“Everybody Says” Characters Need to Change

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of people passing around wisdom because “everybody says” the same thing, as if it were the only way to do whatever is being asked. ”Characters need to change” is one of those things that gets talked a lot about–seen threads in two different places on the subject.  The bad part about passing around common wisdom like this is that if that’s all you see and it’s an area you struggle with, then you might not know there’s an alternate choice that may work better for you.

So, do characters always need to change?

Not necessarily.   In a character-driven story, yeah, it’s a requirement.  I’m not as familiar with romance or women’s fiction, but these also feel like genres where character change would be important to the story itself.  And I’ve seen books where the character changes too much.  This seems particularly true in urban fantasy, where the writers are pushing on the change–and suddenly the series I’m reading has a character so different that I lose one of the reasons I came to the story in the first place.

In genres like mystery and thriller, the characters tend not to change.  I remember reading the Kinsey Milhone series–the character of Kinsey always stayed the same from book to book.  She was an orphan, a misfit in society, and cut her own hair with nail cutters, which didn’t bother her a bit.

But the way most how-to books and writers talk, it’s easy to think that every character needs to change.   I fall into the latter, having a character who doesn’t change–but the situation around him does.  I see topics like character worksheets, character flaws, and character interviewing, and I’m like “What do I do with this?  It’s not me.”

How to get around “Everybody says”?  Be well read in many different genres.

Characterization in Page Turners

I was flipping TV channels and tuned into the current GI Joe cartoon.  I’d seen the one from 1985 and enjoyed it because they’d done a decent job not only with the story, but also with the characterizations.  The new one though–little characterization or story.  Just lots of action.

Action alone doesn’t make a page turning story.  I like action-adventure, but there’s been stories that I’ve been downright bored with.  Lots of action, but no characterization.  One thriller I read had such undeveloped characters that I had trouble remembering who was who.  I kept having to stop at each scene change and think, “Is this the guy who hates his father or the guy with the troubled past?”  Lots of action, but it was kind of hard to follow when I had trouble remembering the main characters.

Granted, plot-driven stories have a character who follows a specific course dictated by the story.  It allows writers not to characterize, but when they don’t, it makes the story forgettable. 

On the other hand, even a little bit of characterization goes a long way.  It puts a face on the story and adds an element of risk.  It also adds a bond to the reader, to make them part of rooting for success.   Some of the more successful plot-driven writers include Lee Child and Vince Flynn.  The characters have a strong sense of themselves and what they will do and won’t do.

Any other plot-driven authors who do a good job with characterization?

Yo, Joe!

Strong Female Characters

When I was growing up, there was little for girls to read other than Nancy Drew and nurse stories.  No action novels.  If a girl was in an action novel, a boy was the lead, and the girl essentially huddled against the wall, hands over her mouth and didn’t do anything to help herself.

Fantasy, mystery, and then urban fantasy broke new ground with women who didn’t stand around and wait to be rescued–they helped themselves.  I tried to incorporate some of this element into a thriller, because it’s still, unfortunately, lacking in that genre.

OCD. Vampires, and Rants, Oh My! addresses some things I’ve noticed in mystery, but more so in urban fantasy:

On the other hand, and more frequently an issue in recent fiction, is the strong female character who, instead of impossibly kicking everyone in the head with more force than anyone else on the planet, becomes a confrontational, abrasive jerk.

The last “kick butt herone” book I read was like that.  It was a new series I hadn’t seen before, and I won’t go past the first book.  The character spent most of the book insulting people just because they were there.  Not only that, instead of dealing with the fact that many women can’t do the same things as guys, the writers avoid the problem entirely by making the character nearly invincible.

I so dislike the insult humor that when I did MAGIC STUD, I went out of my way to avoid it altogether.  The main character is out in the public eye, his every word being recorded and interpreted by the press for hidden meaning.  He is regularly accosted by fans and paparrazi.  But he never, ever insults anyone and always tries to stay respectful.  And while he does have a few things that help him out in times of trouble, they also have some major flaws built in so that he can’t use them that much.

I want to see the characters get out of a problem because they’re smarter than a very smart bad guy, not because the writer made them invincible.  It makes for much better storytelling.

–

L.M. Adams

Plot-Driven vs. Character-Driven

I’ve had a realization over the last few days.  I’ve always thought of myself as writing character-driven books, and I’ve realized that I’m actually plot-driven.  I think I confused characterization with character-driven, and they’re not the same thing.

Consider this from Tameri Guide for Writers on Plot-Driven:

A plot-driven story captivates readers or audiences through the excitement of events. The characters are important, but the action takes precedence.

That description fits the thriller genre perfectly, and certainly fits some urban fantasy.  Even a detective novel would be plot-driven because the readers are coming in to see the character solve the mystery. 

This is what Tameri had to say on Character-Driven:

Character-driven stories rely on interesting characters and their responses to situations. While the situations arise from the plot, readers or audiences remember the characters.

