What's In a Name?

Plotting a new novel recently I have come across a familiar phenomenon. I'm working away on the plot, then move on to fleshing out a particular character, or describing that particular character's backstory or role in the plot.

Slam. Dead stop.

I need the name.

If I cannot get a name that works for me for that character I am completely stumped. It is part stubbornness, part determination, part - well I don't know what. But I have an instinct for what name is right. It's like the core of the character starts as a seed of emotion, and I know that thing intimately. I know that I need to find the right name to unlock it, as though that unique combination of letters and sounds is itself a key.

Once I have the name, everything starts flowing. I can describe the character, I can move on with the plot. Suddenly I know what happened when they were seven, how they feel about their mother and what colour their hair is.

So what is it about names? Do other people find it the same when they are fleshing out a new book?

The idea of changing character names after the book has been written makes me shiver like a ghost just walked on my grave.

In fact, come to think about it. I can't even start plotting a book until I get the title of the book.

So what is it? What's in a name?

Character Purpose

I have been contemplating character purpose lately.

As a key part of characterisation, most people would agree that a character needs to have some desire that propels them - a driving force for their actions. In a more classic sense, a Quest in which they are searching for something. Of course, not everyone agrees with this theory. Some writers, while noting this element of storytelling, choose to do the opposite and leave the character a blank slate in that department, perhaps with a quirky personality, but pretty much pushed around by the forces of their world. Not my favourite type of book, although enjoyed by a certain breed of stylists who throw darts at plot structure.

Robert McKee, in his book Story (and seminar series), talks about conscious and unconscious desire. If any of you have run into McKee before you would know he is an advocate of structure with a capital S. In McKee's view, a character must follow a conscious desire. If they, perhaps through self-revelation or temporary defeat, abandon this desire, it must be because having delved a little deeper they have found their true desire (which they had not realised until this point) or their unconscious desire (which of course is now a conscious one).

I would have to say I agree with McKee completely on this point, but then again I absolutely hate books where the character is at the whims of their world and makes no attempt to solve their own problems or make their own way.

There is one important distinction. I like the heroic journey, but a character can be firmly driven by their purpose and yet ultimately fail without invalidating the story. It's not fun, maybe it is not heroic, but it is consistent storytelling that does not betray the reader's expectations where the character is concerned (although it stands a good chance of disappointing them).

What do you think? Does a character always have to driven by a clear desire/purpose/goal?

Emotional Resonance

Emotional resonance seems a very subjective term to me. Like so many of the phrases you might see on a rejection slip. "Your characters lack emotional resonance". But what does it mean?

Resonance. Well the Free Dictionary gives a few definitions, I guess the most relevant might be: Richness or significance, especially in evoking an association or strong emotion.

If I am guessing correctly - and honestly I don't even know if the people who use this term really define it, even for themselves - emotional resonance is about evoking within the reader the emotions you are trying to portray in the work. If a character is said to lack emotional resonance, then my understanding is something along the lines that this character does not evoke an emotion in the reader.

Now I am pretty sure that this term is also used when people object to a character, and also when the reader does not buy the reactions that a character might have - you might say when the suspension of disbelief is broken. This seems to be a different issue, but it gets lumped into the same basket.

Of course, beyond the definition and what exactly people are trying to say is the reason for the lack of emotional resonance. The characterisation may just be poorly thought out or executed, or perhaps there is a lack of consistency that is jarring. Perhaps the emotional reactions of the character do not gel in some situations, and this breaks the reader-writer connection.

Even though all of this could be true, I think more often than not the reason is that the reader (or editor is they happen to be one), just don't like that character. They don't 'get' them. The things that particular character experience and strive for, their emotional reactions, do not echo with any level of personal experience in the reader. If that is the case, then no amount of crafting will make that reader like the work - no matter how good the characterisation or how relevant it is to the story.

I don't know. Help me out. What do people mean by 'emotional resonance'?

Wants versus Needs

WARNING: Inception Spoiler

Today in class I was talking about Needs versus Wants in characters and their character arcs, and about how ironic it is when a character achieves what they think they want, only to discover it isn't what they want at all.

In the Lord of the Rings movie, Frodo actually says that he wants an adventure like Bilbo. He is first presented sitting in a field reading a book, daydreaming about adventure.

By the end of the movie he has had his adventure and 'saved the world' and returned home, but he can't remain in the Shire because of what's happened to him (the wound he took on Weathertop still hurts). He has to leave the Shire and ends up going into the West with the Elves.

So he gets his adventure like Bilbo and, like Bilbo, he has to leave Middle Earth, when he would really rather live a normal life. He sails off into legend, into the dream that he longed for, only now he no longer wants it.

