Category: names

             So very sorry for the long delay.  You’ve all been very patient.  Like, eligible-for-sainthood patient.  

            I could make a bunch of excuses but, well… I’m probably going to bombard you with self-promotional stuff next year.  Let’s just put it that way.

            Sorry.

            Anyway… let’s talk about that title.  Pop culture reference from fifty years ago.  In the hit western A Fistful of Dollars (also known as “that old western they’re watching in Back to the Future II”) and its sequels, Clint Eastwood’s character is never named.  Never. 

            Why do I mention this?

            Let me go over a few things first.

            There are three types of characters in any story.  You may have heard a bunch of different literary terms for them, but for our purposes I’m going to break them down to main characters, supporting characters, and background characters.  Every character in my story can fit under one of these three umbrellas.  Or in one of these classes, if you prefer.

            My maincharacters are my heroes, and sometimes my villains, too.  These are the people making things happen in my story, and the ones my narrative will spend most of its time with.  If someone makes a movie out of my book or screenplay, the main characters are going to be the ones on the poster.  There could be six or seven main characters in a good-sized ensemble, but it starts getting hard to balance (or juggle) things when it goes much higher than that.  Not saying it’s impossible, but if my story has fourteen main characters, I might want to rethink some things.

           The supporting characters are the ones around my main characters, usually offering some kind of support (surprise) in either a physical or emotional way.  They appear and disappear from the story as they’re needed.  We don’t focus on them as much because they’re secondary in the story.  They help out, in a variety of ways, but they aren’t the ones who save the day or stop the bad guy.

            Finally, we have the background characters.  They’re just what they sound like.  These are the window dressing people.  The ones who fill tables at a restaurant, bring drinks to our heroes, and stand at the bus stop outside so they can be obstacles when said heroes come racing out at high speed.  In the film industry, they’re actually called “background” or just “extras” (and sometimes less flattering terms depending on who’s listening).  Background characters rarely get more than a line or two of description, and it’s almost always physical.  More than that’s a bad precedent, because I’m setting up the reader to think they’re more important than they are.  When my story’s focusing on the flight attendant, I don’t need tons of history and  psychological background about the rude woman in seat 4C.

            Now, before we get back to Clint Eastwood, let me mention something else that’s come up here once or thrice before.  Names.  Names are important for characters, because a name is great shorthand to my readers for how relevant a character’s going to be to my story.  If I introduce a character with a name, there’s a good chance they’re going to matter so the reader should pay attention to them. 

            (I mean, I’m not just going to name some random guy over at table three in the diner, right?   Can you imagine how much Guardians of the Galaxy would’ve dragged if it started by naming every single person in the hospital room with Peter Quill’s mom?  Or all of the prisoners and guards in the Kyln?  That’d just get silly and confusing, and there’d be no point to it…)
            So, what am I getting at?

            I need to keep track of what class of characters I’m writing about and balance things accordingly.  It’s hard for me to say Bob is one of my main characters if the bus driver gets more description than he does.  If everyone in my script is named, how’s the reader supposed to keep track of the important people?

            A while back I mentioned Theresa Cano, a character in early drafts of my many-times-rightfully-rejected novel The Suffering Map.  Except Theresa wasn’t even a character.  She was a rich and detailed transitional device that filled two pages.  When I cut her out (in the fourth or fifth draft, if memory serves) it didn’t change a single thing in the story.
            So, really, she was a two page distraction that broke the flow.

            In A Fistful of Dollars there’s so much focus on the main character that he doesn’t even need a name.  And it’s not like this complicates things  He’s almost always present  and people rarely use names when they talk to each other.  Cormac McCarthy does the same thing in his novel The Road.  We never learn the father’s name or the son’s.  Same with Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive.  We’re more than halfway through Fight Club before it’s pointed out that Ed Norton’s character has never been named.  Heck, Boba Fett’s name is never spoken in the Star Wars movies until about twenty seconds before he’s knocked to his doom in the third movie.

            Speaking of Star Wars… one of the biggest complaints about all the Special Editions and additional canon is how overcomplicated it’s made things.  The folks at Kenner and LucasArts were looking for more marketable material, but rather than making new things they just inflated what was there.  Think of that famous cantina scene with the band and the alien trying to rough up Luke.  Did you know the band has a name?  All the individual musicians do, actually.  So does the alien smacking Luke around (he’s called Ponda Baba).  And the bartender.  In fact, pretty much every single alien in that scene now has a proper name and a race and a back story.

