Bring out the Box (If you need to)

When you start up with a story, you often begin with a certain character in mind.  However, other times, you focus on the plot first, then put in characters.  For me, it is often difficult to come to grips with a character at that point, since he will be simply another actor.  It takes time to develop a personality from nothing, so it’s especially problematic in short stories.

To combat this, I like to put my characters into personality archetypes and work from there in order to build up to more solid characters.  Otherwise they simply drift along with the story, never really sticking.

As a base, I sometimes just come up with something that fits the role (i.e. a rebellious teenager in a horror story), and other times I use one of the archetypes of several personality tests, like the Myers-Briggs.

Archetypes are usually bad because they put your character into a box and leave him there and then you have a character who is not developing, and a cliché.  So the important part of picking an archetype is to build from it, not just lean on it for support.  It’s a lot like structure in stories.

If you can make a character without archetypes, do so immediately and joyfully.  If, however, you struggle to get a solid mass from your collection of words, consider picking a base, a structure, to help you build them up.

Using archetypes also allows you to deviate easily (since you know exactly who your character is—at least in the beginning) and therefore surprise readers convincingly.

Like adverbs, archetypes should be avoided if possible (except perhaps with minor characters that have two lines of dialogue), but used if necessary.  It is especially useful when there are multiple characters in order to differentiate between them and make them memorable, as Orson Scott Card did in Speaker for the Dead.

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From a Different Perspective

People (myself included) often have problems writing from the point of view of the opposite gender, and with good reason.

Men and women are wired differently and therefore think differently.  In the most basic terms, men think logically and women think empathetically.

Neither of these two types (called male and female brains) is exclusive to either men or women, but they do tend to be generally associated with their respective genders.

Male brains are wired to try and fix things and figure out logical solutions to problems.  Female brains are adept at sensing other people’s feelings (which came in handy when they needed to figure out what a baby needed, as it cannot talk) and they excel at languages.

While men seem to isolate language skills in the dominant (usually left) side of the brain, women are usually able to draw those skills from both sides, resulting in a better understanding and usage of language.  That is one of the reasons why men tend to speak less than women (according to BBC UK, men speak average 7000 words a day while women speak 20000).  Men tend to communicate more through actions (maybe it has something to do with the fact that women can pick up on their feelings).

A simple way of saying it is this:  “There are people people, and things people.” (William D. Hamilton)

There is an extreme of each side of the spectrum, i.e. an extreme male brain and an extreme female brain.

Autism is, according to Simon Baron-Cohen, an extreme male brain.  People who have it tend to see everything as ‘things’ instead of the people they are.  Thus, they view people not as thinking and feeling humans, but rather as machines or systems that can be analysed and understood.  It is also interesting to note that eighty per cent of autistics are male.

On the other hand, an extreme female brain, according to Bernard Crespi and Christopher Badcock, is Schizophrenia.  They see minds and people in everything.  They hear voices where there are none and believe people are conspiring against them when no one is.

Using all this information, one could perhaps get a better perspective of the opposite gender in order to write a convincing character.

For those interested in the differences between male and female brains, here is an article.  An article about the extreme male and female brains is here.  Finally, see this post (from Writer’s Digest site) that explains a bit about writing from the male perspective.

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The Myers-Briggs Personality Types

The Myers-Briggs Type indicator was originally derived by Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers.  In turn, they used Carl Jung’s writings in the 1921 book Psychological Types.

These days, it is used to determine what kind of psychological preferences someone has.  It was originally used to determine what types of jobs women in World War II could do best and most comfortably, but this was later rebuffed and now it is used only as an indicator for personality.

There are 16 types, denominated by a combination of four letters:

Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I), Sensing (S) or Intuition (N), Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), and Judgement (J) or Perception (P).

Every person is dominant on one side of the four scales and the combination of dominant traits then determines the personality type.

Extraversion or Introversion

People who lean to extraversion focuses on the outside world; things, people, actions.  Those who lean to introversion channels their focus inward, reflecting, ideas and beliefs.

Sensing or Intuition

Those with dominance in sensing prefer to deal with facts, details and things that are certain; they trust information gotten from their 5 senses.  Those who lean toward intuition like to add meaning to information and find things that aren’t obvious; they listen to their inner voice and trust insight.

Thinking or Feeling

Those who prefer thinking make decisions by using objective logic and an analytical approach, while those who prefer feeling look to their values, the needs of themselves and the other people and beliefs.

Judgement or Perception

Those who prefer judgement want their lives to be stable and decided while those who prefer perception want flexibility and new options.

Each in combination forms a unique personality type.  A free test is available here.

I find it useful to divide my characters into personality types if I struggle to differentiate between them.  I use it as a base to work from, giving me a clearer image of who this person is.

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The Different Masks We Wear

In the introduction of the author’s definitive edition of Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card said something that is very true that I never really implemented in my own fiction.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that every person has different “voices” they use when talking to different people.  They change themselves (even if it’s only slightly) to fit in the interaction in which they take part.  Essentially, we each have multiple personas; one for each relationship we have (including strangers).