I was also thinking about how characters lie to themselves, or don't really know themselves and how this influences what they do. In the movie Inception, when you first see Cobb speak to his children, it is after he spins the top and it falls over. (The top is the totem, if it falls over it means this isn't a dream). So int he real world, he can't be with his children, but it is the thing he wants above all else. At the end of the movie, he spins the top, but doesn't wait to see if it stops spinning, and goes out to be with his children. By the end of the movie, it is more important to him, for him to be with his children, than to be sure this is not a dream. If you accept that the final reality is another dream then his need for his children over-rode his need for reality.

You have to ask yourself, would you have waited to see if the top stopped spinning?

I like irony in character arcs. I enjoy going on a journey with a character and discovering things about them, as they discover things about themselves. The more a character suffers, the more interesting they become for me. And I can forgive them a lot of they are motivated by pure (if misguided) sentiment.

Is the journey that the character takes important for you? Are there certain authors who deliver, whose characters linger in your mind after you've finished the book?

The Core of Characterisation -- by Rowena Cory Daniells

(Rowena is away from her computer, but she left this for us. Enjoy!)
It always comes back to characterisation, for me. Whether it is a movie or a book, I have to care about the people, otherwise why would I keep reading/watching? If a book is really memorable, I find myself thinking about the characters for days afterwards.

I’ve always loved the artwork of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and when the British TV series came out, I looked forward to watching it with some reservations. I loved it.







It wasn’t historically accurate, but this didn’t worry me because I think it distilled the passion and the excitement of being involved in an art movement. Having lived as a starving artist in Melbourne, I can relate to this.

Instead of staid, stiff Victorians, the brotherhood came alive as young men, their lives full of passion, rivalry and self doubt. Characterisation again!

The web contains lots of useful tips on writing craft, here’s an article on characterisation that covers the nuts and bolts. Top 10 Questions for Creating Believable Characters, by Ginny Wiehardt.

Richard Harland has written 145 pages on the craft of writing with a whole section on characterisation.

And here, from the Writing Room, there’s an article on How to Write Great Characters.

What made the TV series about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood come to life for me was their character flaws. They were whole people. They made mistakes, they embarrassed themselves, they cared passionately, they failed to see through things and they tried to repair mistakes – they were human.

Whenever I run a workshop on characterisation I cover all the usual things. Then I ask the attendees to come up with two words to describe their character. The words have to be conflicting. So we end up with a Cynical-Romantic, or a Faithless-Priest. Once you distill your character into two conflicting words, you have the core of their inner conflict.

And just to show how important characterisation is:








Have you seen any movies or read any books recently, where the characters lived on for you afterwards?

Being the Evil Overlord

Two weeks back I promised a piece on writing the Evil Overlord from the Evil Overlord's point of view - specifically, a character who is not merely opposed to the hero's goals, but is actively, deliberately evil. This is a heck of a lot more difficult than you'd think, not least because many of us were raised in an environment where no-one truly believes in evil.

Unfortunately, there's no shortage of examples of people who not only know damn well that what they're doing is evil, they choose to do it anyway. Usually the emergence of someone like this is accompanied by flurries of excuses ranging from the banal - "His mother dressed him funny" - to the bewildered - "But... he seemed so normal." That, or the all-purpose, "He's insane" comes out, allowing people to slide back into comfortable normality and forget that yes, evil really does exist. After all, there are plenty of insane people, and plenty of people whose mother dressed them funny, and even insane people whose mother dressed them funny, and very few of them are evil.

Mostly, they're rational, normal-seeming people, with one exception: I have never yet seen evidence of a truly evil person who does not consider his (or her, although so far most of them have been male) desires and needs more important than anyone or anything else.

Okay, so having got the generalities down - I'm not going into psychological diagnoses, since the goal is to write someone like this convincingly, not perform remote psychology - how do you write someone like this? What are their motivations, their goals?

In a word, power.

Everything I have seen and read indicates that an evil person always wants some kind of power. This doesn't necessarily mean political power, but it always means the ability to control what people do. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to work with the fantasy standard of the Evil Overlord ruling a large chunk of the landscape and trying to get hold of the rest. I'll even throw in all the usual cliches: the dark beasts that ravage the countryside, the armies of ferocious monsters, the works.

Okay, so. You can't convincingly write someone's point of view unless you understand how they think, and you can't do that without becoming them, in a sense - which is why I describe it as channeling the character. This is why some authors can do a wonderful build-up with a shadowy, distant evil, but as soon as said evil is brought into the open, it turns out to be a nonentity that leaves readers wondering why people spent so much of the book frightened of it. It's also why others never bring the evil on-stage at all, or simply opt not to have evil.

