Characters…
Last week I discussed point of view (POV) vs. person. Both involved characters and how we treat them in our stories.
Readers often identify with characters. In my fiction, I kill a few off. Invariably, someone comments or writes, “Oh no, not X! He’s such a great character.” Readers can become attached to characters, but writers have to treat them a bit more objectively—what happens to them must fit the plot and move it forward, and fit the themes winding in and around the plot.
Some authors don’t pay much attention to characters’ names, whether they’re going to kill them off or not. I worry about names a lot. I often use an X as a placeholder until I learn what X is like. Names reflect many things. As an amateur interested in languages and how their histories reflect cultural trends, I believe each character should have an appropriate name. My Detective Castilblanco is a Puerto Rican-American; my arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin is Russian. Although they are both men of the world, their cultural backgrounds play important roles in their subsequent lives portrayed in my fiction.
Writers don’t have to go overboard with their characterizations, but we don’t want our readers to be perplexed and say “Huh?” Dick, Jane, and Spot just don’t cut it either. Who a character is has to make sense. Characters have to seem real. What they say or do has to make sense too.
The flip side of that coin is that a character shouldn’t be a carbon copy or caricature of any real person, especially the author. Writers have to become a bit schizophrenic so every character is a different person one might encounter in real life. I find all that easier to do in first person all the way through the book (that has other benefits too), but many stories aren’t one-person stories. In fact, some novels, through complexity or length of time considered (e.g. several generations), have many characters.
I don’t write outlines for my books, but I maintain a list of characters. At some point when that list becomes too long, I will include the final list at the beginning of the novel. In any case, my personal list has the name of the character and a short description. That also helps me see if I have described a character well enough in words to match my mental image of the character, both physically and mentally.
Imagination is key when telling a story. It’s key for the plot, although that can evolve. But it’s super-important for characters. We need to imagine the inner persona as well as the outer. Both are important.
As often happens in any creative activity, good characterization in writing comes with practice. It is based on observation too. Observation and practice work in hand to make our characters come alive in the reader’s mind.
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Comments are always welcome.
Mind Games. You know A. B. Carolan as the writer of The Secret Lab and The Secret of the Urns. Those novels are sci-fi mysteries for young adults (and adults who are young at heart). In Mind Games, A. B. tells a new story that’s set a bit farther into the future than his first two books. Della Dos Toros is a young girl with psi powers living in the Dark Domes of the planet Sanctuary. Her adopted father doesn’t let her use those powers, but she must do so to find his killer. This story about ESP and androids adds another action-packed novel to the ABC Sci-Fi Mystery series. Just published and available in ebook and print format from Amazon and ebook format from Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
