“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.

Describing Characters?

A hot topic among writers is whether to describe characters or not.  A lot of writers say not to describe the characters, to let the reader imagine them.

I’m always a little disappointed when a writer doesn’t bother to describe the characters.  Mind you, I’m not looking for a detailed vital statistic description of everything possible in the character’s appearance.  One or two sentences might be enough if they’re the right sentences.

And I don’t think it necessarily needs to an actual visual description–hair and eye color and whatnot.  I was in a description workshop, and I think I drove them crazy because I wasn’t describing things visually.   I actually wanted to expand beyond that because there are so many interesting things that can be done.  Here’s a few:

Description by dialogue:  I’ve seen this done a couple of times.  In one of Sue Grafton’s books, a hairdresser gives Kinsey a hard time for hair that looks like rear end of a dog.  In a J.A. Konrath book, the description was, well, quite shocking.  Well written, but it made me go “Eew!”

Through story development:  In a lot of urban fantasies, the character’s appearance comes into play as part of the story.  In the Riley Jensen series, she’s part of the rare red werewolves; in Darkfever, the main character ends up having to dye her hair because the bad guys can identify her.

Through impression:  This is what I’ve been using from MAGIC STUD.  It comes from some of the thrillers I’ve read, and it’s not a vital description statistic, but an impression of the person.  It’s great with an omniscient narrator because I can have a lot of fun with it.  I have a character who gives the outer impression of being a fluffball (see title of book), and he’s actually an extremely dangerous assassin.

What are some other non-traditional ways of describing characters?

Changing the Names of Characters

Over on Wordplay, K.M. Weiland has a post on naming characters.  She covers a lot of the usual territory on naming characters, but has this point to make about changing the names:

Don’t be afraid of changing names when necessary. I very rarely nail my characters’ names on the first attempt. In optimal situations, I have their names hammered down by the time I start the first draft, thus ensuring that the names mesh perfectly with their personalities. But, despite my care, I inevitably find myself with at least one (six in my current project) character submitting an application for a name change.

In the course of writing MAGIC STUD, I’ve had a lot of characters come in and out.  I’ve taken to listing all of them in my information sheet because some I might use later, if this turns into a series.  They just didn’t have a place in this book.  Others changed because I realized somewhere along the line I’d named the characters too similarly.

Then there’s the bad guy.  I had a really hard time settling on that one.  First he was named Tewls, some mysterious rich guy somewhere, transitioning into Spirot in the middle of the first draft.  By the second draft he was Maddox.  That sounded like a thug who only followed orders–hardly the bad guy needed to be a big threat (probably owing to the fact I’ve heard the name Maddox used so many times on TV for a thug).  So it turned into Jack Davies.  That ran me into a new problem:  I had characters named Gene, Jack,  Jerry, and James.  Yikes!

I had to pick which of the four names I really liked, and that was Gene.  Jack underwent a complete name-lift, and for the other two, I just changed the first name.   Gene’s last name also changed because it sounded similar to another name.  

Any naming headaches you can think of?

Pictures of Characters

Jill Kemerer talks about searching the Internet to find the perfect picture of her characters:

Now, I fill out my character sheets for a new book, and when I form a mental picture of the hero and heroine, I spend a few hours on the internet, searching for models/actresses/musicians who come close to the ideal.

When I started my first novel, I remember hunting through fashion magazines for just the right picture of the characters.  Still have it, too, stuck away in a drawer.  At the time, it gave me a clear picture of the character, though it certainly didn’t help me with the characterization.  She turned out to be very unlikable!

But I stopped doing it somewhere along the way.  Not entirely sure why, though I know why I wouldn’t do it now.  The photos in magazines and stock sites are too perfect.  After the photos are taken, a guy comes along with Photoshop and retouches the photos.  Blemishes?  Gone!  Bustline?  Add an inch.  Hips? Take off an inch.  Skin?  Smooth it out and make it less shiny.  They’re not real people–just an idealized image.

What do I do now?  I go for impressions of the characters rather than what they look like.  I have 21 characters, so it’d be time consuming coming upwith photos of every one of them.  If they came up with a cover with the main character on it, I’d like to see what he looks like, too!

Do you use pictures for your characters or something else?

Juggling Multiple Characters in a Scene

When I wrote short stories, the most characters I might have in a story were three, and it was usually two.  Not a lot.  So when I wrote a  book and ended up needing 4-6  characters in scene, it was pretty scary.   I was trying to figure out what to do with them all.

And it’s tough doing in third person.  The scene perspective is through the viewpoint character’s eyes, and he’s not necessarily paying attention to everyone else.  It’s very easy to engage in a series of lines of dialogue between two characters and forget that there are more standing in the room.  Omniscient gives me a overall viewpoint that can see all the characters (omniscient is not multiple viewpoints).