If you need the Evil Overlord, though, here are some ways to make him convincingly evil. First, you need to decide whether he's a pragmatist or an idealist. Yes, evil can be idealist. There is no rule that says ideals have to be good: as a rough guide, if it claims that any group of humanity is in any way inherently of less worth than any other group of humanity, it's probably not a good one (this is distinct from the achievements or actions of those groups - it's talking about the value of people as fellow human beings and nothing more or less). From "People with blue eyes are less human than people with brown eyes", the steps to "People with blue eyes aren't really human" and from there to "talking animals", "beasts", and finally, "need to be exterminated" aren't really all that large. (Some interesting commentary on this point can be found over at http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/03/29/the-man-in-the-mirror/)

An idealist Evil Overlord is likely to be utterly certain that his purpose in life is to guide people to the Truth, even if he has to kill them to do it. His Truth will include a perfect world, and an enemy group that isn't really human. It doesn't matter what the enemy group is: there has to be one to provide an external unifying force and a reason why the world isn't already perfect. Usually he will portray himself as an almost godlike figure leading the chosen few to paradise - and in fantasy, he may well be a godlike figure.

If he is able to empathize with others - which is possible - he will empathize with them no more than normal people empathize with animals, at best. Regardless, he will take intense, sometimes even sexual pleasure in the knowledge that their lives are entirely in his control. Their knowledge that he controls them and that they have no escape merely increases his pleasure. Should they fail to worship him appropriately, he will lash out with what seems disproportionate rage: disagreement, however mild, brings the same response. His will and his alone is the only thing that matters. If reality fails to meet his expectations, then reality is at fault, and must be changed to match his desires. Killing hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people is at best a minor inconvenience - because he is the only person that matters. Everyone else is by definition of lesser value, and therefore expendable.

The true believer Evil Overlord is often intensely driven, using his kingdom as a proxy for his own status. Nothing less than conquest of everyone and everything that dares not to worship him will satisfy him - and probably not even that, although there aren't any examples of anyone getting quite that far to extrapolate from.

It's not possible to coexist with him: the mere existence of something outside his control and his ideals is sufficient reason to destroy it. No matter what ethical framework he uses, it does not apply to the enemy - and anything he does not control is the enemy. To the true believer Evil Overlord, "If you're not with me, you're against me," is the cry of the wuss. His belief is "If you don't worship me, I have to destroy you."

He won't think much, if at all, of his family. Every real-world case of this I'm aware of the family includes an absent father, a disinterested or marginalized mother, and minimal input or abuse from the rest of any extended family. That doesn't mean that everyone with this background will become an Evil Overlord - it does mean that the character flaws typical of a true believer Evil Overlord are not mitigated in any way. I know people who have had to remind their children that just because other people are stupid (these are children whose intelligence is literally unmeasurable - while IQ is a reasonable 'rule of thumb' measure of computing capacity and strengths in particular processing areas (spatial vs verbal vs logic and so forth), the IQ of someone who aces the test is unmeasurable. Someone who almost aces it is also off the chart - they aren't accurate more than a couple of standard deviations off the test norm, so when a 13 year old aces or nearly aces a test normed so that most adults will correctly answer approximately 25% of the questions, well... You might get one or two of those in a generation, and as far as that kid is concerned, everyone else in the world is dumb. If the kid is also short on empathy, you've got the makings of everyone's nightmare, the genius Evil Overlord. Fortunately, most people at that level don't want anything to do with other people - they're like Leonard of Quirm and will be perfectly happy with unlimited time and space to play with ideas) doesn't mean they aren't human.

If he's married, chances are it's mostly a marriage of convenience or politics, and any children he has are mostly raised by his wife (obviously if the Evil Overlord is an Evil Overlady, it's her children raised by her husband - it's just that almost all the examples in fiction and life are male). He will probably see them more as symbols and tools for his goals than as people to love, and if they disagree with him, he will see that as betrayal, and act accordingly.

He will be reasonably intelligent and perceptive - able to see the weaknesses of the people around him and use them to advance himself and his cause (though the true believer Evil Overlord says otherwise it's always in that order). Often the cause he follows will be something that has broad appeal, particularly to those without power when he begins his campaign. No matter which society you look at, those who have power are always a small minority. Something that attracts even a moderate percentage of everyone else will be able to topple or white-ant the ruling system, especially when led by an Evil Overlord who doesn't care who he sacrifices in the process. They can always become martyrs to inspire the next generation and remind them how much they owe to him.

