Research Matters

Oh, yes it does, even - or perhaps especially - if you're writing something involving worlds, pasts and futures that never actually existed. You see, Dave's post and the discussion about it afterwards is only part of the battle. If your story is set in Paris, then given a general time period, most people already have a handy-dandy little mental picture we can use to hang the story from. Granted, the little mental picture might come from a Disney cartoon, but it's enough to give the illusion of a sense of place. In the same way, American Civil War immediately brings to mind the handy-dandy mental picture of Scarlett O'Hara dresses and gentlemen fighting for honor, and oppressed slaves (hopefully not all in the Scarlett O'Hara dresses).

If you're writing SF or Fantasy, you can use key words to evoke the handy-dandy little mental picture: to most people the word "spaceship" gets a picture that probably blends the most recent Hollywood blockbuster, the flying saucer, and a few other odds and sods - unless you describe it first. "Uniform" in this context is almost certainly going to be tight-fitting, and "body armor" something like Storm Troopers, or like one of the assorted SF anime series.

On the fantasy side, "elf" is enough to bring the Lord of the Rings movies to mind. For that matter, unless you explicitly state otherwise, most people are likely to assume quasi-medieval cartoony European rural.

So where is research in all this?

Start by reading Sir PTerry. Now consider that everything in the Discworld starts somewhere in Earth's history and mythology. Yep. All of it - although I really do not want to know where the inspiration for the World's Best Dad mugs in the Exquisition's torture chambers came from. It's not just the weird and occasionally horrible trivia, either: take a stroll through pretty much anything from Wyrd Sisters on, and you'll find all sorts of world views beautifully integrated into the book.

And that, more than fact, is the gold writers need to be chasing.

I'm pretty sure that's not something anyone else is telling you. It's either some kind of mushy "all cultures are equal" - which isn't true, because they're patently not the same, and other people are very much not just like us with interesting food and costumes - or you're getting "write what you know" with the subtext that if you don't belong to the group in question you can't possibly write about it, insulting everyone with an imagination in the process... Anyway, what research can give you is the accounts of people who belong to cultures that resemble your imagined one to some extent - and which reveal the mindset and worldview of those people.

Say you're writing an Asian-themed fantasy, and you want a world that echoes Imperial China of the Han Dynasty. You go looking (Google is your friend) for translations of documents written in that era. Anything you can find is helpful, although if you can find responses to stressful events it's even better. Eyewitness accounts of this disaster or that war compared with a more or less impartial history of the same era can reveal all sorts of things - something Sir PTerry played on with his usual skill in Interesting Times, with Twoflower's incredulous reaction to ordinary people telling soldiers to (more or less) bugger off and the soldiers not retaliating. The urinating dog pictogram is a cleverly placed gag to soften the impact of the real message. I could go on forever about how well Sir PTerry does this, but instead I'm going to focus on a real example, one that's a little closer in time and space (and identities have been munged with to protect the guilty).

Someone I know is in the middle of a rather ugly falling out with her family over a whole lot of things that look petty and silly from the outside. From her side, though, there's a very different filter. As she sees things, she's being treated like a child and expected to do and be what everyone else in her family thinks she should do and be. She sees a pattern of put-downs and insults, and that she's only defending herself. A good writer should be able to tell her story and make her sympathetic to readers who would normally think her actions were petty, malicious, and immature. A good writer should be able to do this even when said writer thinks those actions are petty, malicious, and immature.

Which - of course - is where the research comes in. If you can find enough information about how people in Culture X thought and felt about Situation Y, you can put yourself inside their heads and think they way they did, at least for a little while. From such a source comes Pooh-Bah's much prized artistic verisimilitude and spares you the horror of writing what ultimately proves to be a "bald and unconvincing narrative"

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take any document (yes, anything you can find on Google counts, and yes, it can be a news article. It just has to be a document. No video or audio, please) and try to figure out what that document reveals about the writer's world view. You don't even need to post back what you've found, although I'm sure it will be interesting if you do. Oh, and no using this as an excuse to slam someone for not agreeing with your beliefs. You're supposed to be trying to empathize here.

