Characters

Following up on the last painful lesson, here is another: no one will remember your pretty words, they will remember your characters.

Say that with me… now say it again.

I personally don’t have a hard time creating characters. In fact, I usually create too many and that is a problem unto itself. But there is so much fiction out there where the characters are just bland and boring. At least, that’s the case with literary fiction. Try it in popular fiction and your book won’t make it past the slush pile.

Real People vs. Larger-Than-Life Figures

Oh god. There is it again.

Larger-than-Life Characters

In other articles, I’ve written about my distaste for this term but there is no sense in rehashing that here. The fact is, you need larger than life characters and there is no better way to describe them other than saying larger than life characters. (how’s that for keyword density?)

If you don’t like larger than life characters, get over it. Get over yourself for that matter. Frankly, if you think you’re too good to write characters that break out of scenes and resonate in the reader’s mind, or that your prose will carry you through the absence of such characters, or your story premise is so good that no one will notice, you are screwed.

Sorry to be blunt, but this is more for my benefit than yours.

See, I sometimes wander off into this world called MineIsBiggerThanYours. It’s a great place really because it’s all about me and how wonderful I am. Of course, I am the only person who ever goes there. I am also the only person who is ever going to go there willingly. Don’t subject your readers to forced residency in your own version of this world. Get over yourself. Learn from my mistakes.

Greatness: Strength

Some authors are tempted to make anti-heroes who are weak and somehow find the hidden talent to break out of the mold. Don’t be one of these authors. Please. I beg you. Strength of character and triumph is what draws in the reader.

This doesn’t mean that your character can’t have problems.

A great character is one that not only deepens our understanding of ourselves but that opens us to ranges of potential, a riot of passionate response to the problems of existence. Grim chronicles of human frailty are the job of sociology or, in literature, the business of minor genres like dialect novels, regional novels and docudramas. If you truly wish to write the breakout novel, commit yourself to characters that are larger-than-life. Your fiction will be bigger for it.

Greatness: Inner Conflict

“Accomplishment already accomplished does not hold our attention.” In other words, “what have you done for me lately?”

Characters without issues are really dull. Think about people you know who are practically perfect in every way. Do you enjoy listening to their exploits? I don’t.

I want characters who are striving to reach some goal. I want to reach with them for that goal. I want to be part of that success.

So does your reader.

Inner conflict arises from personal contradictions. The character tries to overcome these issues during the course of the novel (or series). Without something like this to drive them, their actions might seem a bit mechanical. So take heed.

Greatness: Self-Regard

Do you take yourself seriously? This weekend I wrote in my journal “I suck.” Actually, I wrote it several times.

Now who on earth wants to read that? Nobody. That’s why it’s in my journal.

However, the idea that I would write that down and then come back the next day and try to dig myself out of that hole is interesting (well, at least a little). What makes me do that? I care about myself. I want to succeed and I try my best to put everything I’ve got into it because no one is going to give a damn whether I quit or not except me.

This is what self-regard is all about. Do you care about your own emotions? Are you passionate? Does this translate to your characters? If not, then why are your writing?

Greatness: Wit and Spontaneity

I really liked this section. Even though the articles on this site are an expression of my frustration with myself I’m often described by friends and acquaintances as witty and spontaneous. I also hear things like, “Oh I wish I’d said that!” Especially when I crack wise to people who deserve a good verbal beating.

Larger than life characters have this quality too.

Does that make me larger than life? Maybe and perhaps that’s why I hate the term.

Dark Protagonists

Have you ever told someone:

This is the best thing I have ever written.

I have too and almost always that piece of work is absolute trash. Generally, it’s something I’ve written while in a foul mood. I’m sure you know exactly the kind of mood I mean. It usually starts with the dull ache of self-loathing. It expands, sometimes quite dramatically, into a full blow rage that threatens to consumer vast quantities of liquor and calories, swelling your body mass and stretching the limits of your wardrobe.

But maybe you have other vices.

Anyway, as Maass relates, works that come with the preface of best-thing-I-have-written are often terrible.

I have to admit that when I hear that phrase my heart sinks and too often with good reason. The manuscript in question stands a good chance of being about characters who are dark, tortured, haunted (always by “demons”), angry, depressed, cynical or in some other way unbearable. When I just as inevitably point out this drawback, the response is usually, “But I like my characters flawed! That is what makes them interesting!”