            Good thing none of it’s actually in the movie.

            When I’m writing, I have to know what’s relevant.  I shouldn’t make extended detours to cover irrelevant characters because a detour, by definition, is off the path.  It’s breaking the flow.  People can argue about art or style or literature all they want, but if my heroine runs into the drugstore for first aid supplies after a vampire attack and I spend the next seven paragraphs talking about the twenty-two year old failed football jock who’s running the night shift register because he tore a ligament in his junior year of college and had nothing to fall back on when he didn’t go pro, and how he got his name from his grandfather and it caused a huge argument between his dad and his mom when he was little which was what drove him to be a super-successful athlete and why the torn ligament was such a dream-killer… wait, why was my heroine coming in here?  Does she know this guy?   Is he secretly a vampire hunter (doubtful, since we just heard his whole history)?  Is he the love interest?  Is he a potential—no, never mind.  Our heroine just ran back out to get on with the story.

            Once I start breaking the flow—going off the path—I risk losing my reader.  I need to stay focused on my main characters and the actions they’re taking, with some help from the supporting characters now and then.  The background characters, by and large, should stay in the background, with maybe an odd line of dialogue or description now and then–giving them a name and a page of description isn’t going to add anything because they’re not supposed to add anything.  And if I really feel compelled to put the best man in every scene of my wedding story, then maybe I need to rethink who the main characters are and restructure things accordingly.

            Because if I’m not sure where my characters belong in my story… well, who will be?
            And there you have it.  Clint Eastwood.  Hope it was worth the wait.
            Next time…

            Y’know what?  This is so ridiculously late, and it’s a holiday week, so in a day or two I might revisit the idea of how to horrify people.

            Until then, go write.

            Sorry for missing last week.  When I should’ve been posting this, I was at the San Diego Comic-Con, hanging out in the Geek & Sundry lounge and watching the Welcome to Night Vale panel (I even got to ask a question about writing).  And the G&S folks gave me a free copy of the Zombies: Keep Out! board game and a card game called Love Letters.   And Felicia Day smiled at me once as she walked past.

            Y’know, in retrospect, I’m not really sorry I missed last week.

            But I am finally caught up on my sleep. I was exhausted for a while there.

            Speaking of which…

            I write a series set in a post-apocalyptic world.  It was first put out by a small press that specializes in end-of-the-world fiction, and I’ve met a bunch of authors who work in that genre and related ones.  Needless to say, I’ve read a lot of these books and stories.  I’d have to guess close to a hundred in the past five years.

            I have seen a lot of people die on the page.

            I’ve characters die of disease or injury.  Seen them shot or stabbed.  Some have been crushed.  Many have been torn apart by zombies—both classic slow ones and the runners.  A few people have gone peacefully and with no pain… but not a lot of them. 

            On a semi-related note, for a long time there was a joke in comic circles that no one stayed dead except Bucky and Gwen Stacy (who’ve both been resurrected in recent years).  It’s one of the things that made some folks point to comics as low-brow, pulpy writing, because villains and heroes would always return with elaborate tales of how they’d avoided death… again.  The new term tossed about is death fatigue.  Readers are just plain bored with overhyped “deaths” that are reversed in twelve issues or less.

            What I’d like to blab on about this week is sympathy fatigue, also sometimes called compassion fatigue.  It’s a medical term that refers to when doctors, nurses, and caregivers have become so drained by the death and suffering they see that they just… well, can’t feel sympathetic anymore.  Constant exposure has desensitized them.  I had the (very awful) experience once of visiting the “death row” of an animal shelter, and the woman who mass-euthanised the cats and dogs admitted she didn’t even look at them anymore.

            Readers and audience members can feel sympathy fatigue, too.  After watching countless people die, the carnage just fades into a background hum.   It no longer carries any emotional weight.  How often have you watched a horror film with an audience and, after a certain point, people just start laughing? Characters on screen are stabbed, tortured, crushed, and decapitated, and you and your friends are giggling.  Maybe even cheering.

