Chair, Whip, Character

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Or How Not To Go Insane In One Easy Lesson

No, this is not about finding your own true voice in your books.  Well, it is, maybe, but not that voice.  not the style of writing that’s so clear and precise and so indelibly yours that readers know you under any pen name, in any format.  I’d like to do a post about that, but while I’m – I think – finally finding my voice, I’m not yet at the point where I can look at the process and write about it in a way that other people can follow.

This is more important.  No, I’m serious.  Important as a true and individual voice is, this is way more important, because if you fail at this you will never, ever find your writing voice or be successful at writing… possibly you won’t be successful at anything else, either.

To be at risk of this you need to be a character writer.  By which I mean, whether it comes to you first or not, the character is the most important element of the story to you.  (Here, Sarah clears her throat, professorially, and points out that without a good plot, your brilliant character will never be seen by the readers the way you see him or her in your head, so, you have to be both a character and a plot writer.  But some of us feel the characters more than others.)

Look, you’re in this business because your stories have an almost hypnotic quality, right?  You want to make them real for the readers, right?  And here’s the thing… first they become real to you.  And first the characters become real to you.

And there a lot of beginner – and not so beginner – writers run into a snag.  When you do this well, and you can “hear” the character in your mind (by which I’m saying you can think of their words.  Yeah, I know some colleagues who describe this as auditory – and sometimes visual! – hallucinations.  Yes, I’ve read The Bicameral Mind.  My own experience is just of thinking up both sides of a dialogue) it can become hypnotic and addictive.  Your fantasy world, if it’s good, can become an addiction just like any other form of escapism.  And like any other form of escapism, you can crawl into it and let the real world go by the wayside.

So, here’s how not to go insane… or at least not to go more insane than any other writer who does produce work and make money from it.

First – always know which voice in your head is yours.  By this I mean, don’t let the character start dictating how the story should go.  From whichever subconscious impulses you dredged up this character, if you start letting him or her start “telling you” the story without any effort at control or plot, you’ll end up with something that reads like this “I had eggs for breakfast.  Then I cleaned the living room.  Then I went to a great party,” for four hundred pages.  It’s not saleable and it’s ONLY fascinating to you.

Second – remember which side of the head your characters are in.  They’re inside your head.  Meaning, they have no existence and no real power in the outside world.  Yes, some of them have become so real to me that I expected to find them when I walked down the street.  But I didn’t.  It’s important to remember this, because at some point your character will try to give you advice on how to live.  Remember who’s plotting whom.  Oh, okay, so I took laundry advice from one of my characters, but that’s because the solution made rational sense.  I figure the part of the brain I had the character on was what used to think of laundry.  Or something like that.  BUT I wouldn’t take a character’s advice on my love life, my investments or child-rearing.  They’re not real.  They’re INSIDE my head. [From my friend Doctor Tedd Roberts: remember at all times – which voice pays the bills – Oh!  Maybe that’s not such a good idea after all.]

Third – Kill them.  If a character is taking over your book/series/universe, kill him/her.  This is very important because…  Well, for those of you who read Heinlein: Lazarus Long.  Need I say more?  Yeah, I love the character, but after a while it was “What?  Him?  Again?”  The longer you live with a character, the more you become attached to him or her, the less conscious you’ll be of how irritating he or she can be to readers.  It’s sort of like a long term marriage.  You no longer notice your spouse’s knuckle cracking, but it will drive a stranger batty.  Not good for the paying side of the writing, no matter how good to the daydreaming side.

Fourth – Remember creating the characters and making them “real” is sort of like lucid dreaming.  It’s a nice stage, but you can’t live there forever.  Again, remember the bill-paying thing (Thanks, Doctor Roberts.)  You’re not living in their world, you’re living in ours.  And you have to cope with reality.  And if you crawl completely into the dream – kind of like crawling into the bottle – no one will ever share that dream.

Your daydreaming has to end and become work, in order for your dream world and dream characters to go on in other’s minds.

So, stop dreaming and write.  You can always dream more later. And then write that…

15 thoughts on “Chair, Whip, Character”

  2. Darn! You mean that isn’t a real spaceship in the garage? But, I can still go adventuring with my sword and loyal steed, right?