Telepathy and Characterisation

I don't know if you have ever read Stephen King's book On Writing, but one of the things that really stuck in my head was his description of writing as telepathy.

In essence what you are doing is very carefully crafting your own Thought and placing that down in a special format that can be interpreted by another person. All the thoughts, images and musings on themes (both conscious and unconscious), particular word choices, phrases . . . You are communicating this directly into the brain of another human being - across time and space. When you sit down to read a classic, you are opening a window into the mind of that long-dead author. Meshing your thoughts up against theirs and for a moment provoking a state within yourself that echoes that of the original creator.

Recently I have been thinking about this in terms of character. As writers we all try to craft our characters well. We want them fleshed out, with believable reactions and thoughts, consistent backstory and good dialogue. We want their purpose to be consistent with where they have come from, and their goal to echo their nature. But these characters cannot help but be an extension of what we are. The ones we like are those that have characteristics that we respect, or perhaps aspire to. Or perhaps they live the life we may dream of, strive for what we dare not. The antagonists are the opposite - encapsulating all the attributes we perceive as negative, and standing directly in the path to the hero (otherwise there would be no conflict on this level).

So these characters end up projected right into the mind of the reader. I would contend that at this point their is an immediate judgement - just as the human mind forms immediate conclusions about strangers you may be introduced to. Either you like them, or you don't. You have an immediate connection, or you are left underwhelmed. And just as the same person can either be the love of someone's life or a dull stranger (for different people), your characters can strike a chord with the book-buying public or potential editors or fail to create this response.

Now, of course there are some elements of human nature that are nearly always appealing. We love the girl who saves the kitten, or the man who cares about his friend. But when we extend to other elements of character, the reader can simply not connect with your crafted thought-projection.

In story, its the old scenario at the crit group. You circulate the story and find that two people loved the character, two hated them and four hardly care about them - and crit your word choices instead.

Have you come across situations where your characters have both connected to and underwhelmed different readers? Have you ever had one editor rave about your characters while another fails to care about them? Have you ever hunted down a book that everyone was raving about, only to find you either hated the characters or found them vacuous?

PS: I may be out of Internet range over the next day or so, will try to log in wireless, but apologies if I do not respond to posts.

When is a change really a change?

(note: my Internet access is going to be a bit intermittent for the next while - I'll do my best to get to comments in a reasonable time but it could be a day or so before I respond - Kate)

We're all familiar with the idea that characters need to change during the course of a story, short or long, but what actually is change? I don't know about you, but I get kind of tired of books where the main character goes through hell but at the end of the book MC hasn't changed a damn thing.

I'm talking - obviously, about the kind of change that's not physical. Scars, lost weight, gained muscle, and in extreme cases missing appendages... those aren't the kind of changes that matter. The character has to have learned something about who they are, and learned it the hard way.

This isn't something to take lightly. A couple of weeks back I commented that almost everyone fights learning about themselves like this, and resists changing. It's going to take a crisis that threatens something the MC cares for to push that kind of change - like in DarkShipThieves, where Athena fights to keep her view of the way things work every step of the way, but it takes her love for Kit to push her to actually change her beliefs.

Or Dragon's Ring, where Meb is left completely rootless, having lost everything. In that situation, traumatized as she is, she's more open to changing her core beliefs because there's nothing left of what she had - and even then she fights it.

The fact is, the open-minded person who examines their beliefs and assumptions and re-evaluates if there's something out of kilter is only a little easier to find than a living dodo. Most people fight thinking about anything, much less anything as personal and close as that.

So how do you push your characters into it? What makes them change?

When you look at what, historically, inspires change in people it tends to be either some kind of traumatic event - not necessarily the end of the world: divorce can do it, as can losing one's job - or a process of little bits of evidence gradually building to the point where something has to give (like a mid-life crisis). Not surprisingly, since the former is more dramatic that tends to be what gets used a lot in fiction.

The usual method is to determine the things that are most important to the MC, and take them away, preferably by either the machinations of the villain or - and this is particularly effective if you can make it work without a plot that requires every character to have the intelligence of a cauliflower (which may be unfair to cauliflowers) - as a knock on effect from something the MC did.

