More observations about characters

In a response to an earlier post, Robert noted how many writers who are still learning their craft devote too much energy to describing the physical appearance of their characters.  Some thoughts in response:

Yes, description is a bugbear for many beginners.  They believe that the reader won’t be able to picture the character unless they’ve given a complete physical description.  Which, of course, is not true.  And it compounds the error to stop the story, or at least throw it into low gear while a succession of unneeded details about hair and eye color, height and weight, and so on are doled out.

I’ve written entire novels in which the lead character’s appearance is not described.  I mean, not at all.  Not a single word.  In The Damned Busters, for example, Chesney Arnstruther is described merely as a young man.  The reader probably gains the impression that he has not spent any time in fitness centers or on playing fields, but his physique is not dwelt upon.  Nor are his eyes or hair or lips or chin.

He is described by another character as “high-functioning autistic,” but the astute reader will have grasped that facet of his personality long before the phrase is uttered.  Yet he carries the story along because he is constantly doing something to address the problems that, inwardly and outwardly, confront him.

But, for those writers, who don’t feel comfortable unless they give at least a minimal description, here’s a technique I use:  give a general description, add two or three details that say something about the character’s character, then add one characteristic motion.  The motion is important, I think, because it is easier for us to envision moving objects than still ones – something to do with our evolution as creatures that were more likely to be prey than predators.

Here’s an example from The Damned Busters, describing Billy Lee Hardacre, the labor lawyer/novelist turned tv preacher:

He was broad-shouldered, tall, and fiftyish, with silver hair that looked as if it had been poured into a mold and let to set overnight. He wore tailor-made suits with western-style piping on the lapels and a big gold and diamond ring that flashed as brightly as his piercing blue eyes whenever he raised his hands to call down divine blessings--or, more often, wrath--on some celebrity whose behavior had caught his attention over the preceding week.

If I've done that right, you should have a pretty good mental picture of Billy Lee, and at least the beginnings of a sense of what kind of guy he is.

Luff Imbry stories, cheap

Synchonicity at work: just days after my novel, The Other, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, seven short stories about protagonist Luff Imbry -- the corpulent master thief, forger and con man of the far-future Old Earth in its penultimate age -- have become available at the Angry Robot eBook store.

They come in various e-formats for a mere 59p each (less than $1). If you take all seven you can add three more from other authors and have your own mini-anthology for three-and-a-half pounds, which is less than five bucks.

The stories were previously published in Postscripts, F&SF and the tribute anthology Forbidden Planets.

http://www.angryrobotstore.com/short-fiction/order/2/

Interview about The Other

Now that my novel, The Other, is drawing some attention because of the PKD Award nomination, I thought I'd repost a link to an interview (pdf) about Luff Imbry and the genesis of the book and character that Underland Press ran a couple of months ago.

http://www.underlandpress.com/uploads/MHughesInterview.pdf

Nominated for the PKD Award

My Luff Imbry novel, The Other, is one of seven nominees for the 2011 Philip K. Dick Award.  For a guy like me, who used to read Dick back in the sixties, this is one cool day. 

First chapter:  http://www.archonate.com/other

A few observations about characters:

Some writers obsess about how to create real, living people for their stories.  They needn't, because they can't.  All any of us can create are characters.

Characters are not people. They're much, much simpler.   Somewhere in his On Writing --  highly recommended as a manual of technique -- Stephen King notes that, compared to the simplest of real people, the most complexly, carefully drawn character in a story is "nothing but a bag of bones."

People have lives.  Characters only have roles within a story.  They have no other existence than within the story, even if they seem to live on in your head after you finish reading.

Take Yossarian in Catch-22, a story about a man being driven to make a choice between two evils, one of which will kill him physically, the other morally.  We come to know a lot about Yossarian in the context of his situation and his dilemma.

But where did he go to school?  Does he have brothers and sisters?  What's his favorite color?  Is his navel an innie or an outie?

We don't know.  We don't even know his first name, John, until well into the second half of the novel.  That's because we don't need to know.  Probably Joseph Heller didn't know when he created Yossarian.

Characters always have problems.  Or agendas.  They all have something to do, because they're all part of a story, and stories are about doing.  If you have a character in your story who doesn't actually do anything to make the story happen, you have to ask yourself, "What's this guy doing here?" 

