August is Awesome Because of Liesel Hill

Today's awesome guest is so awesome she maintains two active blogs and manages to provide quality content on each.  It's been fun following her thoughts on villains recently.  And she has one book due to be released later this year and another one come fall of next year.

I love the insight Liesel has on a variety of topics, how she engages her blogs' readers and how actively she interacts with them.

Her post today poses questions regarding how much information about a character is too much.  She has an interesting perspective and viewpoint.  Be sure to leave her a comment and let her know your thoughts.

So, without further delay, I give to you the awesome Liesel Hill!

Characters: Is It All Relevant?

by

Liesel Hill

Some weeks ago, a member of my writer’s group said something important to me. (If you’re not a believer, writers groups: invaluable. Trust me! But that’s another post.) She was reading a chapter of the second installment of my Interchron series and she said to me (I’m paraphrasing), “There is a lot of tension in these scenes, but it seems to me that ALL the characters are pacing their nervousness off. Maybe have a few of them do something else. They wouldn’t all have the same nervous tick, would they?”

I grumbled a bit at first, but she was right. The argument could be made that people do tend to mimic one another, especially when they spend a good deal of time together (don’t try to argue; we all know it’s true!) but for fiction, we must make our characters unique. They must stand out from one another. (As in: Characterization 101!)

This led to me thinking a lot about my characters and if I was differentiating them from one another enough. Let’s talk about character charts. These are the worksheets that have (sometimes hundreds) of questions about your character. The idea is that if you can answer all these questions, you’ll know your character well enough to write them.

I know I’ll probably take some heat for saying this, but I’m not a fan of character charts. Of course I am all about knowing your characters, so I understand the concept, but to be honest, I just get bored with them. I mean come on! Is it direly important that we know that Luke Skywalker favored the color blue over brown? A fun factoid, maybe, but it’s not going to change his destiny, our emotions about the story, or the way he approaches his father. Will it make a huge difference if we understand that Harry Potter favors vanilla ice cream over chocolate? Again, it may be important if you ever go on a date with aforementioned boy wizard, but since most of us won’t...

Don’t get me wrong: I understand that mundane details can make our characters human, and I’m all for that. I’m just not a writer who goes into a lot of detail about the color shirt my hero is wearing or what kind of food my heroine prefers.

So what’s my point? In my opinion, the questions we should be asking are the deeper ones. Who is this character? Who or what made him that way? If someone stuck a gun in his face, how would he react? If he saw a large person beating up on a smaller person, would he do anything about it? If given the chance to cheat or in some way be dishonest to benefit himself, would he do it? How does he feel about the religious, political, and social climates of his world? If he could have one thing, what would it be?

These are the questions that will tell us who our characters really are.

Even JK Rowling had to answer these questions. We see the bigger issues in how Harry feels about the pure blood vs. mud-blood feud; in how unfairly house elves are treated; in how he deals with his best friend’s family being poor; and in what he saw in the mirror of Erised.

Of course every story is different. Using the same example, JK Rowling also used a lot of fun, mundane details in her narrative because they made for a colorful world, which is appropriate for the audience she was writing for.

If you’re writing YA, then high school popularity, how the character feels about school subjects, and who their first kiss was may be appropriate to the story. If, on the other hand, you’re writing adult crime drama, your readers don’t necessarily need to know these details about the tough-as-nails detective who’s trying to solve the case.

My point is that any and all characterization details you include in your story need to be relevant.

And what about describing them? Per my writer’s group critique, I’ve taken to describing my character’s reactions to every major emotion. For example, I was recently putting together a character sketch for a new high fantasy project. I wrote about two pages of stuff about one of my main characters, whose name is Wenlyn. For his major emotional reactions, I have this:

• When angry, he clenches his teeth and growls.
• When worried/scared, his eyes get wide and he stands perfectly still.
• When happy, he smiles; when excessively happy, he jumps around in a stationary circle.
• When sad, he clamps his eyes shut and turns away.
• When feeling vulnerable/lonely/abandoned, he clutches people. (This is important because Wenlyn is an orphan with no past, no history, and no family to speak of.)
• When jealous, he presses his lips together and gets color in his cheeks.

These were the major emotions I came up with that Wenlyn may have to deal with in his story. Now I’ll be able to describe his reactions in a distinctive way that sets him apart from his fellow characters.

I have found that describing reactions to specific emotions and asking the deep, hard questions are the best way to have full, round, effective characterizations. These characters will ring true to your readers and jump off the page into reality.

Thanks for reading! :D

About Liesel Hill:

Liesel K Hill is a novelist that writes across three different genres: fantasy, historical fiction, and crime drama. Her debut novel, a futuristic dystopian fantasy entitled Persistence of Vision, will be out later this year (release date pending). The first installment of her historical fiction trilogy, Kremlins, is slated for release fall 2013.

Check out her Musings on Fantasia  blog.
Follow her on Twitter @lkhillbooks and Facebook.

August is Awesome Because of Ken Rahmoeller

People are awesome for more reasons than I dare try to name here, but you can always count on awesome people to be awesome in their own unique way.  Ken Rahmoeller is no exception.

Ken is writing his first book with what I believe to be the healthiest approach I've seen.  He doesn't intend to rake in millions from it.  He intends to rake in something far more valuable: knowledge and wisdom.  

