Churning Out People

Named characters. You remember them. You're supposed to. That's why they're named.

I see a tendency in myself to afford some amount of backstory and personality to every named character I create, which can become a really cumbersome problem, since I name most everyone.

I'm a world builder. I'm trying to create a functioning world completely filled with real people, and I can't do that because I don't have the time or organizational skills to keep up with them all. Instead, I have to decide whether to leave unimportant characters nameless or simply not expand on them. Finding the balance between character development and relevance is critical in leaving the reader interested.

I think I've found a good formula: recurring characters.

The world is a big one and full of people, but not too big, and there aren't too many people. Instead of going into serious detail on a person's backstory, I've decided to have them pop up in other books, in everything from major roles, to small cameos, to the mention of their name. It fleshes them out a great deal because the reader thinks, 'Oh, it's that guy!' and it allows the character more development in a significant and meaningful way.

Spoiler Alert

In my first book, Jon Norsander, there's a guy, a lion, named Lt. Steele. He's shown in the flashback of a major character, but appears in all of two paragraphs. In other stories and series of letters, other characters mention him, and he even authors a few notes of his own. Later, he pops up as a major player in other people's lives before getting a starring role where he assassinates his own king in the middle of a full court.

End Spoilers

I'm trying to flesh characters out only as much as they need to be. I'm not Ernest Hemingway, but I'm not Herman Melville, either. It's been a serious trial for me to bring people to life in the appropriate way, but I think I've found a good balance.

What author do you think had the best character development and pacing? Why? I'd like to learn from the great works of others to help me improve my writing going forward.

With that in mind, here's to the future.

Realistic Relationships

So, writing relationships is hard.

No. Writing relationships is easy.

Writing real, functional relationships is impossible because no sane person can account for the thoughts and desires of two different people. We try to, and everything we try is only a cheap imitation. We come close, or close enough. Some people can write very believable relationships between two fictional characters, but not a single one is perfect because a fictional character can't be thought out fully enough to make them real.

When writing a relationship, you do so to establish what each character is and does. You can learn a lot about a person by seeing what they do, but you learn a lot more by seeing how they act around and toward people AND how they act toward their self.

John took his sword in-hand and cut down seventy-three of his foes.

John saw his friends from a distance, but avoided them by taking a side path. It wasn't that he didn't want to see them. He simply didn't want them to see him.

John looked at himself in the mirror. It was a perfect reflection, and he hated it. He wanted to smash the mirror, but instead set it calmly on the dresser.

In each instance, we see John act and interact (or fail to interact) with objects (the sword, his enemies), people (his friends), and himself (the mirror) and each gives us a different kind of information regarding who he is. His interaction with obstacles shows us his physical capabilities. His interaction with the people and objects around him shows us his personality. And his actions toward himself show us how he feels internally without necessarily being able to read his every thought.

Believability comes from consistency in developing a character, making sure they do the same things in certain situations, and giving depth to them, revealing their character in layers via increasingly complex situations of the same type. Making Eryn Thompson, the Arbiter, into a believable character will be a combination of being able to see his actions and read his mind, but the characters around him are the challenge. Making them believable will rely on interactions with each other and with Eryn, using him, really, as a blank canvas upon which to paint the people around him.

Because we will be seeing everything from Eryn's viewpoint, it will be other characters we're getting to know. Eryn already knows who he is, and he will remind us fairly constantly, but we'll be learning about the people on his journey through Terra the same way he did, by seeing how they work and interact around him.

The hope is that you'll learn about people in the book the same way you learn about them in real life, and I think that will add realism and interest.

Here's hoping.

And here's to the future. :)

Dissatisfaction- A Part of Me

In "The Arbiter", one of the running themes of the book is the main character's feeling of dissatisfaction with his own life and his inability to be the person that he wishes he could.  For Eryn, Terra is a world of escapism.  He's quick to assimilate in the world not because he's particularly suited for it or finds it appealing, but because it allows him the opportunity to reinvent himself.  By and large, he hates the lack of technology, the poorer food availability, decreased hygiene and rough life that he's forced to endure, but he manages to quite willingly, and he reflects something that I see in myself.

