On Character Development
Dear Quinn (and anyone else who'd like to join the tea-party!),
I've been telling stories for as long as I can remember. I was always the kid everybody looked to to create a new game, but I never got to be the princess. No, I was always relegated to playing the father or the king (or, once, a bishop) because unlike everybody else I knew that in order to really play The Little Mermaid you had to have a King Triton.*
You know, we've made the joke before that bad writing is my trigger--nothing pisses me off faster, but really it's not so much bad writing as bad character development. Everything any of us does stems from ourselves, from our past and what we want our future to be. We react to others and others react to us. That's what fiction should mirror. Not so much the basic points on the plot map, although certainly you should have a story line, but the characters themselves. If a character is strong enough, well fleshed out enough, then no matter what they do it's going to make sense within context of that character and within the context of the greater story arc because your reader is going to sense it and feel that "of course that's what that character did, it's all they could do!"
Take for example, my earlier allusion to The Little Mermaid. We'll talk about the Disney Classic version because I don't know if you've ever read the Hans Christian Anderson story (if you haven't, read it, it's so much darker it's great!) Ariel desperately wants to know what it is to be human. Everybody knows this about her, even the people that aren't aware of her humanity infatuation know that she's unhappy where she is even though she's a princess and her father's favorite daughter. When the sea witch (who's driving force isn't so much being purely evil as wanting to stick it to Triton for kicking her out of the palace all those years ago) recognizes this she offers Ariel a choice. Of course Ariel's going to take it. She couldn't not. To turn Ursula down would be to deny herself. Once Ariel's on dry land, she pursues the human prince. Why a human prince and not a mer-man? Because Ariel's obsessed with all things human. It wouldn't be very much of a story if she went on dry land, took a look around, shagged Eric for fun and then went home and married some nice bloke with a swishy tail, would it?
I've always been more interested in characters than story. See, I have never written a story for the sake of writing a story. It's always been the character--that springs up fully formed in my mind and ready to go take a walk--that inspires the writing of the story. I'll be minding my own business and suddenly there's this whole new person in my head going "Have I got something to show you!" and I have to write their story because they pretty much won't shut up about it if I don't. And generally I can see how it ends before i can even see the beginning because I've met the character and the ending shapes them almost more than the beginning.
That sounds ridiculously bizarre.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that because I know my characters I cannot, will not, won't write them doing something that I feel is contradictory to their nature. And, really, you can discern their nature rather easily if you simply pay attention to their actions. When I was in college I took an Abnormal Psychology course and I can honestly say it did more for my writing than possibly any other course I took (this coming from a person with a degree in creative writing) because I discovered the DSM-IV. Or, more specifically, I discovered that you could catalog a person's actions and thought processes and then from that gauge what they're going to do next. That isn't to say that I expect all my characters to have some kind of psychological disorder, but, it did show me that people are creatures of habit. It taught me to sit back and take the action (or thought) in context with the whole rather than simply as an isolated incident. So I learned that everything relates to everything else, even if it's only peripherally. The trick is to be aware of how everything relates.
Take Call Me Hans. When that first chapter was originally written it was supposed to be a one shot. Just a very, very erotic lunch conversation because you and I were trying to figure out what Landa's kink would be. And it made perfect sense (given what we know about the character from that universe) that his kink would be words. So, I used words. Cue the subsequent chapter(s) where it's patently obvious that he and Julie are going to have a relationship but they haven't yet. Why? For two reasons: 1) because Landa's so controlled it doesn't make sense for him to just blithely hop into bed with Julie for no reason other than "she looks hot today" and 2) because his kink is words he doesn't so much care if they've hopped into bed yet because that's not where he gets his greatest enjoyment. I mean, sure sex is fun and why wouldn't he like it, but he gets his jollies more from the conversation and the build up than the act itself.
And then there's Julie. God, I love Julie as a character. And so much of her character is about her being underestimated and misjudged because she's a woman and because she's not necessarily as brazen and sure of herself outwardly as it's expected that she be. Julie's the kind of character that would make a great maiden aunt or a best friend, but not necessarily a smoldering temptress and I love, love, love that her quirks sortof match up with his quirks and off they go. And that happened entirely because I knew that if Landa was going to have word kink it had to be with somebody who could match wits with him, but who wasn't a completely strong, sure of themselves character because if they were, then they'd shut him down before he got started. So I thought "I need a Peggy from Mad Men type" and suddenly I have Julie. Who would be such a badass if she gets the time to develop and become more sure of herself.
