Vital Secondary Characters

A charming and unexpected thing happened to me last week. An acquaintance of mine who was reading "The Eminence's Match" told me that his favorite character in the piece was Harat. For those of you who have read the story, Harat is one of the secondary characters - the main character Xinta's exercise partner, who bunks with him in the school dormitory.

When I told my buddy Janice Hardy about this, she told me that she'd had notes from people who loved minor secondary characters in The Shifter - for those of you familiar with the book, one of them loved Kione the guard, and the other one really loved Soek the apprentice Healer.

In effect, you never know when someone might just pick one of your secondary characters as their favorite! Secondary characters can do so much to enhance your story that it's worth giving them some serious attention.

Maybe you've had the same experience I've had, when you read a book and the main character and his/her core group of friends seem to be the only people in the entire world, going about their business. This always disappoints me. I like to see a world that looks lived-in. There are going to be people in the mercantile street, or if there aren't, there should be a reason why. In a city, there are people working to keep the city going. People changing the lightbulbs. Hooligans and police, etc. etc. A world has a population which moves in patterns, patterns which are not necessarily aligned with those of your core group.

Keep in mind as you work that everyone who walks onstage in your story is there for a reason. It may be an institutional reason rather than a personal reason, but even the spear-bearer is there because he's got a job to do. You may not care about that spear-bearer's opinion on these people he's standing next to, but believe me, he's got one. The person who jumps out of the way of your swordsman, the person who gives useful information to your spy, the innkeeper who serves your questing party beer - each one is doing those things for reasons of their own. It's worth thinking a bit and knowing those reasons, because at very least it will help you to figure out their tone of voice and the expression on their face.

I encourage you to think about secondary characters from their own point of view; it's a valuable exercise even if you're never ever planning to give them their own narrative. As you can imagine, I do this a lot - and I actually have a secondary character whose opinions about one of the main protagonists are so important that I've decided to promote her to a point of view character.

Ask yourself what this person does when they're not on stage with the protagonist. What is his/her job? How did it bring him/her into this room? How does he/she feel about being there? Sure, there will be bit parts and people who don't need to stand out in the crowd, but the more interaction this person has with the main characters, the more important it is for you to know what he/she wants and how he/she judges what's going on. Readers can tell, instinctively, whether this secondary character of yours has a life outside the scene they're reading. It only takes a detail or two, or a slight shift in the wording of the dialogue, to give the impression of that life and bring extra dimensions to your story world. Besides, you never know when a secondary character will grow in importance and take on a key role in your story - or give you an opportunity to deepen their character and tighten the story at a later point.

Finally, ask whether and how your point of view character judges the people he/she encounters. I've spent quite a bit of time on the idea of a narrator as a guide; where your narrators put their attention is going to be a great way for readers to tell what's important in the story, and what isn't. If the narrator notices a single individual in the crowd, then that person automatically gains more importance. By having your narrator notice particular types of people and judge them in particular ways, you can create an effect that deepens your world, informs us about your character, and also plays into such issues as theme and plot.

Give your secondary characters some attention. Your readers will thank you for it.

Culture isn't uniform!

Way back in the very early life of this blog (in 2008!) I wrote a post about making sure your characters aren't all the same. Not surprisingly, the post was called "Don't make them all the same," and I encourage you to go back and look at it.

Today's post deals with culture, but it has the same message. Not only aren't different cultures the same as one another (on a very fundamental level), even cultures that are spoken of as if they were uniform aren't really uniform.

American culture. Which one? From the point of view of Australians or Japanese, our culture is what they see on the television and in the movies. I remember having to explain over and over when I was living as an exchange student in Japan that just because they hear stories about Americans who own guns doesn't mean that every American owns a gun. Just because they hear Americans talk about Christianity doesn't mean every American is a Christian. As my Aussie husband has remarked, "America has Utah, and it has Nevada, and the two are side by side."

You shouldn't be surprised to learn that Japanese culture varies a lot also. There are a myriad dialects across the Japanese islands (as should be expected given the length of time that the population has lived there). The Japanese are particularly proud of their regional delicacies, but the differences go beyond just that.

In fact, culture isn't necessarily uniform even in a single location. In a tiny town dominated by a printing plant, you might have a microculture for the people who work at the plant which distinguishes itself from the people who work in service positions for the plant workers. In a major US university you'll have African American groups and Asian American groups as well as groups based on religious affiliation, hobbies, etc. People align themselves based on professions, religions, neighborhoods - almost anything can become the basis for alignment, or realignment. When I was an undergraduate one of the major issues that came up was that the Asian American group was splintering into subcomponents - the Filipinos and the Chinese, the Koreans and the Japanese were starting to want their own groups. In the US we often talk about the culture of a company, or the culture of sports, etc.

So let's say you're creating a fictional culture. It could be aliens, or elves, or humans in a secondary world - that part doesn't matter. The characters that you create will differ enormously based on the culture they are a part of, but also upon the subcultures they belong to. And here's another thing - different subcultures aren't necessarily even aware of one another's existence, even when they interact all the time. Let's say that you have one group that works as servants to another group - the master group will know a lot about the servant group as pertains to their interaction with the master group, and the expectations for intergroup relations. However, they may not know much if anything about the norms for relations inside the servant group, when the master group is not present. People can live side by side and interact constantly but have no idea how members of another cultural group think.

I encourage you to think this through as you build a world. A character doesn't behave the way he/she does because he/she is a member of X labelled group. That character is a product of his/her own experience and has layers of cultural awareness. That character will also have ideas about how other groups work - and those ideas probably overlap with other groups' views of themselves, but they probably miss a lot too.

I have a big trilogy in my future (something I wrote before when I wasn't as good a writer!) and I'm having ideas for it on and off continually (which is why I'm sure I'll go back to it). One of the things that's developing is the social structure and the intra-cultural contrasts. It's a Varin trilogy, so it's set in a society with seven caste levels. I used to have three point of view characters, but now I have four planned, and contrast is the reason for this. It's going to look like:

1. Imbati #1
2. Imbati #2
3. Akrabitti #1
4. Akrabitti #2

Each of the two members of the Imbati caste have very different ideas about what it means to be Imbati, which grow out of very different sets of experiences - and as you can imagine, the same is true for the Akrabitti characters. There's also going to be an important contrast between the noblemen that Imbati #1 and Imbati #2 work for. These contrasts give the portrayal of the castes and the world far more depth than they could have if I used only a single character from each group. In my reading of science fiction and fantasy I've met a lot of quest groups, and other groups, with different races and cultures - but usually only one representative of each. It's not a problem, per se, but when you want to create a truly three-dimensional society, it can really help to get a stereoscopic view of the cultural groups from which it is formed.

An artifact example: we're not just making up random stuff!

I had an epiphany yesterday, about a suit. Yes, a suit - one that my protagonist's mother gives him for his birthday. If you think about it, if you use those words alone, it's pretty generic. Could be the real world, or a fantasy world, or a science fiction world. The epiphany came to me because I found myself spending a lot of time describing the details of this suit, and wondering why I was doing so. After all, I'm not writing Regency romance where the fashions are much of the point. I don't want random stuff in my book that isn't relevant in some important way.

Let me tell you, it irks me when someone says, "But you're writing fantasy. You can make up anything you want."

Grrrr.

I'm not going to waste words describing a suit if it's not important. And it is - in much the same way that the sun armor was important in "Let the Word Take Me" (discussed in my post "Focus your Worldbuilding Efforts").

But wait, there's more to it even than worldbuilding. That's why I thought it would be worth breaking it down here. First, an excerpt:

"Inside the box [Tagret] found a cutaway coat of mottled blue and green with touches of white. Parts of it glimmered like spider-silk, while others seemed woven of more common fibers. Underneath were two glowing white silk shirts and a pair of trousers in matte slate-green. [...] The new shirts had long cuffs that buttoned with pearls up to the elbow, clearly intended to match the coat's short, flaring sleeves, and to echo the darker pearl buttons that fronted the trousers. This was a style the Pelismara society had never seen - a choice that said 'Mother' all over..."

Even though it occurs in two locations in the scene, this is a lot of words to spend on the details. I asked myself why all these details were important. There were lots of answers.

Worldbuilding
The idea of a cutaway coat is familiar from our world, and the term is important to suggest the shape of the coat, but other details like spider-silk, the long shirt cuffs and the short coat-sleeves are there to make clear this isn't your typical Earthly fashion. Furthermore, the coat is woven in an ocean pattern (ocean is also evoked by the pearls) - but in this world of underground cities, nobody sees the ocean unless they travel, and travel is very dangerous. Thus my protagonist has to describe the pattern as he understands it, one detail at a time. "A style the Pelismara society has never seen" also implies world, because it shows some of the social significance a fashion like this might have. In fact, the Pelismara society ladies and gentlemen are accustomed to wearing jewel colors or earth/stone colors, and the ocean design causes a minor fashion scandal later in the story!