But I have seen large numbers of characters done in first person–of all places.  Laurell K. Hamilton’s early books (first three) were very good at juggling large numbers of characters.  Not a lot of writers deal with large numbers of characters in a scene.  I’m reading a book now where there might might three characters in a scene, but the writer works hard to keep the three characters from being in the scene all at once.  Rather, the main character travels in the scene from character to character.  Three intersect together occasionally, but the writer quickly finds something else for the third character to go work on.  When more than two interact, the writer doesn’t let them interact for more than a few paragraphs.

Me?  Four characters have a discussion and all of them participate in the discussion for several pages.  Some things I do to help with the scenes:

Make sure all the characters should have a purpose in the scene.  They shouldn’t just be lawn ornaments.  When I did my last project, the first chapter had 11 characters.  Since the story had a military unit in it, I had all these characters because it was a military unit, and these characters came with the unit.  Otherwise, it didn’t matter all that much whether they were in the scene or not.  At the same time, I needed to not just remove the characters, but restructure the scene (it’s still a major part of the scene, even if the characters don’t have a purpose; simply removing them may have impacts on other things that happen).

The content should involve ALL the characters.  If the characters are having a discussion, they should all have something to contribute.   Of course, if they have a purpose in the scene, then they should have something to contribute.

Keep an eye on the pronouns.  This was a comment I got in my crits that it wasn’t always obvious who the “he” or “she” was.  With multiple characters tossing dialogue back and forth, it can even be more challenging because it does need to be very clear to the reader who “he” or “she” is.  And it’s all too easy to not get this one right because I know who’s talking in my head, so it makes sense to me.  This is one that I have to pay attention to, and in some cases, revise the sentences to make them more clear.

Build the scene structure to encompass all the characters.   When I first start writing multiple character scenes, I often thought of the exchanges as being two-shots.  I didn’t really envision the scene outside of the two-shot, so I had to pull back my mental camera to imagine something like five characters all sitting on the porch, talking.

Number of Characters

There’s this message board where they ask “Where are your characters?”  Everyone always lists two or three.  Maybe five.  I have 21 in MAGIC STUD.

I always end up with a large cast.  In my last project, I had over 30 in the first draft.  Many of those came out though in revision, and it dropped to probably around 20.   In dealing with such large numbers of characters, these are some things I’ve learned along the way:

Don’t introduce too many characters at once.  When I got the first chapter critted, the one comment across the board was “Too many characters.”  People were having trouble keeping track of who was who.  Character count in the first chapter: 11.  The chapter was revised to have only three by name.  I remember being very careful about it because there was a fourth character, I didn’t name him until the next chapter.

Don’t introduce characters in the middle of a fight scene.  That first chapter was also a fight scene.   The last thing in the middle of a fight scene should be trying to get the character’s names in!  In that case, I started in a different place so the reader could get grounded into the character first, then have a fight scene.

Don’t introduce characters who aren’t in the scene.  This one comes from a person in my critique group who did it.  He’d had probably three or four actual characters on the scene.  And then he starts throwing in all these other names at the read through dialogue.   One of the benefits of critiquing is seeing sometimes how confusing something can be for a reader from the reader’s perspective.

Use the character more than once.  If your character stops to talk to a waitress, think about a way to bring the waitress back.  Waste not, want not.  I find that if I don’t do anything with the character later on, I don’t need the character earlier either.  An auction bidder went zap because he didn’t turn up anywhere else, and on review, I could do the scene without him.

And the biggie:

There’s only one primary main character.  I tend to have four or five main characters.  In the previous project, they all shared equal weight.  That was fine during the writing, but turned into a major problem when it came time to write the synopsis and the query.  I remember when the critique group said there were too many characters in the synopsis (seven in a five page synopsis).  There were parts in the synopsis where a character couldn’t be removed without lying about the story.  And a query is just plain too short to spend it introducing so many characters. The other characters still carry their weight in the story, but the arc of the story following just the one primary main character.

Next up: How to deal with four, five, or six characters in a scene.

Fantasy Name Don’ts

I’ve always liked reading fantasy, especially after women characters really started to come into their own in the genre.  But one thing I’ve not liked about the genre is that sometimes the names are a little too unusual.  At one point, I was fed up with long, unpronouncable names that I had a hard time remembering over the course of the book. 

So when I wrote a fantasy story, I just went to my baby name book and picked normal, but unusual names.  Picked what I liked and didn’t pay much attention to the origin of the names.  The story was called “Necessary Evil,” and I think there might have been three characters.  I sent it off to a fantasy magazine and got a fast rejection with a handwritten note. 

They’d rejected it because of the names! 

I was quite mad at the comments, but I sat on the story for a month, willing to consider changing the names.  I looked at again and decided to let the names stand (though in hindsight, I should have changed the obviously Russian name.  That was probably the name that got the rejection).  I sent the story to the next magazine, and it got accepted, names and all.

