookie cutters. They don’t have enough layers, to return to my original metaphor. They’re completely superficial, unexplored.

Again, in some genres you can get away with this; your readers are not looking for deep characterization. But adding a few layers to your characters is not an especially difficult skill if you’re an observer of human nature, and it can enhance your writing out of proportion to the number of words it requires.

Characters who are restricted to their types are not always flat, and sometimes (for example, in literary fiction or some forms of comedy) their inability to step out of their type, to individualize, exert agency over their circumstances, and go their own way, is part of the point the author is making. It’s a tricky balance to write a type-bound character who isn’t flat and uninteresting, and the usual way to do it is either to go all in on the oddities (the usual comedy approach) or else convey the intensity of the emotion they feel about their situation (the usual literary approach). If the comic writer fails to amuse, or the literary writer fails to engage the reader’s imagination, the result is failure. In other genres, there’s a much greater expectation that the main character will be able to transcend their origins and go beyond their stereotype, though sometimes (the blacksmith’s boy who is the hidden Chosen One in epic fantasy, for example) that is itself a cliché.

My point is that there’s always the opportunity to add another layer to your characters, whether that be making your minor characters memorable as individuals, giving your secondary characters an arc of development and some interiority or contradiction, or sinking a little deeper into the minds and emotions of your main characters and showing them being more than just their archetype.

Jan 25

Do we still need villains?

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My wife and I just watched the movie Cruella, and it struck me that it’s the latest of several retellings in which classic villains – all of them women – are retconned out of villainy. Maleficent was another; Wicked was perhaps the first, or the first well-known, example, and provided the template.

What also struck me, though, was that Cruella moved the villainy just one step back, giving us a different female villain, a new character, who was pretty similar to how Cruella was originally portrayed. Maleficent straightforwardly makes the male hero of the original story into the villain. Wicked (which, let’s remember, is not a Disney movie like the other two) relocates the villainy in a somewhat more complicated way, to the Wizard (who was, if not an outright villain, at least a dubious character and a fraud in the original Oz story) and, to a lesser extent, other collaborators in the Wizard’s dystopic rule, some of whom are women. All three movies still have villains; they’re just not the same people who were the villains in the original stories. Elphaba in Wicked is not simply a hero, either, though she is a protagonist.

We’re currently seeing a redefinition of heroes and villains in history as well as in classic children’s stories. Statues set up to celebrate people (usually men) of an earlier age are being targeted for removal, based on the actions and attitudes displayed by those men during their lifetime. Other people you haven’t heard of before (usually women) are being newly celebrated. To be clear, I’m not saying that this reassessment is a bad thing, though I do think it gets carried too far by some of its proponents in a few cases.

There’s a certain mindset that always looks for heroes and villains in life, as in art. It simplifies the moral landscape, and lets us know whether we should be supporting or opposing someone. The problem is, following this mindset makes it too easy for us to support actions by our heroes that, if they were done by someone else, would strike us as villainous, and vice versa.

And it’s easy (though similarly reductive) to blame art for this. If the fiction we consume is always divided clearly into black and white hats, how can we break out of that mindset when thinking about real people? But there’s also the argument that the reason this is so prevalent in art is that it’s so prevalent in how people think in real life; it’s how we want to believe the world works. Probably cause and effect go both ways. Limited plaudits go to the writers of the movies mentioned above for calling into question exactly who is a hero and who is a villain, though the plaudits are limited because they still retain the hero-villain divide clearly and strongly; they’re not breaking down the divide, just moving people from one side of it to the other.

But do we need to have villains at all? Tina Turner memorably told us that we don’t need another hero; do we need another villain?

Now, I’m as guilty as anyone of putting straightforward heroes and villains into my art, though I hope that in recent years, at least, I’ve started giving at least the heroes more nuance, showing more of their flaws. They still choose to do the right thing, or what they believe to be the right thing, most of the time, but sometimes they’re tempted not to, and sometimes they yield to that temptation in a moment of weakness, and sometimes along the way they make an honest mistake that they and other people end up paying for.

My villains are less nuanced, in part because they’re usually off screen and never (as far as I can recall) get to be viewpoint characters. It’s something I’m aware of as a weakness in my writing.

I’m put in mind here of the brilliant YouTube comedian Ryan George’s “Pitch Meeting” videos:

“And what’s this character’s deal?”

“Oh, he’s evil.”

Hollywood (which is what George is satirizing) doesn’t need to dig any deeper than that. But what if we did?

It’s quite possible to have an antagonist without having a villain, especially if you show their point of view. I recently read an excellent book which goes some way towards this: The Mask of Mirrors, by M.A. Carrick. At least initially, the viewpoint characters all have agendas which are at cross purposes, and they are, at least partially, each other’s antagonists as a result, though none of them is unequivocally a villain; because we get their viewpoint, we see why they are doing things that we might not completely approve of. (At the same time, there are a couple of unequivocal villains in the book, and the viewpoint characters eventually unite to take them on.)