Character
" - a choice that said 'Mother' all over..."
The presentation of the suit precedes Mother's entrance into the scene, and though she's been seen before in the story, this is the first time we see her through the eyes of someone who knows her well and cares about her (Tagret). Essentially, this is when we first see who she really is: a noblewoman of considerable intelligence, with a penchant for humor and subversion, who is trapped in an extremely restrictive social role. How do I get all that in, when the two of them will be talking mostly about the social issues that my protagonist is currently dealing with? Well, I can't tell readers about her (her son would never think about her that way), so I use the suit to imply it. The suit has been specially commissioned, so she's noblewoman with a great deal of money at her disposal. It's a very unusual fashion, so she doesn't follow trends. It also brings an image of the surface world down into the underground city where such things are never seen, suggesting that she doesn't think like everyone else. The rest of her outfits for herself are also going to use surface motifs, so once I had this piece in place I got inspired to expand its scope.

Theme
One of the major ideas that recurs in this novel is that of being trapped and wanting freedom, but having real freedom and the search for it be full of risks. The underground city/dangerous surface travel situation parallels Tagret's inability to escape from the political situation his father thrusts him into, and also the awful marriage situation that Mother suffers. When Mother brings images of the surface down into the city, in this suit and in her own clothing, it shows her struggling against her situation in the limited way she can - a struggle and a tendency for subversion that she's passing on to her son.

Foreshadowing
"Parts of it glimmered like spider-silk, while others seemed woven of more common fibers."
This was an artistic choice by the artisan who created the suit to try to represent light on the ocean water by mixing spider-silk and other fibers. It's also more than that, linking back to an earlier scene when the protagonist takes his friends (all dressed in silk) to a concert hall attended by members of Lower castes (who dress in matte fibers). Tagret remarks that "Tillik-spider silk might be an unregulated commodity, but evidently it was expensive enough to sift Higher from Lower all on its own." The mixing of the fibers in the coat given to him by his mother thus gains an extra meaning of subversion, and hints at Tagret's future, where he'll see that the separation of the castes is another kind of trap and work to break the barriers down.

That's why I described the suit - but I did it before I realized any of these connections. Sometimes you don't know precisely what you're doing - and you don't have to - but your subconscious says this is how it has to be. The exciting part for me about seeing these larger patterns was knowing that I could extend them further across the book. It gave me insight into Variner fashion, and into Mother's character as well. I didn't have to "make up" the rest of the clothes she wore, because I knew what kind of thought had gone into the design of Tagret's suit, and thus the same kind of thought could be applied to her choices for her own clothing. And I also knew that she'd be brave enough to be the only one wearing clothes like this, strong enough to set off a scandal and eventually a new fashion trend in the claustrophobic, decadent Pelismara society.

Because of a single suit, I know so much more about my novel now.

Yesterday was a good day.

External and internal conflict

Ever since reading Janice Hardy's thoughts about the topic on Friday, I've been thinking about external and internal conflict. That very day I realized that the reason a story I've been writing wasn't working was that I didn't have both external and internal conflicts - only external. I found myself asking a question:

Why is it so important to have both external and internal conflicts in a story?

One reason is complexity. A story with only external conflicts feels somewhat shallow to me, no matter how thorny the external conflict becomes. I always like to have the sense that the protagonist is somehow at odds with the external realities of his or her situation.

Another is unpredictability. I always like a story that is hard to predict, and as Janice notes, when you have external conflict driving the story in one direction, and internal conflict driving it in yet another, "crashing them together," the story's direction becomes more difficult to guess.

Both of these are reasons I've thought through before, but this week the problem hit me from another direction, and I came up with a third.

It feels more real.

Now, why would that be? Maybe because it's plausible to think that most people have internal issues they're working through. On the other hand, why would it be so appropriate to have the protagonist dealing with internal conflicts that directly contrast with the external ones? Wouldn't that feel more coincidental? To me it doesn't. After much thought, what I decided was this:

An internal conflict that contrasts with an external one lets the protagonist fight directly against the author.

As a reader, I know that the external conflict is controlled by the author - an outside force that throws things at our beloved protagonist. I don't feel the same way about conflict inside the character, for some reason, even though I know the author is just as much in control of the conflict inside the character as they are of the conflict outside. I think it's because a well-crafted character will feel like her motivations grow naturally from personality, experience and other factors. Thus, so long as the protagonist feels like a real person, then her struggle with internal conflict, while dealing with the events of the plot, will take on additional dimension. Not only will the protagonist's choices be unexpected, but she will take on that quality that I love to feel when writing a character - the feeling that she is acting on her own against me and against what I might (as the writer) want to make her do.

I urge you to think through internal conflict as well as external. It will really make a difference to your story.

Similes, cliché, and added information

Here's a hilarious post from Nicola Morgan about similes. If you aren't sure what a simile is, it's that thing you do where you say something is like something else. "He moved like a cat." "Her eyes were like sapphires." You've seen them before; they're everywhere, and a lot of them are clichéd.

So how do you avoid clichés and keep your similes under control? Nicola Morgan suggests that the simile must add meaning to the writing in order to be worthwhile, and points out that the entire content and connotation of the simile will be added (so be careful).

Question: what does that mean? What kind of meaning does a simile add?
My answer: two kinds.

First, a simile provides a comparison of a story event, character or object, with something else. As it does so, it lends all the qualities of that something else to the object (etc.) it describes. Here's an example, from my story "Smoke and Feathers":

...water reaches out over Ryuuji like a hand of glass.

What's happening here is that a boy, Ryuuji, is having water poured over him from a bucket. However, the effect of the water is far more than him getting wet. (I'll save that for those who read the story.) The simile compares the water to a hand reaching out, which gives the impression that the water could either grip Ryuuji, or maybe even cast a spell on him - things that hands, not water, can do. Thus when strange things start to happen afterward, we've already had a warning of it in the form of this simile.

Depending on the kind of word we choose to compare, the simile can bring along more connotations or evoke a more complete scene to go along with the thing that's being described. This is all included in the first kind of information that a simile imparts, through drawing a comparison.

The second kind of information that a simile can give us is character (and world) information. By this I mean, not comparing a character to something using a simile, but having the comparison itself reflect upon the person making it. If you are using point of view in your narrative, any simile you use will suggest things about the kind of person who would draw such a comparison. Here's an example that Nicola Morgan provided as being a bad example of a simile:

His words paralysed me. I was like a deer that's been transfixed by an arrow, right in its spine, so that it was alive but could not move. [The first sentence says it all. The simile simply adds some wholly unhelpful and, frankly, bizarre, extra images. We learn nothing extra and yet are bombarded with extraneous images of a dying Bambi.]

She says that the first sentence says all it needs to and we don't learn anything extra. I'm not sure about that, though - I personally think the simile suggests something unexpected and unwanted about the character making it. The original writer probably didn't have it in mind to suggest that this POV character was sadistic, or obsessed with death, or anything of that nature. Yet somehow they did. There's added information here, certainly, but information which can only confuse readers about the point of view character.

The information that similes (and metaphors) give us about the point of view character is in fact extremely valuable, and I highly recommend you take advantage in it as you write. Think about what kinds of comparisons your character would make, and why. The comparisons they make will show readers how they judge a situation, and will reflect on their sense of themselves and their own world. Similes give us an enormous opportunity to add dimension and life to our stories.

It's something to think about.

Who they are, and how to get them there at the right time...

Do you struggle with story logistics the way I do? When I say "story logistics," I mean places in a story where in order for something critical to happen for the plot, you've got to

1. introduce a bunch of people, or
2. move someone or something or some group of people from one place to another, or
3. have a bunch of time go by.

It drives me crazy. You have to do this stuff, yet it's dreadfully hard to make it happen without having it devolve into a bunch of "telling" (oooh, not telling!). The fact is, you'd rather just jump to the fun exciting part and make it happen without having to worry about it (unless the quest is the thing).

But you do have to worry about it.

I find that there's often a tradeoff, as in the chapter I'm writing now. Character N gets a piece of news, then has to gather his friends and go off somewhere to act on that news. The real action and excitement are in the action on the news, so I tried to avoid moving a bunch of people from one place to another and having a lot of time go by - but when I tried to start writing it there, it didn't work.

