The Character and the Reader-- expanding the response

Deep POV is compelling and lets the reader experience what the POV character experiences. But that doesn't mean that you should have the character experience be the limit of the reader experience... or contort the character to make him/her have the experience you want the reader to have.

Okay, that's pretty opaque. What I mean is... the reader can "be" simultaneously the character and... also still the reader. That doubling of identity, in fact, is a great part of the pleasure of reading fiction. That also means that if you want to create an experience for the reader, it doesn't have to be the same experience for the character.

The character should be in character! For example, if Joe is furious to discover his house has been invaded by a couple kids, he isn't going to stop being furious in order to --for a moment-- feel so sad about the kid who slams the refrigerator door and backs off. Joe just has to narrate (if we're in his POV and not in omniscient POV) seeing that kid. But this is Joe. He notices the kid by the refrigerator and yells, "Stay away from my food, you little shit!" Joe doesn't have to realize the kid is hungry for the reader to figure that out and feel pity. All Joe has to do is notice the kid, maybe relate/narrate that the kid is skinny (though he might put it as the little vandal is skinny), and that the kid was just in the refrigerator. The reader can draw her own conclusions, and feel her own feelings (and also Joe's).

This is, I think, especially important in romance, where the reader should feel a romantic/sexual attraction (to both hero and heroine, kind of bi, huh? :) from the start. But that can and should happen without the character leading. The character should feel whatever the character should feel at that moment in the plot, given the circumstances, but the writer-- YOU!-- should set up the scene so that the opportunity is there for the reader to feel eroticism or excitement or whatever. Too often writers think that the character has to feel or experience this so that the reader can, but in fact, the character and the reader are different people with different agendas, and will have different responses to the same event.

So of course you want the reader to be intrigued and attracted to the hero in Chapter 1, when he calls the heroine into his office and fires her. But you don't do that by making the heroine stop thinking about how unjust this is and how she's getting blamed for someone else's mistake and how is she going to pay for her kid's asthma treatment without insurance to think that the hero's legs are so sexy and tight under those fine linen slacks.

She can narrate the action you've set up. What action? Well, if you want the legs to show, he stands up to usher her to the door. She can notice/narrate his tautly muscled legs under the slacks, but what is she going to THINK? Not "My, my, what a fine pair of legs, yum," but "that pair of pants could probably pay for a year's medicine for my kid!"

The reader, however, can think that my, my, that's a fine set of legs, yes, even while participating in the heroine's righteous anger. Fiction readers don't need to be led, only guided, and that by the writer, not the character. Let the character react according to who she is at that moment and what she is experiencing in the plot. Just present the scene so that the reader can experience (additionally) that other experience.

Hitchcock knew this, knew the essence of suspense was to let the viewer know more than the characters. The viewer knows there's a bomb under the poker table... there'll be suspense. (See my article about this: Suspense Is More Than Surprise.) If the characters knew about the bomb, they'd jump up and run out of the house, wouldn't they? End of suspense. So let the characters go on playing poker, experiencing just poker fun time, and let the reader have reason to feel suspense.

The reader can be the character, yes, especially in deep POV. But don't think that the reader will ever be nothing but the character. The reader has a very different agenda-- to be entertained, to be thrilled, to fall in love. Don't restrict the reader to being just the character... or the character to being what the reader wants to be.

Alicia

What's your voice?

I'm working on a class on voice, and I've gotten interested in how writers characterize their own voices. What words would you use to describe your voice?
I'm particularly interested in how you think your attitude or worldview affects your voice (like if you're pessimistic) or if you think your voice exhibits a worldview you don't share (like you're really an optimistic, but your voice is sort of grimly humorous).

Also, is your voice YOU? Or do you sort of have a persona-voice, you know, more knowing and erudite than you yourself? Is that possible?

If you write more in character voice, how does this reflect your own voice?

I don't know... but if you have thoughts about how your voice works, love to hear them!
Alicia

For the Mad Men Fans

This post about the Samsonite episode is brilliant. I was starting to think that Mad Men was slipping a bit, but this past Sunday's suitcase ("baggage" of course) episode reeled me back in. The episode was magic, and the analysis in the linked post is all about building intimacy between characters with small concrete details. Well worth a read. But you might need to watch the episode first.