Perhaps the biggest flaw of this kind of Evil Overlord (who is probably more difficult to portray well than the pragmatic sort who will use any ideology needed to gain and keep power) is that he can't understand why anyone would disagree with him. He knows that he's doing evil things but his goal justifies that - so any disagreement with him must be disagreement with his goal which is, to him, by-definition-good. Anything is justified in pursuit of it, so anything that is in the way must be The Enemy and destroyed. He thinks in broad sweeps of generalization: in his world there are no individuals other than he himself.

Is there enough to portray a believable true believer Evil Overlord yet? It's not a task for the faint-hearted. Writing them from the inside means thinking like them, albeit for a limited time, and that always leaves me feeling like I need to shower from the inside out. I'm still not sure whether I feel dirtier because being in the Evil Overlord's mind doesn't sicken and disgust me, or because I've been in the Evil Overlord's mind. It's a dark place to be.

Of course, me being me and having the hotline to evil bastard central in my head, a lot of my heroes tend to true believer Evil Overlord types with enough overrides that they don't or won't take that last step to true evil, and hover just this side of it in what turns into a quest for redemption. This may be why I can write the ones who are evil.

I'd give examples of well-written true-believer Evil Overlords, but right now I can't actually think of any. I can't even think of any good examples of the pragmatic type. Pratchett has quite a few characters who come close, like Lord Hong (pragmatic) and of course Lord Vetinari (also pragmatic and oddly likeable, which kind of disqualifies him). Who can give examples of really well written evil characters who take point of view?

Elements of Characterization

Every writer knows that it's important to have a well fleshed out character, but how do you go about creating one?

You might start with a single idea for a scene with that character, maybe a general impression of what the character is like, but to carry through a novel, you need a real depth, a real sense of connection to that character. It needs to be established to the extent that when you throw a couple of your characters into a room together, they start talking, loving – or fighting – straight away, and the dialogue has a sense of reality.

Sometimes that sense of connection is easy to establish. It is certainly easier for some characters rather than others. There is always the Gatecrasher as well – a likely sign that things aren’t working. If your host of characters persists in being ‘flat’ your subconscious will rebel by spontaneously creating a character that highjack’s the action. Now some people – particularly pansters – let this Gatecrasher in and watch how the story changes. I’ve tried that, and a few disasters later I have decided that the Gatecrashers (except in very rare circumstances) have to be ruthlessly culled. Then you have to go back to your characters and see what the heck isn’t working. Now I’m not talking about the plot development stage – at that point you WANT new characters to spontaneously generate – I am talking about when you are trying to get these onto the page.

Kate had some good ideas yesterday about social setting and how this might influence character. When I am struggling to connect with a character I often go through a fairly structured process to flesh them out, where I will look at a number of different categories, like:

• Background – where did they come from? Where did they grow up?
• Early life – what sort of things formed them?
• What do they do? – It's amazing how often you forget this. Before the amazing events of your story, what did they do on a day-to-day basis? This will define where they were at the outset, what responsibilities they may be leaving behind, even their relationships.
• Love – have they been in love? Can they love?
• Love in the book – is there a romance?
• Friendship – who are the people in their life? Who defines them?
• Desires – what drives them. What are they searching for on conscious and unconscious levels.
• Fears – what are they scared of (and not just not getting the their desires) – what phobias do them have – very useful for building tension
• Journey – what are they going to learn on their quest. Will they fail?

By the time I have worked through this, even the most stubborn character will start to come to life – or will have morphed into something I can work with.

So what tricks do you use to get your characters to flow? Or is your challenge reining them in?

Characters & Superstitions

Fleshing out a characters can be a lot of fun. One popular choice, particularly with horror/suspense writers, is to give the character a particular fear that plays into the story. For example they might have a fear of flying and the big confrontation with the glowing aliens from Mars has to happen on the outside of a racing spacecraft over Manhattan. Or they are afraid of the dark, but to confront the villain they have to go down THOSE stairs into the pitch black basement. This often works well, but can also seem a little contrived if the latter scenes are not woven in convincingly.

But there are plenty of other options. One that is a bit of fun is to incorporate a superstition. This got me thinking about superstitions in general and thought it might be fun for people to post their own superstitions or those of friends and relatives. Having something from real life like that adds a real element to fiction.

In terms of my family, the one I remember most distinctly is one of my grandmother's (that's Eileen up on the left). She used to cover all the mirrors in the house during a thunderstorm. She also used to live in fear of birds flying into windows - it would mean that someone in the family was going to die.

There is the old salt over the left shoulder ritual to hit the Devil in the eye if you spill the salt, but that's never been too convincing for me. What's the Devil care about sodium chloride anyway?