The problem was with the characters. This story has quite a lot of characters, and in this chapter I land readers right in the midst of a pocket filled with heretofore unfamiliar ones. Sure, we've seen them before from afar, but now we're in the point of view of an insider to the group - and he'd know each of them personally. If I tried to start at the point where the action was most exciting, I'd have to detract from that very action by working through a very ugly and clunky list of characters, who would then be difficult to keep track of as the story went on.

After some thinking I decided to do it the other way. To give them the time, and to see if I can move over their travel relatively quickly and smoothly on the way to the main action. If I include the time and the travel, then it gives me room to introduce the necessary characters and have them be distinct from one another. It also gives me time to do more things that I love to do: to show more about the point of view character and the difficulties he has in getting things done; to dive into the social dynamic of this group and explore the push and pull of how it hangs together. N has to go and get his best friend first, and then the group's fastest runner, who is also the most loyal group member - and at that point they discuss who else in the group they need before gathering them and going off for the big to-do. It sets up information that some group members don't know, which adds tension going forward, and allows for a gradual increase in tension and overall emotional dynamics.

The decision for me isn't always clear-cut. In this case, the advantages of the logistical delay outweighed the disadvantages. It's something worth thinking about the next time you slap your own forehead and say, "How the heck am I going to get them there?"

Character arcs - how characters change

Do you have character arcs in your story? Chances are you do, even if you aren't aware of them, or don't call them that. On the basic level, character arcs are the changes that your character goes through over the course of the story. This can include coming to a decision, learning to make particular kinds of decisions differently, learning something important about life, getting to the bottom of a mystery, or any kind of development within the character's mind or personality.

Keeping conscious control of character arcs is a really valuable tool in crafting a story, particularly when you're working with a novel. You can have whole-novel-long story arcs, or smaller arcs like the protagonist's relationship to a minor character, or the protagonist resolving a subplot about something (say, a key he found). These typically all happen concurrently. One nice way of thinking of the climax of the story is to imagine your character arcs bouncing across your story like rocks skipped across water, and then to imagine that several of them must all land at the same spot at the same time - for maximum effect!

At this point I'd like to think about character arcs from two major angles: the plot direction, and the character direction.

Approaching character arcs from the plot direction is something you can do without even having conscious awareness of your plot arcs. You know what needs to happen in the story events, and you know what does happen in the story events, and as the character goes along, he or she just changes with his/her natural reactions to the story events. This is good. It's important (in my view) to keep two things in mind.

1. Story events will make your character react and learn. If they don't, you're missing an opportunity.
2. Some actions by the character will require them to learn things/change before they can happen.

This is where it's helpful to be able to trace the arc backward. If your protagonist needs to be able to fly a helicopter, then it would be good to set that up - either he knows how to do it already (mention how), or he learns how to do it, or he learns different sub-components of the skills at different points (the arc approach). Take the example of Trinity in The Matrix. She very quickly learns to fly a helicopter in the midst of the action, without any time for explanation. But the preconditions that make that possible (she has a data port; people can learn through data loads) have been set up in her actions, and in the actions of others, previously in the story. So if you find your beta readers going "huh?" when your character pulls out his sword and starts swinging, you might want to check his arcs and make sure swordsmanship and/or its precursors, were included in there somewhere. Another possible arc example is if your character has to make a very bad decision that runs contrary to his/her morality - think about how to lead into that decision with smaller plot elements that show the character's non-reliability, or his/her doubts, the ability of another character to sway him/her, etc. so as to prime the possibility of that uncharacteristic decision.

Then there's approaching a character arc from the angle of character change. "Over the course of the story my protagonist has to go from being a bigot to learning to accept others." "My character believes in the status quo, but when he finds out about X, he has to accept that the status quo has always been a lie."

This is what I do a lot, because a lot of my stories are about people changing their minds, or learning what the key to understanding is, etc. I go very psychological in my stories. If you're doing something similar, take a look at that change that needs to happen, and try to break it down into smaller components. The bigger the change, the more different conditions will have to be in effect for it to happen. If my bigot must change his mind, then he probably needs to be put in an extreme situation where only a member of his despised group can help him, and that person becomes a friend/exception as a result. But there will be many things that need to happen in order to create an extreme situation like that - and many things that must happen thereafter, once the bigot has actually engaged with the despised person, to solidify his impression and expand his doubts about his previous views into a broader personal change.

I'll be a bit more specific with another example. My highly educated and informed character X isn't someone you could call a bigot, but has always been taught that people have different fundamental natures. He then meets character M who is in disguise as a member of the same group as X. What will it take for him to accept that M and he have enough in common to maintain a relationship when he finally discovers who M is? He will:

• discover the history of how the different groups were formed out of the same population
• discover that M's group was the victim of a terrible injustice
• go through a series of interactions with M during which he will come to have a high opinion of her.
  

Only when all these things are operating at once does it seem plausible for X to have the reaction he does when he finds out the truth.

Before I leave the topic of arcs, I want to mention a couple more things. First, do you need character arcs if you're writing about real characters and events - say in a memoir or in historical fiction based around factual events - when you know "what really happened"?

My answer is emphatically, "Yes." Character arcs are patterns of systematic change that build on themselves and give a story the sense of being strongly coherent and tied together. If you're working with real events, those should work their way into the character arcs. Character arcs don't have to be predictable, and they don't have to be uniform, but they should be logical and readers should be able to see their plausibility in the context of events - whether those events are fixed by history or not.

Second, what happens when you end up with an arc that you weren't intending to create? I'll take an example from my super writer-buddy Janice Hardy (because I'm sure she'll forgive me!). When I was helping her with an early draft of her Book 3 of the Healing Wars trilogy, I noticed that her character had changed. Nya had gone through so much and experienced so much pain that she appeared to have become less hurt by it. So I asked Janice whether that was what she had intended, and she told me it wasn't. I felt helpful, because after that Janice was able to go through and consciously track how Nya reacted to pain - so that it still made sense in context, but so it didn't accidentally lose the poignancy that it had had through the first two books.

Thanks to the folks at Absolute Write forum for giving me the idea for this post.

The First Day of School

When you read the phrase, "the first day of school," does it give you an emotional reaction? It does me. Today was my kids' first day back at school, and between excitement and jetlag they both woke up about 4:30am. I know lots of moms who are sentimental about the departure of their last-born to kindergarten, but I was more excited for her than sad. It's different if you've had the baby at home the entire time... but my girl wanted to go to preschool with her brother from age 2, so I guess I'm used to it. I also love the idea of more time for my writing!

If you're like me, and you are thinking about worldbuilding, there's an incredible richness of opportunity in something as simple as a day like this. Many societies have big transition points built into them, though they differ across cultures and within cultures as well. Here's a real life example: because I grew up with a professor and a school teacher as parents, our entire life schedule revolved around the school year and summer vacations - and it took some time for me to adapt to living with my husband, who works the 9-5 job all year round.

I always find a story more exciting and real if I can share the emotional reactions of the characters to what is going on around them. Think about the emotional reaction you get just to the phrase "first day of school" - and then think about what you might do with that. You could create a society where the first day of school means something totally different - maybe something scary and horrible instead of scary and exciting. If school is something where you don't see your parents at all, that changes things too. Take a pre-existing emotional reaction and tweak it - send it in a different direction. Or take a pre-existing event, and change it, but keep the emotional response the same. On an alien or fantasy world, what kind of life-changing day would there be to inspire "first day of school" feelings in its inhabitants?

It's something worth thinking about... and now I have to go pick up my daughter!

Know Your Character Inside and Out

For an update to this post with additional questions, click to: Designing character interviews that really matter (including genre-inspired questions)

What do you really need to know about your character? There are a lot of lists out there offering possible interview questions that you can use to flesh out a character, but when I look at them, I find they don't help me much. Why? Well, because of the amount of stuff they ask that isn't precisely relevant - at least, not relevant to the characters I use. It's not much help to ask if Allayo or Rulii or the History Keeper like coffee - they've never heard of it, and it would have nothing to do with their stories even if they had!

The other day I ran across some terrific character questions over at Nicola Morgan's blog, Help! I Need a Publisher! The reason these questions are great is that they offer in parentheses a sense of how the question is relevant to story elements - so I'm going to start by commenting on them and then add some of my own.

Please notice I haven't changed the wording of Nicola Morgan's questions. She chose to phrase them as if they were directly asking questions of the character. I approve of this heartily. Many people tend to ask questions about character (and world) in a distant manner, but taking the questions and putting them in personal address form automatically takes you one step closer to finding the voice of your character. Take advantage - answer as if you were the character, and let a simple switch of pronoun put you in your character's head as you get started. Here are the questions, quoted from Nicola Morgan with my own comments in color:

1. What is your worst fear? And your second worst? (Likely to be part of the conflict and tension.) Indeed, this should probably happen during the story.