Theresa

October Character Journey Workshop

Do you ever worry that your characterization isn't deep enough or that your characters are wooden? This is the class that will help you! The character journey is a way of charting through the plot the change in the main characters, giving them both a reason and incentive to change. In this interactive class, you'll determine where the character starts and ends, and how the plot events can move them along that journey.

Class Begins: October 1, 2010

Class Ends: October 14, 2010

Signup Deadline: September 28, 2010

Class size is limited! Don’t delay!

Cost: $50

Instructor: Alicia Rasley

Alicia Rasley is an award-winning novelist and a nationally known writing workshop leader. She has worked as a fiction editor for a small press, and currently teaches popular fiction in an Master's in Fine Arts program.

To sign up, click the "Buy" button at edittorrent.blogspot.com.

Heroic Traits and Scene Development

Okay. I've been stewing on this one for about a month and, as with other complex writing topics, haven't really hit on a simple and lucid way to blog it. So bear with me. I'll do the best I can. The main concept is something about character-based plotting at the scene level and how to manipulate change in heroic characters. We'll build an example and work from there.

In character-based plotting, we start by deciding which trait we want to have highlighted in the scene action. Let's say our heroine is a volunteer at a convalescent center, and she sometimes tends the hero's grandmother. Let's say she's an artist in a small-town setting, trapped there temporarily for personal reasons, and that she's taken to yarn bombing as a way of satisfying her creative urges and funkifying the town.

So she has nurturing traits, important in a heroine, which can be brought out through scene action in many ways. She's creative and playful, and she thinks yarn bombs are beautiful and funny. She's proud of this activity and thinks of it as a form of urban art. (Which it is. But I might be biased.)

The hero's grandmother is feeling a bit mopey for reasons of her own, so our heroine decides to involve her in a yarn bomb inside the center. The heroine is full of giggles and high spirits, and the grandmother plays along. Together they sneak into the physical therapy room and wrap the supply cabinet in a wild green and yellow and purple striped knit. Then the heroine wheels the grandmother back to her room and goes about her business.

A few minutes later, she sees the hero wheeling granny down the hall, smiles and giggles, and gets polite nods in response. Something about this doesn't sit right with her. She expected a more friendly response at least from the grandmother after their recent adventures.

So she slips down the hallway after them, trailing them from a distance, and watches them enter the physical therapy room. She peeks through the door and sees the hero and his granny have snipped the yarn bomb free from the cabinet and are winding and gluing the clipped strands around cardboard coffee cup sleeves. "Much more practical than a cozy for a supply cabinet," Granny comments, and our heroine feels the world tilt sideways. Practicality was never the point. Whimsy and art -- and cheering up granny -- were the points.

She reminds herself that making Granny happy really is the most important thing, and if coffee mug sleeves make her happier than yarn bombs, then so be it. She enters the room, and with a smile to cover her lingering dismay, helps Granny and the hero finish their task. "What a great idea," she says. "Granny, maybe you can teach people how to make these in arts and crafts on Friday."

The traits that put the heroine in conflict with her environment are creativity and a certain disdain for practicality, and maybe a touch of pride or high-spiritedness. All those conflicting traits are undermined by the action because she sees how little they're valued by the others in her environment. She can no longer feel that she succeeded in her attempt to cheer up Granny by exposing her to this form of removable graffiti.

But she's still capable of nurturing, and that's the heroic trait. So by letting the heroine react fully to the negatives, but then steel herself to remember the more important underlying goal, she's able to enter the room and demonstrate the true depth of her heroic trait.

Do you see how this works? When obstacles and problems throw a character into conflict with the environment, it's okay to attack the non-heroic traits but we still want to leave the heroic traits intact. In fact, we want to be left with a suspicion that the heroic trait has taken on additional importance because of the scene events.

So here's how you do a scene check for this element. First, identify the dominant emotions or traits being expressed by the characters in the scene or scene sequence. (Here, we had creativity, pride, etc.) Then check how many of those traits have been attacked through the scene action. Then identify the heroic trait and check whether it has been amplified as a result of the scene action.

Do we all know which traits are heroic? Can you name any in the comments?