You don’t even necessarily need a personal antagonist to tell a good story, though it helps. We’re currently in the midst of collectively striving against a natural phenomenon, and that’s a powerful story, though somehow we manage to fight among ourselves about that as well.

The question I’m groping towards is: can we (can I) tell stories that show us a more three-dimensional set of characters, driven by personal flaws and incorrect beliefs as much as by their ideals, clashing in complicated ways? And can we (can I) do that without simply declaring morality illusory and writing an entire cast of grimdark alienated bastards?

While I’m at it, can it be funny? I’ve been reading a lot of early P.G. Wodehouse lately (not all of which was comedic), and appreciating his comic gift, and reflecting that I don’t necessarily want to write something dead serious just because we’ve always been told that serious books are more worthy. I don’t get paid much to write, so I ought to at least have fun doing it.

Wodehouse’s characters are often at odds, too, not because some of them are morally evil but because all of them are human. Also, in his later and better-known works, Wodehouse often pulled off the startling feat of making objectively very low social stakes among a privileged elite matter to the reader, but in at least some of his early work, there were characters who, by chance or even because of moral principle, found themselves in economically difficult straits and had to deal with that, and the unfair nature of the world, as best they were able.

I’m left wondering if I can create a fictional world where things matter, and where people clash, but nobody is unequivocally evilbadwrong and most people have a sense of humour about things, and maybe when the mix-up is sorted out we can all have a laugh together.

Nov 16

Letting Characters Be Themselves

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My wife and I have been watching the ITV Sherlock Holmes adaptations that were made between 1984 and 1994. We’ve watched them slightly out of order, because a few of them are longer and we left those to the weekends, so the last one for us was the final episode of the 1993 series. They didn’t end up adapting all of the stories; Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes, unfortunately died in 1994. But towards the end, the “adaptations” became less and less faithful to the originals, with more and more interpolated new material created by the writers from whole cloth.

I’m not sure why writers do this. It seldom works, because apparently it’s extraordinarily difficult for a writer to add to another writer’s work without distorting it out of all recognition (looking at you, Peter Jackson). In the case of the episode we watched at the weekend, “The Eligible Bachelor,” it was based on two different (unrelated) Holmes stories, but more than half of it was completely new material. That new material gave Holmes mystical theories; actual premonitory dreams; a scene where he put his arms around a woman to comfort her with no evidence of awkwardness; and a mention by Watson that Holmes very much admired the same woman’s mental abilities. It also had Watson betraying his Hippocratic oath (leaving an injured man, albeit a villain who Watson himself had injured while rescuing a lady, to be killed by a leopard). And it gave the rescued lady a cliched too-stupid-to-live scene where she went alone to confront a man who she knew had killed at least one woman before, without having told anyone – including her highly capable husband – where she was going, for no good in-story reason.

Holmes fanfic is the oldest fanfic, or so I’ve heard, and there’s a lot of it. A surprising amount of it – and I include the often enjoyable but occasionally clunky series Elementary in this – gives us an out-of-character Holmes of one kind or another. He’s kinder, more empathetic, more humane, romantically involved (often with Watson, fanfic being what it is), emotionally vulnerable… all the things that classic Holmes, Conan Doyle’s Holmes, is not.

I recently read not quite half of Dave Eggers’ The Every. I stopped because the humour, while well done, was too dark for me, and the story both dystopian (which is never to my taste) and deeply pessimistic about both technology and humanity (which is very much not where I am philosophically). One minor scene in the book, which is set in a successor to the current tech giants which has implausibly gained a monopoly over social media, search, e-commerce, publishing, the making of smart devices and basically everything else, involves a project in which people rewrite (by committee) classic novels. Research has shown the instigator of this terrible idea that there are certain spots where a lot of people stop reading these novels, often because they don’t like something a character does. So the characters are rewritten to be more likeable, more in line with current social mores. Less problematic.

In an atmosphere where it sometimes seems that anybody not conforming exactly to whatever this week’s orthodoxy is will be torn apart by a mob on Twitter, I can see how an author would fear this as an outcome. But the impulse, as the Sherlock Holmes episode from 1993 shows, is not new. We’re always inclined to want to revise characters to either be less flawed or else flawed in a way that’s more congenial, or at least understandable, to us. The Holmes of Elementary, for example, is a recovering drug addict (picking up on mentions in the original Doyle stories of Holmes’ use of heroin and cocaine while bored from having no good cases), has superficial sexual relationships, doesn’t get on with his father or his brother, and occasionally screws over his friends because he thinks he knows better than them. Modern audiences, especially American audiences (the show is set mostly in present-day New York, though Holmes is still English) presumably find this more relatable than the emotionally distant, erratically brilliant, relentlessly analytical Holmes of Doyle. The British modernization, Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch, is closer to that Holmes, giving us a Holmes who is, probably, non-neurotypical.

