Category: character

This might be a weird, kinda rambly one. Also on the shorter side because I’m really trying to get through all these manuscript notes before my editor goes on vacation.

Also, if you came here for some reason expecting financial advice… seriously, how did you end up here? I’m really curious. But, no, not what I’m going to be blabbering on about. Buy low. Sell high. Diamonds are inherently worthless. Go green.

That’s all I’ve got for you on that front.

What I want to talk to you about is investment in stories. One issue I see a lot is a sort of general assumption that we’ll just care about the characters in stories. This is a story about Dot. Dot’s a person. You care about people. Hey, look you’re invested in my story.

Except Dot isn’t a person. She’s a fictional character. I made her up. You know she’s not real. Heck, you know she’s not even a character.  She’s just a name, even if you didn’t really acknowledge it until I just pointed it out now. Seriously, what color are her eyes?  What’s she wearing?  How tall is she?  And she’s a name I use all the time for these generic examples, one I lifted from a cartoon I watched all the time back in my twenties.

That’s why you kinda skimmed past her and why you’re waiting for me to get on with whatever hints I’m going to offer, right?  You’ve got no reason to linger on her. She’s barely a placeholder.  She’s punctuation in a vaguely human form.

Jump back. That’s a great way to think of it. The lingering. When we keep thinking about the characters or the story after we’re done reading. We wonder what happens to them next. We try to figure out the puzzle. We hope Wakko gets what’s coming to him. Because we all know he deserves what’s coming.

That’s investment.  These characters or stories are sticking around.  They’ve earned a few hours or days or maybe years of free rent in my head. Enough to make me keep going back to the story to see how things turn out, and maybe even enough that I find that storyteller and beg them for more.

We get investment through characters. Ones we can, on some level, relate to. Characters we can believe in within the world of this story. And, yeah, ones we like reading or watching stories about. 

When we connect to characters this way, they become, to some extent, real people. We project onto them, and so they get bigger than the page, bigger than the screen. I may be off base, but I think it’s the moment when we start thinking of them in terms of ourselves. Maybe we empathize with how they feel about something, or remember what it was like to be in a similar situation. Maybe it’s agreeing with their stance or envying their accomplishment. It might even be a wish-fulfillment thing we know we’d never really do—I wish I had the guts to quit like that. Or the ability to take down a worldwide crime syndicate because one of those bastards killed my dog.

That’s investment. That’s us letting these characters in the same way we’d let a person into our lives. We think about them. We want to know how they’re doing. We consider their existence past that bit we’re told.  We actively worry about them, get excited for them, want them to win.

Y’see, Timmy, without that investment in the characters and the story we’re just… reading.  Watching. Observing dispassionately from a distance.  The only connection is eye contact, and the minute that’s broken we’ve got nothing.

If any of you follow along during my Saturday geekery movie sessions, there’s a phrase you’ve probably seen me use once or thrice or every other movie.  “Who am I supposed to be rooting for?”  So many of these stories push characters who just aren’t likable or relatable in any way.  They’re obnoxious.  They’re cruel. They’re ignorant.  They’re sexist. They’re just plain annoying.  And they’re supposed to be the hero.

Because of this, it’s tough to get invested in these stories. The characters are literally pushing me away from them.  And if I keep watching under these conditions, well…it’s easier to focus on the flaws because there’s really nothing else to focus on. I mean, these movies are rarely known for their top-notch special effects.

I should ask myself a few questions as I get started.  Why should someone be invested in my story? What am I offering?  What’s here that my readers are going to like or relate to?  Are they going to believe in my characters… or roll their eyes at them?

Next time…

Oh, wow. Next time’s the Fourth of July. I’m going to be eating grill-cooked food and playing with little toy soldiers and just possibly enjoying a beverage or two. So no post next Thursday.

Maybe on Wednesday I’ll talk about computers a bit.

Until then, go write.

I’m a big fan of recycling. Fan’s probably not even the right word. It just seems like a no brainer to me. Why wouldn’t you do it? Why would someone be against it? We recycle our glass and plastic. We compost a lot of our food waste and cardboard and even some old clothes. Yeah, you can compost old clothes.  Weird, I know.

We reuse and repurpose a lot of stuff, too. That comes out of, well, being poor.  Even though I’m on a much better footing these days, financially, I still try to reuse things. We never broke the habit of using those spaghetti sauce mason jars as glasses. Half our Tupperware is take-out containers. And I still look at frozen pizza boxes as potential tanks.

What’s odd, though, is a certain subset of folks who’ll mock you for doing this with your writing.