When I was in middle school my best friend and I used to buy composition books and write round robin stories. One of us would start, would get say ten pages in, then pass the story off to the other person. Before returning it, we'd go back over what the other person read and make notes in the margin. The notes weren't always "I love this line" often, we heckled each other shamelessly. Along the lines of "oh, so while he's gazing, mesmerized into her eyes she totes steals his wallet, yeah?" Ever since then, after my initial draft I always, always go back through and heckle myself. That is, I read for flaws. For obvious mistakes. For not so obvious mistakes. Anything that'll stick out to the reader and throw them out of the flow of the story. It could be as mundane an anachronism as using a fountain pen before they were actually invented. Or it could be something as serious as having a character like (because I'm stuck on this example) Landa suddenly break into a spontaneous chorus of Love is a many splendored thing, unless he's doing it in jest or to seriously humiliate I can't see that character going there, can you?
I spend a ridiculous amount of time inside my own head. If I'm on a writing jag I can literally lock myself in my office for days and not talk to anybody but the characters running around in the coffee shop that is my mind. Because of this, sometimes it's hard for me to separate where reality begins and dreaming ends. Also, it means I've got a gynormous grasp on my characters and who they are (and, a lot of times, other people's characters too) without really trying, so I get really titchy really quickly when a scene or a plot point gets thrown in that just doesn't make sense in context. In truth, I think I probably make an awful beta.
You know I started this letter to talk about what I do to make a good character and I'm finding I'm not answering my own question because in my mind, the character's already created, I just do what he tells me to. I think, bottom line, the trick is to assume every character you make is a living, breathing person. To look at this character as a fully formed being with their own thoughts, feelings, dreams, idiosyncrasies and phobias. Even if the character only has two paragraphs of time in the work. Because if it were real life (and great fiction always mirrors real life) then those characters would be real people and real people have all of those things even if we don't take the time to ask. Once you see your character as a real person and not a Barbie doll that occasionally presses it's flat face or anatomical bumps against Ken, then you'll find that you're telling real stories. And that makes all the difference.
Love and chocolates,
Scarlett
*And just for the record, my Triton--and my Ursula--were bad ass, thank you, but the final battle was always schizophrenic because I had to be both at once.
I've been telling stories for as long as I can remember. I was always the kid everybody looked to to create a new game, but I never got to be the princess. No, I was always relegated to playing the father or the king (or, once, a bishop) because unlike everybody else I knew that in order to really play The Little Mermaid you had to have a King Triton.*
You know, we've made the joke before that bad writing is my trigger--nothing pisses me off faster, but really it's not so much bad writing as bad character development. Everything any of us does stems from ourselves, from our past and what we want our future to be. We react to others and others react to us. That's what fiction should mirror. Not so much the basic points on the plot map, although certainly you should have a story line, but the characters themselves. If a character is strong enough, well fleshed out enough, then no matter what they do it's going to make sense within context of that character and within the context of the greater story arc because your reader is going to sense it and feel that "of course that's what that character did, it's all they could do!"
Take for example, my earlier allusion to The Little Mermaid. We'll talk about the Disney Classic version because I don't know if you've ever read the Hans Christian Anderson story (if you haven't, read it, it's so much darker it's great!) Ariel desperately wants to know what it is to be human. Everybody knows this about her, even the people that aren't aware of her humanity infatuation know that she's unhappy where she is even though she's a princess and her father's favorite daughter. When the sea witch (who's driving force isn't so much being purely evil as wanting to stick it to Triton for kicking her out of the palace all those years ago) recognizes this she offers Ariel a choice. Of course Ariel's going to take it. She couldn't not. To turn Ursula down would be to deny herself. Once Ariel's on dry land, she pursues the human prince. Why a human prince and not a mer-man? Because Ariel's obsessed with all things human. It wouldn't be very much of a story if she went on dry land, took a look around, shagged Eric for fun and then went home and married some nice bloke with a swishy tail, would it?
I've always been more interested in characters than story. See, I have never written a story for the sake of writing a story. It's always been the character--that springs up fully formed in my mind and ready to go take a walk--that inspires the writing of the story. I'll be minding my own business and suddenly there's this whole new person in my head going "Have I got something to show you!" and I have to write their story because they pretty much won't shut up about it if I don't. And generally I can see how it ends before i can even see the beginning because I've met the character and the ending shapes them almost more than the beginning.
