Developing Minor Characters

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I love characters.  I love getting to know them, however tricky and long the process is.  I love seeing them develop what writers might call "independence" or "personality" or what-have-you.  I love rubbing shoulders with them.  I just love them. They're always such - characters!

At least, that goes for the major players.  Regina and the Assassin, for instance, or Tip or Marta or Charlie.   These are, after all, the ones I really spend time with: not just the narrator, but the people whose lives are intertwined with that narrator's and who I must deal with in just about every chapter.  As in real life, being with them and trying to get to know them over such a long period makes them (relatively speaking) easy to write.  I know them.  Sometimes they surprise me, but in general I can tell you how they will react in a given situation.  I know Regina has no use for Dickens.  I know the thing Tip misses most when he's miles from land is the trees.  After a while, I just start finding these things out.

minor characters are a different matter.

Just about every story has them - people who exist on the periphery of the story, whose interactions with the protagonist are infrequent, who have a part to play but do not sit at the heart of the tale.  I don't know about you, but I find these ones the tough cookies.  When you have a fellow who drifts in and drifts out, how do you get to know them?  How do you make them memorable?  How do you make them a person?

I've read some tips that advise writers to "give the character a defining trait" - a drawl or a habit or a word they're particularly fond of - to make them stick in the reader's mind.  I suppose if that is the goal, it's a reasonable approach, but it rather smacks to me of "tagging."  You scribble down the defining trait, punch a hole in the card, put a string through it, tie it to the character's leg and voila!  An easy something for the reader to note!  No great brainpower needed on either side of the equation, but the reader remembers (a little remotely) who the character is and so it's all good.

Note, I'm not at all saying that there is something inherently wrong with defining traits; I know there are several in my own books, and I also remember a novel I read some while back where a character habitually said, "Listen now," and it worked.  It fit him.  It was natural, and I liked it.  I'm just not a fan of the dartboard approach to writing - picking a trait and plastering it to the character without even a by-your-leave.  A quirk doth not a person make.

And that, I think, ought to be the goal with every character, major or minor: to make a person of them.  They won't all be equally vibrant.  My word, some of Dickens' heroes were downright pale!  But we ought to do justice to the characters in our stories, and not make caricatures of the poor fellows.

I still find this a tricky business, but one thing I've found helpful in the process of writing Tempus Regina, whose cast is larger than any I have dealt with yet, is to take the time to dig into each person's backstory.  Not that it comes out in the actual novel, mind, because that would be downright tedious.  But when I feel a person is flimsy, it is helpful for me to take them, go back into the bits and pieces I know of their past, and write them a short story.  Casting them as the point-of-view character forces me to study their thought-patterns, and following the snatches of their undeveloped history gives me something to work with.  Then, when I go back to the novel and pick up where I left off, I think, "Nyaha!  I know who you are now."  And even if what I wrote ends up having no bearing on the plot, it still gives me confidence and grants that character that much more reality.

but sometimes what I write does have bearing, and that's even better.

Describing Characters

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Two weeks ago I wrote a post on descriptive passages in general, and the topic of how to describe characters came up in the comments.  We all want our readers to draw a vivid and accurate image of our characters from the book.  But how do we manage to plant that image without abusing adjectives?

I don't believe there is one right way to go about this: it's something determined by style.  There are definitely, however, wrong ways of doing it.  We all know those introductory passages where so much is said about the character's beauty/intelligence/ah-MAZing skills that it turns your stomach.  Should we all have ugly, stupid characters, then, so as not to irritate readers?  By no means: oftentimes the fault comes not in the merits of the character, but from the delivery.  I can get just as frustrated with over-described dolts as with over-described geniuses. 

One of the main problems, I believe, with the attempt to describe a character (especially a main character) is that we have this idea that if we devote enough words to his features, we can translate our own mental image into the reader's mind.  But at least for myself, I don't find that to be the case.  The mental image I have of, say, Tip Brighton is probably not the exact image that a reader would piece together; and I doubt that an image I have of another author's character is quite what they had in mind.  The most important means of communicating who a character is have little to do physical descriptors; they're far more visceral - actions and quirks, not bone structure and eye color. 

