Posts Tagged Character Development

I started this topic over a month ago and I never dreamed it would take so long to get back to it.

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.

Originally, I wanted to put a lot more work into this post, but a sinus infection has robbed me of a week so there will be a second part to this post next week.  However, this cursed infection has given me material, real life material, which is what this post is supposed to be about, so here we go.

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.

I recently have been thinking about gender roles, both in real life and in fiction. 

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?

Have you ever vacationed by the ocean for an extended weekend and not seen a single wave, just gentle ripples in the water for hour after endless hour?

Have you ever been caught out in the desert when the wind picked up?  Had sand pelt your face, forcing your eyes to shut and your arms to rise defensively?

Have you ever expected a light dusting of snow on a romantic weekend getaway and received 42″ (without having chains)?

These are not just the mishaps of my vacations, but metaphors for stories too heavy on characters and/or plot.  Characters are what you see, like water.  Plot is the power behind what you see, like wind or storms. 

Without plot, the story can become drudgery instead of enjoyment – characters bobbing up-and-down without ever cresting or curling in exciting fashion. 

Without a good set of characters to connect to, the story arc is dry and it slaps at the reader’s face. 

When there is too much, dozens of characters who never get a chance to recover from the hundreds of plot elements, the reader is overwhelmed and misses the chance to fall in love (because they are thinking, “Where are my chains?  I can’t get traction.”).

Make your characters interesting, colorful, and dynamic.  Make your story arc full of action, adventure, or intrigue.  Give your story room to breathe, and in turn give your reader the same chance.

Give your reader the chance to experience the ebb and flow of your story with time to enjoy the crests, curls, and splashes of your characters’ experience against the driving power of the plot.

It’s time for my weekly post on Character Development and Introduction, but I’m not going to do one this week.  Instead I will be piggy backing off of a friend’s post, Roh Morgan’s “Characters Who Impact.”  Instead of working with your own characters, Roh is asking you to step back to acknowledge characters who have had an impact on you.  One great part about this post is, if you participate, you can win prizes, and who doesn’t like winning prizes?  So venture over to her site/contest and jump in.

One of the big rules in fiction is: the main character must change over the course of the story.  Another big rule is: characters must act in a believable fashion – they must stay in character.  Okay, now we have two rules that seem to oppose each other at times, but must play together within our manuscripts.  Or maybe these two rules aren’t opposed, but are the start of one rule explained in multiple parts.

A character must reflect reality – real people.  We, real people, learn and grow, stumble and try again, are good at some things and weak in others, and all have something beautiful in us as well as something ugly.  Everyone has a history as well as a future, and we dread some potential futures even as we look forward to others.  We may or may not act as expected all the time, but we have our reasons.  We change, but rarely from something strictly within, rather from an external influence: a rumor, a lesson, an observation, an experience, a conversation, a tragedy to ourselves or someone we know, a hardship, a blessing, a baby, a death, or even something small that sparks a realization – these small things are often the most meaningful over time.

When writing a character, I try to make her/him change only after an event, even a small event sparking a larger realization.  In between these changes, the character is static – almost predictable.  Fortunately, change is a constant in real life, so it happens often to my characters.  The trick to writing a believable character over the course of a novel is to establish the character early and show the events triggering each change.

Sometimes the best way to get to know a character is to find out what they want – what motivates them.  I’m not going to elaborate too much today, but I will give a small example.  I will let you see a little of my wishes, and from there you might be able to guess a little of my priorities, and my past.

If I had a genuine genie lamp, my three wishes would be:

3. To have the fan base of J. K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer without all the critics or stalker-type fans.

2. To be the perfect input-output machine.  Meaning, to:

• accumulate and retain information like Johnny 5 in Short Circuit
• access and process that information like Bean in Ender’s Shadow
• apply that information like Albert Scherbius
• articulate that information like Gouverneur Morris

 1. To be wealthy enough to spend my time traveling with my family, writing, and reading.

Do you see enough there to build a character profile?  Is there enough consistency to see a common thread yet enough variance to be multidimensional?  -I hope so; it’s me we’re talking about after all.  Feel free to make a character based on me – I would probably be honored… depends on the character, I guess.  You can also leave a few notes about your wishes, dreams, or goals.  Who knows, someone may make a character based on you.

People commonly accept that there are five senses: smell, taste, touch, sound, and sight.  We know this, and yet many of us (me included) choose to ignore many, if not most, of the senses in our descriptions.  We prevent our readers from fully experiencing our characters when we do this.  Other less known senses include: balance, acceleration, direction, and possibly (not really a sense) perception.  Those can be important as well.  I’m going to try to describe something without ever telling you what it is.

I focused the camera on the bright pink scar hidden behind black hair, which almost distracted me from the black eyes that were focused directly at me.

Okay, we have a start.  Don’t know if it is male or female; human or animal; alien, fantasy, or earthly; old, young, or somewhere between; or aggressive or passive.  However, we do know that we have its attention and it was recently injured.

A guttural growl exploded from its mouth.  It dropped to all fours and charged much faster than I could hope to run.  I stood my ground, hoping to call its bluff.

Now we have a sound, a growl.  We also know that it can stand upright and move on all fours, which is another visual.  We also judged acceleration and direction.

Its head rocked back and forth and plums of dust rose whenever it exhaled.  I wanted to run.  It smashed its paw into the ground, throwing clumps of earth and rock and causing vibrations under my feet.  My knees nearly gave out.

Now we know it is an animal.  Many of you might be able to guess at the kind.  It is large enough to make a person tremble, can cause the earth to vibrate, and it takes deep, intimidating breaths.

