Sima Zhongda
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- Posted: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 09:39:20 +0000
So I'm finally stepping out of my little box of OP/L regdom and doing what the rest of the WF regs do: posting a rant - one which I hope will be helpful (or at least sufficient to establish the inhuman magnitude of my e-p***s) to the community at large. This is based off the experience I've had creating characters for my various works of fiction over the years, and what I've observed of the experiences of those around me; your personal mileage may vary. Also, be forewarned that I am drunk and it is two in the morning.
1)If you cannot treat a character objectively, they should not be one of your main characters. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Seriously, it's not just an insult to your reader's intelligence if you feel you have to tell them which characters are good and which ones are bad - it's an insult to your own storytelling ability.
First and foremost, it makes the character unbelievable: is the universe biased in your favor, or in anyone else's? Is it identical to anyone's perceptions? Does it automatically rearrange itself so that a given person can say or do no wrong? I THINK NOT, BITCHES. Not even Oxxidation can manage to convince the whole rest of the universe that he's right (even if he is).
If you don't feel that you can let your character stand on their own merits and let the reader judge for themselves whether the character is ethical and worthy of respect or not, you are not ready to tell that character's story. As a reader, I can say that there's nothing that drives me to hate a character more than the author telling me that I should love them - it's human nature to be stubborn, and do the opposite of what you're told unless you can see good reason to do it; there's nothing that makes an author seem more uncertain of their own position than that they have to tell you that a character is good - it's as if they have to chant it like a mantra to make themselves believe it.
On the one hand, it may actually prompt the readers to a closer personal examination of the characters you seem prejudiced towards or against; on the other, though, that prompting is not worth sacrificing their trust in you as a storyteller.
One good pair of examples are Liu Bei and Cao Cao from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Though Cao Cao is completely amoral, he earns the reader's respect, even when he usurps the Emperor's powers, by ruling well over the provinces under his command and by using his military powers to subjugate those territories ruled by the vain and incompetent. He's the most brilliant political leader of his time; he evidences many traits of paranoid schizophrenia, yet he carefully controls himself nearly all the time; he's one of the most complex and fascinating characters in the novel. Even though he's Machiavelli's glamor boy, I love him to death - and it's in part because Luo Guanzhong (the author) says I should hate him.
Liu Bei, on the other hand, is a timid man when it comes to handling real power; he's a follower, not a leader, and he doesn't think himself (and consequently, doesn't act) all that clever; the only real virtue in which his contemporaries would esteem him is that he supports the emperor and is unwilling to let Cao Cao plant seeds of the dynasty's subversion. He desperately wants to do what is right, but often he lacks the wisdom to see the proper course of action for himself, and in the course of his clinging to his misguided ideals, thousands are killed in his name. More than anything, he's terrified to death of what those who come after him will think of him.
Cao Cao has the courage not to care how later ages will view him, and does what he knows to be right even if the majority esteems it wrong. Thus, Cao Cao, who's supposed to be the villain, comes across as more brave and righteous than Liu Bei, whom Luo Guanzhong claims is the hero and a virtuous man. This is how you can embarrass yourself if you don't leave the reader to draw your own conclusions about your characters.
(Get used to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms references; there's going to be a lot of them, as I'm in love with that book despite all its shortcomings.)
1a) If you can't bear to let a character screw up, or to let them suffer the consequences of their actions, you also shouldn't be writing them.
What the reader will connect with, first and foremost, is the character as a human being. Have you ever known a human being who didn't screw up? Have you ever known anyone who hasn't once done the wrong thing with all the right intentions? If the reader knows that the character means to do what's right, their heart will cry out as the character is punished for each of their mistakes - you'll engage their sympathies even further as your character who, in trying to do what they thing is best, is set back further and further.
Contrary to what seems to be common belief, it's not unearned suffering that earns the reader's sympathy, but suffering that the character has earned through the course of their own mistakes, especially in pursuing a noble goal. After all, who hasn't made mistakes? And who hasn't suffered keenly because of them?