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  3. Point 3 is a big one, and your example is perfect. While Lazarus was fun to read in Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough For Love (until the creepy section towards the end), by the time we got to The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, he’d over stayed his welcome. Heinlein though, had the benefit of a very loyal following (built up over a few decades), so he could get away that kind of self indulgence. Most authors can’t count on that sort of forgiveness.

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  5. In fairness, Lazarus wasn’t that interesting a character. No real room for growth and exacerbating his author’s didactic proclivities. (In all honesty, I’ve not read any of Heinlein’s work after Number of the Beast — don’t ask, it’s complicated — and merely indulged the urge to write exacerbate and didactic proclivities.)

    More appropriately, yeah: characters don’t give a hoot about your novel and will hijack it given a chance. They are servants to the plot and must heed its needs. If a character won’t serve the particular plot it is probable you have used the wrong character and need to substitute a more appropriate one; as in film, casting is critical. (Exercise: pick a movie and recast a lead, e.g., replace Pat O’Brien with Rosalind Russell in The Front Page … then remake it with Jack Lemmon in the role. Or imagine William Powell as Elwood P. Dowd.)

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  6. (Glossary: RPGs = Role-Playing Games, in this case, tabletop pen-and-paper-and-dice ones. GM = Game Master. PCs = Player Characters. NPCs = Non-Player Characters.)

    In RPGs… The author is the GM. The focus character(s) is/are the PC(s). The supporting characters and, usually, antagonist, are NPCs. The GM provides plot (in the form of the environment and NPCs) for the PCs to react against, and LO! Story is built! (With, in a real life tabletop RPG, occasional bursts of totally bad pacing or wondrous, wonderful, “the dice never lie!” twists that are things of beauty.)

    Um. Right. That’s the long way of how I tend to think of “whose voice is whose.” The PCs, er, viewpoint characters might like to wander around and have breakfast (especially the ones who are lost in the woods), but the GM/author is the one who says, “Okay, you want breakfast? You have to work for it. And oh, by the way, what are you going to do about those guardsmen who are on your trail? The hounds are baying off in the distance…” The GM/author exists to keep the characters lives interesting. *evil grin*

    (It also is a kind of helpful way of making sure that one’s secondary characters don’t take over too much of the plot — just as players resent the GM’s pet NPC always riding to the rescue and overshadowing the players’ characters with the SHEER AWESOMENESS OF THE GM’S PET NPC, so will readers resent it if some secondary character comes out of nowhere and warps the plot around itself and away from the primary character that, according to the compact of author/reader, the readers are intended to invest in emotionally. The awesomeness of the NPC must always serve to highlight the interestingness of the PCs!)

    …I don’t think one always needs to kill a beloved character, though. (I mean, Doyle tried it with Sherlock Holmes, and look where that got him!) Retiring them to the country to keep bees, on the other hand, is often well-advised. If one loves the universe still, then there are probably plenty of secondary characters to torture, er, write about.

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    1. One of the perks of being the GM is that you can kill other peoples beloved characters. :D

      As author you can of course kill the readers favorite, but it is not quite the same.

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      1. In Darskship Renegade I had to kill one of MY favorite. There is still a back-story novella with him to be written, but if I hadn’t killed him, he was going to take over the whole d*mn series. As is, I’m convincing him he does NOT have a clone aboard the spaceship heading for Earth as I type this…

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      2. Some weeks back the NY Times had an article on a number of authors having honed their craft (re: characterization) via a RPG based on Zelazny’s Amber series.

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        1. I never understood that. My late BIL told me “you should game. It will help you develop characters.” BUT I wake up with Characters in my head. Characters drop in on me at the most unexpected times. Characters aren’t a problem. Keeping them in check is.

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          1. FYI:

            A Game That Honed the Skills of Writers
            By JOHN SCHWARTZ
            Published: September 23, 2011

            Jim Butcher is known to millions as the author of the best-selling series of “Dresden Files” novels featuring Harry Dresden, a “professional wizard” who works in a noirish Chicago as a private investigator.

            But to a passionate virtual community scattered around the world, Mr. Butcher is also remembered as Bassor Thanlis and the other characters he created in the 1990s in an online role-playing game with the unlikely name Ambermush.

