Idly scanning the Dope instead of doing anything work-related, I came across a thread on the magnificent Kim Stanley Robinson and a few Dopers’ lack of affection for him. One complaint in particular drew my attention: at least one Doper dislikes KSR because there is too much characterization in his stories. This statement struck me as odd because to me, characterization is the main reason to read any story. But it’s not unexpected to me; I’ve heard many otherwise rational, non-Etruscan people complain about an overabundance of character study ruining a given science fiction or fantasy tale.
Anywhistle, I thought I’d start thought a thread about it. I am more interested in talking about literature than movies or TV, but if the thread has any legs somebody will ignore that before long and I don’t have the energy for a RhymerRant today, so screw it. Here’s the questions I’d like to discuss:
Can a science fiction or fantasy story have too much characterization for your taste?
If yes, what exactly makes that the case?
Can you give any examples of stories that were ruined in your mind by over-characterization?
Contrariwise, what stories have you read that would have benefited from more character analysis rather than less?
I was going to do a poll but I don’t have the energy for that either. Let’s just pretend I did.
(Squee! Skald, you’re back! Where ya been?) …okay, now that that’s over with…
Yes, but it’d be pretty hard.
I do tend to blank out during a wall of text, so if an author is spending too many paragraphs telling me what someone is like, I’m likely to start skimming, and then I’m likely to start skipping, and then I’m likely to put the book down and find another.
But if the “characterization” is done through action and dialog, I can’t imagine how it would be a problem for me.
I guess I’m the classic “show me, don’t tell me” reader.
I’m sure I have no idea what you are talking about.
[/bald-faced liar]
That strikes me more as clumsy characterization than too much. I could be wrong, though. I’m wrong all the time. I was sure Donald Trump would be in prison by now.
I think it’s possible, but not too likely to have too much characterization. All of the examples that immediately spring to mind are of characters I don’t LIKE, so naturally I would like to see less of them.
Books or series which could use **more **characterization, on the other hand - I think of that a lot.
One I read recently was a juvenile sort-of fantasy “inspired by the Secret Garden” called The Humming Room. It was only 180ish pages, and had the ENTIRE basic plot and complications of The Secret Garden, which (I checked) runs about 350-380 pages depending on edition.
The inspired by booklet was actually interesting. The re-imagined setting was well-chosen, the updating was done cleverly, and the setting was really spooky and vibrant in it’s own right, but in 180 pages, there just isn’t any time to get into the characters, so the replacement “Mary” remains a cipher, their version of Dickon hardly gets any page time, let alone a character, and if Colin had been as flat as the boy in this version, I would have been wondering why Mary even bothered with him!
I’ll have to think about stories with too much character.
On a perhaps related note, you’ve got things like The Hunger Games where I was really really rooting for the author to switch out of first person narration in the second and third books, because by then I was thoroughly sick of Katniss’ thoughts. In that instance, I can most assuredly say that there was too much characterization going on for my taste.
I see this in some book series by authors who don’t have much experience with it; they know they’re going to be writing a series of novels, so they need to introduce these characters that they’ve been thinking about for years, so they have all this stuff to get down on paper so we know how truly epic the story line is going to be across all the novels that they kind skimp on writing the actual story. The most recent example I can think of is John Ringo’s A Hymn Before Battle. He’s got twelve novels worth of characters to introduce and only one novel to do it in, rather than just introduce three or four main characters per novel, and after a while, all of the big, burly, chiseled-good-looks military guys and their cute, nubile nymphette wives and girlfriends start to seem like pretty much the same character.
Yes, it’s totally possible. If the story is slam-bang action, I don’t need a ton of back-story on every character. Some characterization is nice, but it doesn’t have to be their life story so far. (I’ll go off-topic right away and note that I don’t give a pile of bantha droppings what Vader’s motivations were. The whole prequel “let’s give him a back story” crap was just that.)
Like WhyNot, I want to be shown the motivations, not necessarily told them.
Some examples when I think of them, and damn it’s good to have you back!
That may very well be, and I’m having trouble coming up with any examples, which is why I cleverly ignored that part of the assignment in the OP. To be honest, I tend to forget the books I didn’t like or finish, so I can’t really be more specific. shamefaced
I think the only time I find a work has too much characterization is when the author clearly has never heard the phrase “murder your darlings”. The author is so clearly enamored of the character that she or he has created that ever new scene or line of dialogue feels like it has someone hovering in the background going, “Wait’ll you get a load of what he’s doing now!” This can be related to Mary Sue characters, but doesn’t have to be; this phenomenon is a large part of what I disliked about A Confederacy of Dunces.