2. What would you most like people to know about you? (Make sure it's obvious, then.) I'm going to split this one in two:

Part A - What do you want readers to know about you? Seed information like this in character memories, emotional reactions, judgments, or actions.

Part B - What do you want story characters to know about you? This affects how you outwardly represent yourself and the social groups you belong to, for instance in your choice of clothing, speech/interactive style, etc.

3. What would you most like to hide? (Every hero has a flaw.) I think this is related to #2, inasmuch as readers should be aware of these flaws even if story characters are not. The kinds of things we hide are often related to our desire for acceptance in particular social groups, and/or our desire to escape punishment by them. It's reasonable to anticipate that a major character flaw will be revealed or at least cause the protagonist serious trouble in the course of the story.

4. What would you most like to change about your life? (Could be part of the conflict and motivation; could be sub-plot.) I would add, "And how does that affect your current behavior?"

5. Why should we care about you? (Because if we don't, we won't read on.) This is a big one - indeed, a story deal-breaker. If you can't answer this question, your story isn't ready. Period. It's also a show-don't-tell problem... a character shouldn't tell us why we should care. Usually it's a question of having them share their goals and desires with the reader and then showing what will happen if they don't reach those goals.

6. What were you doing before this story started? (This informs your back-story.) I always like to have a fully fleshed back-story including elements of personal history that helped the character get into the position that they are currently in, both physically and emotionally/psychologically.

7. Do people understand you? If not, what do they get wrong? (Makes your character more real because it informs interaction with other characters.) And why? What is it about you that confuses people? Cultural differences perhaps, including different interpretation of manners and behavior? Different moral values? Different language?

8. If I met you for the first time, would I immediately know what you were like or would it take a while to get to know you? (As above.) And does this differ depending upon the type of person you're interacting with? Who has an easy time getting to know you? Who has a hard time? This will relate to questions of what kind of people you trust and what kind you don't.

9. What sort of people like you? Do adults like you? Do boys like you? Do girls like you? Why? Or why not? (Helps place your character within the real world instead of just on the page. It may also inspire some ideas for painting your character richly but subtly.) Keep in mind that distinctions like child/adult, boys/girls might not be the most important. When dealing with another culture, there can be all kinds of distinctions (caste borders, clique borders, subculture borders, institutionally defined roles, etc.) Which social groups are inclined to like you and which are not, and why?

10. Are you happy on your own? (As above.) What does being alone mean to you?

11. What are you going to achieve in my story? (Crucial for plot, since character drives action.) In my mind this is related to the question of why we should care. What do you want to achieve?

12. What trivial but annoying habit do you have? (Makes character more real. Character can show this habit when angry / sad / stressed - helps you show without telling emotion too much.)) To whom is it annoying and why?

13. What trivial but annoying habits do you dislike in other people? (As above.) There are a lot of questions one could pursue on the topic of what a character finds annoying. What constitutes invasion for you? What do you consider dirty? etc.

14. What four (or three or five) adjectives best sum you up? (Helps you remember traits to paint most strongly.) This is a really good place to think about the kind of language your character would use. What qualities does the character's culture define as virtuous? As evil? As unruly or problematic? Try to pick adjectives that imply judgment, such as "incorrigible," "valorous," "ladylike," " etc.

15. Are you going to die in this story? Should you? (Informs plot and interacts with reader's engagement.) I'm not so sure about this one, just because I like to have the character be ignorant of his/her own future. However, it would be interesting to know whether the character wants to die, and how he or she feels about death.
The next set of questions is my own, designed to address specifically the intersection of character and world. Since in sf/f, establishing the nature of the world is a major task that must be accomplished at the same time as introducing the character, why not let your character carry your world in his/her own mind, emotions and judgments? These are the questions - which I phrased as though you were the character asking them of yourself:

1. What is my home like? How do I visualize its boundaries?
2. What weather and physical conditions do I consider normal? What do I fear?
3. What kind of topography did I grow up in, and how did it influence my physical condition and my concepts of comfort?
4. In what kind of place do I feel most at home? What shapes and textures give me comfort, or discomfort?
5. Who is in charge here? Do I respect them, fear them, both?
6. How do I show who I am in the way I dress? What is comfortable? Will I endure discomfort for the sake of looking good or looking powerful?
7. Where do the things I own come from? Do I worry about getting more?
8. What is delicious to me? What do I consider unworthy of consumption?
9. What are my most prized possessions? Do I hoard anything? Do I have so much of anything that I care little if I must give it away?
10. Who do I consider to be unlike me? Are their differences charming or alarming?
11. Am I in control of my own actions and the happenings around me? What or whom do I believe in?

The last thing I want to mention here is character motivation, which I've discussed before but which bears mentioning. Setting up a character's fundamental motivators is very important, but they're a little like a push off the wall in swimming. It'll get your swimmer pretty far, but not all the way to the other side. Each plot event or interaction will change the character's trajectory slightly, and the character's response to events acts like the swimmer's stroke. That additional level of moment-by-moment motivation can drastically change the action and the result.

I was just working on this very thing in my current story, where one of my characters comes to see another, gets pushed away, but then keeps coming back for another attempt. He needs an overall goal when he enters the interaction initially, and this is related to his fundamental motivators. However, once he leaves the interaction for the first time, those initial motivators won't be enough to get him to go back to it. He needs some new rationale to get himself to re-enter the interaction for the second time, and then the third.

In any case, I hope you find these various approaches to character as interesting and useful as I have. Special thanks again to Nicola Morgan for her post.

Do I have a story?

I have a story. This is not the same thing as saying, "I have an idea." In my particular case, I've been searching for this story for a while because numerous people had asked me to write it. "Write a sequel to Cold Words," they said. Easier said than done.

My linguistics stories are like puzzles, with lots of complicated interlocking parts, so as a result I feel I have to know where they are going or I can't even start. "Cold Words" was like this. The idea of writing a sequel had several advantages over starting from scratch:

1. I wouldn't have to design a world with aliens.
2. I wouldn't need an entirely new main character.
3. I wouldn't need an entirely new alien language and an entirely new voice.

All of this is an incredible time-saver. But as many who have tried to write sequels probably know, there are also some serious disadvantages.

1. Any subject of a major revelation in story one has to be a starting premise for story two. You need to inform readers of the "secret" (or former secret) in case they haven't read the prequel, but it can't be the point, or the story will just be covering the same ground.
2. Having a world and a character, and even quite a clear sense of chronology and what would have happened after the first story ended, does not mean you have a story.

This number 2 can effectively stop me in my tracks, because until I have a story, I won't start writing (this is not the case for all writers!). I might also remark, of course, that the lack of a story hasn't stopped many sequel-makers, at least in the case of certain movies I have watched.

What is a story? I'll sum it up this way:

Character X discovers Y and must accomplish Z before A happens or else B.

This rather closely resembles the elevator pitch for a novel. It distills story essence down to its bare bones.

In my case, I've been gathering elements that I like - Rulii and his dependency on humans, his relationship with Parker - and questions that people have asked me - about gender relations among the Aurrel, etc - and trying to fit them together. At last I've gotten somewhere. I don't want to spoil any surprises, so I'll just say that Character X is still Rulii, Y involves Parker, Z involves Parker and an Aurrel Female, and B has to do with human presence on Aurru. It's always good to ask yourself, "What's the worst thing that could happen to my character now?" and try to have it stand in that B position. That makes for a much more exciting story.

In fact, it's good to ask whether you have a story even if it's not a sequel, though sequels are probably more prone to the lack-of-story problem. Giving your character goals and stakes makes everything more exciting.

Inherent Contradictions in Character

Everybody has inherent contradictions in their personality. The minor ones may barely be enough to make us hesitate in a decision. Major ones may lead to internal conflicts that haunt us constantly. Because this is something that is so terribly common in real people, it makes for very strong reactions when I read fiction.

I admit it: whenever I run across a character who appears to have no inherent contradictions, I tend to demote them on a subconscious level. If it's a minor character, I start thinking they're just window dressing. Even if it's a major character, I suddenly find them much less interesting. I hate to say it, but Baron Harkonnen of Dune was like this for me. Bad for bad's sake, ho hum. A being of pure evil is more of a fable-like creature, or devil archetype. I was glad that Sauron never took on human form in The Lord of the Rings, because as a being of pure evil he belonged where he was, offstage, trying to create conflicts in and among all the others.

I remember as a kid playing this game we called "Monsters" but what was really a free-form precursor to live action role-play. Each of us got to make a character, and each of us got one power and one weakness. People who refused to pick a weakness didn't get to play.

Now, I'm not saying every character in a story has to have a "weakness," per se - but contradictions are more complex than that.