            Amber is a reference to a series of fantasy novels by Roger Zelazny, beginning in 1970 with “Nine Princes in Amber,” which served as the foundation of the game. Mush is an acronym for the form of the game, known winkingly as a “multi-user simulated hallucination.”

            In the Amber world — shut down since 2009 but fondly remembered on tribute Web sites — participants created characters and developed scenarios, constructing the action as they went along in a kind of pick-up game of make-believe.

            With no graphics, Amber was a world made of words. For aspiring writers, as Mr. Butcher was back then, that was very enticing.

            He recalled the old writers’ adage that “you’ve got to write your million words” of bad prose “before you’re writing good stuff, and I once estimated that I was writing 5,000 words a day, mushing,” he said. “We were all practicing storytelling every day.”

            He credits the game with honing his skills at using dialogue to reveal elements of the story and in developing characters who interact with others bizarrely — who even seem, to other players, psychotic — but are following an internal logic and personal code. He often struggled, he said, to make a character funny “without his just being a clown.”

            If to Mr. Butcher’s fans that all seems to describe a certain wizarding detective, well, flickum bicus, as Dresden says when he casts a spell that lights candles. “It very much informed the ‘Dresden Files,’ ” he said.

            Whatever you might call it, it seems to be working. The 13th novel in the series, “Ghost Story,” appeared last month at the top of the New York Times list of hardcover fiction best sellers, his third novel to make its debut in that spot.

            Mr. Butcher is not the only author to come out of the Amber community: by some estimates, a dozen or more of the hundreds of former players have gone on to become published authors. Playing Amber then was like attending a writers’ colony, but without the brie and posturing.
            MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/books/jim-butcher-one-of-the-authors-from-ambermush.html?_r=1&sq=Zelazny&st=nyt&scp=2&pagewanted=all

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      3. Actually, the trick probably isn’t so much “you should game” but is, instead, “you should game master.” Keeping characters in check is what a GM has to do, so they don’t run rough-shod!

        Some tricks that GMs need:
        • Learning how to avoid the “railroad plot” (where the players are prevented from doing anything to short-cut or avoid the problem the GM provides, in illogical fashions — “Oh the pirates… had a spare getaway ship next-door! They take off with your little sister NPC after all!”).
        • Learning how to steer the PCs where you want them to go by virtue of their stated character personalities. ( beth . o O (Augh, they’re planning, they’re going to want maps of this place I just made up in my head… OH!) Beth: “Your hidden microphone hears the evil bad guy running the brothel say, ‘Bring me a child.'” Players: “We have no time for detailed plans now! We must rush in and hope we are in time!”)
        • Learning how to identify the true goals of a scene, and let the PCs win the battle — without sacrificing the Epic Showdown later on. (Now, the pirates had just attempted to kidnap the little sister NPC; even though we crippled their ship, when we discovered that they’d been hired by do that kidnapping… wouldn’t we have gone to Trounce the Bad Guy just as happily?)
        • Learning how to craft a plot that doesn’t have a gaping hole that one of your players (or first-draft readers) will point to and go, “You know, character X has something that would turn that hole into a giant I WIN button.”
        • Scrambling to re-assess what the actual goal of the scene is, in order to pretend the players are very clever for spotting that detail that you put in, and figuring out how you can allow them to take advantage of it and still have things to do for the rest of the evening. (This is somewhat easier in books, since you can rip out whole chapters and plonk them into a different file and re-start with the plot hole paved over…)

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      4. That is filed under killing darlings and is supposed to happen. The rationale is that it makes the book better, or so I have been told. ;)

        Playing RPGs as an author may work to learn some of the basics but also some (unfortunately?) advanced techniques like having motivations and sticking to them.
        OK, the latter is more a GameMaster thing, a player has after all only to control one char. After a while a GM has to play say a dozen of recurring non player chars, red shirts and one offs do not count, at that stage your NPCs need to play them self. – In a convincing fashion that does not break the suspension of disbelieve in the moment or (advanced) during the rest of the story.

        I think that part is pretty close to what an author has to do. Who cares if it is a learned or natural ability?

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