You can use this same technique to make your villain seem like more than a maniacally laughing, mustachio'd cardboard cutout - remember that everyone is the hero of their own story; it's often better to portray your villain as committing their despicable acts out of their conviction that they're doing something right or important (or at least out of ignorance of the damage they're causing) - in the villain's most depraved acts, you'll make the reader sick at the heart (instead of the stomach) because they can actually see the reasoning behind it and its seeming reasonability; in the villain's most lucid moments, they'll feel sympathetic towards him (or her) because the villain's so tragically misguided - and the hero will gain additional sympathy, because their eventual slaying of the villain is akin to putting a mad dog down. The dog is suffering; everyone who comes in contact with the dog is suffering; and it takes someone uniquely brave and merciful to shoot the damn beast and put it out of everyone's misery.
2) Knowing your character's self-concept is critical.
Everyone's got one - including your characters, if you ever hope to make them seem like real people. A "self-concept" is how a person defines themself - what kind of person they think they are, what traits and positions they identify strongly with (e.g. "I am one of the most capable scientists in the country, and my work is among the most groundbreaking; because of this, I am setting a strong example for gay men in the sciences everywhere"; " "I am brilliant in every academic field I take interest in and am destined for greatness"; and so forth). Even in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the characters' self-concepts are not difficult to pick up on and understand, as you can see from my analysis in point (1). At the very least, you need to be instinctively aware of your character's self-concept.
Why is this so important, you ask? Because people - not just characters, but people - will fight tooth and nail to keep their reality in line with their self-concept, since any change that throws the two out of synch threatens the very core of their identity. You can use this tendency to your advantage to create engaging and realistic conflict in your stories. And, because you can be sure your characters are willing to go balls-out to get what they want - what they feel they need above anything else - you can be sure your reader will be invested in their struggles. Passion begets passion.
2a) Don't insert flaws to counterbalance the positive traits. This is not ******** DnD.
If your characters flaws do not grow naturally out of who they are and what they do, they'll seem exactly like what they are: artificial and tacked on. These kinds of "flaws" don't carry over well into the text of your story at all; if they ever show up, they'll do it at random, unpredictable intervals, and make your character seem more poorly-constructed than realistic.
Despite what some amateurs would have you believe, it's not important that you be able to name your character's flaws - so long as you know the character's shortcomings by instinct and are not too timid or your ego too entangled with your character to portray them objectively, your character will be fine. If anything, you'll get a lot more mileage out of finding ways for characters' positive traits to work against them. For example (and this is the only example out of my own work I'll use), I've got a rather politically savvy princess - one who is determined to do right by her country and its people, come hell or high water. This means seeing to it that her country is ruled properly, even if she has to spread a portrayal of her own mother as a totally incapable ruler so far and wide that her mother's forced to abdicate in her favor. This gets her into a heaping pile of s**t with the rest of the Powers That Be (given that this is an Orwellian monarchy and any genuine political maneuvering - as opposed to that which is staged for the benefit of keeping the lower orders ignorant of the man behind the curtain - is resisted with all the inertia of an immovable bureaucratic object, which is far more immovable than an ordinary immovable object).
3) At the same time, never make the mistake of considering your characters as real people.
If you don't know your characters a thousand times better than you know all your friends, and a hundred times better than you know your own parents, you'll never be able to depict them accurately and realistically. A character can never be compared to a real person because you have to know them far, far better. You can never enter another person's mind, or step inside their skin; you have to be able to do this with your characters to make the reader believe in them at all. This is why, if you try to use real people as characters, your insights into their behavior will be too shallow and one-dimensional to spark the reader's interest.
Just because your characters cannot be real people, however, doesn't give them license not to act and react like real people. Remember: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; for every reaction, there is a boundary delineated by sanity. A character isn't going to be crippled with grief from the death of their family twenty years later unless they are obsessive and psychotic. If you don't want to write an obsessive and psychotic character, don't crucify them to their past. Likewise, in most settings a character will not immediately swear revenge when they realize their family has been killed - the exception being settings where this sort of thing is not entirely unexpected, or where the characters would already have seen a lot of slaughter and learned to be less fazed by it (as in warrior cultures or at the epicenter of a war-torn land). Even then, however, your characters are still likely to experience shock, denial, and depression very intensely before setting off on their revenge-quest.