Take Nya in Janice Hardy's The Shifter - Nya has a strong sense of family and solid morals, but her greatest power just happens to conflict directly with those morals. Janice turns that contradiction into a fabulous conflict when Nya has to use her power to save her sister.

Rulii in "Cold Words" depends for his social progress on his ability to fight and negotiate. However, neither of these skills will help him if he's ever seen to shiver with cold. He uses molri to stop his shivering - but his addiction to it has adverse effects on his personality, making it harder for him to fight and negotiate. In addition to which, if anyone finds out about his molri addiction, he'll be put to death. The base condition for his success puts him at risk of failure, which leads to more interesting conflicts.

Nekantor in "The Eminence's Match" is an evil ruler, and not just because he was brought up that way. He suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which serves as his own sort of internal contradiction. The disorder makes him endlessly demanding (a typical evil ruler characteristic). It gives him advantageous skills for managing political conflicts, but simultaneously wears him down and makes him vulnerable.

I picked these three characters because each one has a single characteristic which lies at the heart of their internal contradiction - Nya's shifting power, Rulii's drug dependency, and Nekantor's obsessive-compulsive disorder.

There are of course other ways you can approach this - giving a character a backstory which gives them internal conflict, for example. I think immediately of the character of Zuko in Avatar: the Last Airbender, who embodies the conflict between good and evil in part as a result of the conflict he's witnessed between his powerful father and the mother whom he loved best.

Whether good guy or bad guy, main character or subordinate character, your character will gain dimension from inherent contradictions. Keep an eye out for opportunities to develop them, because it will do wonders for your story.

What makes a backbone character

Who is my backbone character?

A backbone character is the character in your story who plays the most cohesive role and binds one end of the story to the other. Without the backbone character, the story can't succeed; in fact, when I can't identify my backbone character, I can't even manage to finish a first draft.

Here's the tricky part. A backbone character is usually your main character - but isn't always.

Sometimes a character will appear spontaneously in your head and start telling his or her story, and you'll write it down, then look back and say to yourself, "Gee, that wasn't difficult." Other times, it will be less clear who's holding this story together. Several factors may make identifying the backbone character difficult.

1. You have a story situation in your head, not a person.

If you know more about the world and the danger situation than about a character in the situation, try to zoom in. Figure out who it is who stands to gain most in that situation, by taking risks and possibly losing everything if they don't drive through all the way to the end. Make the situation personal, and you'll have found your backbone character.

2. Your main character isn't doing much "protagging."

Sometimes you can be sure that you know who your main character is, but that person doesn't seem to get anything done. He or she spends a lot of time observing, and when the chance comes to act, typically he or she retreats from doing so. Sometimes it's that you just need to get your protagonist to be more active; other times, you should consider changing who the main character is. Still other times, it's the observer who serves as backbone because even though he or she has fewer opportunities to act, there are still other reasons why that person binds the story together in a way that others can't.

3. You have two or more characters vying for the position of main protagonist.

Choosing who your main character is can be tricky if you've got multiple protagonist points of view. Of the Hero and his Sidekick, which is the backbone character? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do with the story, and how you want its events to be interpreted by readers (as guided by the characters).

4. Your main character is too unreliable to be the primary narrator.

I'm grappling with this one right now. My main character isn't too unreliable yet, but will shortly be descending into madness, and can't serve as a cohesive influence from one end of the story to the other. Therefore, I have to have another person serving as backbone and holding the story together.

5. Your most cohesive character isn't present at the start of the story.

This one is looming in my future. It's really a revision question: I have this story and I always knew who the backbone character was, because without her to pull other elements of the story together, the whole thing would fall apart. The problem with the original draft was that I had the backbone character begin the book - but she isn't the one who starts the conflict. The other characters do that job. It has taken me years to figure out that I need to get the conflict started with the other two active characters, with their goals and stakes, and then bring in my backbone character when her influence can make a measurable change to the trajectory of the main conflict - i.e. when her role as backbone character is most strongly noticeable to readers.

The real challenge in finding a backbone character is to think through what your story is about, and what its core is really made of. The character who has goals and actions and terrible things at stake (the protagonist) may be the same one who endures through the whole thing and keeps the story connected with its core. But it's important to be aware that this isn't always the case. Especially if lots of people have goals and actions and terrible things at stake in your story (which is a good thing!), it's a good idea to think through which character serves as the central organizing influence.

Ask yourself: Who is the character who binds this story together, rather than letting goals and stakes take them off the main conflict in tangential directions? That person is the backbone character, and deserves as much attention as your main character if you want the story to work.

Dialogue that Matters

What is your dialogue doing?

Dialogue has the power to make a scene feel more active, alive and real. It typically is perceived as fast-paced in comparison with description. It can create character, world, and drive for a story - or it can sound flat and authorial. Here are some of my thoughts on what features make for effective dialogue.

1. Keep dialogue unambiguous and dialogue tags unobtrusive.

By unambiguous I mean that I always try to make sure it's clear who is talking. I've read books, some by quite well known authors, where characters get into disputes and there will be a sequence of five or six lines in which it's just an exchange of dialogue with no tags at all. Now, you can rely quite a bit on the reader's turn-taking instinct. The default assumption in a two-person exchange will be that the two alternate in an orderly fashion. However, in a lengthy exchange it can be easy to lose track of who is saying what. Keeping voices distinct can go a long way toward disambiguating this (I'll come back to this), but judicious use of "said Eris" or "Eris said" is more effective and practically invisible. Another way to disambiguate is to include some internalization from the point of view character. Including internalization is also a great way to show when the pov character isn't telling the truth, without using an obvious tag like "he lied."

I've seen a lot on the internet on the topic of dialogue tags. The general consensus is that one should not use lots of adverbs like "he said angrily" nor should one use lots of fancy words for how to speak "she yelled/thundered/etc." and especially not in combination "he yelled angrily." I think this rule has to do with the fact that dialogue tags stand on their own in the midst of a stream of dialogue, often without the support of surrounding description, and adverbs and tags with special content (not to mention redundant content!) distract from what people are saying. "Said" is relatively invisible, so long as it's not used for every turn. Janice Hardy had a great post on dialogue a few days ago; if you're interested, it's here. I agree with her that it's important to vary the rhythm of the tagging techniques so they don't stand out.

2. Keep characters distinct.

This operates on several levels. The voice of each character should be distinct; people use different styles of speech, sometimes different dialects or even different languages. Their speech will have different rhythms. Each person should speak out of his or her own motives. In addition to this, keep in mind that any two people will not talk about things in the same way. Each one will bring a worldview to his or her contribution.

3. Make sure people speak for their own purposes.

Especially when you're worldbuilding, or working with a complicated plot, it's tempting to turn to dialogue to get information across. This is actually okay, so long as the dialogue also functions and makes sense for the characters. I've often mentioned avoiding "As you know, Bob" dialogue in which people tell one another things they already know just for the purposes of exposition.

However. Even if you're being indirect and slipping the key information into the dialogue, it's vital to ask yourself two fundamental questions: a. Why would these people talk? b. Why would they talk about this? If you can't answer these questions, then whatever your characters say will fall flat. In real situations, people don't talk without motivation. And even if they talk vacuously, it will be for a reason - because they're nervous, for example. It's perfectly okay for dialogue to serve the author's purposes, but it has to serve the character's purpose first.

4. Be aware of all the many things that dialogue can convey.

Once you've gotten in touch with what messages your character wants to deliver and why, think about all the subtler messages that can be conveyed in the way they say what they say. Emotional states. Social status information. Worldbuilding information. Very often these things don't need to be out-and-out explained in the dialogue, only hinted at (hidden in plain sight).

I find it so exciting when I write a line of dialogue, and I can not only feel the purpose in it, but sense the depth of character motivation and world behind it. I hope you get to experience this too.

Keeping The Balls in the Air

My new novel is complex. Those of you who know my writing probably won't find this surprising, since everything I write tends to be complex and develop extra layers. So I thought I'd share a few thoughts on how I keep that complexity under control.

#1. I outline. I'm not talking about the standard-format Roman numerals and then letters etc. but I will write an outline. If my vision on the story is foggy - which it often is for latter portions of long novels until I get closer in the process of writing them - then I just write down an unnumbered list of critical events that have to happen, in the order in which they happen. Those can include things as big as "X character gets killed" or as small as "Y character makes a decision." The closer I get, the more things start fleshing themselves out into scenes and chapters, and then I write down a general description of what should happen.

