Giving a Face to the Name

I was asked how I describe my characters without sounding like an episode of Cops, since I have them cast in my head. The short answer to that is that I don't. that's a super lame answer, I know.

I'm rubbish at descriptions. As a general rule, I'll only describe something if it's relevant. Like, I'll explain the layout of a room if it's going to affect the action in some way. When it comes to characters, well, how they look is rarely relevant.

I always thought that character descriptions should happen early on. In a novel length story, that would be in the first few pages, I guess. The idea being that you want to tell your readers how your characters look before something cements itself in their mind. But if you don't manage to fit it in, have you lost your chance? Is there a point where it's too late? I'm asking because I don't know.

Once upon a time, I actually did describe my characters. My second NaNo novel, from 2011, describes its main character, Zel Van Toren, thusly on page 3:

A few minutes later, she emerged, wearing black trousers and a dark grey short sleeved blouse. She carried the last item from the bundle, a thigh length black coat. Her hair, a murky dark red, was now clean and combed out. Years of neglect had left it tapering towards the ends, with the longest point reaching to a few inches above her knees.

It's a horrible, clunky description. Her companion, Ciarán MacClellan, on the other hand, is described on page 1 as being Irish, and on page 2 as having dark hair. And this is the sort of description I've started leaning toward. But why? Why couldn't I describe his bright blue eyes and crooked grin that remained despite all the shit he'd been through?

It's like I find something wrong with thinking about characters long enough to describe them. And so, unless it's somehow relevant to the plot, I just don't mention it. I've started realizing that basically no physical description is really relevant, so now no one gets described at all. In today's story, Rachael is implied to be about thirty, if you do the math, but gets no other description. At all. Martin is described as having tattoos on both arms, though the only one specifically mentioned is a bird on one hand. And these are only pointed out when Rachael notices them. The only thing we know about their height is that either he's tall enough or she's short enough that she stands on her toes to kiss him.

Would I like to provide a better picture of my characters? Absolutely. But I am by no means an expert in all this, and I have no idea how to do it with it sounding stupid. You either stop the story while you describe every detail of the character, or you try to work it in bit by bit. But there's always going to be something that will never fit in naturally.

Concerning things like a character's style of clothes, there is the above example where I described what she was wearing after bathing. When that character was introduced, she was in a prison, and so a big deal was made out of her getting new, clean clothes. But I hate doing that. I once read this really crappy story online somewhere where there was this girl, and everything she wore was explained in detail, down to the exact length of her skirt in inches. This happened any time she changed clothes. That's what I think of every time I consider describing what someone is wearing.

Long story short, I have no idea what I'm doing, so I just kill everyone before I have to describe them.

The Whys and Wherefores

You get a bonus post this week, because I want to get back to the story in progress for Friday, but I don't want to sit on this until next week. I received two questions, and I thought they were unrelated enough to each get their own post. This question was about two pages long so I've just picked out the pertinent parts.

"Do you set a guideline of musts or cannot's will not's do you ever think about the objective of these characters and where you want them to end up. … How do you pick the objective when you come up with a character or do you?"

I think characters always need to have some motivation or objective that drives their story arc. I also think that maybe I don't always know what it is when I first start out. Starting with last November's NaNo novel, I've really tried to outline my story more, so I'm not so much making it up as I go. As it turns out, outlining didn't really help all that much in the grand scheme of things, but it did force me to examine the goals of my main character a little more.

The main character of that story, Daniel Sheridan, had just been framed for an assassination, and his end objective was to clear his name. Simple enough. Along the way, he wanted to stay on the right side of the law as much as possible, so he couldn't, say, kill anyone, or steal anything. So he had to try to survive, on the run, while still remaining an upstanding citizen. Since he wanted to prove that he was innocent and not a criminal, he couldn't become a criminal in the process.

In general, I think most of my characters have at least some end goal. Usually there are subgoals along the way, because something has to drive the plot. Otherwise, random things happen, and characters just react to them without ever really trying to accomplish anything.

I guess I'm just going to give some examples of character objectives from my past scribblings:

• Unknown Soldier - a man wants to live up to the example set by his mythical hero
• To Hell and Back – a guy wants to rescue his friend from the Underworld
• Secrets of Sterling City - a kid wants to unravel the mystery surrounding the local mine
• Locking Up the Sun - a man with a superpower wants to be left alone, but in order for that to happen, he must first save the city
• The Edgelands - a man wants to find a way home from the alternate dimension he's fallen into
• The Midnight Carnival - a girl wants to escape the demonic circus she's trapped in
• Secrets and Thieves - an ensemble cast with a variety of goals:
• An orphan spoon thief wants to find his own past
• A teenage heiress wants to escape an arranged marriage
• A narcoleptic gunslinger wants to do some good with what he believes will be a short life
• A neo-Bedouin wants revenge for his murdered family
• And several others
• A Conspiracy of Ravens - the aforementioned frame-job wants to clear his name

And that's saying nothing of the antagonists of these stories. Even bad guys need motivations. They can't be doing it just for the evulz. That's just an unsatisfying way to go. The above listed stories aren't even all of the ones I have. There are several more where the objectives are not so clear, and it's more like "crazy things are happening, let's all try not to die." I mean, that's most of my plots anyway, but I try to have a little more than that.