For myself - I have one that I have never been able to shake that was passed onto me by my mother. If your ears are ringing, it means someone is talking about you. If it's your left ear it's something bad - if it's your right ear it's something good. You might say I live in fear of left-sided ear infections. This is totally crazy, and yet I can't shake it. It has a spooky king of logic. If my tinnitus worsens I could be in for permanent paranoia.

What superstitions do you have? Or interesting rituals - the more bizarre the better!

Females in Fantasy and SF

R&D Studios

I went to a great workshop at the Romance Writers Conference where we covered characterisation. One of the things that came up was being sure to make the heroine worthy of the hero. We had to exercise our 'inner mother-in-law' to decide if she was good enough for him.

Then later at a panel of Paranormal and Dark Urban Fantasy writers with Denise Rossetti, Keri Arthur, Emily Gee and myself we were talking about how the heroines in these books are allowed to get away with a lot more than the heroines in mainstream books. They can take more than one lover and they don't have to deny their sexuality.

It made me realise that there is still a big divide in what we will let female characters get away with, compared to male characters.

Sarah Rees Brennan wrote a really good post on women in fiction here. Her section on 'Harry Potter and what if HP were really Harrie Potter, how would we feel about her?' confirmed this feeling. Her point was that we let male characters get away with a lot more than females. if you had a female character who was amazing good at everything and men were constantly throwing themselves at her, wouldn't you feel annoyed by this character? She cited James Bond as an example.

If it was a guy in the illustration above he would be wearing sensible furs, maybe with his chest bare. He certainly wouldn't be wearing the equivalent of a chain mail bikini.

In SF and fantasy are we creating female characters who are restrained by the gender limitations of our own society? What do you think?

Describing Emotions

Emotions. We all have them, and our characters all have them (well apart from the scaled Zeomoth from Betelgeuse 7, but since the collapse of their stellar empire due to lack of interest, thank goodness we don't have to worry about them). Describing them in a character can be a challenge. I find describing my own emotions a challenge and there are no layers of prose between Me and Me.

There are plenty of words for emotion, but when its all said and done they all seem to boil down to four or five basic states. I can't help but thinking its a bit like how the Eskimos have so many words for snow. Are we now limited by our own language in expressing reality? Are we now dealing with the legacy of the stoic British with their endemic Stiff Upper Lip? Perhaps like people in equatorial New Guinea had no need for snow description, were our mostly bloody-minded and warlike [linguistic] ancestors not in need of emotional description? Was there a little known tribe of expressive Keltoi wiped out by Caesar's advance into Gaul that had twenty basic words for emotion? Or are we losing them even now as languages go extinct?

You have some basic states:

Angry, Sad, Happy, Fearful

Which come with flavors i.e. Happy => Delight, Ecstasy, Excitement etc

Then others that seem to be a combination of various elements of this basic emotional spectrum:

Apathy, Loneliness, Hate, Confusion, Bewilderment, Shame, Annoyance, Grief, Depression, Apprehension, Disappointment, Irritation, Horror, Jealousy - the list goes on.

I'm not trying to start an exercise in semantics, and I realize some Psychologists probably spend there lives studying this exact thing, just trying to express my frustration at grappling with it. Despite the bewildering array of words that you might get from a thesaurus, I often end up dissatisfied, falling back on a combination of the two. i.e.

"Yolinda looked at Finn, both pleased by the off-hand compliment and yet annoyed at the reference to her betrayal of him on Fraser Island. "

In this line above, isn't Yolinda actually feeling just one thing? A weird admixture of the two emotions? If so what the hell is the name for it!

Is this just me or do we need new words in the English language? Does it take us as writers to push the boundaries and invent new words and expressions, much as the Elizabethan Poets did way back when the language was in its infancy?

Yours Bemused/Hopeful/Anxious/Determined/Pained

Chris Mc

WHAM! Hear the mountains dropping

Yes, it's the author plotting/Can't write a character to save her life (sung - badly - to the tune of Scotland the Brave)

We all like to see the hero triumph against impossible odds, which is part of the reason why we like underdog stories. We also like the hero to actually be moderately heroic - to do things rather than wait for fate or some kindly deity to drop it in his, her or its lap.

So how do we write that? Obviously there have to be obstacles, and they have to be real obstacles, things that could feasibly stop the hero cold or possibly even kill him. If there weren't any, the book would be dreadfully boring.

This is where a lot of authors come adrift and start to plot by dropping mountains. You've all seen it. Hero is going along heroing, things are starting to look good, then WHAM! and the mountain drops in the form of a catastrophic event coming out of nowhere. Some books get so bad about this that any time the poor hero starts to catch his breath the poor shell-shocked reader starts looking for the next mountain.