All that to say, we needn't depend on descriptions to summarize a character.  That isn't to say we should rid ourselves of all descriptions, however, only that less can be more where adjectives are concerned.  The amount of description for any character should be determined by the circumstances of his or her introduction, and by the style of narration.  I mentioned in the comments on my previous post that I tend not to describe my main characters much beyond hair or eye color.  This is because my main characters are my narrators, and even in third-person, it's awkward to have the character appear be describing himself.  (Apparently mirror-scenes are cliche to the nth degree, so I can't recommend them.)

It is possible to get around this in means other than the mirror-scene, though, especially if a novel has two point-of-view characters; I do this a little in The White Sail's Shaking, since I switch between Tip and Marta.  When Marta first meets Tip, there are certain things she fixes on at once: his hair, which is always sticking up, and his laugh, which sounds like a cork coming out a bottle.  When Tip gets to know Marta, he's much more attuned to her looks than she is to his.  (And he has this idea that she's pretty, which is silly, but what can you do?)  If you do have more than one narrating character and they interact, I think it nice to show their first impressions of each other and what features stand out in their eyes.

Another good thing to do - and I mentioned this briefly in a post I did almost a year ago - is to allow other characters to comment on your narrator in subjective terms.  Charlie Bent is always quick to point out how plain Tip is.  (What else are friends for?)  A seaman who rumbles briefly through The White Sail's Shaking very kindly remarks that Marta's features look like a boy's.  I like these dashes of outsiders' thoughts, so long as they are in general and not specific; unless the speaker is lovesick, I doubt they would go into detail about the narrator having blue eyes and perfect teeth.

There's more freedom in describing secondary characters, I find, as long as the setting is appropriate.  Note - if the main character meets a person while they're both running away from the Gestapo, that's not an appropriate setting.  But in normal circumstances, some description from the narrator's eyes is good.  Try to incorporate the main character's feelings, rather than conveying mere lifeless adjectives - it makes it much more enjoyable to read, but also to write.  I just picked up The Lantern Bearers last night, and the first chapter is a good example of this.  The main character, Aquila, has just come home for a visit after a year away and is seeing his sister, who has grown up in that time; the descriptions are tinged with nostalgia and affection.

Emotions are the best means of adding color to the characters on the page, for they introduce the element of subjectivity that gives reality to the mind of the narrator.  No matter how you go about bringing them into play, they must be present.  Without them, people are not people at all and the only images the writer communicates will be of colored carboard-cutouts.

The Genius of Dickens

I apologize for the lack of posts; this past week has been quite busy and I've not been on the computer much.

Dickens is the kind of writer who must either be loved or hated. Readers either see him as brilliant and witty or dull and tedious, and there are elements of his style which support both views; it doesn't help, for instance, that he was paid by the word and that he was in constant need of money. In addition to the length of his novels, they deal with very dismal themes - not the kind of light reading you want for a rainy day. In fact, until I began watching the Masterpiece Theatre adaptations of his works, I did not realize that Dickens' novels were concerned with anything but starving orphans, a misconception which I am sure is shared by many others. Dickens is simply not appreciated by the majority of readers nowadays.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Little Dorrit, one of Dickens' less familiar novels, although it has become more well known since the release of the BBC production starring Claire Foy and Matthew Macfadyen. Although we had long owned an older production of David Copperfield, the Little Dorrit mini-series was my family's introduction to the world of Dickens adaptations, and my introduction to Dickens as something more than a boring and dismal writer. It had intrigue. And romance. And wit. And - and color! I was startled and pleased, and began to take an interest in reading more of his books than I had hitherto.

I had read A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers before, but though I enjoyed both, I did not fully appreciate them. After watching a slew of Dickens adaptations I picked up Martin Chuzzlewit, not being in the mood for one of his more popular and more dismal novels, like Oliver Twist, and learned to appreciate his writing. Then, as I already mentioned, I just recently completed Little Dorrit and found it fantastic.

I am no literary expert, and so I do not intend to go to great lengths to talk about the minutiae of Dickens' style and his expert use of adverbs or some such silliness. But I would like to do my bit to set aside the idea that Dickens oughtn't be a classic or that his stories have no life. While it is true that he tended toward wordiness, it is amazing how much wit and truth he put in those "useless" words - proving that, while less may be more, it does not necessarily follow that more is nothing. (Chew on that conundrum for a bit.)

