For this post, you can take what you like and apply it how you want, but I am thinking of side characters – one-time only characters and maybe some infrequent reoccurers (yes, I made that word up for this blog).  For these guys, I would recommend you steal liberally from your own experience, people you observe, and people you read about.  But don’t look at every behavior; these aren’t your main characters, look at the behaviors that will define a character in just a few words.

The July 7th week had a couple enlightening news stories… human stories: 

Sacramento Bee ran a story initially advertised as “Hot Tub Hero” and was formally titled “Neighbor in hot tub spots blaze, saves Elk Grove families.”  This story showed a side of humanity we can really get behind, be proud of.  This guy sees an explosion, tells someone to call 911, races to both houses to wake the sleeping residents, then takes a garden hose and battles with the fire so much that me loses the hair on his right arm.  Then he had some humble remarks, “Just being neighborly,” “It’s just fate that I was in that hot tub and happened to be looking in that direction,” and “You would’ve done the same thing if you’d seen a fire.” 

CNN ran a sad story about a woman who, two years ago, accidentally left her baby in a car, “Tragedy in the backseat: Hot-car deaths.”  The story was from her viewpoint, a viewpoint I don’t here often.  Beyond her own grief and guilt, she talked about how her family handled the situation and the charges which were filed against her.

The week of August 4th, there was another great human story:

The Daily News reported about a gunman’s girlfriend dealing with the aftermath: “Kristi Hannah, girlfriend of Omar Thornton, recalls gunman’s goodbye, racism concerns.”  This is an article that shows the dynamics of a relationship, while giving your glimpses of both the boyfriend and girlfriend.

Right now, there are enough articles about Shaquan Duley to make a fairly good character profile/sketch/outline/whatever you want to call it.  She killed two of her three children to be “free.”  From these stories, you can see her life three years ago, before those two children were born.  You can see her life change, and know about the lectures she was receiving.  Then, you read her own words about how and why she took her children’s lives.

In each of these stories, there is enough detail and dialogue to base a character.  Maybe not a main character, but a side character – an interesting, dynamic side character.

Now, if I were doing a crime novel with a PI or detective, I could make a scene where there was a mother who, intentionally or unintentionally, kills some of her children.  A humble bystander saves the last of the children from this event.  Plus, there is the reaction of the spouse afterwards.  You have a nice set of scenes for your detective to walk through, setting up his/her personality for the remainder of the novel.

Whenever possible, borrow from reality.

• laugh at your jokes simply for the joy of laughing with you
• make you feel both young and old at the same time
• let you know exactly how they are feeling
• have no fear (of putting anything in their mouth)
• eat when hungry, sleep when sleepy, play while energetic, and smile while happy
• make the most wonderful and horrible faces

Dark silhouettes moved across the window and I dropped to the ground, back down.  I looked to see the source of light that was giving me away, hoping it wasn’t the authorities.  An old man, probably a custodian, just stepped out for a cigarette break at the next office building.  I stayed on the ground, waiting for him to go inside and turn off the light.  I watched the sky, occasionally glancing at the smoker across the way and the office I was only feet from, debating the consequences if I were caught – consequences for me and my country if I were ever caught.  Then, knowing I could never retell the story, I saw…

After 16 years of looking, tracking, hunting, and setting traps, we finally captured one.  She had brown eyes and long brown hair.  Her eye brows were thicker than I expected – fuller than the ones in the photos – and her eye lashes were thinner.  Her lips were not the deep red I was expecting, either.  Nothing about her: clothes, figure, posture, attitude – nothing was what I expected.  But we had definitely found one, a human woman, one of the last chances to repopulate our species after…

• Finished the last third of Jumper: Griffin’s Story
• Critiqued 12,000 words for my writing critique group
• My baby got an ear infection
• Read The Lightning Thief
• Lost 8 days of my life to a sinus infection
• Spent one weekend gathering letters of recommendation (thank you for the contributors) and writing essays for a grad school application
• Critiqued 92,000 words for an anthology project
• Didn’t get a chance to write anything fictional

Over this last month I have learned that:

• I don’t like it when my baby has an ear infection
• Babies become, um, explosive when antibiotics are involved
• Sinus infections are awful
• Critiquing 104,000 words in one month is a large amount, and trying to get a group of people to critique that much is stressful
• It is difficult to get letters of reference and transcripts in a timely fashion
• I miss writing when I don’t get to do it

Every fiction author wants their story to have characters realistic enough to hold the reader.  For main characters, this is paramount; this is who your readers are sharing the adventure with.  To accomplish this, I recommend you steal liberally from your own experience.