If you can't give the character a role in the story, then he's not part of the story, and you'd be better to take him out -- even if you carefully drew him based upon your recollections of your most beloved high-school teacher. 

Characters have two kinds of problems:  external and internal.  Major characters' problems, whether innies or outies, are big -- see Yossarian's case above.

Minor characters can have big external problems if the story requires it, but they don't need big internals, because the story is mostly about the major characters, and you just don't need to make every card in the deck a king or a queen.

A major character's external and internal problems interrelate.  Dumbo can't fly until he has self-esteem, and he can't have self-esteem until he flies.  Yossarian has to find a way to live without being part of a senseless killing machine, and he does it by realizing that there's a third option to which he's been willfully blind.

Bringing the character to a climactic point where the external and internal problems satisfactorily resolve is what storymaking is largely all about.

There are various ways to reveal character.  In ascending order of usefulness, they are:

·         the narrator tells us what the character is like;

·         other characters tell us what the character is like;

·         the character himself tells us what he is like;

·         we see what the character is like by what he does.

Although modern literary fiction often goes to great lengths to use the first technique, it is not recommended for genre authors.  You are a lot better off if you show your character in action -- that is, in characteristic action -- because characters are what they do.

And that characteristic action should involve conflict, because there is no story without conflict.  People have tried to boil down the essentials of story to twelve or ten or seven basic plots.  I reduce them to three:  man versus man;  man versus the universe;  man versus himself (for "man" you can read: woman, boy, girl, robot, alien, talking rabbit, typing cockroach).

Whether you get it down to twelve, seven, or three, the key word in each one is "versus."  Stories are struggles.  Whether the characters win, lose, or (as with Yossarian), transcend the conflict you set for them, they struggle to get something done -- even if, as with Hamlet, it's just to make up their minds.

Reviews and an interview

This morning brought a flood of good reviews.  First, Andrew Wheeler, former editor of The Science Fiction Book Club, blogged a review of The Other, calling it “a sparkling, wonderfully amusing novel, full of great dialogue, odd situations, and quirky characters; it's a lovely, masterful souffle of a book, and I can think of no reason why any reader wouldn't love it.”

Then something I’ve been awaiting with great anticipation:  Stephen Theaker, doyen of the British Fantasy Society, interviewed me a while back for his Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction and Paperbacks.  Now the magazine is out (meaning it’s available free in pdf, Kindle, Epub, and Feedbooks formats, or as a paperback from Lulu).  Just follow the link and scroll down.

In the same issue, Stephen also reviews all three Henghis Hapthorn novels – Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Hespira – and says, “Reading all three together like this was one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of my life.”

Outlining

I let this blog slip because for a couple of months I was without a reliable internet connection, deep in rural southern Italy where I'm housesitting.  But things seem to have stabilized so I thought I'd go back to giving advice to writers.

The Canadian novelist Russell Smith has a piece in today's Globe and Mail about how to write your first novel.  All of it good advice, I thought, except for the bit about outlining.  I added a comment to the article, which I've reproduced below:

I have fourteen novels in print and have done some teaching and mentoring, too.  I agree with all of what Russell is saying except for the point about outlining.  For some people, it's an absolute necessity;  for others, it's a potential book-killer.

I've only outlined a book once, and that was a for-hire job under a pseudonym, writing a novel about the X-Man, Wolverine. The rights owners, Marvel, required a full beginning-middle-and-end outline before they would approve the project.  It was the most difficult part of the assignment.

In every other case, I've started with a character, a situation, and the event that triggers the conflict that will form the heart of the story.  I also have a general idea, which becomes sharper as the work proceeds, as to what the story is about. 

"What the story is about" is different from "what happens in it."  Dumbo, for example, is about a hero who can't accept his own heroic nature, until he is brought to a climactic choice where he must be a hero in order to save the only person whom he loves and who loves him.  The first Star Wars movie is essentially the same story.

If you know what your story is about at that basic a level, beneath the happenings of flying elephants and feuding droids, you'll know what has to happen in it to make it work out all right.

One last bit of advice.  Writing a first draft is like hitting the beach on D-Day.  You don't stop to tend the wounded or mourn the dead.  If you don't get off the beach, you'll die there.  Which means:  the point of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.  Don't  go back and rewrite the first chapter until you've finished the last.  Get off the beach.  Otherwise, you may never get past page twenty.