Many, if not all, of Dickens' novels have a high moral tone and a heavy political criticism, but unlike most modern novels - and, no doubt, many of his own era - he succeeds in keeping the reader engaged even through long chapters on the Circumlocution Office by his tongue-in-cheek narration. Although he is essentially satirizing the British government and there is no action, he makes up for it with humor and shows a little later that some detail on the Circumlocution Office was necessary for the storyline. I do not suggest using this as license to run to great lengths with backstory and description, but I believe a little such spice would not go amiss. Writing gurus today are so adamant about chopping words and never having any sentence that does not move the plot along that, judging from the sizes of paragraphs in modern novels, writers seem afraid of exceeding three or four sentences in each. So the moral of this story is not to be flowery merely for the sake of being flowery (unless you're getting paid by the word, in which case, have at it), but not to be scared using too many words.

Another thing for which Dickens ought always to be regarded as a classic is his skill in crafting characters. I have seen many books around on "crafting characters" and "creating the perfect character" and "eliminating every cliche that ever existed from your main character"; but I really have no idea why such works are needed when we have Dickens novels. In his books he displays a variety of characters such as I have never seen in any other author's work, and characters who exemplify such extremes and yet also come across as unquestionably realistic. His main characters, indeed, are not so much this way as his supporting characters are; in Little Dorrit, the titular character narrated a relatively small proportion of the book. Throughout the novel she is a quiet, retiring young woman who hardly stands out at all, but is made remarkable in her silent virtue by the characters who surround her - her petulant father, her ne'er-do-well brother, her proud sister, and the hard and self-righteous Mrs. Clennam. Arthur Clennam, the narrator of most of the story, is a kindhearted man with a desire to do right, but again, he is not remarkable in the way the minor characters are.

Little Dorrit alone provides a plethora of fantastic minor characters. There is Fanny Dorrit, the main character's proud sister who is given to outbursts of temper followed by outbursts of tears and cries of "I wish I was dead!" There is good-natured Mrs. Plornish, who believes she can speak Italian and always has to "translate" for the Italian Cavaletto (who can communicate in English). There is Maggy, the orphan girl who had a fever when she was ten and has never gotten any older since. There is the whole cast of characters who make up the Circumlocution Office, particularly Barnacle Junior with his eyeglass-woes. And then there is my personal favorite: Mr. Pancks, the grubby rent-collector who is disliked by the population of Bleeding Heart Yard, while his hypocritical employer is beloved by all. Pancks is described as the Tug - always puffing and snorting and going along at a great rate, chugging into 'dock', towing the 'ship' (his employer) around.

Those are just a few of the outrageous characters who populate Dickens' novels. Most writer's minor characters appear to serve a plot point and then slip into oblivion, but with Dickens, everyone is made to stand out no matter how slight his role is. Just about any of his stories will provide a writer with a lesson in minor characters and how they make a story move - and that is the genius of Dickens.

Merlin and Character Studies

A little while ago, a friend of mine introduced me to the BBC show Merlin. That is to say, she introduced me to the bloopers first and I laughed so hard that I figured I might as well see if the actual show was any good. I was hooked after the first one. Perhaps the second. Anyhow, I was hooked, for a variety of reasons: the cleanness, the humor, the excellent foreshadowing, and the characters. Every major player has depth that unfolds over the course of the thirteen-episode-long first season, from Merlin himself to the sorceress Nimueh, and each individual intrigued me as a viewer and as a writer. For those of you who have not seen any of the show and might want to, I have endeavored to keep this post as spoiler-free as possible.

Gaius, the court physician who takes Merlin in when the young warlock arrives in Camelot, is a fairly stoic character from the beginning and provides the father-figure that Merlin does not have. He has the caution that Merlin lacks and can come across as unfeeling in his attempts to stop the young man from rushing headlong into good-intentioned scrapes, but the screenwriters did not make him an idiot. In several instances where Merlin's plan of action is at odds with Gaius', Gaius is eventually shown to be the wiser one as Merlin, ignoring advice and blundering on, creates more trouble rather than fixing the problem.

"You have taught me so much: taught me who I am, taught me the purpose for my skills, taught me that magic should only be used for great deeds. But most of all, you have always taught me to do what is right." (Le Morte D'Arthur, Season 1 - Merlin to Gaius.)