Limyaeel has a rant on what writers shouldn’t do when coming up with fantasy names (I violated #6 with my story!).

With my WIP, I do have a few unusual names like Cabiessien (which is a made up name, based on another name) and Phannelia (straight out of my genealogy.  I have a branch of the family with names like Philander, Herminas, and Havilah.).  Everyone else has more of a Europeon flavor.  But I’m finding it a lot harder to pick names now than I did when I scanned the baby book for “Necessary Evil.”  We now have so may names available from different cultures, it’s hard finding ones that all fit together!

Not Using First and Last Name

The Guide to Literary Agents blog has an entry on Agents and the Slushpile: 10 Reasons They Stop Reading.  It comes from a writer’s conference where agents discussed these reasons.  Most of them are what I expect like:

 3. Not giving the reader a sense of place or where the story is going

No surprise there.  A story can have clean, perfect prose, but if it doesn’t mean the sense of story, it’s not going to hook an agent. 

The one that did surprise me was this one:

7. Introducing a character with first and last name, as in, “John Smith entered the room.”

I’m puzzled as to why that would be on a top ten reason for a rejection, especially since it doesn’t seem to be a particularly big issue.  At least to me anyway.  Now I’ll have to go back and look at the books I have and see what the authors do when their characters walk onto a scene.

–

For MAGIC STUD, today’s wordage report is 1,000 words (4 pages).  I’m now over 60K and about to ping over 61.

Barry, Barry, and Jerry

The names of my characters are driving me crazy! 

I have 23 named characters (at least so far that I’ve found), and one of the hardest things has been in keeping track of them.  I originally did a list, but the book changed so much at one point that the list was difficult to keep up (there were more characters than 23 originally).  I knew also that it was likely I was going to have to change the names of some of the characters, because some might be too similar to each other.

So, as part of my revision, I made a list of all the names.  There was one character whose first name turns up only twice in the book, and it was Jerry.  Since it sounded too similar to a couple other names, I changed it to Barry.  Then I discovered in my list that I’d already used the name Barry for someone else.  So I changed that character’s name to Paul.

Meanwhile, I figured I’d probably ought to rename the bad guy, since the name never did much for me (and besides, it, too, started with the pesky J letter).  Two minor characters needed last names, and one minor character needed a first name.  I think my eyes are starting to cross.

And none of this includes the three dead characters who get mentioned throughout the book; the names of the family house (which have women’s names); and the fact that several of the characters so despise their first names that they go by middle names.

I just used an Excel spreadsheet and put the first name in one column and the last name in another.  That way, I can sort it both ways and catch problems like Barry and Barry.

What I Learned from Non-Traditional Sources 2

A cold front plowed through here, and we got snow.  Not a lot by most snow standards, but by DC standards, it’s “Oh no!  It’s snowing!  IT’S SNOWING!  AARGH!”  Good thing it’s the weekend and not a commute day, though tomorrow may be interesting.

Several of my ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, so I’ve been doing some genealogy to prove the connection to that ancestor.  I did genealogy about ten to twelve years ago, but I ended up with so much paper that it got overwhelming, so my first task has been to start by working the organization issue better than I did than.  One of my ancestors was a missionary, and there are five passport applications on record just for him–and several for his wife and children.  The papers add up very quickly!

The Weekend Genealogist talks extensively about organization, particularly through the use of forms.  This has got me thinking about whether the application of forms would help with fiction writing.  The area that has gotten my attention is characters and character worksheets.

I personally hate, hate, hate character worksheets.  You know the ones–they ask a long list of questions, many of which will never see the light of day in the book.  People might say it’s helpful to know something even if it doesn’t turn up in the book, but that doesn’t feel like a good use of time for me.  I just looked at one, and it was eight pages!  That’s a lot of work for things that don’t end up in the book.

But there are also things I do need to know that are hard to remember.  For example, my main character’s mother gets mentioned by name periodically.  She’s been dead thirty years, but her murder is an unsolved crime that still creates news stories thirty years later.  Her name is hard to remember how to spell (the name is out of my genealogy!), so I end up having to look it up each time its referenced.   That’s a nuisance because I have to stop everything to open an Excel file to find a list. 

So all the discussion about genealogy forms has got me thinking about how I might use a form to solve this problem.  And I also started thinking about why I really dislike the tranditional character worksheets.  It also appears to lie in why traditional outlines don’t work for me–I don’t need to know that intense level of detail.

So I was thinking more along the lines of a more general character information sheet.  Basically, it’s a quick reference for the material that I am using, like the name of the character’s mother.   What I ended up with was a total of five fields:  Name, parents, description, general background, and backstory.   With something like description, I can put in only the information I’ve actually used rather than having blank spaces that “need to be filled in.”   The nice thing about it is that it’s easy to change if I want to add or take out a section for a different project.

The form is in Excel if you want to check it out.