Pratchett punctures this beautifully in The Color of Magic in the sequence with the Gods playing games with Rincewind and Twoflower, causing random pieces of scenery to land on them and getting them (actually, mostly getting Rincewind) into terrible trouble.

So what's the alternative?

Characters have motivations. The hero wants to rescue an adoring maiden, cart off several wagon loads of gold, and settle down to a comfortable retirement with his adoring ex-maiden. The villain wants the hero to become a sticky smear on the ground. The maiden wants to be rescued. Everything outside whatever sends the hero off after this particular maiden should arise naturally out of the hero doing his thing, the villain doing his, and the maiden doing hers. If a mountain lands on the hero, it should land there because something the hero did pissed off someone else, who set up a large catapult and sent that mountain flying, or because the villain is trying to keep the hero out and launching pieces of landscape in order to protect himself and the maiden he's holding hostage. The reason the villain is holding the maiden hostage is another layer: perhaps her father owes him a lot of gold, or he's paying back an old grudge, or he's fallen for her and is trying to get her to marry him and this is the only method he knows.

For instance, in Sarah's Gentleman Takes a Chance Tom and Kyrie both want to protect themselves and the people of Goldport from a murderous shifter, without drawing attention to themselves because a guy who turns into a dragon and a woman who turns into a panther would probably not like the results of being known for what they are. Dante Dire wants to pin the deaths of thousands of shifter beetle larvae on someone, kill someone, and get out of the hick little town, and wouldn't object to doing so with an attractive companion like Kyrie. Rafiel wants to stop the killings and find himself a nice girl who can accept him for what he is. The killer wants dinner. The intersection of all these motives drives pretty much everything that happens in the book.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to name the books that offer really good examples of the character's motivations and actions driving the plot, or if you're feeling contrary, the ones where the author is flinging scenery from on high. And explain why, of course.

Flesh on the Bones

Between Sarah's discussion of empathy, Rowena's talk of bent characters, and Dave's lament on the futility of forcing them to do what you want once they've come to life, I'm left without much choice for my first appearance as a new Mad Genius. The character in question is giving me the smirk that says "Next time trust me. I know better than you."

So without further ado, I shall ramble for a while on the process that finished with Prince Vlad Draculea taking up residence inside my head as a very real person.

For many years before I started writing Impaler, I was fascinated by the historical Prince Draculea (BTW: the spelling is the closest Anglicization of the way he spelled his name. Just another example of character stubborn. He won't let me spell it any other way). What I had was pretty much what any writer has in the early stages of story generation long before there's any conscious move to write the thing: a mix of 'this is a neat idea' and someone who does or did interesting stuff. Add to that the question, "What if he had survived the assassination attempt?" and I had my story.

What I didn't have was my character. Instead, I had a huge problem. How does one depict a man whose name is associated with the most appalling atrocities (and let's face it, they didn't call him 'the Impaler' because he was a nice guy) or the Stoker vampire? He was the central character of the story, but whitewashing his deeds was out of the question. I didn't consciously wonder how I could show him in a more sympathetic light, but the question gnawed at me for about a year between when I first jotted down the rough plot outline and when I started to write. In the meantime, I wrote a completely different novel, ConVent, which is under consideration at Baen.

And I read everything I could lay hands on about Draculea and his times. Translations of period accounts of the Siege of Constantinople (eye-opening, to say the least), reading and re-reading the various Draculea legends, and gradually building from the bare facts and the legends an idea of what kind of man Draculea might actually have been.

Probably the most useful thing I did was wonder, "Why?". Asking myself why Draculea would have acted the way he did helped me to understand the era, as well as the man, and led me to some truly mind-boggling bits of 15th century trivia along the way.

I originally intended to write Impaler as mostly Draculea's point of view, with a few key scenes from other POVs. Instead, somewhere as I reread one of the Florescu and McNally biographies, I got him. Somehow, the constant "well, why would he do that?" had fleshed out the man enough that he was there in my head, dictating the book to me.

From there it was a case of balance: showing Draculea's human side through his narrative without flinching from the worst of his nature. The end result was good enough to make the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award quarter finals, and is currently on an agent's desk in its entirety.

I'll finish with a few paragraphs from the opening so you can judge for yourself how well I fleshed out the man and brought him to life, and whether you can identify with him.

Impaler
Chapter 1

Always before battle begins I am possessed by the need for solitude and prayer. It is a curious thing, for I have never fought as merely another knight. I first ruled men at the tender age of eighteen, when the old Ottoman Sultan Murad and his son Mehmed still thought I could be a Turk puppet.

