I’m at the ACFW conference in Dallas, and it’s after midnight, local time. I don’t know if I’m still on West Coast time or not, but I’m a little sleepy, so this’ll be a short blog.
Technically, the conference starts tomorrow, but today is Day 1 for me, because we had the annual board meeting this afternoon, and one of my duties is to attend that.
Writers have been arriving all day, and it’s great to see a number of friends again. My brain is really bad at face-recognition, so it’s sometimes hard for me to recognize people I haven’t seen for six months or a year, especially if they’ve changed their hairstyle. Tomorrow will be easier, because everyone will have nametags.
Well, let’s talk about characters for a bit. Some people love creating characters and some people hate it. I love it, which means that I haven’t spent as much time studying HOW the process works, because it comes naturally to me. So I was glad to read a very good explanation of the steps of character creation in James Frey’s book, HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD MYSTERY.
The first step is to define the character’s “physiology” which is a little broader in scope than what I would have guessed. The “physiology” includes the character’s physical appearance, obviously, but it also includes nonphysical inherited attributes, such as intelligence and personality type. It also includes acquired characteristics such as scars, tics, diseases, language skills, talents, posture, degree of fitness.
In my experience, this is the easiest part of creating a character, and it’s the one beginning writers tend to spend most of their time on. It’s all important, of course, but it’s only the beginning.
It’s nice to know, for example, that your heroine has green eyes, but it’s far more important to know how she feels about that.
It’s good to know that your hero is only 5’3″, but it’s better to know whether his height has made him feel insecure or has given him a Napoleon complex.
If you were writing a novel with me as a main character (you’d be crazy to do that), you would want to know that I’m not good at recognizing faces. But you’d NEED to know what coping mechanisms I use to compensate for that.
We’ll talk about the second major aspect of character-creation tomorrow.
I’m indebted to Don, Holly, Andra, Lara and Lois for their comments yesterday. Each comment gave me a lot of insight to understand the concept of developing characters.
I know some of the things discussed here, but the way you add that little extremely-important extra blows me off. Amazing.
That was the most clear way I’ve had that explained.
I love creating characters. One of my favorite resources for character development is Alice Orr’s No MOre Rejections. In it, she provides in-depth questions to learn more about your characters from the inside out, meaning she doesn’t dwell on the physical aspects so much, but the internal makeup of characters. Knowing what makes a character tick helps to figure out their GMC.
Excellent. And Lisa, thanks for the book tip, too. 🙂
That’s actually the part I dislike. I’m not a visual person. I don’t see the book, I hear my internal narrator reading the words to me.
I like finding out who my characters are, but I’m not very good at picturing what they look like.
I hope you’re enjoying yourself at the conference, Randy. Dallas sounds like a great place to be this time of year, if you like the heat. (Read: it sounds more appealing than northern Saskatchewan this time of year.)
As for developing characters, I have trouble knowing exactly how much physical description to add how early on and how to integrate it smoothly into the story.
I have to agree with Carrie, I think in words, not images.
I’m also a very slow cook – it takes me forever to get the feel for where I want to go.
Having written much more non-fiction than fiction, I looking forward to hwo this topic developes.
Thank you, Randy! I’m experiencing “Aha!” and “Well, duh!” moments here. Makes so much sense and I can see all of what you’re saying playing out in the novel I’m currently reading. And now I’m excited to put it into play in the novel I’m writing.
You already have me thinking.
Can’t wait to read more!
Wow! Thanks for that Randy. I spent many hours learning about my character’s traits, but I never really thought about how those things made them feel….and that makes me feel very dumb. HA! I mean, knowing that my MC has a scar is one thing, but knowing how he feels about it is a whole OTHER thing. Anyway, so now I get to do some more thinking…
Wow! Thanks for that Randy. I spent many hours learning about my character’s traits, but I never really thought about how those things made them feel….and that makes me feel very dumb. HA! I mean, knowing that my MC has a scar is one thing, but knowing how he feels about it is a whole OTHER thing. Anyway, so now I get to do some more thinking…
I think WAY too much, so my characters have layers and layers of psycho make-up.
What’s fun for me is when to build complex emotions and attributes into our characters so we know them better than the character knows themself. It gives an added element to what the character gets to discover along the path, or a bit of conflict with other characters or situations.
For example, if my main character—let’s call him Randy—is not good at remembering names and has developed a way to cope with it, but doens’t really think about it because he’s not that introspective and it just kinda developed naturally over time, then he might realize over the course of the story that his coping mechanism (which is to mentally picture a person’s name spelled out in Marvel comic style font over their head since he has a photographic memory and a fascination with comic books) makes him feel kinda weird and self-concious when he meets people because he’s aware that they look a little alarmed when he asks them how to spell their name and then stares off in a glassy-eyes trance over their head.
