Of character development and interest in people( rant)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m an amatuer writer, not by trade but by hobby. Someday I’ve love to see my stuff published and admired. A movie would be cool, but I’m not holding my breath and I’m certainly not writing for that purpose. In order for that to happen, I need to write somethign worthy of it.

And to do that, I’ve been trying to strengthen one of my weakest areas…Character. To say my characters are often stereotyped is like saying the ocean is wet. So I’ve been trying to improve them by reading what I can about the art and trying to learn what good characters are made of.

It’s still coming slowly and with difficulty. I can come up with backstory, but really creating distinct interesting, personalities is eluding me. And after some reflection, I’m pretty sure a big piece of the problem is that for the most part, people aren’t my strong suit.

I’ve tried people watching, but it doesn’t really tell me anything. I’ve tried looking at people and wondering…what’s their story? But I can’t think of anything and just seeing someone for 5 seconds walking by tells me next to nothing about them other then their clothing preference. And often, I feel I really don’t care enough to really try to guess.

I either am not interested by people or don’t know how to talk to them. Pretty much every conversation I have with people who aren’t close friends is purely interrogative and ulitilarian

Sample: “Do you mind if I sit here?” “No” “Thank you”.

Since I know nothing about people I meet(no known common interest), I have nothing to talk with them about. And so it goes.

I went to a film festival this weekend, based on a common theme, so I could be farily sure that most of the people there shared interest in that theme. Even then, when talking with actors and filmmakers, I could think of little more to talk to them about then their films.(Give them a bit of a review, ask any questions that came to mind, goodbye). The only conversations of real length and substace were with people I already knew from previous years.

Hell, I have friends who I barely talk to any more. One of which could be dead for all I know, since I haven’t heard a peep out of him in years. I had completely forgotten about him until just the other day Then I have others who I’ll talk to about anything and everything. A little project posted online 3 years ago got the attention of a guy in Germany, and it started an e-mail conversation that hasn’t stopped yet. I’ve never met the guy and I talk to him more then most people I know. So I am capable of talking people ears off about many different things if I know them.

Other times, I’ve had interesting conversations with people for the first and last time. The single serving ones. It’s interesting while it lasts and then neither of us will ever hear from each other again. Maybe I’ll send an e-mail and never get a reply, maybe there will be a secondary conversation and then nothing more. Maybe I just can’t think of anything else to say to them. And 99% of the time, the lack of subsequnt contact bothers me not at all.

And I’ve gone off track. I’m trying to figure out if I’m anti-social, have no interest in most of the human race(If you asked me who my hero was, I’d probably tell you I don’t have one. Ask me who was the most infuencial person on my life and I’ll say my father) or just have lousy(read:nonexistant) conversation intiation skills.

And back to the topic at hand, If I indeed don’t have any interest in people, is there a method of developing fictional characters in which this isn’t an issue(I suspect I know the answer, but I might as well ask. And don’t say the Lovecraft school, because I’m well familar with that one. I’m trying to move out of that school).

Reads back over that and sees if that makes any sense. Decides to post it anyway

Does it make sense? If it does not make sense, you must aquit!

2

bump

3

I can see how this would be problematic developing characters in your writing.

I don’t feel quite qualified to tackle the larger questions you raised, so I’ll just pose a few of my own.

What makes a character in a book or novel memorable and interesting to you? It might not necessarily be the same list of qualities that others would have, but just your opinion. Can you figure out some themes that catch your notice and try and work those themes into your own characters?

Similarly, think about what types of people you do form friendships with. What makes them more interesting than the greater percentage of folks you don’t pursue relationships with? Try and identify some characteristics they share and won’t that lead you to themes you can use in your writing maybe?

4

A nifty website for character-building and general writing-goodness: Limyaael’s Fantasy Rants . They’re specifically geared towards the fantasy genre, but her tips on scenes, POV, action, dialogue, cliches, is applicable towards most fiction writing.

5

Have you ever read much of Harlan Ellison? Aside from developing amazing characters in his short stories, he also writes more about the writing process than any other author I’ve read. His essay Telltale Tics and Tremors (I read it in The Essential Ellison, but it may be published elsewhere) especially dwells on what makes for good characters, and which authors he thinks do a good job (Robert Bloch and Mellville, IIRC).

6

What about basing your fictional characters on a person or people you know? (A single character could be an amalgamation of several different non-fictional people.) Or you could take a 1-from-column-A, 1-from-column-B approach. Make a list of characteristics and pick from there when you are creating your characters.

Or not…

7

I did (am still doing that) that when I wrote (am still writing) my series of short stories. It’s a good approach, IMO.

8

Actually, I love that site…well, I found them on another site, but these look new, so even better.

9

I’ve read “I have no mouth and I must scream” but little more then that. I didn’t know he wrote about character development). I’ll look for that.

10

I would say that what defines a “well-rounded character” isn’t that he is original or deep, or not a cookie-cutter character. Instead, it’s that he has a history that you know and that isn’t all going to make it into the book.

For instance, The Cookie-Cutter Tough-Guy Loner; we enter and he has a ticket to Tunisia. As he is on his way to the airport, he hits a deer with his Harley, getting thrown from the bike and wounding the deer. Picking himself up from the pavement, he goes over to the wounded animal, looks upon it without movement until he sees the light go out in its eyes.
He tears up his ticket to Tunisia, and wanders into the wilderness his remains found several months later in a cave, the police report giving his cause of death as starvation.

Now I just randomly picked a cookie-cutter character, randomly chose a particular instance for him to be in, and a random reaction to it; making sure none of those was normal or expected. That isn’t to say that a tough-guy loner wouldn’t do such a thing, just that ours did. The question is, why? He had seemed like such a stereotypical character up until suddenly buying the ticket for Tunisia, and then going bonkers over a deer. I don’t have one, having decided the course of events randomly, but having now done such, I can come up with several different histories for the character that would naturally lead to the random series of events. And the reader doesn’t need to know what that history is. But you knowing it, can then go back and add other minor oddities back through the story that would also be possible given a character with that history. Certainly he’ll still 80% of the time just be an everyday tough-guy loner, but every once in a while, you can throw in some random thing…say that at some point in the story he just randomly says, “Damn religion. My parents shoved that crap down my throat… Heh, just goes to show them.”

This would be because his family is Tunisian. But he was too much of an individual to play his place in a proper Arab household and left for the US. But soon after he had left, his parents were murdered but the murderer released because he was the son of a high-ranking government official. Not wanting to deal with his parents’ death, he becomes focussed entirely on the murderer and eventually decides that he will fly back and get revenge. At this point he sees the dying deer, and suddenly he realises, “My parents are dead…there is nothing I can do for anyone in the world, and no one who cares whether I am alive.” His following reaction is a tad extreme, but that’s because of…<insert more character history here>

But, the reader never knows that.

Real people have entire lives and things that they are dealing with at the same time as the story. They may be dull, stereotypical people, but if you have a story of the life of every character that you introduce that goes well beyond anything you’re ever going to put in the actual book, and the character does seemingly random things from time-to-time just like real humans do–voila, you have a full character.

Making those “interesting” characters that people will care about is of course a different issue. But I’ll just assume (since you didn’t mention it) that this wouldn’t be a problem for your stories if the characters came across less 2D.

11

Well, I wonder if maybe a good way to get into random people’s heads might be to go read some online journals and blogs. You’re not going to get the same thing from looking at a person on the street or casually talking to them as you are reading what they’ve written about who they are.

There are a ton of them out there too. You could probably search the major sites for what kind of character that you’re interested in, read a few journals that fit that type, and composite a character out of those (presumeably) real people.