Those who slander me say I care nothing for the fate of other men. They forget that those who rule by the Lord's grace are entrusted with the Earthly welfare of their subjects, and to some extent their souls. To take one's subjects into battle, however righteous the cause, ensures that they will sin. The burden of their souls falls upon me, their Prince.

I do not allow others to see my weakness. Few great lords care for the fate of those in their domains. That I of all men should do so would seem the most grotesque of jests. I, whose name echoes through Europe as a byword for atrocity. And yet, I am driven to pray for those whose lives will end on the battlefield this day, men whose only crime is to obey the commands of their lords.

Characters, bent is better.

Characters -- I prefer characters that are slightly skewed, odd ball people who don't quite fit in.

I'm a Buffy fan, not Buffy so much but as her supporting characters. I've just started watching TrueBlood, the Sookie Stackhouse series. I'm up to episode 6 and enjoying it. I couldn't help compare the characterisation. I'm thinking aloud here ...

Sookie is a sincere southern waitress, who just happens to be able to hear people's thoughts. She's a little but acerbic, which is nice.

Buffy's answer to everything is 'tell me how and I'll kill it'.

Even though we are only just into the first series, I prefer Sookie's characterisation.

Bill the vampire's back story is very straight. He was a poor but honest Confederate soldier, who was turned into a vampire and had to walk away from the family he loved.

Compare this to Spike the vampire's back story. He was a bumbling clerk who wrote bad poetry because his romantic soul outreached his ability.

The Spike character had the advantage of quite a few series to develop his character before his back story was invented and revealed, but I prefer the Spike backstory because he would risk all for love, while Bill would give up everything for love.

For me it is the odd ball person who sees the world in a slightly different way, who is the most interesting.

Are you into odd ball characters?

First, You Breathe in His Nostrils

So we’ve been talking about characters – the good, the bad and the ugly – but there is one thing that ties right back to my long disquisition on voice.

Just like I said your plot is a means to test the character (and I’ll be happy to explain that later, or the others can, I’m sure), the voice is a means to make the character live. You must have the reader present THERE, or it’s all for nothing.

I’m going on about this, because it’s all too easy to slip into what I call “sheet of glass” writing if you’re tired or sick, and then you need to have some idea what’s wrong and how to fix it.

I’m going to be insufferable and give examples from my own writing – well, one of them a collaboration with my friend, Kate Paulk who will be joining us soon.

Kate and I were working on this story (in the Valdemar Antho above) while we were both on deadline for other projects and so tired we might as well have painted eyes on our eyelids and slept through it. So the first version of the opening we came up with was this:

*Heart, Home and Hearth

The air smelled of snow to come. Ree snuggled closer to Jem in the burrow they had claimed for the night and wished he knew what to do. Summer learning to live wild, putting more and more distance between them and the walls of Jacona -- and the Emperor's soldiers -- had been hard on Jem.

The younger boy was all human, unlike Ree. He didn't have fur to protect him, didn't have the sharper senses of the rat and cat that had merged with Ree in the Changecircle last winter. Since they'd escaped Jacona and the hunt for hobgoblins like Ree, Jem had grown thinner until his bones showed under his skin even though between Ree's animal instincts and Jem getting wicked good with a slingshot they had plenty to eat most days.

But that was summer. Fall meant less to eat, and Jem's clothes weren't much better than rags. When it started to get colder at night, they'd tried scraping a deer hide clean and Jem wrapping himself in that, but it stank too much and got stiff and cracked. Neither of them wanted to leave the forest to try to steal clothes from the farms and towns they'd seen from the forest edges. *

It’s not bad, but we felt like you could hear the telegraph cables twang along the way. So we worked on it. This is the same opening in its final version:

*Heart, Home and Hearth
Sarah A. Hoyt
Kate Paulk

The air had a sharp bite and you could smell snow even deep in the narrow earthen borrow, under the roots of a great oak tree, where Ree and Jem had taken refuge.

Winter is coming, Ree thought. There’s no escaping it. He felt Jem shake with cough in his sleep, and snuggled closer, trying to keep the younger boy warm. Summer had been all right for living wild and putting more and more ground between themselves and Jacona -- and the Emperor's soldiers.

Even though Jem was all human and didn’t have the sharper senses of the rat and cat that had merged with Ree during the Changecircle last winter, he had got wicked good with a slingshot. With Ree’s animal instincts to lead the hunt, they’d rarely missed a meal. But the last few weeks, it had gotten so cold, and it seemed like all animals were either hybernating or had gone South for the winter. And you could see Jem’s bones through his skin. Hells you could see them through the rags that passed for his clothes. And he was cold all the time, and for the last three days he’d been coughing all the time, and wheezing when they walked too fast.*

Do you see a difference? Is there a difference? Am I imagining things?