I’ve brought up many, many times the need to cut manuscripts.  We write so much stuff that gets trimmed away.  Clever bits of descriptions.  Cool dialogue.  Sometimes whole scenes, subplots, or even whole characters. When it comes time to hone and focus that first draft, all these things can fall under the editorial knife.

Now, weird as this may sound—like I said, for most of you this is going to sound bizarre, but—some people think this cut material’s gone for good. It’s been deleted. Even if some record still exists, it’s unusable now. Toxic. Radioactive. It’s somehow been tainted forever.

I think a lot of this comes from people who lean a little too heavily on the art side of writing. Oddly enough… the ones who don’t write that much.  They get a little too focused on the idea and the craft and the ART of it. I put these words together in this way for this story.  I didn’t use them like that or like that, and so pulling them out and putting them somewhere else would just be wrong.  It’s not what I first intended.  It’s not what those phrases were created to do.

If I listen to those folks too much… or maybe if I am one of those folks (it’s okay, admitting it is the first step)… I probably have a somewhat shallow view of recycled material.  Those dialogue exchanges that I cut, or that subplot or character… they’re not going to work anywhere else.  I’m not being artistically honest or something like that.  How could a character crafted for story A possibly work in story B? Dialogue that I’d intended for X just shouldn’t work coming out of Y’s mouth, especially if Y’s in a completely different book.

And if I do try it and it does work… well, that just says something about me, doesn’t it?  I probably don’t know what I’m doing. My writing must be pretty thin and generic if I can just pluck some material from here and drop it in over there.  I’m probably lazy as hell in other aspects of my life, too.

If you happen to be the one out of four who thinks this… sorry.  It just isn’t true.  In any way.  Just in case my tone wasn’t carrying through.

Of course I can repurpose material. Artists have done it throughout history.  We jot down notes for one thing and end up using them for another.  We cut from that and then repurpose it for this.  Exchanges of dialogue. Neat ways to describe something.  Maybe a whole scene of morning-after awkwardness or a supporting character who got nixed for space.

Granted, none of this is going to slide right in without a bit of work and some tweaks.  I’m probably going to have to change a few proper nouns, and possibly a few personal pronouns, too.  Maybe an adjective or three.  That’s just the nature of such things. But it’s still absolutely fine to use it.

And honestly, because it’s older stuff I didn’t use before… I may have improved since I first wrote it (hopefully I have). That was a great bit back then, but y’know, if I just did this it’d be fantastic.  Or maybe he seemed like a good character for back then, but now I realize this should all really be centered around her.

I’ve got a book coming out later this summer/early fall called Terminus(that’s probably what we’re calling it), and it’s got a discussion between two characters I’ve been trying to use for almost eight years now. Seriously. I had to cut it from another book, but it’s got some great character stuff and I’ve always wanted to use it. Terminus finally gave me a great place where it could fit. And, yeah, it needed some adjustment to fit in this story with these characters at this point in the overall story. But it’s still 80-85% the same and I think folks are going to love it when they read it.

Still not convinced? Are you one of those one out of four who’s ready to pop down to the comments and point out I’m one of those lazy hacks who barely qualifies as a real writer?

How about Ray Bradbury? Is he a lazy hack? Most of Fahrenheit 451 is recycled ideas, after all. Bradbury had already used the firemen (the book burning ones) in a bunch of different short stories.  They even show up in The Martian Chronicles.  He’d also done longer stories about book burning and corpse-burning (seriously).  The spider-like Mechanical Hound is from an old short story he’d never finished.  There it‘s a law-enforcement tool used by sheriffs and police. He lifted the entire description, almost word for word, and dropped it into 451, along with some dialogue about it. Heck, the whole book is an expanded version of his short story “The Fireman” which he expanded into a novella and then expanded again into a full book.

And he’s not alone. Lots of writers have files of material they had to cut. And they’re always trying to find that material a new home.

Y’see, Timmy, yeah, writing is an art. But like every kind of art, the “how I do it” is entirely up to me. My manuscript might be pristine and pure and new. It might make Frankenstein look like somebody with a small appendectomy scar. But honestly, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is the manuscript I have at the end. Does it flow? Are the characters believable?  Is the plot interesting? Does the dialogue ring true?

Then it’s good.  And that’s all that matters.

Next time… okay, to be terribly honest, next time is the day before my birthday. One of those milestone, “we should make note of this” birthdays. What I’m saying is, I’m probably going to be drunk. Which means I’ll end up talking about Godzilla or something.

Until then… go write.

Today, I was hoping we could have a quick talk about that mysterious figure across the street.  You know the one.  Over there.  The person in the hat and trenchcoat who’s just standing on the edge of the shadows, watching us as we dig up this old time capsule.  The one who said something cryptic as you walked by.

You know who I mean.