If you look at the psychology of it, I’d guess that it has to do with our need to fit in.  Humans are social by nature.  If you are in a group of people, or even just in the company of one person, you want the other party to accept you.  Your mannerisms, attitude and the like changes to something that you believe will cause them to include you.  Ergo, we have a collection of masks hidden in our psyche, and we swop them continually in order to fit the different situations/contexts we find ourselves in.

If you apply this to characters in a story, it is obvious that for every relationship, you’re going to have to develop a persona for your character.  If there are three characters in a story, you’re going to need four personas for every character—one for each relationship.  One and two, two and three, one and three and when they’re all together.

While this is probably going to be a lot of hard work (especially if you have a lot of characters), I think it’ll add a depth to your character that you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise.  And you’ll have a lot of fun doing it.

On another note, we, as writers, have another mask.  It’s the persona we assume when we write things down.  The smart people call this voice.  It’s sort of like a public mask, the one we put on when we speak to the world.  The question is this:  Will you craft a porcelain mask, or go out in public with a cardboard face?

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Finding the Human

I liked the idea of having a series' post on Mondays, but since my story crafting is over, I'll have to think of a new thing to do. Meanwhile, here is a filler.

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When I first started writing, my characters were very flat and unnatural.  I quickly learned that they needed to be human, i.e. weaknesses etc.

However, with that came a stream of characters that share a common problem with (too many) characters in fiction I’ve seen.  A single flaw.

I made characters with good intentions and strong senses of justice.  They were pseudo invincible and quite frankly, close to perfect.  But I inserted a single flaw to make them human.  I inserted a little event into his past and there he was, now afraid of the dark.

Mood made a post where he (unrelatedly) used an example of Indiana Jones being afraid of snakes, and that (when regarded in isolation from the rest of the story) served as a perfect example.  Just to make him more human and less invincible.  Using it as an obstacle later on, when he is trapped with a thousand snakes causes me to overlook this.

Misha Gericke’s post about clichés mentioned a jock that secretly plays piano.  Again, a fine example.  Using a little quirk to try and MAKE a character more human.

As with physical quirks (such as the twirling of hair when nervous), you can easily centre so much attention on the quirk/flaw that you define your character by it.

Humans are insanely complicated, so by simplifying them to a personality quirk, you’re essentially dehumanising them.

Every decision we make is a vast series of neurons firing in our brains.  We take in the information around us, compare it to the information we have already stored and then we choose.  Thus, every decision is a gateway to finding the human in your character.  Instead of relying on a fear of snakes, Indiana Jones is made human by the decisions he makes.  At one point, he chooses (after some coercion) to leave behind a treasure in order to get out alive.  It speaks a lot about who is, without relying on quirks.

I recently read Wilbur Smith’s River God, and the protagonist, Taita, is a genius of many measures.  He is a good person and loyal to his master and friends.  However, he is constantly lying and hiding the truth from those same people in order to help them or someone else.  He often runs from problems and avoids conflict.  All these things make him a remarkable person, but nonetheless human.

Humans are central in most stories.  Characters can’t be made human by flaws.  Bad decisions make characters human.  Quirks and flaws are only extras.

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Finding Voice

Today, I want to touch the subject of voice. Not long ago, I finished Dean Koontz’s What the Night Knows. While reading it, I couldn’t help but notice the unique voice that each character, done in third-person limited POV, had. The use of words and just the general style of the sentences identified each character so that I could pretty accurately identify a character without seeing his or her name.

Normally when you hear ‘voice’, you think of the author’s identifiable writing style that made it possible for people to divine that Richard Bachman was in fact Stephen King. (If you find the possibility of identification through voice interesting, check out the experiment at Literary Lab here, and the conclusions here.)

But each character in a story has their own voice (or should have their own voice) and when you’re writing first person or third person limited, that voice has to come through the text.

How do you construct a unique voice? Look at these excerpts from What the Night Knows:

1) The previous night, his nerves had been fried because of the freaking dream in which the big hands had tried to tear off his face and gouge out his eyes, those fingertips as big as soup spoons. He was a little disappointed in himself that he’d been rattled by a moronic dream.

2) For a moment, this curious uneasiness threatened to disorient him – until he understood the cause of it. Together, the family was five targets clustered, therefore vulnerable to quick annihilation. Although he had no incontestable proof that any enemy waged war against him, he was thinking like a man embattled.

Do you see the difference? Though there are no names in the passages, the two voices clearly defines them. Can you guess which is the father and which is the son?

Vocabulary can often suggest a voice – a professor is apt to use bigger words than, say, a kid in high school. Another is the way in which they compare things (e.g. soup spoons and a war). The way in which their train of thought moves.

It is important to find your voice, but don’t forget to find your characters’ voices too.

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