But then I wouldn’t be able to shoot them. Which I wouldn’t, of course. That would be wrong.
You know how I feel about feelings. Ten laps.
I’m sorry, but I can’t accept your claim of shame, dollface. In the first place, you’re on the Short List, so all your sins are assigned to what’s-his-face’s account, and in the second place, it’s reasonable for you to forget details about books you found too uninteresting to finish. That is what uninteresting means. And in the third place shame is for Czechoslovakians.
This I can understand, though Rhymer policy is to pretend complete ignorance of Suzanne Collins and all her pomps. I don’t even know how to spell her name.
I’ve never yet read sf/fantasy with too much characterization, though I have read stories with poorly done characterization, which can seem like too much. I’ve been looking at it lately, in my reading, how writers put in the back story that makes the characters rich and more real than so-called real life, and use it to enhance rather than disrupt the flow of story.
Can an example be a book about a secondary character in a previous novel that the author just couldn’t help messing with? If so, then Heinlein’s “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” is a big-time offender! Let’s explore Maureen’s entire-frakking-life for 800 pages. The only things the novel actually produced were a description of how Pixel walks through walls and how Ira Johnson dies in the original timeline.
That novel is deliberately nothing but a character study/alternate world history. There was too much incest in it for my taste*, but concentrating on Maureen’s character (and by extension deconstructing Lazarus in many ways) was well done.
*No, I am not going to quantify how much incest is too much. Except to say that Time Enough for Love had somewhat too much, while To Sail Beyond the Sunset was way over the line.
I understand what you say and part of me agrees…yet I read that whole novel in one sitting. While I don’t think it’s good enough for rereading, Heinlein must have done something right to keep me reading it.
Oh, and I loved the whole bit on how to punish people who mistreat cats. It was in that book, wasn’t it?
I posted in the KSR thread that I don’t think too much characterization is possible. There can definitely be too much presence of a character one doesn’t like (as in some examples above) and there can be badly done characterization as well. If the characters are starting to blur together, I’d say that’s an example of not enough characterization rather than too much (if they were characterized enough, they would be distinctive).
Maybe the problem is that the word is ambiguous. To me, “characterization” means the parts of the story that make the characters interesting, engaging, and let the reader get to know, understand, and care about them as distinct individuals. This does include displaying the characters’ flaws in action, as well as giving them important choices to make, and showing their actions reveal their personalities and values.
Explaining back story can be characterization, but isn’t necessarily. Talking about the character’s feelings and opinions, likewise. Characterization is not done in a vacuum. If the only purpose of a given paragraph or chapter is characterization, the book is probably under-written - the problem is not too much characterization, but not enough plot or theme or setting or whatever else should be there too. The best books have multiple purposes for every scene - characterization just one of the possible purposes.
There is a considerable amount of characterization detail in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Hunger Games, and I love both of those books. It doesn’t really matter to me how long characterization takes, unless it’s being repetitive for the sake of word-count-padding. More characterization is good! There’s very little I dislike more than a story where I can’t tell the characters apart by name by the second or third chapter. I’m likely to set such a book down before I get much further, because if I don’t KNOW these people, how am I supposed to CARE about them?
I’m also likely to set aside a book if I find the protagonist’s characterization really lame or unappealing, though… like Bella in Twilight, or Rodya in *Crime and Punishment *(which I realize is not a fantasy book, but just as an example of an unappealing protagonist). Both those stories had plenty of lengthy detailed characterizations, but the characters sucked so the stories couldn’t maintain my interest.
So, not only is it necessary to have sufficiently detailed and lengthy characterization for me to stay interested in a story, but the characters themselves have to be interesting.
Anne Rice is a great example of this. Most of her Vampire Chronicle books could accurately be called “Lestat is awesome!” And I don’t see any particular reason why we had to have Armand’s life story three times over (in The Vampire Lestat, Blood and Gold and The Vampire Armand).
I find your mentioning Twilight and Crime & Punishment in the same sentence disturbing. In the future please remember that the Dope style manual recommends that any mention of Stephanie Meyer should end with the phrase “and that’s why we have capital punishment.”