Theresa

Dragging out ending

Just read a very good mystery where the murderer was arrested and taken away 3 chapters in-- I mean, Chapter 24 out of 26 chapters, so 2 chapters after the solution of the mystery. I read those last 40 pages thinking that any minute, the REAL murderer would be unmasked. After all, why solve the mystery so early in the book (with 2 chapters to go), if that's the actual solution.

So of course I thought the guy fingered for the crime was actually taking the blame for his mother or girlfriend-- whoever the real murderer was-- and that the truth would be unveiled in the last chapter.

Nope. The guy arrested was really the murderer. Now I would have had no trouble with this except for the expectation set up by solving the mystery too early. We're all trained by cinema-- if the monster is killed early, then it'll come back to life or there'll be a bigger monster with five minutes left in the film.

So be careful not to set up the reader for disappointment. Resolve that external plot near the end of the book. You might want a scene or two, maybe 15 pages, to wrap up the romantic conflict or the internal conflict. But two chapters-- that's tempting the reader to imagine a new ending, one perhaps more complex than yours.

When do you end your story? Any thoughts here?
Alicia

Young Characters Are People Too

I was lurking in a discussion of characterization when the mostly baby-boomer discussers were talking about how it's difficult to create young protagonists if you didn't have examples right there with you, and even those with children that age had some trouble making the characterization work. I just happened to have read this article by an acting coach about why the Bobby Jindal speech (after Obama's first State of the Union message) was panned by so many.

The coach said that he could tell that Jindal was concentrating on the "how"-- "how do I show sincerity?" rather than the "why"-- "why do I believe this?"

The coach remarked, "In life we have thoughts and feelings and then we find the words to express those thoughts and feelings. It is a straight line. In acting as in public speaking, we start with the words. What should the great actor and the great orator do? They should find the thoughts and feelings that make them need to say these words. In short they should find The Why.

"What is a common mistake? It is focusing on The How. The actor or orator in this case is thinking about How to make the speech effective. If you supply the Why, The How takes care of itself. What Jindal did is focus on How he wanted to come across. In acting I call this a General Attitudinal Choice. He thought of the effect he wanted to have on the audience. He wanted to come across as likable and friendly. He wanted the audience to think that he is a good guy, so he adopted a general demeanor of kind and empathetic. This is why he came off as condescending. No matter what he talked about the the pose was the same. He was trying to project his idea of a warm and friendly guy. Therefore he came off as patronizing."

Well, really, when I read that, I thought it connected. :) Let me first talk about the problem. The problem is that if we the author don't "feel" this character within us, we might not be able to make that character plausible. And it's probably harder to easily feel a character who is of another generation. We know we can't just think of ourselves at that age, because the world has changed (hurray!). You probably don't want the 2010 heroine bopping to Beatles' hits (though, you know, my sons that age love the Beatles and Stones and Hendrix and all 60s music, go figure... I had a student last semester who wore a Beatles' t-shirt, and told me that he knew all their songs-- I said, "Because your mom played them when you were young?" He gave me a puzzled look and said, "My mom played Bon Jovi songs, not the Beatles." Who knows, as another 60s icon sang, where the time goes?). But it's not enough to know the latest musical trends and the clothing fashions. Those are just labels (and they'll probably change before the book comes out-- don't want to refer to the Jonas Brothers when you know in a year they'll be in the "where are they now" category).

It doesn't help that our major media portrayal of young people is on TV shows, which usually show them as whiny narcissists. This has been jumped on by a older member of the generation, who wrote a book called Generation Me, which purports to examine the culture of youth (only affluent white youth, from what I can tell-- not the students I teach at a community college, for sure) and dismisses them as, natch, whiny narcissists. Well, let's ask "why?" Why does she diss her own generation? I need only point out that she's on the older edge of the generation (as are most of those TV writers), and have you ever known a big sister to speak with unqualified admiration about her younger siblings? (As an older sister to 6 siblings, I admit this reluctantly.)

I can summarize the conventional wisdom on these kids who are of the same generation of many of our characters (somehow, let's face it, it's easier to do an action-adventure novel or a romance with, uh, young and fit characters :)-- but heck, you watch the same TV shows that I do.