Uther, King of Camelot, is one of the most interesting character studies of all the Merlin cast. He is not an out-and-out villain, but he certainly is not a hero, nor even a good guy; he has suffered at the hands of sorcery (yet has also benefited by it) and lives in fear of all kinds of magic, swearing that Camelot will never fall to sorcery while he is king. His fear controls him, and any mention of sorcery drives all reason right out of his head. His acts are often condemnable and either fear- or self-driven, and he shows neither mercy nor understanding.

At the same time, he is not written (or played) as a wholly black-hearted ogre with no background or emotions. While I don't believe that a person's past in any way condones evil in their present actions, or that men and women are "basically good," yet in a story it is often more believable to give an antagonist an understandable history, rather than to say, "He's simply evil. So there." The writers of Merlin pulled this off with Uther by revealing some of his past encounters with sorcery and showing both the good and the evil that came of it.

As for Uther's emotions, several episodes reveal his deep love for his son, Arthur, and for his ward, Morgana, and his willingness to do anything to protect them. While these feelings also lead to wrong choices quite often, they have the effect of softening his character somewhat so that viewers can have some sympathy for him, while still wanting Arthur to take the throne.

"...He's a broken man consumed by fear. His hatred of magic has driven goodness from his heart." (The Nightmare Begins, Season 2 - Aglain to Morgana.)

Nimueh, the arch-nemesis of Season 1, is the opposite of Uther and yet also very similar. She is a powerful sorceress whose mission is revenge for the lives of her fellow sorcerers whom Uther has killed, so she represents all that the king has sworn to destroy. At the same time, though, her past and Uther's are linked, and the writers employed the same tactic they used for Uther in giving Nimueh a history to make her an understandable - though not a sympathetic - evil. She is not thrown into the role of villain with a mere, "I hate everyone just because." She has purpose, and that makes her even more evil - and thus a better antagonist.

"I have watched so many people I love die at your hands, Uther Pendragon. Now it is your turn." (Excalibur, Season 1 - Nimueh to Uther.)

The Great Dragon whom Uther imprisoned years ago beneath the castle is the narrator of the series and something of an enigma. He is the one who shows Merlin that his purpose is to protect Arthur at all costs and to get him to the throne of Camelot, but the Dragon's motives become increasingly suspect as the first season progresses. The question of whether or not he can be trusted adds a further element of suspense to the storyline, as he is often the only character strong enough or wise enough to help Merlin. It also makes him three-dimensional and allows for a contrast between himself and Merlin, between the Dragon's self-serving mindset and Merlin's self-sacrificing spirit. Had the screenwriters made the Dragon a purely good character, it would have had the double effect of making him flat and taking out a large portion of Merlin's moral struggles.

"Your destiny is to protect the young Pendragon until he claims his crown and, when he does, magic can be returned to the realm. Only then will I be free." (Le Morte d'Arthur, Season 1 - The Great Dragon to Merlin.)

Morgana, niece and ward of Uther Pendragon, is another difficult character whose true colors have yet to be revealed. Throughout the episodes she has had dreams in which she has glimpsed the future, making Gaius, who prescribes medicine for her nightmares, wonder whether she may have the same sort of magic that Merlin does. Though she is usually a sweet and goodhearted young woman, she has a darker side - fierce loves and hates, a quick and passionate temper, and a lack of guidance. She is unpredictable and has the capacity to turn into sorceress like Nimueh, and as her character and powers are slowly revealed, they give more force to the question of her future.

"I am never going back. These are my people. They are like me. I don't feel so alone here." (The Nightmare Begins, Season 2 - Morgana to Merlin.)

Guinevere, or Gwen, is Morgana's maidservant and friend and represents her polar opposite. Where Morgana is fiery, Gwen is subdued; where Morgana is sarcastic, Gwen is sweet; where Morgana flies into a passion at the hint of injustice, Gwen accepts her lot with resignation. She is loving and full of blessings for almost everyone; but like Morgana, Gwen has convictions and frequently voices them, though she generally regrets it afterward.

An interesting point that is brought out by the second season is that, though Morgana is the king's ward and the prettier of the two women, still it is Gwen's sweetness that attracts the men and makes her the subject of the age-old question in fiction, "Who is she going to marry?" Her natural openness and affection has torn her between two men, and I have yet to find out how the screenwriters will resolve it.

"Gwen is the most kind, loyal person you would ever meet and she's been more than a friend to all of us." (Lancelot and Guinevere, Season 2 - Morgana to Arthur.)

