Take One Lump or Two?

Day five of Lerowen's challenge was on the least favorite of your own characters, and I gave the award to Marta because of how difficult I find her to write. However, since she is a necessary part of the plot, I am forced to overcome that and make myself acquainted with her lest she become flat and annoying. Every character who is mildly important to the plot must be just that - a character, an individual person with a life that readers can tell stretches before and beyond the scope of the novel itself. Sometimes this develops of its own accord. Sometimes (to twist Jack London's quote) we must go after it with a stick.

tea or coffee?

Difficult characters plague just about every writer, and there are a dozen ways to beat or coax them into submission; they do not, however, all work universally, so this is trial-and-error. The very first thing to do if you wish to get to know the character is to ask them an important question as soon as they drop by to visit: "Tea or coffee?" My tongue is not wholly in my cheek; it's amazing what such a small and seemingly inconsequential choice can say about a character. Tea and coffee illustrate two ends of a personality spectrum as surely as do the terms "introvert" and "extrovert," and they turn up more often in real life. I frequently hear people lovingly discussing the merits of particular coffee grounds and crying out in horror at the idea of drinking decaffeinated coffee, while others shrug and say, "Coffee's all very well, but tea is such a homey thing. I must have my tea." An illustration that comes very easily to me would be the two main characters of Wordcrafter, who are opposites on this point as on so many others.

Justin: Justin is the embodiment of tea, really. He is withdrawn, shy, and generally sedate, finding comfort within himself rather than from the people around him. He's the sort of steady chap who will gladly sit by you through a rainy day and need nothing for himself, the sort who can comfort and encourage in any situation.

Ethan: Ethan's coffee. He tried this whole "tea" thing and thought it a very strange, watery concoction, but the smooth, bitter strength of coffee had him from the first. Ethan is more brilliant and assertive than Justin, confident and easy and perhaps a little proud. He is more striking, or, for lack of a better term, more flavorful. When you want someone to wake you up and dazzle you, you head for Ethan.

These are extremes, but they serve to make the point of the powerful indicator a choice between tea and coffee can be. So invite your character in, put him or her at the kitchen table, and ask the first question: "Tea or coffee?"

take one lump or two?

The kettle's whistling or the coffee is percolating, and you've brought out the sugar cubes and the cream. But there are half-a-dozen ways a person can take their tea or coffee, and depending on taste buds and personality, a character could take theirs black or with cream, with one lump of sugar or two (or three!), with honey mixed in or with a sprig of mint on top. Jenny's character Rhodri, for instance, takes his tea black and could not be induced to take it any other way. If forced to take tea my character Tip would likely also have it black, but he would prefer straight, strong, black-as-a-bat's-wing coffee. That's the way he is: plain and blunt, lacking any frills or tact. Charlie Bent would have tea with two sugar lumps...and, maybe, if you turned your back long enough (but watched him in the side of a tea pot), he would take another and eat it plain. And that's the way he is: smooth and easy, the perfect gentleman while you watch him, but with his own quirks that he can't quite resist when your back is to him.

How a person drinks his coffee or tea is as significant as which he drinks. It makes a world of difference whether he asks for tea or whether he chooses coffee, and then the cream and sugar provide some details for his personality. To say that Ethan is a coffee-person is not quite enough; does he take it black? No, he takes it with cream to make it go down easier. Justin likes his tea without milk so that it stays clear and amber, but he puts in just a little sugar after it has cooled so that he can watch the beads in the bottom of the cup. These are the little things, not necessarily important if you take them by themselves, but offering further glimpses into the personality of the character if you look hard enough.

Careful observation, my dear Watson, is everything.

Day Five {Least Favorite}

day five: the least favorite character you've written

(This is a bit like the Razzie Award, isn't it? I don't know that I would want the distinction of Worst Character.)

When on day one I struggled to produce a favorite character, I was looking over a cast of characters whom I dearly love and trying to pick out one - at most two - who I could tentatively call my "favorite." Like most writers, I even take pleasure in my villains. Christopher of The Soldier's Cross was indeed less fun to write than Jamie of Wordcrafter or Lewis of The White Sail's Shaking, but still I know him and he belongs to me, so I can be pleased with him. No, none of my villains can step in to fill this role.

I have had difficult characters in all my works so far, with the possible exception of Wordcrafter. In fact, I've discovered that I have the most trouble with female characters. Jamie and Copper, the two women of Wordcrafter, came with surprising ease to me, however, and so I would have to turn to either Fiona (The Soldier's Cross) or Marta Rais (The White Sail's Shaking). But I don't even remember writing Fiona (ah, the bliss of forgetfulness), so I would have to say that currently my least favorite character is

Marta Rais

Marta is the other main character of White Sail's. The daughter of a Syracusan actress and a British seaman, Marta is orphaned at seventeen when her mother dies of an illness and her father is reportedly killed in an engagement with a French corvette. Her survival depends on either reaching England and, hopefully, her father's relatives, or remaining in Syracuse and going to work in a theatre. She refuses to do the latter and turns all her energies toward getting to Britain, but by a twist of Providence she finds herself on an American schooner heading to a war with the Barbary states instead of a British merchant bound for England.

Marta is a hard character to write because she is a woman in a man's world, which means I have to show her vulnerability while still trying to convey her strength of character. I had the same trouble with Fiona. Women weren't meant to be running here and there without anyone to protect them, and so it is difficult to feel and write the emotions of a girl who finds herself in a situation such as this. She can't be crying all the time (Tip would go crazy, poor fellow) but neither can I pretend that she would be as cool and collected as a man when she has just been dumped into a world entirely foreign to her. There has to be a balance, and it's a difficult one to find.

Although I am 90,000 words into my novel, most of the sections that are to be from Marta's perspective have yet to be written because she is still largely an unknown. I suspect, however, that by the time I reach the final page of White Sail's I will be as fond of Marta as of the other characters, and once again I'll have no reply when someone asks me who my least favorite character is. Which is fine with me.