Sunday, August 28, 2011

Technical Topic: Creating Characters

Elsewhere, someone writes, pretty much:

My characters never develop beyond something used to fill a gap in the story or follow the plot as directed by the writer.  

What goes on through your head when you create a character?



There are dozens of good ways to develop characters.  You get thirty writers talking and you're going to hear thirty methods, most of them contradictory, some of them involving lists and interviews and diagrams and scrapbooks.  Some of them mentioning alcohol.

The best way to create characters is to try a bunch of these methods with an open mind and then go along doing what works for your particular and idiosyncratic creativity.

When I suggest this stuff below, you are advised to take it with a grain of salt because it may not work for you.  But here something to try:


Sit down where it's quiet and you don't have anything you need to do for a while. Get comfortable. Close your eyes. Think of your character in one particular scene, in one specific time and place.


This is a visualization exercise. You're going to crawl inside that character. You are going to see the world from his POV.

Try real hard not to feel silly, ok?


We enter the character by imagining what comes to his senses.

He or she is sitting, as you are. What's underneath him -- the stairs, a log beside the campfire, a velvet sofa? Is there wind? What do you smell in the air? What do you hear?

We enter our character by imaging the interior of his mind and body. He is filled with emotion and needs. Is he warm, cold, tired, hungry, excited, angry, annoyed, afraid?
Our guy has just finished doing something. What? He carries the immediate memory of those recent actions and feelings.

And we enter the character by imagining his needs.

Your character, at every moment, is just chock full of some goal.
What does he want, right now?
A sandwich? Directions to the zoo? A chance to kiss Molly? The combination to the safe? Escape from the toothed boomerslings?
What emotion does he feel in regard to that goal?
What action does he plan to get him what he wants?

This is how we create our people.  We don't look down from on high as if they were chess pieces we're going to move around at our convenience.  We get down in the mud with them.  We gain our insights from sensing what goes on inside the skin.  We find out how the characters see each other at eye level.
Because that's where we are.  At eye level.

I don't mean to say we shouldn't set down a list of parameters for the characters.

In Forbidden Rose, right from the start, I knew Justine had to be very young, no older than Adrian.  She had to be intelligent and educated, of the nobility, a great and loyal French spy, more fond of guns than knives, and with a horrific past.  I pictured someone of sorta midbrowny coloring, so she wouldn't match Adrian's darkness.

These are character parameters I needed for the long-term plot of Forbidden Rose and Black Hawk.

But see how none of this is important stuff about her.  None of it helps me know who she is. Any kind of persona at all could fit inside those parameters.

I didn't know 'Justine' herself till one day I was writing along in the early imagining of the story and I closed my eyes and there she and I were, in her bedroom, with Severine and Adrian.  It was one of the first scenes of the book I could visualize.  That's when Justine began telling me about herself.  And that's the first time I saw Severine and knew how I'd wrap up the story.

So this is what I'd advise.
Instead of laying down the law on what our folks have to do for plot reasons or what they have to be so they match some consistent and usable character we want them to be,
we let them tell us what they feel and think and need.

We learn this stuff because we are inside their skin.

Eventually, we can ask what they want, long term, and we can go back and look into their past to discover why they want it.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

My Earthquake

And the earthquake . . .

We are 30 miles from the epicenter, so we got the full surround-sound experience.

The house shook quite a bit.  You could hear this thing.  A deep rumbling noise.  The feeling was rather like being on a train going over rough track and swaying some.  Stuff jittered and moved.

I took a second or two trying to decide whether this was an earthquake, (get outside) or a nuclear strike on Washington,(duck and cover,)  decided on earthquake and yelled for the kids (my own and five friends)  to get out.

They were all -- 'Get in a doorway' -- which was good enough practice as that went, but this seemed to be a long rumbly one rather than a 'house coming down around us right now' one, so I got them outdoors.
I was so proud of them for being knowledgeable and wise.

It lasted a while.  I think I could have recited the whole Gettysburg Address if I had kept up a fast clip.

This is my -- I had to think about this a while -- third good shaker of a quake and my fifth quake if you count a couple little bitty tremors.  And it's in Virginia.  I didn't feel any quakes when I lived in California.
 Go figger.

I didn't even have stuff shake off the shelves.  This is in part because I do not have shelves full of breakable stuff.  I have books. The TV slid across the old wood chest I keep it on but did not fall over and break, which is a pity since it is the TV-that-will-not-die and dates from the Seventies and has tubes in it.

My friend who owns an antique shop just about ground zero says a lot of little brickabrack suicided.

The DH  was outside working on the motorcycle.  The shaking made it hard for him to keep his footing.  He said the walls of the house moved and flexed in an interesting manner.