#2. I manage my worldbuilding. I design until I'm blue in the face, and compile lots of files full of notes. After mostly finishing the design, I try to wrap this all together into one bundle which I call point of view. Once I have the point of view right, it pulls a lot of the worldbuilding and basic character elements together at once and lets me work with them together instead of separately. As I write, I then selectively deepen my understanding at different points depending on the needs of the story.

#3. I keep explicit track of plot and character arcs. Plot arcs and character arcs often parallel one another, but are not always the same. If there are only two or three arcs going, I can usually keep track of them in my head, but my current novel has about six, all of which are interrelated, so what I'm doing is making a list of them and appending it to the back of each chapter. Then once I've got the chapter sketched, I can check to make sure all the arcs are addressed in the action I'm planning - and again after I've finished writing I can write notes about how each arc has been pushed forward. This is information that I can then carry forward into planning and writing the next section. So as an example, my initial arc list looks something like this:

Ongoing arcs:
Catacomb/Kartunnen Ryanin/Akrabitti
Kinders Fever
Reyn/Fernar jealousy/Della/Yoral
Tagret/Imbati
Nekantor/Speaker of the Cabinet/Garr
Tamelera/Aloran

As you can see, it's pretty much incomprehensible to anyone but me (and others who know character names or to whom I've mentioned plot elements!). I stick notes on the end of each arc label to track what I've done. Ideally, each chapter should do something for every arc. It's probably okay if one or two of them don't develop through a single chapter (due to the pov character I'm working with) but I want to make sure I don't drop them for too long.

#4. I keep track of characters' mental states (psychology). This is related to plot and character arcs, obviously, but I do track it independently. Given that I place a lot of importance on characters' decisions (related to romantic or platonic relationships or to any other critical plot element), and I like to have my characters build up gradually to those decisions. Motivation is really important - so important to me, in fact, that it's the reason why I write chronologically. What a character thinks at any given point will change what they do, and thus what the story does as well. I can't be certain whether an event will happen - or more critically, how it will happen - unless I have a continuous process of development in the mental states and motivations of the characters and their interactions. If I don't keep track I will have to go back and find the lost thread of psychology where it dropped off, and rewrite everything from then on (which makes me scream and want to bang my head on walls!).

#5. I keep track of "arrows." Literally, this is what I call them; my friend Janice will say to me, "You need to line up your arrows," and I'll know exactly what she means. I'm not sure whether to call it "theme" but I usually have an underlying issue that I want to have going on in a story. The plot and characters tend to serve it on some level; descriptions will also serve it on some level. In my linguistics stories, it tends to be the critical social or linguistic issue that underlies the misunderstanding between human and alien characters - so a good many of my arrows serve as clues to the hidden solution. The arrows can be words, phrases, word repetitions, dialogue elements, events, etc. so long as they contribute to the drive and focus of the story. When I write with attention to arrows (and believe me, I give the arrows a great deal of attention in revisions because they're tougher to track in a first draft), it's not just a question of just finding a cool way of describing something, but finding the right way: the precise description that will align its arrows with the character, the plot progress, the worldbuilding elements, the dominant metaphors, the theme, etc. This may all sound rather abstract and possibly a bit frivolous, but "lining up the arrows" often makes the difference with my beta readers between a story being cool but not having much impact, and a story being vibrant and amazing. Another way to talk about arrows is in terms of "alignment" and "focus." They're worth some attention, because they can make a huge difference.

One last note: I don't feel I have to keep track of all levels at once. I bundle things together to get them going (like pov, which subsumes worldbuilding and character and elements of character arcs etc.). I don't try to keep my outline in my head; that's what the written outline is for. The only part I keep in my head is the immediate section I'm working on. I keep my focus in the character's point of view and develop the plot along with the mental states. I try to keep my arrows aligned on a basic level but if I don't quite manage it on the first go, that's okay. That's what revisions are for!

Those are my thoughts on complexity for today. Now I have to go do some juggling.

Companions

Companions. Doctor Who is famous for them - Leela, Peri, Sarah Jane Smith, Adric, etc, etc - but almost everyone has them. In some cases they're sidekicks of a sort for a single main character. In other cases a larger group sticks together. Frodo has Sam. Aang has Katara, Sokka, Toff (and Appa!). Zuko has Iroh. The list could go on and on.

Why are companions so important?

One reason is social realism. There aren't that many complete loners out there. People have friends that they live their lives with.

Another reason is that the main character needs help. When you look at the Avatar group (Sokka wanted to call them "team Avatar" I believe), it's balanced between different types of people. There's an air-bender, a water-bender, an earth-bender and a warrior. That gives them a wide range of skills and strengths that they can use to get through their stories successfully.

Another big reason is information management. The Doctor has mountains of specialized skills and knowledge - because he's a Time Lord! - but without the companions he'd have no reason to explain any of it. If you have a major character who's an incredible specialist on some topic, you can always show him or her doing what he/she is good at... but if you build in an information imbalance between that person and someone else, it gives him/her an opportunity to explain where that skill came from, or how it works, or any number of other things that would otherwise feel like blatant infodumping.

Conflict is another reason. Conflict can serve the purposes of information management, as when two people start arguing and that lets them divulge information to the reader that the characters already know (without using as-you-know-Bobs), but I've separated it out because it actually does a lot more than that. Conflict is an enormous source of drive in the plot. Ongoing disputes (of the right variety) between a character and her companion can influence where the story goes and keep us wanting to see what happens. Conflict can also drive character development.

Dealing with an introverted character is a lot easier if that person has a companion. You can make good use of internalized thoughts when you're working with the written rather than the visual medium, but still, internalization can only take you so far. A companion gives the introverted character a reason to try to speak - or perhaps a reason to try not to speak! A companion will bring certain topics into the introverted person's thoughts. Appa gives Aang a reason to talk out loud even when he's alone, which is very useful to the storyteller who can't make any use of internalization.

Companions also create wonderful opportunities to explore language. Some companions maintain an ongoing banter which can really add to the ambiance of the whole story. Their talk can be helpful for a story not only for content reasons, but for dialect reasons, and for the way it reveals aspects of the social contract in the community from which they (or each one) comes.

I'm not going to end this by saying you need to go off and give your protagonist a companion. Sometimes that's the right thing for a story, and sometimes it isn't - but it's worth considering. Even if the companionship is short-lived within the story, it can still be a valuable addition to what you're creating.

Chances are that if you've gotten much of a story written (especially a novel) you already have companions built into it. If you do, then it's worth looking at them and thinking explicitly about how they are functioning and what kind of work they are doing for you, the writer, as well as what they're doing for the other characters. That way you can deepen them, tune them, and strengthen them so that they're making a bigger difference for your story.

It's something to think about.

Using the (Social) Tools You Have

I wonder if you've ever had this experience: you're reading a story set in a far-away world, either far future or far past or far distant in species or dimension, and despite this incredible distance and differences in every detail of their environment, protagonists in this environment seem to be motivated by modern world values. As you can probably guess, the most common version of this that I've run into is the female protagonist who protests the fact that she has no control over her life - easily imagining all the amazing things she could do if only every member of her family and her society and every institution around her weren't there to prevent it.

Call it a pet peeve, but this drives me crazy.

Let me be clear. I am not trying to say that people always accept their lot in life. Any time you have an imbalance of freedoms between one group and another, the group with fewer freedoms will most likely notice the difference, and certain members of that group will feel the need to protest or do something about it. Whether that protestation is quiet, or gets quashed, or turns into revolution depends on social and historical context.

What you'll find, though, is that that same social and historical context - the worldbuilding that so many of you work so hard to achieve - will have deep implications for how the downtrodden think about objecting to their status. Often enough, they won't object at all.

The powerless often have power in certain circumscribed areas. Noble women in the year 1000 AD in Japan led very closeted lives and were entirely protected and directed by their men - but. They learned how to protect themselves by finding powerful protectors among those men. This meant they knew which men to approach, which to allow close, and how to handle them. They knew how to use family alliances on both maternal and paternal sides in order to achieve security or advancement. They also knew how to use their skills with writing to gain prestige, or how to use their skills in memorization of classic poems to get attention. Classic poems may not seem like a big tool for social advancement, but you might be surprised how important they were in the Heian era Imperial court.

People learn to use the social skills they have. They see what works and what doesn't, and they pursue those areas where they can win small victories. Or big ones, as the case may be. Jacqueline Carey's Phèdre (Kushiel's Dart) uses all of her personal skills as a courtesan and a spy to get things done that you might not expect.

In fact, if you think about it, accidentally giving a culturally situated character modern expectations and sensibilities will not help but hurt them. Suddenly they'll appear to believe that they have absolutely no useful skills, and no avenues to escape the oppression they endure - which is not in fact the case. At the same time they'll be able to imagine possibilities that are both implausible and impractical for a person in their situation. So the chances that they'll be able to accomplish anything go down, and since their vision is too unrestrained, they'll be more frustrated than ever. In those circumstances the author may feel tempted to use modern means to give them opportunities for action, but that will only draw the story further away from the world and cultural/social situation that the author intended.