I long to say, “You mean, theraputic?” But I bite my tongue.

Ugh. That was a painful thing to read. I can point to half a dozen stories off the top of my head that have characters who fit the bill. Most of them are just the kind of “my masterpiece” garbage that Maass describes. I look back on their rotting carcasses with shame.

If your characters fit this scheme, it doesn’t mean you have a hopeless case. What you need to do is deal with that darkness. The character has to recognize their problem and seek to change the situation. This is how you draw the reader in and make them root for your tragic hero as he (or she) seeks to become, well, untragic or at a minimum sympathetic.

The Highest Character Qualities

Forgiveness and self-sacrifice. Let’s remember here that we live in a society, despite some current outward appearances, that is based on these two fundamental qualities. Whether we subscribe to the dogma surrounding these ideals, each of us in our own way feels sympathetic toward those who truly embody these principles.

That might be laying it on a bit thick. I’m a cynical person and so I tend to think that the forgivers and self-sacrificers of the world are suckers. But then, if I think real hard about it, I think that way because I tend to do both and people walk all over me because of it.

Building a Cast

You might be tempted to fill your whole story with characters that just jump of the page, and some writing books will tell you this is a bad thing. I’m not going to do that because I’ve read plenty of books that have a huge cast and are just spectacular. Think I’m kidding? Ok, count the major characters in Lord of the Rings. You can just count the characters in one book if you want. Doesn’t matter. The cast is huge.

As Maass points out, the most common mistake tends to be poor focus rather than the size of the cast. Here we begin to get into the idea of combining characters while thinking through the planning stages of a novel. This was an interesting concept to me when I first began to try it five or six years ago. It’s a practice that I highly recommend, even if you’re just doing it for fun.

I could quote at length here, but I’m not going to. Read this section closely.

Advanced Character Relationships

How do your characters know one another? Are they friends, strangers, brothers? Which one of these three is likely to produce the most friction? Complex relationships, like those between family members are usually far stronger than friends and certainly more than with strangers. Blood is thicker than water, you know.

Here again Maass breaks in with the idea of combining characters so that you can strengthen traits and develop a stronger focus.

A breakout novelist will also make moments when characters measure how their opinions of others have changed. Such moments reinforce the sense of passing time and the effect of a novel’s events on their lives. Such moments contribute to the layering of characters and story line that is so central to making a breakout novel.

Change. Isn’t that a word that comes up when thinking of the best novel’s we’ve read? “It changed my life.” But why? Could it be that the characters in the novel changed too, and that in their recognition of their own change and of those around them we carry forward some sense of that identification into our own daily lives? Yes. I think this is an important lesson.

Sidekicks and Narrators

This section really deserves to be expanded, but then I have yet to see a book that really tackles the idea of sidekicks head-on. Too often, we as authors tend to think too much of our main characters. We tell the tale from their perspective because we like that character, want to be that character (in some respects). However, there are so many examples of stories told from the perspective of a secondary character who watches the main character go through their trials. This could be the disembodied voice of a third person narrator, but I think it is more powerful when that voice comes from within the story.

For example, what would Sherlock Holmes be without Watson to tell his tale? Well, if Holmes told the story, we’d know a heckuva lot more about his process of deduction. That much is certain because a Holmes narrator would need to share his inner thoughts in order to gain our trust and sympathy. With Watson narrating, we can watch this nearly omnipotent detective from a distance and marvel at that which is unknowable. This quality, the unknowable, is something that only a sidekick or third person narrator can give to your work.

I’ve struggled with this one time again and invariably I come back to the idea that the story has to be told by someone other than my protagonist. I think this works especially well with those characters who are dark and brooding. The great Unknowable…

Depth and Differentiation of Character

This is another section Maass brushes over, which is sort of funny because he went on at length about details and depth. Then, when we get to the meat about characterization, he sort of trails off. Well, I think this is partly because characters, while very important, are not his strongest suit (at least in this book).

Try Writing a Damn Good Novel by James M. Frey if you’re hankering for real depth about characterization. I’m going to skip out here myself now and get on to the part where Maass really shines.