I am by no means an expert of any kind. I'm just throwing words together and hoping something cool happens. But I am trying to be better. By having to justify things here, it's going to force me to try a little harder, and put a little more effort into things like plot, setting, and characterization. Hopefully I'll be able to produce something that people like and want to read.

As always, leave me comments, ask me questions. I will probably answer any open-ended questions in future posts, so if you want me to ramble on about something, ask away. We'll be returning to our prison train adventure on Friday.

Everything for Everything in a Place

Once again, I'm going to be answering a question, and butchering a well known phrase in the process. This week's question is: 

"How do you set the tone for the places that appear in your story do billboards pop up saying enchanted forest or scary circus in Chicago rainy streets of Seattle or do you name them after you see the story. What comes first the city or just a random location and you build from there?" 

Well, over the years I've had a variety of peculiar locations. There was a city built up on the side of a mountain, a town that fell through a rift in the universe, and an underworld that included parts of basically every mythology I could find. On top of those, I've had ordinary cities where less than ordinary things happen.  

What all of these places have in common is that I made them up to suit the needs of the story. As a general rule, I don't use real places because sometimes I need to have a prison on a cliff by a lake, and Seattle or Chicago just aren't delivering.  

An interesting aversion to this is that characters are nearly always from real places. There is a long-running joke that one character will always be from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, going back to a script based on a short story, based on a Breaking Benjamin song. I haven't used that in a little while, but there's always the potential to bring it back.  

The point is, if my plot needs a creepy town in which to take place, I'll create a creepy town. If I need a city large enough to have an arena and host a gubernatorial rally, I'll create that too. A lot of them are based on or inspired by actual places. This is helpful for things like basic layout, population, and climate. I'll just picture it in my head, rearrange some things, and give it a new name.  

I'm now going to tell you the story of a particular town, in a particular story, because it's kind of a weird tale. Above, I mentioned a town that fell through a rift in the universe. This town was called McClellan, and it really existed. Apparently. At some point. It appears in my 1922 atlas, and nowhere else. Situated somewhere between Coeur d'Alene and Post Falls, Idaho, it seems to have dropped not only off the map, but also off the world. So who is to say that it didn't fall through a rift to another dimension?  

I actually turn to that atlas a lot to find town names that are no longer used, because half the time I'm terrible at naming places. I get so caught up in finding the perfect name that it just goes unnamed for half the story. I'll put in a little placeholder like [city] that I can replace later on.  

I feel like I'm really getting off track here. I guess the point of all of this is that I usually created a town, or a city, or whatever, to suit my needs. Although, the "creepy circus" mentioned in the question was the setting for my attempt at a Young Adult novel, The Midnight Carnival, and I definitely had that setting in mind before I figured out what the hell that story was about. It's about a circus, as it turns out, not a carnival, but the name sounded better that way.  

Does that answer the question? At all?  

As always, feel free to ask questions about any part of this madness I call a writing process. Yes, all of you. You can post anonymously or just with a name if you don't want to log in anywhere. 

Chicken or Fish

I was asked a question last week, and so I'm going to take this post to answer it.

"My question is this do you come up with story first or the character or a combination or what? What inspires the story more the character or the story?"

This is what I like to call a "chicken or fish" question.¹ Do the characters create the plot, or does the plot define the characters?

The short answer to this is that it depends.

The story I'm working on right now started with a vague idea for a plot, since I had a prompt to go off of. I then had to figure out what kind of character would inhabit this story. Now they're sort of evolving side by side. I realize something new about the character (stay tuned for Friday) and that leads to some new element of plot.

I think I usually start with a plot and then work in the characters. I have lists and lists of plot ideas, dialogue   fragments, you name it. Typically I'll take one of those and then figure out the whos and whys. 2015's NaNo novel, A Conspiracy of Ravens, started with the idea that some guy would be framed for an assassination and find himself caught up in some conspiracy. From there I had to figure out who this guy was and how he got mixed up in this. And then there was the blogger, who was supposed to be a bit part who would be posting stuff in the background, maybe aiding our hero. Then he just invited himself in, making himself at home until he got promoted to deuteragonist (secondary main character). This changed the course of the story entirely.

But sometimes, I start with some characters. The most notable character-first story is my NaNo from 2014, Secrets and Thieves. I had the general idea of "post-apocalyptic adventure," but there was no set plot until I brought in all these characters and figured out what they were bringing to the table. Two characters, a renowned spoon thief and a polio-stricken inventor, both originated in other stories before I transplanted them into this one. They were joined by a teenager running from an arranged marriage, a narcoleptic gunslinger, a small-town physician, and a man seeking revenge for his murdered family. I took all of these people, threw them together, and let them work out where their story would lead.

Either way, once I have a vague plot and some characters, they will play off of each other as the story builds.  Sometimes, I think I have a story figured out, but then a character comes in and informs me that the plot is going to go in a totally different direction. There have been times that I'll be writing along, and I'll be like, "Holy shit!" as something completely unexpected happens. You'd think I'd know what was going to happen, but half the time I'm as surprised as everyone else. And the plot can also change the characters. Sometimes, because something has to happen, it makes me realize something new about the characters. The whole process is very fluid.

I hope that answered the question without going off the rails too much.

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^{1. "Don't you mean 'chicken or egg'?" Yes. But also no. It's a long story.↩}