Some examples of well-managed character change: Vimes through the course of the Ankh-Morpork Watch books, and Carrot. (By comparison, Rincewind remains unchanged - he's the Eternal Coward, which makes him funny as all get-out, but best handled as the observer to the character who does change - which is mostly how PTerry writes him).

Athena and Kit, in DarkShip Thieves. Tom, in Sarah's Shifter books.

Meb and Finn in Dave's Dragon's Ring.

Who else can you think of?

Push those buttons, baby

No, not those buttons. The other buttons. The hot ones.

Okay, not those hot buttons, either.

What I'm talking about are the little things that you find utterly maddening, and which anger you beyond any kind of rational level compared to whatever sets them off. For instance, if I've gone to extra effort over something for someone, and that person inconveniences me, I go from calm to nuclear between one heartbeat and the next. Another one that gives me issues is when I'm expected to follow the lead of someone who - in my highly expert and infallible opinion, of course - couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery. I'm sure you have a few of your own little glitches like that, probably including some you don't want to admit to.

Characters need hot buttons like that, too. And stories need to push them - because that's when your lead, or your villain, or whatever, is most likely to do something irrational which triggers off the cascade that makes things worse. It helps, of course, to establish the hot buttons early, so that when they get used later readers don't wonder where the heck that came from.

I'm going to use - carrying on the theme from Sarah's post - Darkship Thieves as an example. One of Thena's hot buttons is being physically restrained, so much so that she's prepared to commit murder and mayhem, not necessarily in that order, on the person who dares tie her up. We see this in the first few chapters of the book, so it doesn't seem at all out of place when Thena goes nuclear later in the book. Of course, she's got a few other hot buttons as well, and Kit isn't exactly the most level-headed person ever, either.

Who and what else uses character hot buttons well?

p.s. Apologies for being kind of scarce and not entirely with it. It's now a week since the layoffs, and work is totally batshit insane busy. I'm not sure when things will settle down, since the backlog was impressive before this happened. Now it's more like a cliff about to land. Such is life.

What is Characterization?

This is a question that has often baffled me. And it's not a trivial question. If you and your potential editor don’t agree on what good characterization is, then the relationship ends before it begins with the manuscript in the discard pile.

I have my own ideas about characterization. I like to see emotional depth, what matters to the character, some idea of what their personality is like and how they might go about getting what they want or overcoming their problem, all blended with the right amount of backstory. All this is best revealed gradually through the actions of the character and the events of the plot.

But for me this stuff is ‘internal’.

For others good characterization is ‘external’. They like to see particular actions or mannerisms in a character that can be readily recognized – and are often repeated ad nauseum through the story. From Harry Potter think of Hermione Granger’s ‘bushy hair’ or Hagrid’s large bulk. It seems like every single time these characters appear there is a reference to the 'key characteristic'. If I read another dark fantasy character who can't be separated from their cigarette, I think I'll choke. If subtle enough, I guess it works as a subconscious cue.

One of the reasons I stopped reading the Wheel of Time series was I got so sick of this. How many times can Nynaeve al’Meara pull her damn braid? Especially when nothing else was happening except a self-perpetuating word-mill of dialogue? I’d rather know more about what makes her tick.

I think a little bit of the external things can be an excellent part of the mix, but when this is supplied as the major component of characterization I start to get annoyed.

There is a lot in this though – it really appears to be a divide in the way writers approach the work (and how editors interpret it). Maybe its even deeper than that, maybe it’s a personality divide.

I was watching a local television program – the Tuesday Book Club – where various local literary luminaries wax lyrical about three or four books, each giving their considered opinion. Even these quite established and successful writers could not agree on this one. One of them was seriously bagging one of the books, criticizing what, in his opinion, was a very superficial characterization for the above reasons, while another could not give it higher praise in the same arena.

What’s going on? Please enlighten me!

Embrace your Inner Weird

Or ... when writing characters, be honest, even if it hurts.

Ok, we writers, like all creative people, are a bit weird, always watching, listening and trying to make sense of the world and why people do things.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that everyone else is just pretending to be normal, so they can pass.

Think of the gardening shows, where presenters run their hands through mulch and wax lyrical about the joys of compost.