 I have not been down to look at the foundation or checked the chimney.  These will no doubt tell us if they are no longer tight in their own good time by (a) flooding or (b) setting the house on fire.  

The epicenter is 8 miles from the North Anna nuclear power plant.  I am assured there is no important structural damage.
This removes all nervousness.  The government would not lie to me.


I did not feel a sense of foreboding and would have been of no use whatsoever to my primitive tribe in warning them of impending danger.
I did feel rather odd afterwards.
But then, one would.  I wasn't scared, but my chest felt tight and my stomach was unsettled.
You cannot possibly be interested in the details.  Really. 

The animals did not act oddly beforehand.
They are obviously less sensitive than Chinese chickens.
I have long suspected this.

The cat was deeply distressed, however, when it struck and went streaking out of the house to jump around in the leaves out back, scared of the way the ground was acting.

The dog slept through it.

We've had a few little aftershocks.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Banner finis

And I have a banner concept. 

Not final.  Not just the way it's going to look.  But I expect it will bear some relationship to the final design. 
The web designer is either pleased or tactful and we are talking technical details about drop down menus and search boxes.  I like it that we've got to the point I have no idea what is going on and cannot add usefully to further websiting.   


Could Romantic Scientist and Skittles get in touch with me.  You guys won an ARC of Black Hawk.  Hard decision, when everyone was so very helpful and intelligent.  Yeah! 

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Technical Topics -- Building Minor Characters

Someone asks,

I want to expand the role of a minor character.  I want to make him a villain.
How do I make him more real?

Lots of ways to approach this.

First off,  you get to use all the tricks you used in building your major characters
on the small fry.
Give him something to believe in; give him a problem to solve; give him an interesting and complicated past; give him something that makes him hurt; something that he delights in, give him something he wants very very much, give him some small oddities of appearance, action, movement or belief.

That's pretty basic character building.

Here's four more approaches that might be useful:

-- What does he sound like in dialog?
Consider cadence of speech.  Word choice.  Accent.  Big words or small ones. Modern slang or precise, scholarly finicky. Long sentences or short. Concrete terms or figurative. Metaphoric language or literal.

But it's not just the words.  It's the delivery.  It's how he speaks.  What are the customs of his dialog.
Does he rush to agree with what other folks say? Does he interrupt? Does he respond to what has been said or go off on a tangent? Does he wait before replying, or jump into speech immediatly. Does he stay silent and carefully watch others?

Compare the dialog and delivery of Uriah Heep with that of Bill Sykes.  Look at the accompanying body language.  (Go ahead.  I'll wait . . . )

And moving right along.

-- What does your character do?  Nothing defines a character like what he does.   

A small behavior;
(he hides his meat under a pile of rice at the cafeteria line so he doesn't have to pay for it;)
reveals larger behaviors;
(he's an embezzler.)

The lovely young girl who casually stomps on a cricket, ('insects give me the creeps',) is not lovely inside.

What folks do stands up and shouts so loud about what they are, that we can't even hear them explain that they are not really like that but are something else altogether.

-- Minor characters, maybe especially villains, tend to have simple and consistent behavior.

But while the balance and pace of the story may demand this simplicity of character, it's worth remembering that no one is all of a piece.  We may not show the many depths to this villain bloke, but those many layers exist.   We know this, even if the reader doesn't.


-- And it's often useful to remember that every character is the hero of his own story.  How would he see things?

For some interesting comments on hero-age and villain-age, see the Wenchposting  here.


Monday, August 15, 2011

Banners Yet again.

So.  Still playing with the banner:

This one has a blue banner and the 'e' is not covered.
Then the same banner with the 'e' covered.

I am not at all sure about this shade of blue.  No.  Not sure.
And I have to work with the edge of that door.  It needs to look like a door.  Maybe I can add a dark strip down the side.




 This one has a more active woman.  I like the concept, but the picture of her takes more space, it being active and all.

In the first case, I've moved the lettering on top of her.
This might work with more powerful lettering, but seems illegible as is.



Here, I keep the picture, but make the name smaller so it all fits.
I do not know what to do with the right side of the picture.
The whole photoshop thingum is kinda beyond my grasp.  Obviously more tinkering is required if I want to do this.

  This one has a wedge-shaped upper line. 
Somehow I think the concept of wedge-shaped upper line is cooler than the execution.
 And here we see one with a thicker upper line altogether. 

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Banners again

So.
I'm still looking at possible banners for the blog,
because I dither a bit on this,
and also I have to do the work when I have an odd minute free.

Somehow one is never expected to have even minutes free.

Could gamistress66 and Christine get in touch with me?  I'll send you each an ARC of Black Hawk.
I had a very hard time -- an impossible time -- deciding who was most helpful.  So I picked out the five great comments and did a blind drawing and you two won.