On one of my previous projects ( a thriller), the story was set during the Civil War.  A Federal army officer was off on his own agenda, but he had to stop a fellow junior officer named Babcock who knew too much.  Very briefly, I considered a scene where the major orders Babcock’s regiment to come after Babcock, using a lie the soldiers believe.  Babcock realizes that, and he’s caught in the position of knowing his men will kill him to follow orders or to kill his own men for following orders based on a lie.  That never got past the thought stage because it would have been a distraction in the action-based story.  Now I undertand why it didn’t fit.  Action in the story took precedence, and such a direction would have been a distraction for what I wanted to do overall with the story.

Characters Description Boring?

Describing character always seems to be a hot topic among writers.  Some people describe all their characters and try to get the description in up front.  Others are adamant about never using any description and leave it up to the reader to picture the character.

I like seeing character description.  Usually if it’s missing, I find the description and the narrative lacking in general.  It’s like the description adds a bit of sparkle to the book, and it’s the ones that sparkle that gets me to read another of the author’s books or to buy the book.

I think some people stay away from character description because they think it’s a boring vital statistic description–height, weight, hair color, eye color.  I even participated in a description workshop where the teachers were convinced that was the only way to describe characters.  The truth is that I can’t tell you the height, weight, hair color, and eye color of any of my characters–not even the main character.  But I describe every one of them, even the walk-on characters.

Which is a lot of characters.  I have 22 named characters, plus the walk-ons.  That’s why I don’t come up with the vital statistics for each one.  It’d be too time consuming and would tend to make everyone sound alike.  Instead, I tend to hit one or two important details.  The details vary.  It could be a basic description, like what they’re wearing and how it plays into their characterization.  Or it could be a metaphor.  With omniscient, I can use the narrator to bring in a detail about their life that we wouldn’t know in first or third.  As I’m writing this, I’m thinking that I haven’t used smell as a description, so I could have someone wearing distinctive perfume or colonge, use too much perfume or colonge, or smells like cigarette smoke.

I also try to do something else with the description besides simply telling the reader what the character looks like.  Sometimes there’s a little humor, or a bit of characterization (particularly useful when doing a walk-on role on a character who returns later).  Maybe even a bit of backstory.

Character description doesn’t need to be a boring list of vitals!

Spotting Lies & Fiction

This article “The Truth is, Spotting a Lie Isn’t as Easy as it Looks” brings up some interesting points about lying.  I like articles like this because I can usually take something away from it and apply it in what I write.  In my current project, the main character has to lie a lot.  He’s not who he says he is, and he has to lie about that; he’s dealing with magic and monsters, and he has to lie about that (because the world isn’t ready for it).  The people around him find out that they have to lie, too, for a lot of the same reasons.

But these paragraphs were particularly useful:

First, there are “emblems,” such as the “thumbs up” gesture, which is recognized to mean “Okay!” Emblems are helpful in truth detection, but only when they are arrested in mid-gesture: shrugging one shoulder, starting to raise and flap your hands away from yourself, as if to say, “Oh, I’m finished with that” — but halting the gesture. Your body just told the truth before you could stop it. These are “emblematic slips,” Ekman says, and indicate the subject is trying to suppress or alter information.

Second, there are “illustrations,” such as waving your arms or jabbing a finger in the air. Illustrations decrease when people tell lies because liars are being careful and unconsciously inhibiting their motions.

Emblems and illustrations give me examples to think about using.  Some may be too subtle to use in a book without having to explain it to the reader in some way.

A third one is manipulations–of all things, grooming tics.  I imagine this might include fiddling with a tie (I did that in a chapter, and the character was indeed lying), twisting hair, chewing on eyeglasses, etc.  This is commonly believed to be a sign of lying, but according the article, it actually isn’t.  On the other hand, if it is commonly believed to be a sign of lying, then it could be used in a novel.

How Do I Create My Characters?

One of my early memories of character development was running across a character worksheet in a book.  The book’s probably long out of print, but it had a lot of items on the worksheet that the writer was supposed to fill out to develop the character.  I had a hard time understanding how knowing what a character’s favorite color or or where they were born was character development.

To me, the development starts with the story.  Even my main character is created out of what I need in the story.  But I don’t have any specific steps that I do; rather, it’s something that evolves as the story evolves. I usually start coming up with characters because I need a particular role in the story.  Like if people got lost in an underground tunnel, who would show up to help? Police and fire. So a policeman and a fireman. Make the policeman young and a little reckless but very observant; make the fireman a fire captain in his forties and an experienced leader.

Then they evolve with first contact in the story.  In the above description, the fire captain was instantly on the page like this, because it was an easy role to do; the police officer required a little more story and some additional research to build this image.

As to the little details that tend to turn up on the worksheet–I’ll add those into the story as I need them.  I did need to know the name of the main character’s parents because they do get mentioned in the story.  It’s part of a subplot that’s important to backstory.  But to other characters like a police officer, an antique dealer, or a limousine driver, these details simply aren’t important to the story and aren’t important enough for me to spend time creating.