What I know is that we want to create real people in our characters, no matter what their age, but we don't want to do this by pretending that the time period and culture don't matter (that is, we don't want to make them just like us, only 25 in 2010). And they won't seem real if we create them with labels-- she likes the Jonas Brothers (because she's actually 12 :), he owns a Mac Airbook-- and make that the only individual and generational thing about them. The reader is going to read that and sense "inauthenticity/insincerity" even if you meant for the best.

Instead of labels-- the "how"-- let's try going inside.

Well, first let me give my own sociological impressions of this generation, based on a smallish sample-- my kids, their friends, and hundreds of students (mostly working class or poor, but also some middle class, and some upper-middle-- I've taught at three universities).

They are actually whiny. :) I mean, I'll agree with that. Well, let's come up with a nicer way to say that. They have no trouble, in the main, voicing their discontent and hoping if not expecting that someone will fix it. If they don't like their grade, many of them will tell the professor that and beg or demand a better one. (There is some justification for that-- what used to be just a "major," and so just a choice, is now a "school" with competitive admission, so that B in English might mean she can't get into nursing school, believe it or not-- and if you wonder why there's a nursing shortage, you might ask why anyone would assume that nursing students should get an A in English, like an English major....)

But they are far more kind, loving, compassionate, and open than the immediately previous generation X (the one that drove so many of us out of college teaching...). They are much more peaceful and ready to find common ground than baby boomers. They have little fear of emotion-- this is especially striking in the young men, who seem less fettered by the rather toxic male culture of the baby boom and the even more toxic male culture of the ones that came to age during and right after WWII. (I am generalizing, which is part of my point-- we can't help but generalize, but what the whole generation seems like might mean nothing about an individual.) Competitiveness is no longer the defining trait in male-to-male relationships. (The postwar men were poisoned by this, I say as a woman observer. Fathers were even competitive with their sons... ever see The Great Santini? I knew lots of fathers like that.) Now notice that one significant difference with the new generation is they have grown up with women in positions of power. Many had single mothers (and you want to see a 25-year-old man cry, get him to talk about his single mom-- "She's my hero!" is what they often say), and many have had women bosses from their first jobs. They have also had girls-as-friends and are likely to be comfortable with that.

Oh, and the young straight men have mostly all had openly gay friends, and they just don't seem to have as much of an issue with that.

For young women... well, this is the first generation of girls who grew up mostly all playing competitive sports. (Thank you, Title 9!) That, I think, is significant in a lot of ways. Sports changes the girls, but the girls change the sport too. :) Something I notice that is a direct result of girl-sports is that our definition of beauty is changing. "Toned arms" doesn't mean just smooth and straight, but also the curve of strong biceps. (There's a whole website devoted to Michelle Obama's upper arms, which I'd think was sexist, but then I remember the website devoted to Pierce Brosnan's forearms, and ....) And there's a wonderful new attitude that you can be a tough athlete and then that evening be a girly-girl in a sexy short dress. These young women athletes don't feel they have to be tough all the way through all the time-- they know they can just play tough. The Williams sisters are as tough as any man, but did you see Venus playing the match in dangly earrings and a necklace?

But there is a sort of disquieting requirement felt by a lot of girls that you have to be beautiful, or -- beauty being notoriously in the eye of the beholder and thus available to anyone who is loved :)-- "hot"-- sexy, I guess. It's sort of baffling to us older folk, who think youth is sexy-- "Why worry? You're 23. By definition, you're sexy!" But that is no doubt exacerbated by the weird fixation the media has with presenting sex-workers as exemplars of what Men Really Want in a Woman. "Porn-worthy," not a term I'd consider a compliment.

This generation of women has also grown up with a sense of possibility that is not limited by their gender (though the whole generation has a much more intense sense of the limitations of the economy and planetary future than I think we baby boomers ever did).

So, to connect this to characterization, let's take for example a young woman character. I see two things that will factor in to your characterization, as much actually about building her world as building her, but factors you might keep in mind:

1) The universal qualities of youth-- young people are usually more resilient, less thoughtful, more creative (if you haven't written great poetry, played great heavy metal, or come up with a new mathematical theorem by 30, you might as well forget it-- these are "youth-intensive" fields). They are more active, quicker thinking but not deeper thinking. They are usually far more dependent on friendships-- their friendships are more intense. They are probably more into entertainment, especially music. They are sociobiologically programmed to be keeping an eye out for potential mates even if they aren't actively seeking. This doesn't necessarily say much about her as a person, but before you have your recent college graduate decide to forego clubbing for a night vegging out on the couch, ask yourself if that's more like YOU (or me, at least) than like a young person.