Think of all those clips on U-Tube of peoples' cats and dogs doing cute things. You realise those people are following their animals around with a digital camera just waiting for them to do something. That's weird.

Think of the dentist who loved Star Trek so much he built his dental surgery like the bridge of the USS Enterprise and made all his nurses wear the 1960s uniform.

Think of the collectors who search for things like match boxes, old dress patterns and radios. Some of them even build sheds, or add rooms to house their collections.

Think of the times you did things that embarrassed you and you put your foot in it. Think of the times you did the right thing by accident, more than by design. Think of the less than wonderful moments when you fought down a craven impuslse to cry, this is all too much. Then you got up and kept going because you had to.

Now look at your characters? Are they too 'straight'? Do they need more quirks, more failings, more doubts?

Who did you like Mickey Mouse or the irrascable, Donald Duck? In Australia we prefered Donald, he had faults. We could identify with him.

So, embrace your Inner Weird. There's a little bit of 'weird' in everyone.

Are there characters in books or films that stayed with you because they were flawed? Are you a Mickey Mouse or a Donald Duck person?

Trouble By Any Other Name

As I hinted in my answer to Dave’s Monday post, names of characters assume a disproportionate importance to me. I don’t know if anyone else is bedeviled with this problem, but I can’t seem to write a character at all until his name is right. The voice won’t come into focus until I know to whom it belongs.

Now on the outside it looks like a very weird ideosyncrasy. I mean, as good old Will of the shaking lance told us, a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet. In real life, I’m fairly sure we’ve all met the equivalent of Prudebunny Pussicat who was hell on wheels. It is a well known fact – though its so well known it could be used in naming characters, frankly – that if you name a kid Grace she will trip on her own two feet all day, a Joy will be a sourpuss and I’m fairly sure all the young men now named Storm or Blaze will turn out mild-mannered milquetoasts. Heck if you want to be assured of a go-getter as a son name him – as one of my mother’s friends was – Amavel (in Portuguese, non literal, it means "mild mannered.")

So why does it assume such a disproportionate importance in characters? I don’t know. Perhaps it is one of those instances in which life does not have to be plausible, but fiction does. Or perhaps it’s the newly-hatched duck syndrome. As I get tired of preaching to new writers, it’s very nice that you want to start your book with this incidental never-again-seen character, but your reader, like a newly hatched duckling, will attach to it and be very upset when he’s not the main character. In the same way, when we get introduced to someone in real life, we’re not bound to the name only. If Amavel has a roguish twinkle in his eye, we’ll know better than take him at his name-value.

On the page, though, no matter how much you describe the character, the name gives us a hint to what he is. And unless you make it a point early on of pointing out that he is ironically named, people will think you mean it.

I first ran into this with Nigel Oldhall, who was a secondary character in Heart of Light. For a secondary character, and given his attitude, I wanted staid and somewhat wet. I didn’t realize that making him the hero of the third book would drive me insane and I’d be dragging "Nigel" up and down the page. (I asked, but the editor wouldn’t let me give him a more colorful pseudonym.)

I ran into this headlong with the sequel to Darkship Thieves, in which took secondary character Etienne Boulanger (let alone that given my issues with double letters he was often Etiene or Ettiene) and made him main character. It just wouldn’t work. In the first book I wanted an every-man sort of name at least in the planning process and he wasn’t central enough for the name to bother me. But dragging an Etienne through the book was impossible. So, with the editor’s consent – and going back to the first book before it’s typeset – he’s been renamed Simon St. Cyr. Why this works better I don’t know, but it makes the character immediately live for me. The St. Cyr, btw, was at his insistence. I have NO clue why. (I had a similar issue with Draw One In The Dark in which I tried to name Kyrie Kris and Krissy and Katy and Kelly, but nothing would work till I named her what she thought she was called "Kyrie Grace". The fact that this was the name of the newborn daughter of a friend made no difference at all to the character.)
I confess to making extensive use of www.behindthename.com, though mostly I just skip through the desired pages until a name "clicks" with what the character.

So, why do you think this is? Are there any characters you think would change completely with different names? Would Pride and Prejudice work just as well if Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy’s names were reversed? Why not?