Flesh and blood characters for stand-out stories

You know how, when you’re thinking about something, everything around you seems to be that same something? For me recently, in writing, that “something” has been character. Everywhere I turn, strange, even bizarre characters have appeared. First, there’s the news, replete with characters to study. Then the writing course offered by NaNoWriMo through the online site Coursera includes a segment on character. Even when I turned to what seemed to be a delightful book about a woman and her pet bulldog, darned if the “character” aspect didn’t appear again. (For both woman and her canine friend!) Finally, half of this fall’s writing workshop sponsored by the Writers Guild of Texas hinged on the aspect of character. 

Creating fictional characters, we as human beings can relate to is such an essential element that the basic formula for story is: character + action = plot. But how to create those characters? (I’ll save the action portion of the formula for another post!)

image: Wikimedia commons

During the Coursera lessons, novelist/instructor Amy Bloom noted, “Most of us have enough trouble being ourselves, without having to then take on the task of (inventing) other people. But when you’re a writer, that’s the job. You have to enter into their body, into their soul, and see the world as they see it.”

So no wonder that after bestselling romantic suspense author Cindy Dees, who taught the WGT workshop, confessed that character development isn’t her strongest point, she developed an entire course on the subject to help her compensate. Because I was a student of Dees at a creative writing course at Southern Methodist University several years ago, I knew there would be character description worksheets. This time they were even bigger and more detailed than I remembered. 

There are innumerable sample character building worksheets online, including one developed just for NaNoWriMo, but I’m addicted to Dees’ version.

I don’t want to – in fact, it’s not even possible – to include the entire volume of information Dees lists in a single blog post. They include all the generalities available online: ethnic, social, economic, religious and educational background; behavioral descriptions; and physical description. (The Dees version emphasizes the way the physical characteristics evoke the main aspects of the person’s character.)

Digging deeper, she asked her audience members to list the main qualities that describe and define each character, the characters’ ethics (what they believe) and their code of honor (what they do), and consider the possibility of internal conflict these present.

“Some characters talk about their values,” she said, “but don’t do a darn thing.”

Dees’ character spreadsheets included side by side listings for both the main character and another primary character (and can be expanded to include multiple other characters). What I found particularly interesting was her suggestion of placing a checkmark by each point at which the characters’ personalities, background, etc., would conflict. And using these points of conflict to help build the story. 

“Is there a moral crisis that challenges (the character’s) values? If there’s not, why the hell are you writing the book?. . .What makes (the character) argue passionately about after they’ve had a few drinks?”

Then there are the detail such as: What’s this character’s most embarrassing moment ever? When did this character feel like the greatest fool ever in his/her life? “Such profound and visceral moments” can make readers so emotionally involved with a character that Dees tries to include at least one in every book.

And the often talked about issue of character likeability? As novelist Amy Bloom also noted in her discussion of character in the segment of her Coursera class, “You don’t have to like your characters, but you do have to love them and be willing to see the world through their eyes.”

It’s great to “have your heroic characters do something heroic off the bat to show us they’re the good guys,” Dees said. But watch out for cliché moments. 

Since the appearance of the late screenwriter Blake Snyder’s handbook, Save the Cat! “I’ve seen a rash of characters who climbed trees and saved cats recently,” she noted wryly.

She continued. Is the character interesting? Fascinating? “Interesting is someone I’d like to talk to at a cocktail party,” Dees told her audience. “Fascinating is, I can’t look away from that train wreck. A person can be terrible and be fascinating. Bad guys are where you can really (write) off the rails.” (I’ll add – study your news sources for examples of off-the-rails, over the top versions.)

As I flipped through the pages of character sheets Dees passed out to the workshop audience, I groaned inwardly at her suggestion to “give a symbol set to each character.” I should have known she had more in mind that yet another magical piece of jewelry or sparkly slippers. Not. She wanted us to think of our characters as that symbol.

“If I think of a character as a motorcycle, I can create a whole set of characteristics without ever calling him a motorcycle.” He/she can be noisy, powerful, eccentric, a loner, with as many of the attributes the writer attributes to motorcycles as the dog writer at the beginning of this post attributed to her bulldog. 

And I thought, yes, I do have a character who’s a motorcycle. . . And maybe one who’s a bulldog, as well.

Wordcraft -- ‘You talkin’ to me?’: writing better dialogue

“I have a character development class at Collin County College,” author/teacher Scott Morgan says, “and somebody always says, please tell us you’re going to talk about dialogue.”

So he obligingly gives the Writers’ Guild of Texas members who gathered recently a chance to hear him talk about talking¾ in fiction. Because as anybody who’s eavesdropped at their local coffee shop or tried to transcribe audio tapes knows, real talking isn’t something most of us want to spend pages and pages reading.

“Real talk is a lot of um’s and uh’s,” Morgan says. “Real talk is pointless. Real talk is spinning wheels. Dialogue is not real talk. Dialogue sounds like people talking but it’s not. You will never hear people say the things people say in Quentin Tarantino movies. Or if you do, you know they’re film students.”

Instead of being a transcription of reality, dialogue in fiction has to seem real but accomplish in a few lines or a few pages what would otherwise take weeks, months or years to do in real talk. The first step, Morgan says, is to understand the purposes of dialogue in fiction.