2) The qualities of the generation she's in-- that's fairly easy to do with a contemporary book, and not actually that hard for a historical either... just respect the reality of their culture and life. A heroine in Kentucky in the years immediately after the US Civil War is not going to have the same worries and values as one in London in the roaring 60s or in Chicago right now.

You don't get off the hook by setting the book in the future or on another planet. All that means is you have to figure out how her generation has been molded by the events of her childhood and youth and the culture around her. You have to make it up too. :) But you're already world-building-- extrapolate from what you have.

Keep in mind that she's got a lifetime, albeit short, of accumulated generational experience, and it's not just This Moment that counts. For example, most of us go on loving the music we loved when we were 15. We of course pick up some other favorite songs, and might even acquire new passions. But what's popular right this moment is probably not what she's listening to during the dark night of the soul... she's listening to the songs that made her cry back when music alone could make her cry. So if she's 22 today, she probably still has favorite Dave Matthews songs, and John Mayer songs, and maybe (though she might not admit it) Britney Spears songs, but she probably doesn't pay any attention to the Jonas Brothers. If someone says, "Quick, name an animated film," she'll blurt, "The Little Mermaid," not Fantastic Mr. Fox.

But generation is more than pop culture, isn't it? (I'm asking you. I'm a baby boomer. Our generation was pretty much just pop culture. :) What else influenced this generation? Well, we know THIS generation had 9/11 in the middle of their teen years and grew up with the Web and Internet and came of age to get their own My Space page and Facebook accounts, and are adept at texting... what the heck does that MEAN? Does it mean they are better or worse at personal relationships? Do they trust too easily or not at all? Do they understand or misunderstand literature from the 18th Century? :)

==

So when you've thought about what the background for this person might be, what the universal qualities of youth are and the particular qualities of this generation, then what? Background is not destiny. And I think to some extent, that's where characterization begins, not ends. If my heroine is merely a person of her time and age, then she's more generic than any real person would be. She's "how," not "why."

To get to "why," we have to consider how she reacted to those generational influences, and why? Why did one girl in the era of Britney decide to study opera? Why did one boy respond to 9/11 by signing up for the Marines, and his brother responded by joining an antiwar group? You don't have to put that into the story, of course. But if a heroine born in 1985 sings opera in the shower, you might think about what overrode the pop culture influences. This might be a clue that she didn’t grow up in the US, or she was home-schooled, or that she was raised by an aging-hippie grandmother who didn't have a TV.

That's what we owe all our characters, to understand the world they came from (and how it differs from the world we came from!), and how it shaped them, but also how they responded in their own way to the factors that influenced everyone in their generation. We have to find out the "why"—why they become the person they become.

Alicia

Guest Post

I was asked to blog over at Pens Fatales on erotic romance, and chose to share my thoughts about why this genre is pro-feminist and pro-woman. I hope you'll all read it. This might be the truest opinion I've ever blogged on the subject.

Theresa

What's in a name?

Reading a book and liking it, but I can't remember which person is which. Is Hillary the waitress who is winning the cooking competition? Or is that Hailey? Or maybe Holly-- no, she's the one who was on the police force but quit to go to culinary school.

Right?

Take heed. It's a whole lot easier to get into a character when you can associate the name with the situation. And when two or more characters have similar names, well, some of us have trouble remembering. Look at those:
Hillary
Hailey
Holly

They all start with H, have an L in the middle, and end in Y. As I read fast through the story, they all look alike. And while I can sort out the names finally, I simply haven't been able (halfway through) to associate each name with the right person. This isn't usually a problem for me, and the writer is adept at characterization and character voice, so I really think the confusion is all about those three very similar names.

How do you choose character names? Do you have any rules you enforce on yourself as you choose (like two names can't start with the same letter, say)? As a reader, how do you respond to names? Can you think of any times the name got in the way of your bonding with a character?

Alicia