Additionally, unless loyalty and duty are major motifs in your story's culture, and unless revenge is strongly entwined with both (the filial son avenges his father's murder without concern for his own fate; the loyal vassal avenges his lord's murder no matter what the cost), your character isn't likely to be so keen on revenge decades or even years after the fact. They may have found other reasons to go on living, or realized that revenge is a hollow ideal - it won't bring their family back, after all. Even in cultures with the above ideals, it's rare to find those who live up to them.
Again, I'm going to use Cao Cao and Liu Bei as examples. Most of Cao Cao's family was murdered by bandits; while it didn't take him that long to pull himself together and set out with his army for revenge, he ended up losing heart and putting his campaign on hold after a few months. Liu Bei's sworn brother, whom he loved more than his own family, died in battle; for days Bei refused to eat or drink, and "wept until his robes were flecked with blood." It took even longer for him to be in any shape to muster his troops and march in the name of vengeance (a lot longer - he didn't set out until over a year later).
4) Knowing minutiae about your character is ******** worthless.
Trivia do nothing except take up unnecessary space in your mind or hard drive. If you feel like some random tidbit is important to the character, keep asking why.
So your character's favorite novel is Romance of the Three Kingdoms. That's all fine and dandy - why can they relate so strongly to the novel? What about it draws them in? Which themes and characters can they relate to, and why? What motivated them to pick up a four-volume, 2200-page Chinese epic novel in the first place?
Unless you can extrapolate something significant about the character's personality and sense of self from asking such questions about their favorite novel (or movie, or toothpaste, or whatever), the bit of trivia is useless. Purge it from your memory and from your hard drive. Do not try to include it in your finished work. (If, however, such a bit of trivia does come up naturally in the course of writing, you might want to make a quick note of your character's answer, just to make sure that you don't contradict yourself later on - say, by having them claim their favorite novel is Romance of the Three Kingdoms at one point and then having them being totally in love with and having memorized the entire text of the Mahabharata at another.)
And be sure to keep in mind what Orson Scott Card notes in Characters & Viewpoint: someone can like all the same things you do, and still not be the kind of person you'd let babysit your children.
5) Stereotypes and archetypes are not your enemy.
If anyone among you claims that, at their very earliest stage of their development, your character was not a stereotype or archetype, you are a liar and hypocrite and you will hereby remove yourself from my presence.
Stereotypes and archetypes are immensely useful things. They're what give you the freedom to develop your character at the rate and in the method of your choosing - because it's extraordinarily difficult to give attention to every single detail of your character at once. Until you've taken the time to develop your character into their own person with their own unique history, a good portion of their personality and personal history are going to be stereotyped. And it takes time to fill in the important details of the character's history and develop the logical bonds between cause and consequence, between nature/nurture and what they're like now; stereotypes, archetypes, and even cliches are exactly what buy you the time to do that. You use them to fill characterization holes until you can come back and fill and strengthen them later, like a dentist places a temporary crown on a tooth. Never criticize yourself for using them during the early stages of character-building; everyone does it, and you know you're going to come back and flesh them out or replace them entirely anyway.
The problem with stereotypes, cliches, and archetypes only comes when you get lazy, and can't be arsed to develop a character beyond their very earliest stages; while some degree of this is acceptible with minor characters, it's extraordinarily difficult to get away with for the major characters of a novel. The only person I've ever seen pull it off (Simon R. Green) has a sense of style so far beyond that of everyone here that it's virtually outside our light cone.
6) I'm skeered, Uncle Zhongda!