“You’re trying to explain something, you’re trying to move the plot, or you’re trying to develop character,” Morgan says. “If writing doesn’t do any of these things, it’s not dialogue. Don’t put quotes around it. All those other factoids that people want to put in dialogue, you can leave out.

“The main reason people talk (in fiction) is to explain something. Typically, the expository stuff comes from the expert, so you have people ask them questions. You want the answers to be purposeful. The key to dialogue is compression, the relevant details.

Most writers are taught to skip explaining things to a listener who already knows them, but we’re often baffled about how to convey information to readers without turning a page gray with vast swathes of exposition. Morgan has a spin on that issue as he moves
into the plot-moving and character development aspects of dialogue.

“If your characters have a common body of knowledge, the way to get them talking is to have them disagree about it. Because my memory lane is not your memory lane.

“Dialogue is action and conflict. The best form of action in dialogue is arguing. Have an argument with your character. If one of your characters cheeses you off, you’re doing a good job. Give your characters opinions. Have them say things that you don’t necessarily like, because you will know what to say to them. If you have an argument, you can mix and match your conflict.”

Got all that? Then add something else¾ remember to make all this craft invisible. Nobody should notice the writing itself. As Morgan says in one of his favorite examples from film, “I love Martin Scorese, but he can be so good with his camera work that you find yourself noticing the camera instead of watching the film.”

Which leads to a final caveat. “I’m going to yell about something,” Morgan says, “accent and dialect. Do not write accents. Do not write dialect phonetically. I hate that so much I want to die. You are not going to get it right. Being from New Jersey, I can tell you, nobody in New Jersey says, ‘Joisey.’ You are going to insult people and throw them out of the story. What you want to write are patterns of speech, not accents.

“The key is to keep your ears open and listen to what people are talking about. I never heard anybody say, ‘I tell you what’ except in Texas. If I were going to write a Texas character, I’d write ‘I tell you what.’”

Want to know more about Morgan and his own writing? Visit him at
www.Write-Hook.com/. Or take his class at Collin County College, where his next session starts in February. And for more about the Writers’ Guild, meeting the third Monday of each month in the Richardson, Texas, public library, see www.writersguildoftexas.org/.

Wordcraft -- Harris gets deadly serious about characters

The list of teachers and topics for Saturday’s writing workshop from Mystery Writers of America was impressive: college instructors, writers with strings of awards, an investigative journalist. And then there was Charlaine Harris, whose Southern vampire mysteries have all made the New York Times best seller list, and I knew I had no choice but to open this discussion with a few perceptively wacky words from the creator of telepathic, vampire dating, mystery solving barmaid Sookie Stackhouse.

“Here’s the first rule for the characters who populate your book,” Harris told the her sold-out audience, “everybody’s got a job.”

And that’s “job” as in something they get paid for as well as serving multiple functions in the book itself. Harris learned this the hard way when her Sookie Stackhouse series took off, finally developing a character list in the hundreds (most of whom she lists in After Dead, her absolutely last word on the world of all things Sookie).

And with so many characters, “they must be so distinctive that the readers won’t have to keep flipping back the books” to identify them, a distinction aids by careful choice of names. “Do not use names within the same book that start with the same initial,” she said, adding a tongue in cheek admission of her own weakness, “I’m very fond of the letter J.” (Not that you’d guess it from her character list.)

So how does she recommend finding these distinctive names? In obituaries. Or better yet, delinquent tax notices, frequently published in small town newspapers. Although she warned, “Don’t ever use the complete real name from those.”

And remember the common characteristics everyone possesses, including some I‘ll admit never hearing in any other writing class, such as moral code (“even if it’s do unto others before they do it to you”) and sexual orientation (“it informs everything they do”).

Having said all that, and more, Harris admitted to being “a pantser of the worst sort”--an author who writes by the seat of her pants. The one character she said she had “built as a conscious thought” was Sookie Stackhouse herself. “In order to shake up my career, I thought I would make her do something completely different--a woman dating a vampire” because of her strange disability, the ability to read the minds of her fellow human beings.

“Telepathy would be a terrible thing,” Harris said, “Because I believe in the polite lie, because I was brought up Southern.”

Fortunately for the sake of her romantic involvements, Sookie discovered she couldn’t read the minds of dead people, such as vampires, leaving her blissfully unaware of the true answer when she asks a vamp important questions she’d rather not know the answers to.

(Harris cheerfully admitted that though she remained faithful to most traditions of vampire lore, she wasn’t above making things up, like vamps’ lack of brainwaves, when it suited her.)

So what’s she planning to do now that the Sookie series has ended this year? She’s got a new mystery series set in the small town of Midnight, Texas, with the first volume, Midnight Crossing, due out in May. For more about Harris and her writing, I’ll leave you to check out this mistress of mystery,
http://charlaineharris.com/.

And for more about the Mystery Writers of America, contact its Dallas chapter at
http://dallasmysterywriters.com/.

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One of the instructors at Saturday’s session, Hallie Ephron, will return to Dallas January 25 for a day-long workshop on romantic suspense, courtesy of the Dallas Area Romance Authors. For information and to register, see
www.rwa.org/p/cm/ld/fid=1155/.