Lancelot, probably the third most well-known character of the Legend of King Arthur, is portrayed in the BBC series as a great swordsman, but not a nobleman and thus not eligible to serve as one of the Knights of Camelot. Unlike in most of the King Arthur tales, he is a humble man whose one goal is to serve the king of Camelot, and whose character is far nobler than any real nobleman's. He has actually only appeared in two episodes so far (once in Season 1 and then again in Season 2), but the screenwriters have established him so well in those that he is not "out of sight, out of mind"; he is a critical player, but exactly what part he will eventually play remains to be seen.

"For all my words, for all that I believed, I've come to nothing." (Lancelot and Guinevere, Season 2 - Lancelot to Guinevere.)

And this is the part where you wonder where Arthur and Merlin himself have gotten to in this list. However, they deserve a compare-and-contrast post of their own, as Dr. Watson did, so their character studies will come later.

John H. Watson, M.D.

Watson is underrated. Perhaps understandably so; after all, compared to the brilliant Holmes, Watson is hardly remarkable. But, then again, no one in Conan Doyle's novels is very remarkable when examined in the light of Sherlock Holmes (a fact of which that detective is keenly aware). Watson never fails to be startled by the minutiae of his friend's deductions, but is not quick enough to pick up on them himself, and his frequent inability to guess at the trail of Holmes' thoughts leaves many readers to conclude that he is a dunce.

Not so. Watson is no idiot, as he shows in The Hound of the Baskervilles, where he spends most of the book attempting to solve a mystery on his own; rather, he is the perfect foil for the eccentric genius of Sherlock Holmes. Whereas Holmes' talents lie in the realms of careful planning, plotting, and not a little deception, Watson is a man of action, generally ready with a pistol in his pocket to help his friend out of a tight spot. If not brilliant, he is brave, and never one to back out when the danger is high. His job is to fire at pygmies, throw smoke bombs inside rooms through open windows, and, most importantly, to do everything without asking questions or questioning Holmes' methods. As Holmes himself remarks in Hound, it is in the hour of action in which he turns to Watson for aid - and it is in the hour of action that Watson excels.

Holmes: "And when I raise my hand - so - you will throw into the room what I give you to throw, and will, at the same time, raise the cry of fire. You quite follow me?"
Watson: "Entirely.... I am to remain neutral, to get near the window, to watch you, and at the signal to throw in this object, then to raise the cry of fire, and to wait you at the corner of the street."
Holmes: "Precisely."
Watson: "Then you may entirely rely on me."

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia.)

Another point that is often missed is that only a character like Watson could be written as a loyal friend of a man like Sherlock Holmes. If Watson were as brilliant as Holmes, it would be unreasonable to think that the two would be friends, for their talents would lie in the same areas, they would clash, and it would ultimately diminish from the grandeur of Conan Doyle's masterpiece: Sherlock Holmes.

Watson is most important, however, in his capacity as a filter between Holmes and the reader. While readers may be disgusted with Watson for not always "catching on," this only shows that they don't realize how very much in the dark they would be if there were no character in the story to whom Holmes explained his logic. There are only two other options: first, that there be no explanation at all; or second, that Holmes' thought processes would be explained in narrative form rather than in dialogue. The first would alienate readers by making Holmes into an unapproachable, and incomprehensible, character, as, without an explanation of his conclusions, Conan Doyle's detective would seem absurd. Indeed, many of Holmes' seemingly random conclusions do seem absurd until he has languidly explained them to Watson.

As for the second, this means would make the prose tedious and parenthetical. Something along the lines of, "'You took the train back from the country this morning,' said Holmes. He knew this from the little splotch of mud on the threshold, which was not one of the five hundred samples known in the city of London and which naturally indicated that he had been out in the country. 'And you were late.' This, of course, came from the fact that the mud was rounded into the shape of the flat of Watson's shoe, which indicated that he had been sprinting." It is so much nicer to set out this information in dialogue form, rather than having the author feed it to the reader in such a way as to indicate the former's assumption that the latter is an idiot.

Instead of burdening his stories with either of these options, Conan Doyle created the character of John H. Watson, M.D. As an intrepid friend, supporting character, intelligent sidekick, and narrator of Holmes' cases, he remains a classic and oft-overlooked figure in the familiar mysteries of Sherlock Holmes.

(Maker of graphic unknown.)