That sounds ridiculously bizarre.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that because I know my characters I cannot, will not, won't write them doing something that I feel is contradictory to their nature. And, really, you can discern their nature rather easily if you simply pay attention to their actions. When I was in college I took an Abnormal Psychology course and I can honestly say it did more for my writing than possibly any other course I took (this coming from a person with a degree in creative writing) because I discovered the DSM-IV. Or, more specifically, I discovered that you could catalog a person's actions and thought processes and then from that gauge what they're going to do next. That isn't to say that I expect all my characters to have some kind of psychological disorder, but, it did show me that people are creatures of habit. It taught me to sit back and take the action (or thought) in context with the whole rather than simply as an isolated incident. So I learned that everything relates to everything else, even if it's only peripherally. The trick is to be aware of how everything relates.
Take Call Me Hans. When that first chapter was originally written it was supposed to be a one shot. Just a very, very erotic lunch conversation because you and I were trying to figure out what Landa's kink would be. And it made perfect sense (given what we know about the character from that universe) that his kink would be words. So, I used words. Cue the subsequent chapter(s) where it's patently obvious that he and Julie are going to have a relationship but they haven't yet. Why? For two reasons: 1) because Landa's so controlled it doesn't make sense for him to just blithely hop into bed with Julie for no reason other than "she looks hot today" and 2) because his kink is words he doesn't so much care if they've hopped into bed yet because that's not where he gets his greatest enjoyment. I mean, sure sex is fun and why wouldn't he like it, but he gets his jollies more from the conversation and the build up than the act itself.
And then there's Julie. God, I love Julie as a character. And so much of her character is about her being underestimated and misjudged because she's a woman and because she's not necessarily as brazen and sure of herself outwardly as it's expected that she be. Julie's the kind of character that would make a great maiden aunt or a best friend, but not necessarily a smoldering temptress and I love, love, love that her quirks sortof match up with his quirks and off they go. And that happened entirely because I knew that if Landa was going to have word kink it had to be with somebody who could match wits with him, but who wasn't a completely strong, sure of themselves character because if they were, then they'd shut him down before he got started. So I thought "I need a Peggy from Mad Men type" and suddenly I have Julie. Who would be such a badass if she gets the time to develop and become more sure of herself.
When I was in middle school my best friend and I used to buy composition books and write round robin stories. One of us would start, would get say ten pages in, then pass the story off to the other person. Before returning it, we'd go back over what the other person read and make notes in the margin. The notes weren't always "I love this line" often, we heckled each other shamelessly. Along the lines of "oh, so while he's gazing, mesmerized into her eyes she totes steals his wallet, yeah?" Ever since then, after my initial draft I always, always go back through and heckle myself. That is, I read for flaws. For obvious mistakes. For not so obvious mistakes. Anything that'll stick out to the reader and throw them out of the flow of the story. It could be as mundane an anachronism as using a fountain pen before they were actually invented. Or it could be something as serious as having a character like (because I'm stuck on this example) Landa suddenly break into a spontaneous chorus of Love is a many splendored thing, unless he's doing it in jest or to seriously humiliate I can't see that character going there, can you?
I spend a ridiculous amount of time inside my own head. If I'm on a writing jag I can literally lock myself in my office for days and not talk to anybody but the characters running around in the coffee shop that is my mind. Because of this, sometimes it's hard for me to separate where reality begins and dreaming ends. Also, it means I've got a gynormous grasp on my characters and who they are (and, a lot of times, other people's characters too) without really trying, so I get really titchy really quickly when a scene or a plot point gets thrown in that just doesn't make sense in context. In truth, I think I probably make an awful beta.
You know I started this letter to talk about what I do to make a good character and I'm finding I'm not answering my own question because in my mind, the character's already created, I just do what he tells me to. I think, bottom line, the trick is to assume every character you make is a living, breathing person. To look at this character as a fully formed being with their own thoughts, feelings, dreams, idiosyncrasies and phobias. Even if the character only has two paragraphs of time in the work. Because if it were real life (and great fiction always mirrors real life) then those characters would be real people and real people have all of those things even if we don't take the time to ask. Once you see your character as a real person and not a Barbie doll that occasionally presses it's flat face or anatomical bumps against Ken, then you'll find that you're telling real stories. And that makes all the difference.
Love and chocolates,
Scarlett
*And just for the record, my Triton--and my Ursula--were bad ass, thank you, but the final battle was always schizophrenic because I had to be both at once.