I have another copy of Black Hawk -- 'the ARC' to give away.  It'll be for further comment or for what was already said or a combination of both.

What I'm thinking of right now is:    





Or its kin an kith:


























Then we got blue options:



























And we got variations:



































Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Technical Topic -- So how do your write relationship scenes, anyway?

Someone asked, (more or less):

I don't write Romance, but I want to add a romantic scene.  How do I do this?

A 'romance' scene falls into the category of intense, interpersonal scene.

There are many kinds of scenes. You got yer 'individual concentrates on something' scenes like 'Frodo climbs the cliff in Mordor'.
You got yer brisk, big-movement action scenes like 'George kicks the villain in the teeth' or 'Marvin drives a car really fast'.
You got your scenes of internals like 'Harold remembers his boyhood' or 'Martha plots a murder'.

A romantic scene is a two-person interaction scene. Similar interaction scenes are 'an argument', 'a confrontation', 'a persuasion', or a close, emotional dialog of any kind.
Even if your folks don't have a lot to say to each other, that's the kind of scene it is.


What are the characteristics of a close interpersonal scene?


1) Very tight focus on the other person. The corollary, that's the next point below, is a lack of focus on the surroundings.

Most visuals are going to be of the other person -- the non-POV character -- and they are going to be small details. This is where you talk about the shape of an ear lobe or the crooked eye tooth on the lower jaw. Not -- he's tall. Not -- he's wearing vintage cowboy boots.

When someone is in the most intimate zone of contact with the POV character, description includes smell, taste, touch, hearing small sounds. This is when he notices the smell in her armpits, the taste of her hair, the sound of her stomach rumbling, the fleshy mumble of his ear lobe.

You convince the reader that these two people are propinquitous by using details that are only apparent upon close contact. 
We note the small changes in the eyes or mouth that signal feelings. The POV character is intensely aware of the other person's expression.


2) We tend to leave out most description of the surroundings.

So . . . not so much talking about the semiraker and dohinki on the engineering panel. Not so much commenting on the clouds floating over the fleecy red fields of the planet Florami. Not so much dwelling on the color of the damask curtains.

This is why it's nice to put the romantic encounter in scenery that has been used before and described before. The reader already knows what the galley looks like before you move your protagonists in there and set them to making love on the counter.

This 'I have no time to talk about the color of the couch' is true in 'fight scenes' and 'intense dialog' and 'escape scenes'. If you've nailed the description down earlier -- even just walking through the place -- you don't have to sketch it in now.

3) You do add description that enhances the purpose of the scene.

This is true in any scene, of course. In an intensely emotional scene, you have one or two emotional themes you're playing with. You highlight scenery description and stage business to follow the emotional theme.

If the scene is sensual, you might describe the furs and velvets on the bed. (And yes. There is no reason space travellers wouldn't have furs and velvets on the bed.) The smell of flowers in a vase. The gems on the perfume bottle on the dresser. The ozone and mineral smell of the warm bath that's been run in the room next door.

If an issue in the relationship is the strength, lethality and touchiness of the female, your stage business might be she's chopping carrots for dinner. The glint of the knife becomes part of the dialog, symbolic of her own dangerous edge.

4) Dialog, dialog, dialog.

A romance scene is about communication between the protagonists.

Build the dialog by giving them something to talk about.

Now it might be simply 'my room or yours', but if this is an important relationship, there's probably more to it than that.

What you do here is ask yourself -- 'In this scene, what changes in the relationship?'
That's what the dialog is about.

Techniques for building this 'what changes' dialog:

-- Have a character say something true. Truth is tremendously powerful in dialog. "I hated it when you went to bed with Jerome." "I'm planning to do this once, and then walk off and leave you." "You're not really pretty."

-- Make the character sound like himself. You always do, but if there are tricks that give your character his voice, this is the time to put them in place.

-- Take some of the words the character is thinking and put them into speech. When the words are said out loud, the other character can respond to them.
If a character says, 'the sheets are cold', you have dialog about this. If he thinks about the cold sheets . . . the perception stays small and lonely.

-- Let them talk about the problem that has kept them apart for the eighteen chapters before this.

-- Let them talk, (or think,) about what happens next. (No.  Not just the horizontal rumba.  What happens next week?)


5) Dialog is couched in relationship terms.

Dialog is always responsive, of course. That is, when something gets said the returning words are an answer.

In a relationship scene, the words do not merely respond to what is said. Each bit of dialog is also responding to where the relationship is right at that moment.

She: Where did I leave my car keys?
He: On the table.

versus

She: Where did I leave my car keys?
He: Here. No. Don't get up. I'll pass them to you.

That moment, the relationship is at a place he wants to give something to her.

He: A little onion. A few olives. That's done. Pass me the crisper.
She: Here. I'll take it out to the table.

versus

He: A little onion. A few olives. That's done. Pass me the crisper.
She: Here. That looks remarkably tasty. I'll take it out to the table.