Unless you have really severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you succeed perfectly well at being a three-dimensional, well-rounded and interesting person. If you'll reread the rest of this rant with an open mind and a positive learning attitude, you should be able to expand this success to your characters as well. You might also want to read Stephen King's On Writing, Nancy Kress's Beginnings, Middles, & Ends, and Orson Scott Card's Characters & Viewpoint if you're still unsure of yourself. I know I found them worth it! 3nodding
1)If you cannot treat a character objectively, they should not be one of your main characters. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Seriously, it's not just an insult to your reader's intelligence if you feel you have to tell them which characters are good and which ones are bad - it's an insult to your own storytelling ability.
First and foremost, it makes the character unbelievable: is the universe biased in your favor, or in anyone else's? Is it identical to anyone's perceptions? Does it automatically rearrange itself so that a given person can say or do no wrong? I THINK NOT, BITCHES. Not even Oxxidation can manage to convince the whole rest of the universe that he's right (even if he is).
If you don't feel that you can let your character stand on their own merits and let the reader judge for themselves whether the character is ethical and worthy of respect or not, you are not ready to tell that character's story. As a reader, I can say that there's nothing that drives me to hate a character more than the author telling me that I should love them - it's human nature to be stubborn, and do the opposite of what you're told unless you can see good reason to do it; there's nothing that makes an author seem more uncertain of their own position than that they have to tell you that a character is good - it's as if they have to chant it like a mantra to make themselves believe it.
On the one hand, it may actually prompt the readers to a closer personal examination of the characters you seem prejudiced towards or against; on the other, though, that prompting is not worth sacrificing their trust in you as a storyteller.
One good pair of examples are Liu Bei and Cao Cao from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Though Cao Cao is completely amoral, he earns the reader's respect, even when he usurps the Emperor's powers, by ruling well over the provinces under his command and by using his military powers to subjugate those territories ruled by the vain and incompetent. He's the most brilliant political leader of his time; he evidences many traits of paranoid schizophrenia, yet he carefully controls himself nearly all the time; he's one of the most complex and fascinating characters in the novel. Even though he's Machiavelli's glamor boy, I love him to death - and it's in part because Luo Guanzhong (the author) says I should hate him.
Liu Bei, on the other hand, is a timid man when it comes to handling real power; he's a follower, not a leader, and he doesn't think himself (and consequently, doesn't act) all that clever; the only real virtue in which his contemporaries would esteem him is that he supports the emperor and is unwilling to let Cao Cao plant seeds of the dynasty's subversion. He desperately wants to do what is right, but often he lacks the wisdom to see the proper course of action for himself, and in the course of his clinging to his misguided ideals, thousands are killed in his name. More than anything, he's terrified to death of what those who come after him will think of him.
Cao Cao has the courage not to care how later ages will view him, and does what he knows to be right even if the majority esteems it wrong. Thus, Cao Cao, who's supposed to be the villain, comes across as more brave and righteous than Liu Bei, whom Luo Guanzhong claims is the hero and a virtuous man. This is how you can embarrass yourself if you don't leave the reader to draw your own conclusions about your characters.
(Get used to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms references; there's going to be a lot of them, as I'm in love with that book despite all its shortcomings.)
1a) If you can't bear to let a character screw up, or to let them suffer the consequences of their actions, you also shouldn't be writing them.
What the reader will connect with, first and foremost, is the character as a human being. Have you ever known a human being who didn't screw up? Have you ever known anyone who hasn't once done the wrong thing with all the right intentions? If the reader knows that the character means to do what's right, their heart will cry out as the character is punished for each of their mistakes - you'll engage their sympathies even further as your character who, in trying to do what they thing is best, is set back further and further.
Contrary to what seems to be common belief, it's not unearned suffering that earns the reader's sympathy, but suffering that the character has earned through the course of their own mistakes, especially in pursuing a noble goal. After all, who hasn't made mistakes? And who hasn't suffered keenly because of them?