            How do I keep people from laughing?

            Let me get to that in a kind of roundabout way…

            A bad habit I’ve mentioned before is naming every character.  I think some time in the past an MFA professor or writing coach offered some advice about names and it went through a dozen iterations of the telephone game.  Now there’s a (thankfully small) school of thought that says every character should have a name.  That guy at the bus stop.  The cook behind the counter.  The woman in the leather jacket.

            When I give a character a name, I’m telling the reader that all these people are important.  There’s a reason she’s Phoebe and not “the blonde” or “the woman in the leather jacket.”  A name tells the reader to take note of this person because they’re going to affect the story.  If it turns out Phoebe has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, it means I’ve distracted the reader.  And distractions kill the flow of my story.

            When this idea gets mixed with death, it creates a pattern you’ve probably seen before in stories.  We’ll get introduced to a random person, be told a bunch of character stuff about them, and then, eight or nine pages later… they’ll die.  Usually their death will be connected to the larger threat, if not the larger story.  Giant ants, Ebola, vampires, terrorists–whatever the actual protagonists are dealing with, these poor folks will stumble across it and be wiped out.  In some books, this can happen four or five times.  Introduce a character, kill ‘em.  Introduce a character, kill ‘em.  Introduce a character, kill ‘em.  Introduce a character… well, you get the point.

            The idea here is that I’m showing my readers the widespread nature of the threat, or perhaps the ruthlessness of the killers.  And it should carry emotional weight because I spent a couple of pages making Phoebe or Wakko or Dot feel like real people.  From a mathematical, by-the-numbers viewpoint, this is all good, right?

            Catch is, though, my readers are going to notice this pattern really quick.  Just like they’ll notice that I’m naming background characters who have nothing to do with the plot, most readers will realize I’m just introducing characters to kill them off.  So they’ll stop investing in these characters as a way to save time and effort.  It’s a defense mechanism.  They just stop caring.

            And once the reader stops caring, well…

            Perhaps the worst thing this means is that once my readers have been conditioned by all the meaningless deaths, they’re going to be numb to the important ones.  One of my leads will make a heroic sacrifice or that jerk supporting character will finally get what’s coming to her, and my readers will gloss over it the same way they barely registered the last six or seven deaths.  My whole story gets lessened because I’ve lessened the impact of death.

            Don’t get me wrong.  It’s okay to have people die.  I’m a big fan of it.  But I can’t use cheap tricks to give these deaths weight.  I need to be aware of who my characters are and what their deaths are accomplishing within my story structure.  If I just need someone to die gruesomely to set the mood or tone, I don’t need to make them a major character—or to convince my readers he or she is a major character.  And if I’m going to kill off one of my major characters, her death shouldn’t read just like the nineteen deaths that came before it.

            Because when I kill off someone important, I want you to care.

            Next time, I’d like to offer you all a simple choice.

            Until then, go write.

            A while back there was a discussion on a page I browse semi-regularly.  A few folks were moaning about the overzealous use of firearms terminology in some stories.  It can get frustrating and distracting, I admit.  There are writers who feel a need to show off their knowledge by naming every single weapon, component and accessory their protagonist or villain is using.  Every time they’re seen.

            The term I’ve heard for this, which I have to admit I love, is gun porn.

            The real question, of course, would be… is this a bad thing or not? 

            The answer is one of those gray areas of writing.  It depends a bit on what the author’s trying to do.  It depends on the character.  Honestly, it’s a simple issue, but because firearms tend to be a very divisive subject—where some folks love and worship them to an almost obsessive degree and other folks hate and revile then to an equally obsessive degree—they get brushed into their own special category sometimes in writing, even though they don’t need it.

            See, a pistol or rifle is really just like any other object in my story.  It’s a name, and there’s a time for proper names and a time for pronouns.  To paraphrase the song, if every time Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla walks into a room, Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla makes a point of patting the holster of Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla’s Sig Sauer Pro2340 pistol and considers that now maybe it’s time for Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla to draw his Sig Sauer Pro2340 pistol…

            Well, Peter William Clines will be putting that manuscript down pretty fast.  Peter William Clines can tell you that much for sure.

            We’d all much rather read that when Rufus walks into a room he makes a point of patting the holster of his pistol and considers that now maybe it’s time for him to draw it. 