I know I'm not any sort of hero.  There's nothing heroic about me.  That's why I enjoy writing for Terra so much.  By building a fantastic world filled with strange people, magical creatures, and interesting places, they sort of allow me to live through them in a vicarious manner, and I get to do all the impossible things that I wish I could through them.  I think a lot of people have a dissatisfaction with life that they're unwilling to explore out of discomfort and wish that they could experience more.  I try to capture that longing in Eryn, who goes so far as to reinvent the person he is to more quickly leave his old life behind.

In his own world, he worked the service desk at a technology store.  Reaching the twilight years of his young life, he realizes that none of his dreams came true and he's beginning to assimilate into the "drone" status that we all fear slipping into.  When the Watchers offer him a chance to change everything and become the person he wishes he was, he's more than happy to take them up on it.  Without ruining too much for you, he's a firm believer in the adage "I would rather be a tiger for a day than a sheep for a lifetime."

That's who Eryn, the hero, is, and I'm glad to have created something honest of myself in him.  I hope the four of you enjoyed learning a bit more about him and continue keeping up.

Here's to the future!

The Arbiter- It's Good to Be Back

Hello there, the five of you who read my blog posts.  It's been a while since I've been around, but we finally got our project finished and, for a minute, I'm able to redirect my attention toward writing books and such.  With the direction everything's gone in, I completely lost focus on what I was working on before.  Bearing that in mind, I started work on a book that is both new and very old.  It's new because I'm writing it now.  It's old because it's the first story I'd ever created.

A while back, I finished the first draft of "Atreleise", the first book of Terra that I completely finished.  It has my favorite characters, settings, and, in my opinion, most memorable story, but you only get to see half of it.  Near the end of the book, the main character, Atreleise, reunites with his initial companion, Eryn (the Arbiter), who has acquired quite a number of his own companions.  I never explain where these people come from or what their stories are, but it's implied that they experienced an adventure all their own.

That is the premise of "The Arbiter".  It follows Eryn from the time he enters Terra all the way to the end of the story seen in Atreleise.  When I initially wrote it, the story was all over the place and it was written in a third-person omniscient voice that went along as the tale did.  In this new version, we have Eryn as the narrator, talking about the experience as if he's watching the movie of his life.  He relates exactly what he sees and hears while also trying to share what he must have been thinking and feeling, as he can't clearly remember such things.

I took the cue from Hemingway, whom I rekindled a flame for after rereading "The Sun Also Rises", and while I don't copy his style, I certainly take some things from it.  Eryn admits that he's not an author and isn't trying to be one.  He relates his story concisely, with no real verbosity and little in the way of purple prose.  He's himself in the future looking back on his past actions, so he often regards himself with disdain as we go along with him, ashamed of some of the ways he felt and acted.

I've never done anything like this before, so I'm hoping the dream comes to fruition.  I'll be posting little tidbits about the characters, story, and setting here and there, so keep an eye out.

Until then, thanks for reading, and here's to the future!

In Absentia

Sorry guys- I've been gone for a while.  Working on a book unrelated to the Terra series for a little while and also helping develop a video game for the iPhone and Android, so it's been busy.  I'll be sure to restart the thread once my audience grows and I get back into the vein of fantasy adventure.

Until then, cheers!

Making People Talk

Without a doubt, the toughest part of writing is and has always been good characterization.  Even if the setting, the plot, themes, morality, love, the power of friendship, and every fable that Aesop could muster all gathered together in perfect timing and harmonized beautifully, without interesting, believable characters there is no book.