You can use this same technique to make your villain seem like more than a maniacally laughing, mustachio'd cardboard cutout - remember that everyone is the hero of their own story; it's often better to portray your villain as committing their despicable acts out of their conviction that they're doing something right or important (or at least out of ignorance of the damage they're causing) - in the villain's most depraved acts, you'll make the reader sick at the heart (instead of the stomach) because they can actually see the reasoning behind it and its seeming reasonability; in the villain's most lucid moments, they'll feel sympathetic towards him (or her) because the villain's so tragically misguided - and the hero will gain additional sympathy, because their eventual slaying of the villain is akin to putting a mad dog down. The dog is suffering; everyone who comes in contact with the dog is suffering; and it takes someone uniquely brave and merciful to shoot the damn beast and put it out of everyone's misery.
2) Knowing your character's self-concept is critical.
Everyone's got one - including your characters, if you ever hope to make them seem like real people. A "self-concept" is how a person defines themself - what kind of person they think they are, what traits and positions they identify strongly with (e.g. "I am one of the most capable scientists in the country, and my work is among the most groundbreaking; because of this, I am setting a strong example for gay men in the sciences everywhere"; " "I am brilliant in every academic field I take interest in and am destined for greatness"; and so forth). Even in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the characters' self-concepts are not difficult to pick up on and understand, as you can see from my analysis in point (1). At the very least, you need to be instinctively aware of your character's self-concept.
Why is this so important, you ask? Because people - not just characters, but people - will fight tooth and nail to keep their reality in line with their self-concept, since any change that throws the two out of synch threatens the very core of their identity. You can use this tendency to your advantage to create engaging and realistic conflict in your stories. And, because you can be sure your characters are willing to go balls-out to get what they want - what they feel they need above anything else - you can be sure your reader will be invested in their struggles. Passion begets passion.
2a) Don't insert flaws to counterbalance the positive traits. This is not ******** DnD.
If your characters flaws do not grow naturally out of who they are and what they do, they'll seem exactly like what they are: artificial and tacked on. These kinds of "flaws" don't carry over well into the text of your story at all; if they ever show up, they'll do it at random, unpredictable intervals, and make your character seem more poorly-constructed than realistic.
Despite what some amateurs would have you believe, it's not important that you be able to name your character's flaws - so long as you know the character's shortcomings by instinct and are not too timid or your ego too entangled with your character to portray them objectively, your character will be fine. If anything, you'll get a lot more mileage out of finding ways for characters' positive traits to work against them. For example (and this is the only example out of my own work I'll use), I've got a rather politically savvy princess - one who is determined to do right by her country and its people, come hell or high water. This means seeing to it that her country is ruled properly, even if she has to spread a portrayal of her own mother as a totally incapable ruler so far and wide that her mother's forced to abdicate in her favor. This gets her into a heaping pile of s**t with the rest of the Powers That Be (given that this is an Orwellian monarchy and any genuine political maneuvering - as opposed to that which is staged for the benefit of keeping the lower orders ignorant of the man behind the curtain - is resisted with all the inertia of an immovable bureaucratic object, which is far more immovable than an ordinary immovable object).
3) At the same time, never make the mistake of considering your characters as real people.
If you don't know your characters a thousand times better than you know all your friends, and a hundred times better than you know your own parents, you'll never be able to depict them accurately and realistically. A character can never be compared to a real person because you have to know them far, far better. You can never enter another person's mind, or step inside their skin; you have to be able to do this with your characters to make the reader believe in them at all. This is why, if you try to use real people as characters, your insights into their behavior will be too shallow and one-dimensional to spark the reader's interest.
Just because your characters cannot be real people, however, doesn't give them license not to act and react like real people. Remember: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; for every reaction, there is a boundary delineated by sanity. A character isn't going to be crippled with grief from the death of their family twenty years later unless they are obsessive and psychotic. If you don't want to write an obsessive and psychotic character, don't crucify them to their past. Likewise, in most settings a character will not immediately swear revenge when they realize their family has been killed - the exception being settings where this sort of thing is not entirely unexpected, or where the characters would already have seen a lot of slaughter and learned to be less fazed by it (as in warrior cultures or at the epicenter of a war-torn land). Even then, however, your characters are still likely to experience shock, denial, and depression very intensely before setting off on their revenge-quest.
