One Thousand And One Parsecs

Thoughts on writing characters

A couple months ago, I was listening to one of my personal recordings of Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 lectures from last  year’s class.  The topic was writing characters.

Brandon outlined several techniques for making characters sympathetic.  He also outlined how to round them out: give them flaws and handicaps, as well as little quirks to make them unique and memorable.

However, I couldn’t help thinking that something was missing in his formulation.

Before I continue, let me say that I don’t want to disparage or criticize Brandon Sanderson’s abilities to write compelling, well-rounded characters.  His excellent work in Mistborn and his other novels shows that writing characters is one of his strengths, and his advice from the class is true and very useful.

At the same time, I don’t think the “checklist” approach to writing characters allows us to formulate a more comprehensive theory of writing characters.  I wondered the same thing in the class, too.  During the lecture, I asked the question: “how do you use these tools and keep your characters from seeming too much like patchwork?”

Brandon’s initial response was that these techniques should be seen as tools, not as fundamentals.  He then went on to say that the most important thing to keep in mind is the character’s motivations–why they want what they want.  Beyond that, you just have to tweak the character until they fit into their role.

I think it goes deeper, however.  Certainly, the characters need to have a defined role in the plot, but during the process, that role might change as the character comes to life and does unexpected things.  It’s better to fit the plot to a character rather than to fit the character to a plot.

After thinking about it for some time, I came to the conclusion that the best way to write characters is to keep two essential rules in mind:

Rule #1: Every character is the hero of their own story.

Rule #2: Every story is composed of three parts: beginning, middle, and end.

The first rule is straightforward: every character sees their life as a story in which they are the main character.  This is because all of us, as humans, view our own lives in this way.  We may look at other people and consider them nothing but extras in the story of our life, but they certainly do not think of themselves in this way.

To arrive at a comprehensive theory of writing characters, however, we need to know what it exactly means to be the hero of one’s own story.  We can only understand this when we realize that a story is composed of three basic parts: beginning, middle, and end, corresponding roughly with past, present, and future.

Every hero has an origin and a destiny.  Without these, they don’t have a story; they don’t have a beginning and they don’t have an end.  This is why the hero cycle begins with the miraculous birth and ends with ascension and apotheosis.

Writers should keep this in mind as they sketch their characters.  If you don’t know where your character came from–who their parents are, where they  grew up, what were their major formative experiences, etc–your characters are going to fall flat because they’re just extras in someone else’s story; they have no story of their own.

Likewise, your characters need to have a destiny.  If you’re a discovery writer (like me), this might be harder because you don’t know, from the outset, where everyone’s going to end up.  Keep in mind, though, that the “hero of their own story” rule applies to the story the characters tell themselves just as much as the story you’re telling.  If you know your character’s goals and dreams–or why they have a conspicuous lack of them–you can use this to flesh them out.

Each character’s individual story is like a thread, which the writer weaves together with other threads to form a beautiful tapestry.  That tapestry is the novel; without the individual characters’ stories, the work would feel week, shallow–threadbare.

Of course, it’s not always possible (or a good idea) to reveal everything about every character.  It’s also not always possible to outline every character in great depth–not without catching “worldbuilder’s disease.” Instead, the rules of worldbuilding should apply–only use 10% of your worldbuilding in the actual story, no info dumps, etc.

I don’t think that’s a comprehensive theory of character just yet, but I think it’s a step closer to one.  If you have any ideas or suggestions of your own, please do share.

Image courtesy Postsecret

Quest for Lost Heroes by David Gemmell

It has been forever since I read this book.  Still, I really should review it.  Here goes.

At Bel-Azar, four friends held out against hopeless odds, only to be spared by the Nadir Khan.  Known by the Nadir as the “ghosts yet to be,” they enjoyed the fame of heroes for a time, but now live in obscurity in their own kingdom.

When a band of slavers raze a village and carry off the women, however, a young, reckless boy named Kiall calls upon the forgotten heroes to help him free his unrequited love.  And so the “ghosts yet to be” join together for one last quest, only to find that the stakes are much higher than any of them could have forseen…

David Gemmell writes awesome fantasy!  Some of the best I have ever read.  This one, while not quite as deep and meaningful as others like Legend, had its moments.  Let me just say, Gemmell knows how to kill off his characters.

The story started off very well, with some interesting introductions.  It felt a bit like a cowboy movie, where the heroes are all outcasts, unable to find their place in mainstream society.  I immediately took a liking to the main character, Chareos–Gemmell knows how to write heroic characters, even dark heroic characters.

The action began immediately, with blood and battle in every chapter.  As usual, Gemmell did an excellent job getting to the meaning (or lack thereof) of it all, but at times, it felt a little bit superficial.  Not very much, but sometimes, it seemed that he threw the action in just to keep the story interesting.  It didn’t pack quite the same punch as Legend, which was a much superior book.