I recently saw a doctor who seemed confident, smiled, shook my hand before washing his, sat on his rolling chair and listened to me describe all my symptoms, made eye contact as he asked me a series of questions about my symptoms even though I just covered all that.  These traits are boring – common.  However, he had two traits which I think would set off flags in people’s minds as to what type of doctor he is: he always said “I see” after every statement I said, and he didn’t describe anything about the medicines he prescribed me – he really was going to boot me out the door without explaining what I was supposed to be taking.  With just a few lines of dialogue and using these two traits alone, I can have a doctor who sparks interest with the reader.  With just a few tweaks in the dialogue, I can make him the anal doctor without time for his patients or the absent-minded doc who would like to go home to deal with some personal issue.

Right now, as stated earlier, I have a sinus infection (the reason for my doctor’s visit).  This is new ground for me as I have had many of the symptoms before, but not all at once and not this bad.  So, now in misery, I have material.  It isn’t just the pain I can describe (pressure, stuffy nose, sore throat, pressure, nose bleeds, chills, pressure) because that just gives the ailment, but the thoughts going along with my condition give personality.  On Sunday, I wanted to put my head in my wood vice and crank away, and yesterday, I would loved to have taken a drill to my left eyebrow and maybe also to the left side of my nose.  Someone who has had a sinus infection before is probably going to relate to my pain, but my reaction to the pain, my thoughts, tell something unique about me as a person: I know woodworking tools.  I never said I was a woodworker, but I hope most of you would think I am just from dreams of how to deal with the pressure.

So, in a fairly bad week, I have come up with some ideas for future character development.  I would encourage you, bad week or good, observe everything you can.  Don’t just look at others, but examine yourself as well.  Find what clicks; find what sticks.  Practice.  Get feedback.  Observe more.

Actions can show a character’s course through an event, dialogue can pass along information, and thoughts can fill in gaps, but finding the correct traits will give personality and history.  Whenever you get a chance, borrow from reality.

Like many, I grew up watching children’s programming – for me it was the early and mid-80s programming.  I watched Sesame Street, Smurfs, J.I. Joe, Transformers, Duck Tales, Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers, Inspector Gadget, Scooby-Doo, Scooby and Scrappy Doo, Ewoks, and Richie Rich.  My babysitter’s daughter watched Care Bears, so sometimes I saw the intro of that cartoon before heading to school.  What I can’t help but notice now is how many male influences there were in those cartoons and how few females, and most of the females were in traditional roles.  I had even started to notice this ‘conditioning’ by the age of 12 or 13.

I also read many of the classics as an adolescent.  Once again, most of the major characters were males.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I saw an article talking about driving and genders.  The article was quick to point out how many more accidents men get in compared to women, yet the article didn’t talk about the amount of driving men do compared to women.  I posted a question: “How many accidents do men get in per mile compared to women?”  It was an honest question, but it turned some people into very mean (evil) posters.  I was accused of being a sexist who belongs in the 60s, I was told to shut up, I was called things I won’t repeat here, and yet I was praised (maybe that’s an exaggeration) by some for bringing to light the real issue.  But I hadn’t said anything; I only asked a question.  Only one person tried to answer my question; the rest thought my question was a statement, reading more into what I had asked than what I meant based on their stereotyping and prejudices – and their assumptions about my stereotypes and prejudices.

People understand gender roles now in more complex and confusing ways than they have in the past.  Women are often expected to work outside the home but are still expected to take care of the same chores they always have had in the home.  A man’s role in children’s lives is starting to become acknowledged, yet the man is rarely the one blamed in child neglect cases.  More women are in college now than men, but the term “CEO” still brings a man’s image to most people’s minds.  Women are starting to make careers out of athletics, but if you turn on a sports channel you probably expect to see men’s sports.  Women have made up 60% or more of the voting public in the USA for the last 20 years, yet we still haven’t had a woman president or vice president.  What does all that mean?  I don’t know.

I have heard someone say, “Beware making a woman weak in fiction unless you also have an equally strong woman with a larger role in your manuscript.”  And you can add, “Don’t have a working father who does both dishes and laundry unless you can handle people saying, ‘This isn’t realistic.’” 

In reality, there is still a large group of people who see traditional gender roles in their daily lives, or people, like me, who grew up watching 80s cartoons or other programming that conditioned thought patterns.  There are also people who have no idea what ‘traditional gender roles’ means, people who have never known an outdoor dad and indoor mom.  How do you write to both groups?  I don’t know.

Like with the responses to my question about driving stats, readers will bring their own personal biases and make assumptions when you challenge what they see or desire in regarding gender roles.  You must think about how you want to approach your characters.