Additionally, unless loyalty and duty are major motifs in your story's culture, and unless revenge is strongly entwined with both (the filial son avenges his father's murder without concern for his own fate; the loyal vassal avenges his lord's murder no matter what the cost), your character isn't likely to be so keen on revenge decades or even years after the fact. They may have found other reasons to go on living, or realized that revenge is a hollow ideal - it won't bring their family back, after all. Even in cultures with the above ideals, it's rare to find those who live up to them.
Again, I'm going to use Cao Cao and Liu Bei as examples. Most of Cao Cao's family was murdered by bandits; while it didn't take him that long to pull himself together and set out with his army for revenge, he ended up losing heart and putting his campaign on hold after a few months. Liu Bei's sworn brother, whom he loved more than his own family, died in battle; for days Bei refused to eat or drink, and "wept until his robes were flecked with blood." It took even longer for him to be in any shape to muster his troops and march in the name of vengeance (a lot longer - he didn't set out until over a year later).
4) Knowing minutiae about your character is ******** worthless.
Trivia do nothing except take up unnecessary space in your mind or hard drive. If you feel like some random tidbit is important to the character, keep asking why.
So your character's favorite novel is Romance of the Three Kingdoms. That's all fine and dandy - why can they relate so strongly to the novel? What about it draws them in? Which themes and characters can they relate to, and why? What motivated them to pick up a four-volume, 2200-page Chinese epic novel in the first place?
Unless you can extrapolate something significant about the character's personality and sense of self from asking such questions about their favorite novel (or movie, or toothpaste, or whatever), the bit of trivia is useless. Purge it from your memory and from your hard drive. Do not try to include it in your finished work. (If, however, such a bit of trivia does come up naturally in the course of writing, you might want to make a quick note of your character's answer, just to make sure that you don't contradict yourself later on - say, by having them claim their favorite novel is Romance of the Three Kingdoms at one point and then having them being totally in love with and having memorized the entire text of the Mahabharata at another.)
And be sure to keep in mind what Orson Scott Card notes in Characters & Viewpoint: someone can like all the same things you do, and still not be the kind of person you'd let babysit your children.
5) Stereotypes and archetypes are not your enemy.
If anyone among you claims that, at their very earliest stage of their development, your character was not a stereotype or archetype, you are a liar and hypocrite and you will hereby remove yourself from my presence.
Stereotypes and archetypes are immensely useful things. They're what give you the freedom to develop your character at the rate and in the method of your choosing - because it's extraordinarily difficult to give attention to every single detail of your character at once. Until you've taken the time to develop your character into their own person with their own unique history, a good portion of their personality and personal history are going to be stereotyped. And it takes time to fill in the important details of the character's history and develop the logical bonds between cause and consequence, between nature/nurture and what they're like now; stereotypes, archetypes, and even cliches are exactly what buy you the time to do that. You use them to fill characterization holes until you can come back and fill and strengthen them later, like a dentist places a temporary crown on a tooth. Never criticize yourself for using them during the early stages of character-building; everyone does it, and you know you're going to come back and flesh them out or replace them entirely anyway.
The problem with stereotypes, cliches, and archetypes only comes when you get lazy, and can't be arsed to develop a character beyond their very earliest stages; while some degree of this is acceptible with minor characters, it's extraordinarily difficult to get away with for the major characters of a novel. The only person I've ever seen pull it off (Simon R. Green) has a sense of style so far beyond that of everyone here that it's virtually outside our light cone.
6) I'm skeered, Uncle Zhongda!
Unless you have really severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you succeed perfectly well at being a three-dimensional, well-rounded and interesting person. If you'll reread the rest of this rant with an open mind and a positive learning attitude, you should be able to expand this success to your characters as well. You might also want to read Stephen King's On Writing, Nancy Kress's Beginnings, Middles, & Ends, and Orson Scott Card's Characters & Viewpoint if you're still unsure of yourself. I know I found them worth it! 3nodding