So I encourage you to think through how your characters use the social tools they have to get things accomplished. See if you can find a situated way for your character to work toward his or her own ends. If they can use gossip or information control, use that. If they can stealthily organize masses of people, use that. A character can take the social walls that limit them, turn them into shields and use them for protection.

If you let your characters use the social tools they have, they'll fit far better into their own worlds, and you'd be surprised how much they can accomplish.

Character description: who? when? how?

I got the idea for this post from a thread on the Absolute Write forum, in which a member was asking about how to come up with fresh ways to describe characters' appearance.

It's interesting, but the question of fresh ways to describe appearance does contain a fundamental assumption that character appearance must be described. This isn't always the case. There are plenty of times when readers are happy to fill in an appearance from their own heads, and don't want to be bothered with the details - this is especially true when the action of an exciting story is flying along. So I thought I'd break the question into three parts: who? when? how?

1. Who?

You don't want to describe everyone. When we walk around in the world, we take in everyone's appearance on a basic level, but we don't have to remember it - and our brain takes it in easily as part of its massive parallel processing. When you're writing a story, you have to take that massive stream of parallel input and render it in a single stream of words. The result is this:

The more of the parallel stream of experience you try to capture, the longer the single stream of story language gets, and the more the perception of the passage of story time slows down.

So my general rule for describing appearance is as follows: describe only those people who deserve to be noticed and considered for a non-negligible period of time. I put the rule in this general form because I know some folks out there are writing with character-external narrators. Your narrator is going to have an enormous influence on how you should treat the problem of description (whether it be of characters or setting). Different narrators will concentrate on different things. With an omniscient narrator, the biggest question is who and what in the story the reader needs to notice. With an in-the-action character narrator, the biggest question is who and what in the story that character notices. With an out-of-the-action character narrator, such as a retrospective narrator, you can include stuff that the character noticed in the action, and stuff they noticed or recalled, or looked up, after the action finished. I talked about noticing in my earlier post about unreliable narrators (which some may find illuminating for this discussion, so it's here.)

I should add that I mean these suggestions to apply to all characters - including the point of view character. Ask yourself, for the sake of argument: How much time do I spend focusing on and maintaining my appearance? How much does the question of my appearance intrude on my daily judgments (of, for example, how other people treat me)? If your point of view character doesn't care about his/her appearance at all, and doesn't feel it's relevant to the way others treat him/her, then really there's no reason to slow the reader down and get into details - not to mention that there's no natural context for it.

2. When?

Different authors will likely treat this differently. When I'm powering through and drafting a story, I usually don't even think about the who/when/how questions on a conscious level - I just write. However, when I go back and edit, especially when I've been told by a critiquer that I need to include a description of someone, I try to look for what I call natural context for description.

Natural context for description is that moment of noticing and consideration. When does it happen, and for how long? When you pass someone on the street, what do you notice about them? Chances are it's not going to be their height and weight, unless you've been trained to give police evidence. In a split-second glance, you might notice just one feature - unusual hair, or clothing. If you're close enough to them to be potentially in their sphere of influence, you might notice their size relative to yours. If they are nondescript in a crowd, you might not notice them at all; if they are nondescript but alone, probably all you'll notice is their presence or absence, and maybe a bit of the surrounding context of where or when they appeared. If they are totally and utterly alien but moving too fast to be stared at? You might only notice they were alien. And maybe the color of their blur as it moved by.

Naturally, then, the longer the period of time you have to look - and the better reasons you have for doing it - the more you're going to notice. A character may notice one feature of a person on first glance (in which case, mention it at that point in the story), a few more features in a second encounter, but not actually be able to put together a detailed impression of a person until they've met face-to-face for a period of time.

I've heard people remark that romance includes a lot of description. Well, it does. But there are two very natural reasons for this. First, when we're romantically interested in someone, we're going to spend a lot of time and resources considering them on all possible levels, the easiest of which is appearance. Second, when we're romantically interested in someone, our senses are heightened, which enhances our ability to notice small things in our surroundings. Bang, there you have it - more natural context for description, even independently of authorial style and choices.

Contrast this with moments of high action in a story. Action is where you're going to want to keep description to a minimum. When things happen fast, we don't have time to notice a lot. And when we want readers to perceive that things are happening fast, we don't want to add the extra words that will cause them to feel story time slowing down.

3. How?

Wow, we've finally gotten to how. Let me start by saying that some of the aspects of "how" have already been touched on in the question of "when," at least where it concerns how much description you want to put at different points. So I'm going to try not to concentrate on that, and take the discussion in a bit of a different direction: the noticing and judgment direction.

What one person notices about another at any given time will depend on a lot of personal and cultural factors. Even a split second judgment of "what stands out" isn't necessarily going to direct everyone's attention to the same things. Someone with police training will be able to form split-second descriptions of height, weight, and distinguishing features. Someone with spy training will have very different impressions - possibly notice whether the person is armed, or moves as if they have martial training etc. Does their species stand out most? If they're alien, or if the observer is an alien seeing a human, then maybe so. Or if the character is an older woman judging a younger one in a social context, she may bring a large set of expectations for proper behavior and appearance, and run down a basic checklist of these in her initial judgment of the younger person.

To go back to the question of freshness and originality - if you write your description as befits the individual judgment of a unique point-of-view character, including that character's species, cultural background, individual experience, and social role in the context of the encounter, you're far less likely to describe people the same way twice. And the more time the describing character has to pass judgments, the more divergent these things can become.

Just for fun, here are a couple of character descriptions from my alien points of view.

Allayo the Gariniki describes humans:
"My captors have the faces and ruffs of simians, but are too large and have no tails at all."

Rulii the Aurrel describes human hands:
"Parker shows me his hands: short, stiff, single thumbs placed far to the side; long, long, soft brown fingers ending in covers like pale coins instead of claws. Hand-showing: a human submission move."

Part of why I include these examples is to show difference; part is to show that one character's description of another does more than describe the other: it also reveals things about the one doing the describing. We describe things and people in terms of what we know well. So from Allayo's description we can learn that she knows about small monkeylike creatures with tails. We can also conclude that she isn't one of them. Though we don't have enough information to construct her full appearance, we can be put on the alert to look for more cues to her actual appearance as we go forward (she's a reptile). From Rulii's description we can conclude that Aurrel hands have more than one thumb, that his thumbs are long and flexible, and his fingers are short and have claws. We also get a hint that he cares about submission behaviors.

Comparison between two characters is a great tool to provide natural context for description, especially for description of a point of view character who isn't naturally vain or otherwise focused on his/her appearance.

One last thought: while many times it's great to leave a character's precise appearance to the imagination of the reader, it's worth establishing that character's physical characteristics if they will be relevant later in the story. You don't really want someone getting halfway through your novel before they realize that they thought the main character was a brunette and the author thought she was a redhead. That level of strategic placement of description is unique to the author's point of view, and can often lead you to have to stick descriptions in where the character didn't naturally fall into them on the first draft. But if you keep your eyes out, you can usually find an opportunity here or there to provide a few extra words in a natural context. And then it will all work out.

My character needs backstory!

I thought I'd share a story from my writing life. After months planning the details of a new story - human scenario, alien scenario, alien physiology, language, culture, technology level, etc. - I started to write, got 212 words in, and had to stop. The problem? It felt too shallow. I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen, in the form of a scene-by-scene description, but I wasn't really feeling my main character, Lynn.

She had no backstory.

She had a job, a general background and knowledge base, but no individual history. And my characters need backstory - not that I ever insert it in pure backstory form in the text, but if they don't have backstory, then they always feel shallow.

Actually, I knew going in that Lynn had no backstory, but I thought I'd just figure it out as I dived in. Unfortunately, writing the opening didn't really tell me as much about her as I'd hoped. So I stepped back, thought about it, and realized two things:

1. Lynn's backstory should hand her an existing problem that could get worse or drive the conflict in some way.

2. Lynn's backstory should reflect my overall thematic issue choice for this story, namely, attitudes toward technology.

These are things that I think apply not just to my own characters, but to general strengthening of a character's role in any story. The character should fit the story. Whatever actions the character must take as the plot unfolds should not be easy, and it's more exciting when characters have something major to lose as well as gain (stakes).