Elementary also gives us a Watson very different from the original, and I don’t mean because she’s an Asian woman; that’s a much less significant change than making Watson a competent detective, Holmes’ equal partner in most ways, rather than his loyal muscle and occasional conscience.

Now, far be it from me to speak against fanfiction of any kind, including the kind that people get paid for. These characters belong to humankind now, and what you choose to do with them is entirely your own affair. But I am raising the question about why we have the impulse to remake iconic characters in a more relatable mould, to make them easier to understand, to make their choices more like what we would choose, even if, because of these changes, there’s a strong sense in which they are no longer that character.

When I’m writing original characters, that same impulse is there, and I have to say I yield to it a lot (I’m criticizing myself here too). I think I’m most successful when I manage to resist it, at least to a degree. I’ve recently finished drafting the last of the Auckland Allies series. The character Tara, initially prickly, angry, and rude, has an arc through the series towards liking and respecting her colleagues more and acknowledging this to them, but her inner monologue doesn’t cease to include snarky digs at them. She just doesn’t let them come out of her mouth quite so much. Sparx still fails to land his pop-culture jokes most of the time, but he’s still trying (sometimes very trying). Dan, if anything, ends the series less admirable to the reader than he was when first introduced, because we get to see some of the compromises and flaws that lurk under his white-knight persona.

Iconic characters often become iconic because they’re out of the ordinary, not just in their abilities, but because they fail to fit with the world around them in some way. It’s worth considering why our impulse is to sand the rough edges off them, to make them more acceptable (whatever that may currently mean).

Dec 05

Characters keep surprising me

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I know I keep saying this, but these characters keep surprising me.

I had Rain down as a fluffy do-gooder type, maybe with a bit of an anti-establishment edge in a hippie kind of way, and damn if she didn’t turn out to be an ex-gang member who once cut another woman’s face with a broken bottle.

I really should stop stereotyping people. Even the people in my head.

Writing this book is turning out to be like herding lynxes. In the best possible way.

I’ve started on the werewolf, Windknower. His story hasn’t caught fire yet, but it will. It will.

That leaves only the two least interesting characters of all. I mean, surely a statistician and a very serious religious guy have lived boring lives.

I’m so looking forward to finding out how I’m wrong about that.

Nov 25

Telling people’s stories

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I’m 22,000 words in so far, and it’s looking like this will be a substantial story.

I say that because I’m starting out by having eight important characters tell their backstories (not just one after another – there’s plot advancement in between too).

If I’m going to have that many important characters, I want each one to be unique and real to the reader before I get going. All too often I read a book and someone’s speaking and I think, “Who’s that character again?”

So far, I’ve had:

  • Berry, the shepherd’s daughter and traumatised ex-shaman-apprentice, and the assault that led her to break her oath and flee to the city
  • Patience, the Countygold (Countess), and the youthful boating tragedy that shaped her political ideals
  • Dignity, the mad scientist son of radical revolutionists, and what he learned from being imprisoned throughout his late teens and early twenties.

Five to go, and even if they’re all relatively short, I’ll easily hit 30,000 words before that introductory part of the book is done. So, assuming a beginning, middle and end of roughly the same size, about 100K.

I’m looking forward to what Hope the strikingly beautiful commoner magus, Windknower the shy, scruffy werewolf, Learned Vigilance the very serious religious scholar, Tranquil the lower-nobility statistician and Rain the docklands social worker have to say.

I also want to do cards (or Evernote notes, at least) for each of them outlining what they want, why they can’t have it, and what they will (and won’t) go through to get it. That’s what is going to drive my plot. One of my faults as a writer is that I’m too softhearted towards my characters. I give them what they want instead of making them work for it. Well – that stops now.

UPDATE: Just finished Hope’s story, another couple of thousand words. I had her down as a good girl, but she surprised me with how much trouble she got into. I never know what these characters are going to do ahead of time.

Nov 10

Liking Mr Bucket

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I knew Bucket the activist gnome was going to be an important character.

I didn’t expect him to turn up so early (Chapter 2) or so naturally, though. And I especially didn’t expect him to be so easy to write.

His dialogue just writes itself. I could write him for hours. Some characters turn up and they’re wax dummies. They won’t say anything. But you can’t shut Bucket up.

Berry, my viewpoint character (the ex-apprentice shaman with the post-traumatic stress), liked him instantly, and so did I. It’s probably a bit early to sign up as a Berry-Bucket shipper, but the option’s on the table.

He’s a frood who really knows where his towel is, too.

Welcome, Mr Bucket.