Writer's Blog: Characters#2

Sorry about the extreme lateness of this post. Its been sitting on a tab in my browser for a long time. I thought I'd posted it - turns out I hadn't.

Chapter 5 of Writing a Novel looks to the subject of characters.

Characters are one of the most complex aspects of writing. Some authors describe how they can 'watch' their characters. Basically they know the characters so well that writing a scene about them is similar to the experience of listening to a conversation and just recording what is being said. I remember JMS saying that when writing a G'Kar scene he knew the character so well that he could just 'watch' and write what was being said.

I have not had that experience with my characters yet but it must be a magical thing. I even get into difficulties with how a character looks. For this at least you can cheat - well in a way. Sometimes I just simply search for an image of a person who looks like I want my character to look - then I just simply describe them.

Incidentally one of the best character introductions I've even seen is in Twin Peaks. Specifically the introduction of Dale Cooper. It is very simple. All he is doing is entering Twin Peaks and talking in detail about his expenses and, briefly, trees. Yet in that short piece, where he is speaking into a Dictaphone, we learn all we need to know about the character.

As with the other chapters this section gives a list of exercises to try. When writing science fiction or fantasy these sorts of exercises are quite complicated. If a character is living in a fictional world then, sometimes, everything about their life has to be invented. If they visited Mars you have to think of a good name for a city on Mars.

In the novels I have read the development of character is almost invisible. You reach the end of the novel and you know many details about the character but you can't always say how you know those things.