So in this case, I had Lynn working as an engineer on a large-scale project (trying to avoid spoilers here) in which all information was considered highly valuable and worth protecting from spies and incidental observers. I had also established that Lynn was going to be played against the head of information security for the project. There was already an external risk to this information built into the outline... so I decided to get Lynn closer to a form of internal risk. That was when her backstory became clear to me.

Lynn has a relative who is a hacker, and for that reason has had trouble getting security clearance for her project. With her relative now in jail, she's been allowed on the project in a low level position. She's more gung-ho than most, but people are unwilling to listen to her suggestions because she's only been there five years for everyone else's ten. So she hacks the system to try to improve it herself. It gives her a secret - there's no way she can tell anyone what she's up to without endangering her place on the team, because with her relative in jail, no one would believe she's doing this for the good of the project. It also makes her highly invested in the project's success, so that when the external difficulties show up, she'll act to protect her work and that of her teammates. But she still won't be able to align herself with the head of information security, who constitutes a danger to her presence on this project she loves.

At this point I figure I have to put in the obligatory warning about beginning with backstory, or infodumping. Don't do this; go straight to the main conflict. The very fact that you know about a character's backstory will show up in that character's reactions to events.

Because I haven't yet started over with my story (and I will be starting over - bye-bye 212 words!) I can't say how I'll execute Lynn differently with her backstory. But I'm excited to work on it and find out.

Characters and Direction

The responses to my last post really got me thinking about characters and their relation to a story.

Characters have always felt very real to me, as though they were my friends and not simply the creations of my imagination. I often discover that characters I designed as mere walk-ons will end up taking on greater importance as a story progresses. And I do feel that they have wills of their own, because when I submerge myself in them, I feel their voices and their desires more strongly than I do my authorial planning.

Often when I'm having trouble getting through a scene, I discover that what is missing is a deep sense of what one of the characters needs. Sometimes that missing point is a sense of the judgment of the point of view character, and other times it's the motivation of the other person in the conversation (as happened recently with the romantic lead in my novel).

I originally started writing short stories as a way to get to know characters who couldn't be point of view characters in the novels I was writing, but whom I wanted to know better. This means that when I first wrote short stories, they felt like vignette snippets from a larger piece of work, and I needed to do a lot of work to grasp the structure of a stand-alone short story. But I did find that going to the trouble of creating a voice for a character helped me to understand them better for the purposes of both the short story and the novel. My main bad guy from the Varin world, the Eminence Nekantor, became a completely different character when I got close enough to figure out precisely how he thinks. Now I find that I love a really challenging character voice - like the mentally ill Nekantor or the alien Rulii - even when it can take me an hour to get into the proper head space to write the voice fluently.

It can sometimes be difficult to know which character to use for the primary backbone of a story. Janice Hardy was the one who really drove the critical criterion home to me: it's a question of stakes. The primary point of view must belong to the person who has the most to gain or lose in the course of the story. So while dallying in other viewpoints can be instructive and help you to flesh out a story, it's not necessarily what will get the story written. To extend the backbone metaphor, if you don't have your backbone in the right place, it's hard to know where to hang the flesh so the body will actually work properly. I wrote about half of a novel believing that my backbone character was one person, and then found it petering out. Only some time later did I realize that I'd picked the wrong person. Now that I have the focus placed correctly, the outline of the story is clear to me from beginning to end, and I can't wait to write it.

Janice and I got talking after my last post about the question of letting a character take charge of the story's direction. She pointed out to me that what I had described as letting the story follow the character was somewhat misleading, because it could have been construed as meaning that the story had no direction and rambled on wherever the character wanted to go. Of course, I thought, that wasn't what I meant. Janice has a way of knowing precisely what the stakes of a story are, how to escalate them dramatically, and where and how she wants to bring the story to an end - but she's amazingly flexible about the details of how she gets there, and that's where she listens to where her characters want to go.

There are a lot of story markets out there that talk about how they look for "character driven" stories. This is opposed to "plot driven" stories. I find that if I don't care about a character, I don't care about the story. This is something different from disliking a character. I can hate them, as long as I care about what happens and whether they get what they want or not. The decisions the character makes, and the actions the character takes, must critically affect what happens in the story, particularly the final outcome. Yes, there's room for external influences - attacks, or natural disasters, or simple bad luck - but these have to be present in conjunction with the character's goals and drives, or the story will just feel like a lot of meaningless stuff happening.

The idea of goals and stakes for a character is independent of the choice of first or third person point of view, or degree of narrative distance. A story usually has a character trying to achieve something, or trying to make some kind of decision. The character is our guide to how to feel and understand the world in which he or she moves.

Love them or hate them, we need to care about our characters.

The Puppet Problem

This post is inspired by the Question Box. (If you have a question, this is a great place to put it.) My anonymous Romanian poster says, "the problem is that the protagonist is a female and I seem to have some difficulties in getting the character's pov. Feels a bit artificial, like maneuvering a puppet. I didn't manage to get 'inside.'"

This question makes me think a little of my friends Mary Robinette Kowal and K Richardson - because Mary is a puppeteer, and K is in theater. While I'm not sure precisely what they would say about this topic, I do think the task of getting into writing a character is a lot like the task of acting one.

I personally feel that I need to know a lot about a character in order to write him or her. The amount of what I need to know isn't precisely measurable, and I'm sure that different people feel they need to know different things about their characters. However, I would say that you need to delve deep into a character in order to make him or her feel non-mechanical. What we don't want is for the character to feel author-directed.

So what makes a character feel author-directed? Usually in my experience it's that the character is put into the story for a reason decided by the author, and the author has a lot of ideas about what the character then "has to do" in order to make the story work.

In order for a character to feel organic, that person needs to be self-directed. That means the author should sit down and figure out what that character's cultural viewpoint and backstory is, to the extent that it is relevant to his or her decisions about the actions he or she must take in the plot. The things that we know about our characters show in everything we write about them. If we don't fill them out sufficiently, our own minds and motivations will fill in those subconscious blanks, and that's when the character will start feeling strange.

Here's an example. The character Rulii, in Cold Words, must have difficulty communicating with the human linguist Parker and the human diplomat Hada - but he must not be able to figure out precisely why. In order for this to appear natural, I have to get deeply in touch with the possible factors that may be confusing him. He knows he feels discomfort with Parker when he speaks because Parker is trying to be deferential to him, and he's trying to be deferential to Parker at the same time. That's the surface level. His discomfort is deeper, though, because mutual deference is perceived in his society as a sign of low class, or of extreme intimacy. Because he values Parker, he doesn't want to think of their language as low class, but because he is a Council member in a business relationship with an alien, the idea of intimacy with him makes Rulii very uncomfortable. Furthermore, Parker tries to use an alien term ("friend") to describe their relationship, and the social implications of this are also very troubling to Rulii. When all of these factors come together, Rulii feels very uncomfortable, but enough possible causal factors are present that he can be plausibly confused about which one is the most important.

This is a complex example. However, I'd say to go about creating building blocks for your character's self-animation, you should start simple and let additional complexities suggest themselves (I "discovered" the whole problem with "friend", for example).

Start by considering what you want the character to achieve, and ask yourself whether that is what the character wants to achieve. If it isn't, ask yourself what the character really is trying to achieve, and make sure you have your plot events lined up to push him or her off-course just enough to arrive where you want. Once you know what your character is trying to achieve, ask yourself why.

The harder your character must work to achieve this goal, the more motivations he or she will need in order to justify all that effort. So just wanting to stay alive will work, but it's more powerful if there are also additional personal reasons. Think about what those might be, and try to ground them in something inside the character: a personal motto perhaps, the culture of a group that he or she belongs to, a personal experience with a mentor or during childhood, etc.

I have had the experience of writing a character and having them not do what I wanted them to do. Maybe I'm lucky because my characters do take on lives of their own. But if they're not behaving appropriately, I still have a problem. The moment I try to make them do what I want, they're working for me and not for themselves - they turn into puppets, or bodies, that I have to shove through the motions. Not good.

I know two solutions to a problem like this. One is the one that my friend Janice Hardy often follows: just let the character go where he or she wants to go, and let the story follow. I have a tougher time with this, so I usually go with the second solution: go back and change the nature of the character. If the character is too aggressive, go back and create a background or set of experiences that will temper the character's judgment in the situation you want. Maybe he's aggressive with other men, but his father taught him to protect women and that tempers him in the scene where he needs to be gentler with a female character, for example.

I don't usually interview my characters, but I know many writers who do - or who write a piece from the character's point of view just to let him or her act naturally for a while and help the author feel in touch. That can be a useful piece of preparation, even if you don't actually plan to write the character in first person point of view. I also have a set of questions related to characters and their relationship to the world they grew up in that might be useful, here.

I hope that has shed some light on the topic; I welcome any further comments or questions.