This post isn’t about telling you the solution, but to get you to think about the questions:

• How do I want to portray gender roles in my manuscript?
• When is my manuscript taking place and how should my characters reflect that?
• Who is reading my manuscript and what are they expecting?  What do I want to tell them?
•  How does my handling of male and female characters reflect on me?

Here’s my problem: while I can research many forms of communication, my experience and education is limited – I just won’t think of everything.  So I am asking, please, help me compile a list of communication forms.  Please be inventive: fog horn, smoke signal, Morse code, pony express, bullroarer (or rhombus or turndun), bell tower, pneumatic air tube, or whatever comes to mind.

Here are some examples of what I am looking for:

Calling Card: Notes left on entry tables in the 1800s to let people know they had been called on.  Mostly used by women (and maybe for women).  More info at: http://www.jamesfordmuseum.org/e_nineteen_cent_life.php

Signal Flag: Use of signal flags started sometime around late 1600s or early 1700s for communication between vessels.  These codes are still used, but at not as much now as other forms of communication are more effient.  More info at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Signals and http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/xf~sfh.html

I would like, as complete as possible, to list all forms of communication with information about when and where it is used and by whom.  I am hoping this will help writes place their time periods more accurately while researching projects.

Related post: Modes of Communication in Character Development

• This is too robotic
• No one talks like this
• He’s over-the-top cheesy
• I don’t like this accent
• I can’t see this word used here
• This phrase takes me out of the setting
• Where are the accents?
• It’s hard to write accents and it’s hard to read them
• A few colloquial words help a story
• Who says this?
• These new/strange words take me out of a story

Without dragging you through all the conversations and arguments I have had, and without pulling you (kicking and screaming) through my thought process (scary – don’t want to go there), I will give you my conclusions about speech use, and I open my comment section for opinions and (civilized) debate. 

Word choices, accents, colloquial words, pacing, contractions, and slang all give characters, and the narrator, a voice (yes, voice – I can’t think of a better term).  A properly chosen voice can put a character into a specific time and place while a poorly chosen voice can ruin a moment or a story.

Everyone writes with a specific voice, even if they don’t think they do:

• contraction usage (“We’re not going in there” is different than “We aren’t going in there”)
• spelling (“dialog” compared to “dialogue”)
• modified words (“I don’t want to go to…” as “I don’t wanna go to…” or “I don’t want ta’ go to…” or “I ain’t goin’ to…”)
• word choice (“One meter” versus “One yard” versus “One and a half cubits” versus “A walking stride”)
• slang (“Wicked” versus “The bomb” versus “Kickin’” versus “Cool” versus “Awesome” versus “Bomb Diggity”)
• expletives (won’t go there)

The list goes on.  To assume you don’t write in a voice, and therefore refuse to understand you are placing your characters in a specific time and place, is to deny your readers the full experience of the story being told.  You must change your characters voice if they are not from the same place or time as you or the realness of the character (and the story) goes away.

Now, if you are on board with me so far, I have to push the other way a little.  If you are intimately familiar with another voice than the one which is natural to you, then, by all means, write it out.  However, if you are not gifted that way, hold yourself back from going too far.  Using a voice you, and maybe your readers, are unfamiliar with is a matter of balance.  If you use too much slang and modify too many words, it may (will) do two things: be hard for the reader to read, and prove how much you don’t know.

When using alternate voices, you need to pick certain clues that can give the feel you want without distracting from the actual story.  For these clues, go to YouTube or Bing’s Video search, and find people who talk the way you want to have your characters talking.  Trying searching for someone explaining accents and slang in certain areas.  If possible, call the Chamber of Commerce or a University in the area of interest and just chat with someone.  Pay attention to what they are saying, how they are saying it, and which differences are important for giving the right feel. 

Once you have what you think you need, practice.  Try saying the lines aloud.  Try writing the lines and having friends and family read it.  Quiz people you are trying it on to see if it is too much or too little.  If you aren’t getting it right, go back to your sources and find different clues.  Experiment!

You don’t need to include everything, but giving a taste of an accent, a localized slang, or anything that puts the character (and the reader) into another time or place is well worth the effort of research and experimentation.  Putting the correct voice on a character is as important as the clothes they wear or the fears they hold – it is a part of who they are.

For more, read Guest Blogger: Ninja Cups and the Path to a Better World on P.D. Wright’s blog (by David Oliver) and Balance on C. Michael Fontes blog.

Other resources are:

“Using Slang and Accent When Writing Fictional Dialogue” by Todd Eastman

“How to Write Dialogue for Fictional Characters With a British Accent” bye Valerie David

“Do You Have an Accent?” on Readable Blog