Again, the same, with my own writing, the novel DarkShip Thieves coming out in January. This is the original run at the opening:
* Daddy’s Girl

I never wanted to go to Space. I never had the slightest interest in spaceships. The colonization of other worlds left me cold. I never even hankered to visit Circum-Terra or to see the energy trees up close, by the faint glow of almost-ripe energy pods.

There were people who dreamed of all of this. They cornered me at parties and social occasions -- adenoidal boys, skinny and overeager, with greasy hair and lumpy suits; and sad girls, awkward in dresses, their faces white and pasty and virgin of make up.

They talked of space-materials -- ceramite and dimatough -- strong enough to withstand travel through the void and light enough to consume very little fuel. They spoke of thrusters, acceleration, g-force, gravitation, sustainable space colonies.

Their eyes grew doleful, and their voices vibrated with tears when they spoke of how the human race had abandoned its birthright to outer space after the turmoils two hundred years ago.

In the late twenty second century, they’d tell me, their faces earnest, the mules had built an intergalactic spaceship and they’d made plans for colonizing the solar system in fifty years.*

This is the version that WILL be published:

*One
I never wanted to go to space. Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. Never had any interest in discovering the truth about the darkships. You always get what you don’t ask for.

Which was why I woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in my father’s space cruiser.

Before full consciousness, I knew there was an intruder in my cabin. Not rationally. There was no rationality to it. The air smelled as it always did on shipboard, as it had for the week I’d spent here – stale, with the odd tang given by the recycling.

The engines, below me, hummed steadily. We had just detached from Circum Terra – a maneuver that involved some effort, to avoid accidentally ramming the station or the ship. Shortly we’d be Earth bound, though slowing down and reentry let alone landing, for a ship this size, would take close to a week.

My head felt a little light, my stomach a little queasy, from the artificial grav. Yes, I know. Scientists say that’s impossible. They say artificial gravity is just like true gravity to the senses. You don’t feel a thing. They are wrong. Artificial grav always made me feel a little out of balance, like a couple of shots of whiskey on an empty stomach.

Even before waking fully, I’d tallied all this. There was nothing out of the ordinary. And yet there was a stranger in my cabin.*

So, again am I imagining things, or does the second one work better? And if it does, can we discuss why? Why the character comes more alive in the second version than in the first of both of these?

Why I love my husband, reason #256

Today he read a scene I’d just written and said, “You might want to hold back this piece of insight into his character, because you don’t want to cheapen him.”

I boggled. “Fascinating.”

“Am I being stupid?” he said.

“Heck no. This is an important part of how readers feel about character. I’m really interested in this idea, but I don’t get it yet.”

He explained. “If you hold it back, and we learn this about him later as things unfold, it adds depth and layers to him. If we learn about it now, it just kind of builds a cardboard box around him, like, This is who he is, end of story.”

My brilliant husband.

Of course this echoes a rule from the great Lynn Kerstan: “No backstory. Ever. Never in chapter one. Never in chapter two. Not in chapter three, either, no matter how badly you want to do it. Let it come out between the two main characters in dialogue. That way it becomes part of the internal plot, part of the unfolding of their relationship, rather than an expository lump that falls on the reader’s head.”

Apparently the reader feels it is falling on the character’s head, too, to ill effect.

New rule. “Early backstory cheapens your character.”

Thanks, honey.

How do you make your POV characters interesting?

One school, popular in Space Opera, does not even try. You know, huge sprawling stories set over ten volumes with seventy-three POV characters, all of whom start to blur so you have to put a glossary of who’s who at the front. These sell really well so they are a viable commercial proposition if that’s what you want to do.

But suppose that you want to focus on a couple of characters and bring them alive? OK, the easy answer is that you give them personalities. The difficulty is in the execution. One tip is that real people, the interesting ones anyway, are a mass of illogical contradictions and so are interesting fictional characters.

Take some fictional detectives. Inspector Morse likes real ales and classical music. Sherlock Holmes, the man of logic, is a dope fiend and violinist. Miss Marple is a dotty, little old lady with a ruthlessly logical criminal mind while Hercule Poirot has too many idiosyncrasies to count. Caroline Graham, who wrote the Midsomer Murders, hit upon the wonderful idea of turning all this on its head. She made the detective boringly normal – middle-aged, sane, married to same woman’s institute wife all his life, one ordinary daughter – and thus unusual in a genre of tortured policeman with bad social lives - but gave the criminals wonderful and weird eccentricities.

In short, be original.

I shall have more to say on this subject in my next blog. See you on Saturday.

John