Characters, the reality and otherwise of

I was following a blog thread on characters that started here with discussion on how to develop characters' voice then moved over here with a side discussion on interviewing/pretending to be your characters, or not and then to here with dicussion on what degree of real characters have to their authors.

The thought of pretending to be my characters is squicky. I can't interview them either -- it's just wrong. I did manage to come up with 20 questions that they will answer, but as you can see they're not very talkative and it's certainly not a character building tool. I think this is because they don't exist out of the context of their story/world, so they how can I interview them? Maybe if the interviewee was someone from their reality, it might work, but I don't see it as much use, for me, as a character developing tool.

What does work for me, is having them tell me their story beyond the borders of whatever I'm actually writing. That is, making up stories about the characters' past and futures. Past events get added to a timeline in case I decide to refer to them, future events are just for me (ha). It seems a more natural way of working out what makes them tick, what matters to them etc, that the artificial nature of an interview.

One thing I do that pulls the characters out of their reality though, is "take them shopping" or to a museum or some other place that might interest them. The point of this is to explore how that character see things, to be able to filter the world through their view of it. Which is, in my opinion, what character building is all about -- developing a character so they do have their unique perspective and then being able to get this across to the reader. (Visiting such places/exhibitions also helps to expand my knowledge of subjects that are relevant to the story/characters.)

Does it require breaking down, or at least thinning, the fourth wall to actually interview a character? Or is it just a different way of approaching the problem?

At the other end, I can't treat characters just as pieces to push around the board. I don't see how you can do that and still get believable characters. Maybe it works in idea/driven stories? If I try it, I end up with dry as dust scenes, when I can get them written in the first place. I'm happy enough to kill them/torture them/otherwise make life tough for them, but again, I can't do that if I just see them as playing pieces, because then I don't care, so what's the point?

Name Game

I am so tired of coming up with names for things and people.

Now I'm stuck on a surname, of all the stupid things. These are usually easy because they don't get used much, but Morgan is digging in his heels. I think he realised he was too co-operative over his first name. ("That's mine!")

So it has to start with a B, have ls and in it and end with a, or maybe e; and have d' or De at the front. Why???

(He's considering Sarles at the moment, so maybe he's just unsure.)

Mixing Colours

Further to ideas from previous post, in my novels, I invariably have some supporting character who is of a different race to majority of the human characters. The outsider/different world view thing can be useful in a supporting character.

So I wasn't that surprised when one of the major characters (not a main one, but he's one of the three POV holders) in Falcon told me he was a half-caste, his father was the from the predominant white-race-yet-to-be-named, his mother from a smaller, dark-skinned race. It's just an interesting back story, after all. Until I discovered his mother's people are looked down, consideredless intelligent, useful as servants but little else; and the idea that people from the two races would come together, let alone produce children is just disgusting. Of course, this character has an advantage due to his job (people don't always see past the uniform), but it means he is bringing in all sort of issues and conflicts that I didn't intend to be in there.

Still, it's interesting to explore

Walk-on characters

In writing, I find there are two types of characters:

- the ones I create and put on the board
- the ones who walk onto the board and say "Here I am".

The first usually result from a story need, there's a role to fill so it's filled. They tend to be well behaved, but this can make them dull to write.

The second appear in the story, often for no apparent reason, or they're minor characters who are given a bigger role than originally intended. These are the ones who like to take the story into interesting or different places. If they're not the main character, they believe they're entitled to their own subplots, and then their own book. They walk on, and take over their little corner of the story

It's these characters who bring in interesting plot twists, who offer interesting world building details, who make the stories worth writing.

But where do they come from?

Deliberately trying to create them just leads to more type one characters. They come from the dark pool as story ideas, no doubt. Story ideas come from random thoughts, little details, interesting phrases and odd concepts that fall into the pool where they float around looking for other bits to join up with, until they spark and create a storyline. Maybe walk-on characters take a swim in the pool, and pick up the bits that make them spark.