Dramatis Personae - Tempus Regina

Recently I was looking over my Dramatis Personae for The White Sail's Shaking, written back in March of last year.  It was amusing to see how the characters have since developed, not simply in the usual way of story arcs and all that, but from how I imagined they would be to what they truly were.  It usually takes me a little while to really grasp my characters - somewhere around the 50,000 word mark - and after I've grasped them, I have to go back and correct all misrepresentations in the beginning of the story. 

Yet as I venture into the strange, strange world of Tempus Regina, I thought I would do a Dramatis Personae post for it.  I don't expect this to be accurate to the finished product, or even the 50,000 word product; but it will give everyone a tiny glimpse into the story, and I'll be interested, sometime down the road, to look back and see the differences. 

tempus regina

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Regina

Regina has appeared on Scribbles a few times, but not being of a very open or sociable turn of mind, she hasn't featured much.  She has a spotty history; she can still remember (when she cares to) the time before she, her mother, and her brother moved to London from the country, but since then her life has been full of fog and dirt and hard labour.  Nine years of taking care of her mentally-ill brother on her own have lent ice to her personality, and no matter how turbulent the waters may grow underneath, she keeps that ice intact.  Not even being hurled through time, tangling with history, and falling in with an assassin can break her of that.

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The Assassin

The Assassin has also featured, with some success (little wonder: would you look at that guy's cheeky grin?).  He's a nebulous fellow, with a past about as spotty as Regina's and a present that exists primarily in the dark.  He dabbles in a little bit of everything - a little alchemy, a little astrology, a little assassination.  For a price, he agrees to help Regina find the answer to the riddle of the pocket watch, and thus hurls himself headlong into a hunt that will muddle past, present, and future and change the face of his world.

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Morgaine

Morgaine is something wholly different from either Regina or the Assassin, but her path runs into theirs, and after that there is no separating them.  She is quiet, not with Regina's stoniness, but with the air of someone who has learned to hold her tongue and prick her ears.  As tied to Britain as an oak tree, there yet remains something in her that has nothing to do with that world at all.  She feels it rather than knows it, and the knowledge of her own self, somehow entangled with the life of a woman from the future, shakes her foundations.

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A Fisherman

Living in a hut at the edge of a river, this man passes for a sort of strange fisherman - only, he fishes for knowledge and not trout.  Like the Assassin, he keeps to his shadows; he is the man above the stage, not necessarily making the puppets move, but watching them as they do and perhaps giving the strings an occasional tug.  He knows more about the Dragon watch than the other three characters put together, but there remains a large gap in his information; and until he has filled it, he keeps back and watches the puppets move.  When he comes out, though, I do believe he'll come out with a roar.

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.