            Sometimes.

            On the flipside, I was watching an old giant monster movie the other day.  Not one of the classy ones from Japan, but a western attempt to cash in on the  craze.  At one point, the characters are gathered in the war room looking at a map of the city, trying to figure out if they’ll be able to stop the monster or not.  And the three-star general stabs his finger down on the map and says “We’ve got to get it out in the open so we can throw all our stuff at it!”

            All our stuff…?

            Y’see, Timmy, just like some characters, there’s going to be times it makes perfect sense to write out the full name of a pistol, and some when it’s perfectly fine to just call it “her pistol” or “his rifle.”  There will be times when the full name of a weapon is going to be a distraction more than anything else, but also times that it’s going to seem silly and out of character not to use it.  It’s important for me to remember that it isn’t always about what I know or what’s right—it’s about what the character knowsand thinks is right.  A trained assassin might see a Heckler & Koch G36, but a schoolteacher’s probably just going to see a big, scary-looking machine gun.
            In my own book, Ex-Patriots, Stealth is a deductive genius and a walking Wikipedia.  She’s Sherlock Holmes in spandex and body armor.  Early in the book, when she first encounters the soldiers from Project Krypton, she immediately identifies the exact model of rifles they’re using and realizes the unusual way the weapons are being used.  Yet in that same moment, it’s clear St. George—a former maintenance guy—has no clue what kind of rifles the soldiers are using.

            Watch The Matrix sometime.  Is that a love letter to gun culture or what?  And not a single weapon is named in the movie.  Not one.  The closest they get is when they talk about the EMP they use against the Sentinel robots.

            I just finished reading one of the Harry Dresden books by Jim Butcher, and at one point Harry and his friends end up with a few pistols and shotguns.  And that’s what they’ve got—a few pistols and shotguns.  Harry identifies one of the pistols as a 9mm when he gets it, but that’s all the explanation we ever get.

            Ash may have his double-barreled Remington 12 gauge, but most of us just think of it as his boomstick.  And that name really fits with a guy who’s not too bright and making a lot of stuff up as he goes.

            We all know Chekhov has a rifle hanging above the mantle, and we accept that as sage bit of writing wisdom.  Yet who among us has stopped to question what kind of rifle it is?  I’d bet a ton of money that nobody here has, because it’s just not important.

            As a small side note, I mentioned a ways back that this is a good rule of thumb for screenplays.  Unless it is life-or-death important to the plot that the bad guy is carrying a Glock 34 9mm with a custom rubber grip—I mean, the plot will collapse if he doesn’t have this specific weapon—then I’m not going to waste my words naming weapons.  When the movie gets made, there are going to be prop masters and armorers who know much more about this stuff than me, and they’re going to make good choices so we all look good.  Until then, my characters can just have pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and so on.

            And on another somewhat related note… a common criticism I see is folks shrieking, “They’re called magazines, not clips!”  This is kind of the same issue as above.  Sometimes I need to make sure that the weapons are loaded with magazines, but there are just as many times it makes more sense to call them clips—even though it’s inaccurate.  Yes, many folks who knows their weapons knows the difference.  If my characters don’t, though, then it wouldn’t be that surprising for them to call that thing holding bullets a clip.  It’s been a common mistake for almost eighty years, after all.  In fact, it’d come across a bit odd and fake if every non-soldier and non-gun-enthusiast in my story used precise firearms terminology.

            So here’s a little suggestion I’ll toss out for you.  Maybe this’ll work for you, maybe it won’t.  The next time one of your character pulls his pistol or swings up her rifle, ask yourself this…

            Would you be as specific and descriptive with the weapon’s name if it was a bow?

            There are lots of different types of bows, with many strings, grips, pulls, models, extra add-ons, and so forth.  That’s not even counting the arrows themselves, and the different shaft lengths, fletching, heads, and notching.  Professional archers are very specific about what they will and won’t use.  So at this moment in your story, if someone aimed their bow at your character… how much detail would you feel compelled to use?

            If the answer is “not much,” maybe that’s a sign to rethink how much detail’s going into that firearm.

            Next time, courtesy of the Beatles, we’re going to take a little trip.  Odds are you won’t enjoy it.

            Until then, go write.