I think anyone who pressed their ear against the door while I was going through scenes would think I'm crazy.  To get the best accents and most organic dialogue that I can, I speak out loud to myself as different characters and type down the first things that I think to say.  For me, whatever I said naturally after getting into character is what that character would have said were they real.  Of course, if it seems asinine or poorly scripted in retrospect, I'll change it.  But, for the most part, it works like a charm.

I seem to have the easiest time writing secondary and background characters and making the "extras" of the world come to life.  I've never had a problem making the hero's friends or the villain's trusted lieutenants interesting or unique.  It's always the main two or three that give the most issue.

For the hero, he can't be perfect because he's only a person, but he has to be likable.  The villain also can't be a complete monster because then there is no empathy from the reader for him, no remorse for his death and no greater thought beyond triumph and "Yay, we beat Sauron."  I don't want that from my works at all.  Ever.  And I never want my readers to feel that.

Characterizing the hero has always been on the back burner for me.  Sure, he's the main character, but I'm often less interested in the good he's doing than the bad.  He must be riddled with flaws and often unwilling to admit it, but I also have to make him distinct from the last hero.  What is he like and what do people like about him?  What stops him from being perfect, how does it affect his relationships, and how does that, in turn, affect the story?  Perfect heroes are boring.

For myself, it's the villain.  It was always the villain.  The plot is made because a hero is needed.  Heroes are generally a reactive force to a proactive villain.  In essence, the bad guy needs to do something evil in order for the good guys to need to exist.  It is for this reason that I've always preferred villains and enjoy creating them the most.  They are what makes a hero relevant at all.

I absolutely hate when a villain wants to just "conquer the world" because he wants to.  There is no lamer reason for seeking power than "just because".  He/she should have a reason for doing so, a screwed up past, or some great moral dilemma that has turned them down the wrong path.  Sometimes, the hero and villain are distinguishable only because the author chose one of them as their point of view.  Those are my favorites.

When I write, I try to make the villain of one book the hero of another.  If you guys want, I will one day write their books as well.  Here's hoping I do well enough for it.  Thanks for reading.

Here's to the future.

Short Story Briefing- Pun Intended

Once more, I've hit the creative roadblock that always happens during every book I write.  I've built the world, named its inhabitants, and identified where they belong within the over-arching story.  When I write and think of writing, I use a lot of music as an aid and it puts images in my mind of moments that would be really cool to explore in a book.  Unfortunately, this leaves my characters doing a lot of really cool things with no development in the middle.  If I wanted that, I'd write new scripts for He-Man, or I'd recreate new Conan comics, but I want my work to have more substance.

The latent issue is coming up with realistic events that tie these "action scenes" together in a way that leaves you emotionally-impacted when whatever happens happens.  Sure, it's sad to see someone getting crushed under the heel of a hundred-foot-tall monster called the Monolith, but it's a lot more side when you have two-hundred thirty pages invested in them.  Ultimately, I'm trying to create the believable characters that react the way I imagine they would in certain situations.  I want my books to read like really good movies.  That, I'm finding, is seriously hard.

And so I go to the short story.

In every tale is a cast of characters somewhere between major and tertiary, but none of them fill the place of "hero" except one.  You can develop them in a book as much as you want, but the reader will normally root (if you've written them properly) for your main character.  The other guys are interesting for sure, just not enough to warrant a fifty-thousand-word lexicon of their goings on.

Instead of giving them their own full novels, I've decided to write snippets, little slices of their lives and events that ultimately bring about the end of the entire saga.  With these, I can talk about any event that I want, flesh out whomever I want, and make moments as cool, crazy, or interesting as I want because I don't have to worry about tying them together with a lot of "Middle-Earth walking".  I get to kill two birds with one stone: eliminating my roadblock, and writing constructively until I can focus on the novel again.

I'm working on a few short stories that I'll tie together in compilations, but in the meantime I'd like some feedback from you guys, either on here or via e-mail, for suggestions about what you'd like to see or whom you'd like to hear about.  After all, the story doesn't go forward without you.

Here's to the future!