Because she's thinking how tasty he looks.

I do not mean you fill the conversation with innuendo. You just take into account that people talk to each other differently when they are in a romantic situation.

6) Because a romantic relationship scene is about sexuality and sensuality, describe the internal physical response of the POV character.
Try not to be purple about this.

And the POV character sees signs of sexual response in the other person.

7) Direct address.
Mostly characters do not address one another by name. The usual advice is to pull these direct address names out -- and very good advice that is.
In a relationship scene, though,  I think he can call her Sue-Ellen or Gigi once or twice.

8) Pacing is generally slow in relationship scenes. There's lots of talk. You get a pause now and then. Lots of internals.

You can slow pacing with a few complex and longish sentences interspersed into the page, or by adding stage business that the reader will see as taking a long time.
'He crossed the room and then paced back again.' is nine words.
'He hunted the shelf till he found the dictionary.' is also nine words -- but that action is going to slow the reader's perception of the pace of the scene.

When you get to scenes of actual sexual activity, the pace should pick up for at least part of the scene.
This sort of scene benefits from noticeable changes in pacing.

9) It is a Romance genre convention that POV can be switched once, or more than once, in sex scenes. This gives the reader two POV glances at the same material.
Not by any means necessary, but something to think about.

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Technical Topic -- How much abuse


Someone asked elsewhere . . . 

How much physical abuse do we put the character through?

To which I respond . . .

A reader is probably less interested in the abuse per se --
than in what the abuse means to the character
and how the character reacts.

The interior of the scullery boy plotting revenge in a I'm going to pee in her soup before I bring it to her way while he nurses his aching head and scours the pots
is actually more interesting than the cook hitting him over the head with a spoon. Boink ouch boink ouch pain suffering.



The underlying problem with hapless suffering, in a story sense, comes when it happens to someone without freedom of choice.
Abuse or pain endured is, (like a typhoon or a swarm of army ants or crippling illness or crop failure or the Empire at war,) a story problem.
Story is character choices and character action.
Story is the character doing stuff.

Starving to death on the farm is story problem.
Jack climbing the bean stalk is story.

The wicked stepmother and step sisters is story problem.
Cinderella making her own dress to go to the ball is story.

Pollyanna losing her family is story problem.
Pollyanna choosing to look on the bright side is story.

It isn't about suffering. It's about agency.

If your protagonist is acting and choosing, then the sufferings spotlight the importance of his choices. It's story. Go ahead and abuse the poor protagonist. Frodo's sufferings on his trek through Mordor are story.

In Frodo's case, suffering raises the stakes.  Privation and pain make the protagonist's courage or innocence or steadfastness shine.  But we don't mistake the suffering for the story.  We concentrate on what tells story.

The 'story' in Oliver Twist is not about Oliver starving to death in the workhouse. It's about Oliver standing up and saying, 'Please, Sir, may I have some more?"


This is why the protagonist's stay in the kitchen under the heavy hand of the spoon-wielding cook or the child growing up with a sexually abusive uncle will often be introductory to the story.

The reader is given enough background to emotionally understand why Cedric-the-cooksboy is desperate enough to run off in the middle of the night through war-torn Madreltonia or why Albert-the-schoolboy poisons his uncle's tea. Then Cedric and Albert get on with the business of doing something instead of being somebody's punching bag.

Saturday, August 06, 2011

New Look for the Blog

I changed the design of the blog
as you see.

Y'know how sometimes you go out and buy a new car because you are just in love with the idea of having a shiny new car with really sleek lines and good gas mileage and, like, tailfins?

This is not what I'm doing here.

Or sometimes you buy a new car because your neighbors keep walking by and saying, "When are you going to get rid of that scrap heap?"

Which is why I'm updating the website
at considerable effort and inconvenience and not a little personal expense.

But that is not why I changed the blog.

Sometimes you get rid of your car because vandals have come by and set it on fire and painted obscene mottoes all over the carcass and let the air out of your tires.

That's why I changed the look of the blog.

For reasons which will remain forever unclear, but are probably related to something abstruse and technical Google did with how it uploads stuff to Blogger,
lots of Blogger folks suddenly started getting black spaces and white triangles and exclamation points all over their blogs.

Doubtless dead-black-and-exclamation-marks have a design purpose.
Not for my blog
so much.

I put up with a long black column slashing down the left side of the blog for a couple days.  I joined discussions and listened to the usual fixes that everybody promised would work, that did not work for me.  I played with the code of the blog, which is always dire and trying and in this case also did not work.

I became distressed.

So I changed templates.
This is something I've been avoiding for years,
because something usually goes wrong when you mess with stuff.




That is why I have a new design.