No, seriously.  We all know the character I’m talking about, right?  The one who shows up in the first chapter, spouts a few  statements, and then vanishes for the next three or four hundred pages.  Heck, maybe they don’t come back at all.

An idea struck me the other day, and I realized I haven’t talked about it here in a while so I thought I’d go over it again.  And, as usual, the best way to do that is with a story.

I talked last summer about moving and getting rid of a ton of old Warhammer figures.  I’d built and painted a lot of them.  Some of them were classic figs from twenty-odd years ago.  A few of them were honestly kind of beautiful, in their own way.  A couple were still sealed in the original package.

So I saved a few, maybe six or seven, that I thought I may use someday.  Or just really liked a lot.  The rest… got traded in for store credit.

But here’s the thing.  With them gone, my shelves became a lot cleaner and neater.  And I got a lot better with my hobby time.  I could find things much faster, which meant I was getting more done.   It sounds really straightforward, but getting rid of the clutter that wasn’t doing anything made my hobby much better.

I think this holds for stories, too.  As writers, we like to think the only limit is our imaginations.  But we’re still dealing with other restrictions.  The size of my manuscript.  The size of my cast of characters.  The patience of my readers. If someone’s going to take up space in my story, there needs to be a reason for them to be there.

An example I’ve given before is Guido, the super-strong mutant from X-Factor.  Guido was a fun-loving, John Lennon-sunglasses-wearing guy who made the “gorilla body” physique popular years before Luther in The Umbrella Academy.  Also, as I understand it, now he’s dead and one of the lords of Hell or something like that, because who wants fun-loving characters around when we could have drama, right? Or maybe he’s alive again.  I lost track.

Anyway…

When Guido made his debut with X-Factor at a press conference, one of the reporters called out “He must be the strong guy!  Every group’s got a strong guy!”  Which led Guido to start calling himself Strong Guy from that point on, but also drew attention to the point that… well, yeah.  Every group does have a strong guy.  Because in the stories most superhero comics lean towards, a strong guy is very handy to have around.  There’s a reason to have them on the team and in the story.

In stories, we sometimes end up with characters that don’t serve a purpose.  Perhaps they’ve got a fantastic voice or a really clever description.  Maybe they’re a kind of character that doesn’t get seen a lot.  Maybe I came up with the idea for them in the shower and just really like how they turned out.

But if they’re not really doing anything to advance the plot or the story… I should probably get rid of them.

Before anyone goes nuts, I admit this is a bit of a broad statement.  There are going to be lots of characters in any story, and some of them are going to have a minimal-at-best effect on the outcome.  The guy serving our food.  That woman guarding the armory.  The fourth person to die in the battle.

Thing is, though, I shouldn’t be putting a lot of effort into someone who isn’t actually going to be doing anything.  All my characters should be propelling the plot and/ or story forward.  If they’re just standing around not really doing much… well, why would I spend a lot of effort on them?  Why give them a name and a backstory and a detailed physical description if all they’re going to do is walk up to the table and drop off three drinks?

This brings me nicely to a potential exception to this statement.  Sometimes we just run into someone interesting.  That one person who stands out because of their wild wardrobe or random pearls of wisdom or… heck, I don’t know, maybe they’re just funny and flirting a lot.  It’s not that uncommon to have this sort of chance, memorable encounter.  Think of the bit player in a movie who stands out in a scene just as much as the main character. Sure they exist, and we all love to encounter them in a story.  Sometimes the reason to be there can just be “this is really cool.”

However…

If I’ve got three or four or more characters like this, that’s starting to really cut into my page count.  At just three or four pages per encounter, that’s twelve or sixteen pages of my manuscript that have nothing to do with my story.  It adds up quick.  This is me deciding I’ll keep a few of those little toy soldiers, but just the special ones, and the ones that look good, and the ones that have fond memories, and the rare ones,  and suddenly I’ve put a hundred of them back on the shelf.

If I’m one of those writers who tries to make every single character special… well, there’s a good chance people are going to start getting frustrated with my lack of focus.

Y’see, Timmy, it keeps coming back to that idea of clutter.  Things getting in the way and slowing us down.  It’s okay to a small extent, but once it hits a certain point… we just have to stop everything.  And the people we’re trying to impress with it…  they’ll probably get annoyed with me.  Or flee in terror and call one of those hoarders shows.  Or the literary equivalent of one, I guess.

I may have some of the coolest, rarest, most beautiful characters out there.  But if they’re not really doing anything, I should maybe at least consider getting rid of them.

Speaking of which, next time…

Well, I’m starting a new book, and we haven’t talked about that whole process in a while.  So maybe I’ll talk a bit about drafts.  Unless one of you has something else you’d rather hear about?

Until then… go write.