Once he realizes he’s been doing it so long that it has affected several areas of his life, he has to decide if he’ll try to figure out a more socially acceptable way of doing it, or just embrace who he is, go all out with it, and make it cool so everyone else will want to do it too. One of those tiny little revelation/resolution things to spice up the story.
Or not. (Was that middle paragraph all one sentence?)Sheesh. I’m switchin to decaf.
Thanks Randy and have a great time at the conference!
I find that seeing the physical things with my characters is easy, it’s getting down the deeper things. I can pretty well see it in my mind but to get it down onto paper in something that makes sense is hard.
D.E.:
You and I are dumb together! I also never considered how a physical or psychological trait can effect my characters’ emotional makeup.
I think my characters – even those I know well – will deepen even further.
Very cool.
I think as women particularly our physical self really affects our inner world, even tiny stupid details. In my experience, guys built at either extreme of the scale can be very self-conscious of it but don’t sweat detail so much.
My father was 6 feet tall when he was 13 (he stopped growing at 6’4″), and he had a lot of extra pressure to think and behave as an adult because of it, simply because people assumed he was older. Big effect on his psyche.
Even in daily doses, there’s so much to learn here!
I hope this blog eventually spirals around again to topics already covered. This morning at 5:30 I had a breakthrough in writing an author bio, but now it’s too late to share. Same thing happened with one-sentence summaries. Guess I gotta get quicker on the uptake!
Enjoy the conference!
Really weird confession here. As a child I loved “let’s pretend” games. As an adolescent I did a lot of daydreaming, bringing my heroes and heroines into my pretend stories. (Shhh!)I find this can still help. As I’m developing characters, I get into scenes with them and actually converse with them, or listen to the characters talk with each other.
Getting to know my characters this intimately also helps me to keep each one in his/her own voice so they don’t begin to sound alike (or like me).
As I said, really weird, but it works for me.
I enjoy my characters. I use the usual character chart:height, weight, hair color, eye color, etc., but I haven’t spent much time in my pre-wriiting thinking about how they feel about themselves and their physical endowments or lack there of. Some of this comes out naturally as I put them in scenes. As I spend more time on this, I’m sure I’ll be able to deepen my characters. Thanks, Randy.
When writing my first book, I hit a wall. So I went for a walk with my main character and asked her how to work it out. She told me what she would do next. In a more recent manuscript, she surprised me at the end of the book when I thought she should shout the closing line, and she insisted on whispering it. OK, I know you’re supposed to go easy on the whispering, but she insisted!
Lois, I thought everyone did that! Seriously. I’ve been known, in the wee hours of morning, to actually “act out” scenes with my characters just to see how they’d react to a situation and why. It really helps them feel like real people, so writing it all down is easier.
Andra, we shouldn’t call ourselves dumb. We’re just slow. LOL! Nah. See the thing is my MC has a lot of inner turmoil, so I understand how that affects his moods etc, but I never really gave any thought to how his physical traits affected him. But you know, some of my physical traits affect me, so why not him.
Did, I mention how much I appreciate you Randy.
Lois, I thought everyone did that! Seriously. I’ve been known, in the wee hours of morning, to actually “act out” scenes with my characters just to see how they’d react to a situation and why. It really helps them feel like real people, so writing it all down is easier.
Andra, we shouldn’t call ourselves dumb. We’re just slow. LOL! Nah. See the thing is my MC has a lot of inner turmoil, so I understand how that affects his moods etc, but I never really gave any thought to how his physical traits affected him. But you know, some of my physical traits affect me, so why not him.
Did, I mention how much I appreciate you Randy.
Great topic. Characters are my favourite part of any story I read – I don’t even care as much where the journey takes me so long as I’m enjoying the company.
I love working on my characters’ personalities and motivations, but I find it much harder to bring them to life externally. I want to give my characters their own unique style of dialogue, way of moving, physical gestures and habits and so on but while I have a lot of resources to draw on for personality styles (and motivations come to mind fairly easily) I haven’t found anything like that for the externals.
All I can come up with is that I need to do some in-depth people watching, and fill a note-book with the gestures, speech patterns and physical attributes that I observe and sprinkle them over my characters – but is there an easier or more organic way of bringing the “outside” of my characters to life?
I don’t have problems with seeing any of my characters except for the the main character. I always put myself into his or her head and see the story through them. Therefore, all my main characters look like me. HA! I do give different descriptions, but in my mind, my protagonists are me.
Talk about ego.
But really, it’s not that I think too much of myself. It’s that I’m so much into the story that I’m simply there.
Randy,
Wow! Thanks for blogging after midnight for us! I am touched. Hope your class goes really well, and the name tags take the pressure off face-recognition difficulties. =)