It took me a few chapters to feel that the story was progressing–Gemmell isn’t always strong on plot–but once I did, it really took off.  I finished the last hundred or so pages at a sprint, and the ending, like all of Gemmell’s endings, did not disappoint.

Overall, I’d say this book is more fan action-adventure story than anything else–light reading, compared to Gemmell’s other work.  Still, it was definitely entertaining, and much deeper and well-written than your typical thriller.  If you like heroic adventure stories with lots of action, you’ll love this book.

It’s full of stars!

I have a confession to make…

I should have been writing these past three hours.  I really should have been writing.  But a couple of days ago, I downloaded this awesome program called Celestia.  And when I say awesome, I mean awesome!

Imagine Google Earth.  Now, imagine Google Earth…for the Universe.

I told you it was awesome.

Anyway, I just downloaded all the messier objects , gps satellites, and some other random addons, and spent the last two hours playing with them when I should have been writing. Gah!

Oh well, I guess you can call it research.

My goodness–words cannot describe how cool this stuff is.  It’s like…like a planetarium on my computer.  I’ve never felt so small in such an incredibly vast universe!  And oh my heck, do you know what it’s like outside of our galaxy?  No stars–just blackness everywhere!  It’s so freaking scary!  And inside of those massive globular clusters, like M13–holy cow!  What would it be like to live on a planet in one of those clusters??

I should probably stop rambling.  But…but…it’s just so awesome!

This is the kind of stuff I’ve been writing all my life!  Stars and galaxies and planets, other worlds–and now, at last, I can get some kind of a tiny picture of what it all looks like.  I feel like the nexus 6 soldier from Blade Runner: “I’ve seen things…” Seriously, this has the potential to revolutionize my writing.  The things I’ve seen…

But anyway, time to get my mind off the stars (at least temporarily) and write!

Quick worldbuilding question

For To Search the Starry Sea, I’m writing from the point of view of a far future starfaring culture completely independent of Earth. They’ve preserved our concepts of “hour,” “day,” and “year,” but these units of time do not correlate in any way with the revolutions of the worlds on which they live (basically, a set of tidally locked moons orbiting a gas giant planet several AUs from its sun).

The people of this culture use terms like “morning,” “evening,” “day,” and “night” to describe their waking and sleeping cycles, but having been cut off from Earth for so much time, they don’t associate these times with the position of the sun.  In order to convey that this is different, I’m thinking of spelling “afternoon” like “afternune,” to show that there’s been some cultural drift since the migration from Earth.

Does that work?  Or if  you had to read “afternune” instead of “afternoon,” would it completely throw you out of the story?

Or am I just not making any sense at all?

Career chat at high tea

So my Turkish supervisor at WINEP took us new interns (all four of us) out to the Mayflower hotel last week for high tea, where we talked about how things have been going for us at the institute so far.  It was interesting–the first time this Mormon boy has been out to tea, particularly in such an upscale setting.

One of the questions he asked was “what are your long term career goals?” I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I know what I didn’t say–that I wanted to break into publishing and become a novelist.

(Just in cast my supervisor reads this, I want to make it clear I wasn’t uncomfortable talking about my literary aspirations with him; it was just that the conversation at the table seemed to be headed in a very different direction, and I didn’t want to derail it.  Everyone else was talking about grad school, study abroad, government, that sort of thing–and I got the sense that that’s really what my supervisor wanted to talk about.)

My experiences in the past three weeks in Washington DC have only confirmed and strengthened my goals to pursue writing as a full-time career.  At the same time, though, I’m starting to realize that I don’t have to limit myself to one career track; many people in this “town” (as everyone calls it) bounce around in multiple careers, some of them quite different.  It’s not so much about working a “day job” until you get published, so much as doing multiple things and being ambitious.

That said, I don’t see myself pursuing a career in policy-making.  Everyone I see doing that is working overtime, all the time.  Instead, I want to find something that’s going to facilitate and reinforce my writing career.

There are some things I like very much about where I’m working, though. One of those is the emphasis on the Middle East–such a fascinating and dynamic part of the world, rich in history and culture. Another thing I love is how informed I am about current events–never in my life have I been so up to date in what’s going on in the region. The news really comes to life when you’re keeping up with it on an hour by hour basis. And I also enjoy the more academic-ish feel to the place here–the emphasis on research and scholarly pursuits.

Some things, though, I really don’t like. One of those is being stuck in an office all day. The people I work with are great–I couldn’t ask for better. But the office environment, with its dynamics…I don’t enjoy being in an office all day. The same goes for wearing a suit and a tie–I’m not a big fan.

In short, I really don’t know where I’m headed in my non-writing career; nothing has really “clicked” yet (if anything, just the opposite). But whatever I do, it’s probably going to involve something Middle East, and something that helps to facilitate my literary aspirations. That’s all I know for now.