Two cubs walked into the clearing, whining.  It reared up and growled in my direction.  Pieces of spit and undigested food splattered over my face.  The last thing I remember before I fainted was the overwhelming smell of rotten fish.

Okay, if you pictured a bear, without me actually telling you, then I described it well – although I did cheat by using the cubs.  I used everything except taste and balance.  I could have used taste, but I didn’t want to go there.  Now we can go back and replace the word ‘it’ with ‘bear,’ ‘her,’ and ‘animal.’

I focused the camera on the bright pink scar hidden behind black hair, which almost distracted me from the black eyes that were focused directly at me.  A guttural growl exploded from the bear’s mouth.  It dropped to all fours and charged much faster than I could hope to run.  I stood my ground, hoping to call her bluff.  The animal’s head rocked back and forth and plums of dust rose whenever it exhaled.  I wanted to run.  The bear smashed its paw into the ground, throwing clumps of earth and rock and causing vibrations under my feet.  My knees nearly gave out.  Two cubs walked into the clearing, whining.  She reared up and growled in my direction.  Pieces of spit and undigested food splattered over my face.  The last thing I remember before I fainted was the overwhelming smell of rotten fish.

I chose an animal for this example, but the concept applies to aliens, fantasy creatures, people, and even to animate objects.  Try it yourself, using as many senses as you can: smell, taste, touch, sound, sight, balance, acceleration, direction, and perception.

“Every decision you make – every decision – is not a decision about what to do. It’s a decision about *Who You Are*. When you see this, when you understand it, everything changes. You begin to see life in a new way. All events, occurrences, and situations turn into opportunities to do what you came here to do.”
  – Neale Donald Walsch

How true is the above quote?  Are we really defined by our actions?  If you are doing something wrong, you hope you are not defined by that action.  However, others can’t see what is on our inside, what we are thinking; they only see what we do.

How often do you read a news report about an alleged pedophile and think, “He needs to be locked up and the cell welded shut”?  How often do you open your wallets to a charity that helps kids, homeless, or victims of a natural disaster?  Why is that?  We don’t know who those people are inside.  We don’t know the motivations for each action.  But we do know what the actions are.

When you are developing a character, it is much the same.  You may have a character that is defined by what they think, but that would only be your main character.  The others are defined by what they do and say. 

Our readers are going to have good and bad thoughts about characters based upon the character’s conversations and reactions to situations.  So, if you are going to show the character saying or doing something, do it intentionally.  Every action, every decision, will define who they are.

• If someone always writes hand written messages and visits people’s homes for dinner, what type of person would you picture?  Would you visualize an older or younger person?
• If someone is sexting, texting, and consistently on the cell phone, would you picture someone in their 60s or someone under 25?
• If someone emails, uses cell phones, and IMs, do you see someone you know?  Do you see someone who lives or works in a city, is between 15 and 55, and has consistent access to the internet?
• If someone is making video calls, visiting blogs, and emailing, what comes to mind?  Do you see a tech savvy adult, who is either a business person or hobbyist of some sort?

Why is that?  Because ways to communicate has been changing and expanding at a quick pace.  This era (2000-2010) has more diversity in communication technology than any other time in history, and some may die out in the next few years.  Different generations and social classes have locked into specific modes of communication. 

While I am obviously going to be making generalizations and playing with stereotypes, I think you will see my point.  This is kind of the 2010 over-generalization primary forms of communication related to age/social class (you can bicker in the comments if you like):

• Drawings – young children that have been traumatized, architects, fashion designers, and crime scene investigators
• Walkie-talkies – kids
• Journals – teen girls
• Sexting – younger, more risqué people
• Social (online) games – teens and young adults, mostly males
• Video Calls – richer, more likely to be young business men
• vidBlogs – younger, dynamic, high-energy people
• Text – younger, mostly in cities, hipper
• Consistently on Cell – normally people younger than 35
• Instant Messaging – people with consistent access to the web
• Social Networks – baby boomers to kids
• Blogs – normally business/special interest people, age independent
• E-Mail – average / common adults for today 15-55
• Occasionally on Cell – average / common adults for today 15-55
• Pagers – In 1990 it was drug dealers, then medical field, then everyone, now back to just medical field
• Home Phone – non-techie people
• CBs – On-the-go business communications and hobbyists
• In Person Visits – family/church oriented people, normally older
• Hand Written Mail – almost exclusively seniors

I’m sure there are tons of methods that I forgot (and one that I purposefully excluded).  And you may disagree with the specifics of any one, or many, categories.  These are just to form guidelines for this snap-shot of history, April 14, 2010. 

When you introduce a new character, you can give them a very specific feel by describing how they are communicating.  They work effectively if you combined them.  Take these examples:

• John looked at the incoming text on his phone and slammed the privacy shield closed on his computer’s web cam.  The incoming message read, “OMG!  CANT BLIEVE U TALKD ME N2 THIS.  SHOW NE1 – UR D.E.A.D!”  John smiled as he shuffled over to his bed, flipping through the pictures Amber sent.
• John shook his friends’ hands as he backed out of the doorway.  “Sorry I have to leave so soon.  I know I don’t come by enough these days.  But I have to get these letters to the post office and Amber will be having supper on soon.”

If you can see the difference, then many of your readers will also.  While communication mode isn’t enough to solely describe your characters, it is a powerful enhancement to other forms of description.

For your writing challenge this week, try to find as many ways as possible to describe John’s leaving a conversation with anonymous friends to give attention to Amber.  Remember to use forms of communication to help define the age and social status of your characters.