Ken goes into detail about what he's doing, how and why on his blog's About Ken and His Book page.  I believe that if he's not careful, he just might discover the formula for success!

Ken's a chemist and can do more than stupify you with his awesome wand!  Give Ken a big, awesome welcome!

Peanut butter or chocolate?
Chocolate, of course.

Paper or plastic?
Plastic. It works better when I’m emptying the litter box.

Plot or character?
Hmmmm...

Which is more important to the success of a story? Opinions vary, but many experts will tell you the character is more important. I tend to disagree. I understand their point, especially in certain genres such as romance, but for me personally, it’s always been about the plot. If I have a choice between a story with a great plot and average characters or a story with an okay plot but really great characters, I’ll pick the one with the great plot every time.

Now I’m not denying the benefits of creating good, interesting characters. The reader is going to spend a lot of time with these people (or aliens, or animals, or whatever) and it can be a boring ride if you don’t care what happens to them. I’m just of the opinion that a great plot can help you fall in love with otherwise boring characters as you watch them struggle their way through the story.

But even if you’re one of those writers who think plot is more important, you still want to create great characters to go along with that fantastic plot you spent all that time creating. So what’s the trick to creating great characters? There’s no one perfect answer. Some writers fill out questionnaires describing their MC’s likes and dislikes. Others interview their MC. Still others work out huge backstories for each and every person in the story.

None of these methods work for me. They all require an intimate knowledge of my characters at the beginning of the story and I simply don’t have that knowledge until I’ve finished writing the story. I let my characters start out as blank slates and their traits evolve over the course of the book. Perhaps this is a consequence of being a first time writer, but I’ve found this technique works well for me and I’ll continue to use it until something better comes along.

When I began writing my story, my characters were startlingly bland. I knew one of them was going to be the bad guy and one was going to be a jerk and another was going to be supportive of the main character, but that was about it. But as the story progressed, I would often realize a particular subplot could be strengthened by having one of the characters behave in a certain way, so I simply gave that character the necessary trait(s) and ran with it. Not only did my subplot become stronger, but I’d also learn something new about one of my characters. Cool.

After repeating this process ad infinitum, I soon found my story populated with characters who were far more interesting than any I could have created on my own. Best of all, I was giving them the best kind of quirks – ones which have an effect on the plot. After all, if the quirks and traits you give your characters can be removed without affecting the story, you need better quirks and traits.

Of course, this method is not without its drawbacks. Creating characters in this manner often necessitated that I go back and revise earlier chapters. And I'm not sure how I would go about writing a sequel using this technique, since the characters will have already had their traits locked in beforehand, but that's the chance I'll take for now.

So what method do you use to create your characters?

I'd like to thank Jeff for allowing me to participate in his August is Awesome series.

About Ken Rahmoeller

Ken Rahmoeller is awesome!

I'm a chemist living in Detroit, Michigan who accidentally discovered he loved to write stories while fooling around with Harry Potter fan fiction. I enjoy castles, alchemy, and making stuff blow up for the amusement of my children (and myself).

Connect with Ken at:

His Blog: A Hogwarts Sabbatical

On Twitter: @ChemistKen

The Little Things

I've come to realize that in writing, it's often the little things that bring a character to life more than anything else.  It's the little things that make our characters interesting, enjoyable, and sometimes frustrating.  Just like with us, they often tell people more about who we are than anything else.

Like when your crayon-wielding son gives you the illegible, hand-drawn Father's Day card--the one with the picture where you look more like a giraffe than a human and you search the entire house looking for a magnet that will hold it to the refrigerator.  Or when your daughter gives you the broken limb from a dogwood tree that you're expected to plant and keep alive until she's married because it has pretty flowers on it.

Those are wonderful snapshot moments in time.  But what if those moments occurred years ago?  Do they reveal only who we were as opposed to who we are?  Do they give our characters history?

Consider: In a few years that young father will age and become like me.  Upper-middle-aged.  A laundry list of new character-revealing traits emerge.  Like when said upper-middle-aged man ponders how it's even possible that a single eyebrow hair can grow to a full inch in length.  Overnight.  And how he must be careful when trimming that lone rogue with battery-powered hair trimmers using the one upper-middle-aged eye that can see around hands and clippers.

The aging father remembers how he prayed for hair to cover his smooth chest because all the other young fathers had hair and he had none.  And waking one morning to find that hair had indeed grown, but on top of his shoulders, down his back, out of his ears, and his chest was still bare.  How he made the mental note to be more specific in subsequent prayers and wondered if Gabriel and Michael peered down from Heaven pointing and giggling at God's latest prank.

I wrote in a previous post about how it's easy to capture the mundane, but where one detail can bore the reader with unnecessary information another detail can bring a character to life and do as much--if not more--than the primary plot can ever accomplish.

Maybe it's more important to see what Mom does while making breakfast than it is to know what she's serving.  Perhaps it's not little Johnny's refusal to eat his cabbage that fascinates us, but rather seeing the face he makes when Mom sets it on the table.  Suzie's math test may have received a bad grade, but watching her evade Dad when she brings it home tells us more about Suzie than the simple fact that she finds mathematics challenging.

Life is filled with these little moments of thought and behavior that when properly revealed to readers enables them to identify with our characters.  To love them or hate them or feel for them like we want.


What are the little things about your characters that will tell me who they truly are?