Choose Your Camp: The Fine Line of Iconic Characters

Camp NaNoWriMo begins in April! In the spirit of friendly camp competition (and inspired by one of our favorite scenes in Scott Westerfeld’s Afterworlds), we asked our friends to Choose Your Camp. Today, Christina Dalcher, author and Wrimo, shares how she learned to walk the tightrope of realistic, yet quirky characters:Now is the time to confess: I’m head over heels in love with another man. 

His name? Jack Reacher.

I don’t actually want to date the guy. But man, that character. The loner with the noblesse-oblige complex, the no-phone-no-suitcase-no-attachments idiosyncrasies, the mathematical obsessions. Reacher is at once Everyman and No Man, and his creator, Lee Child, got it all right when he made this character. 

Are Child’s plots interesting? Yes. Are his settings unique? Sometimes—it depends what you think of as unique. Plenty of Reacher’s adventures happen in small-town Anywheresville, USA. What stands out in every single book, literally heads above the rest, is that six-and-a-half-foot-tall man who won’t take nonsense from anyone.

Reacher, wonderful as he is, has serious competition from the woman who lives in my head: Dr. Daniela (Danny) Jones. She’s my main girl and my favorite character. Why? Because Danny’s got exactly that: character…

She’s tough and clever, cynical with a soft side, and resourceful as all get out. Danny’s a linguist, a former FBI Special Agent trainee, a waitress, and an orphan. Sometimes I’m kind to her. Other times, I put her in nasty situations. (That’s okay—I built Danny to be able to get out of them mostly unscathed.) 

Wherever I take her and whatever happens, I know my girl will be the center of the story.

Whether I’m reading or writing, it’s all about character. You can come up with an intricate plot and most out-of-this-world world, and still fail. How? By not creating a character your readers want to root for. 

Imagine, if you will, the following scenarios from well-known novels:

Oliver Twist:Fagan is a kindly old soul who loves helping young orphans.

The Silence of the Lambs:Clarisse Starling is a seasoned FBI agent with no fears or emotional baggage.

See what I mean? I’ve just taken iconic characters and made them un-iconic. Normal. Boring.

Before I start writing, before I consider what’s going to happen where, I think about who stuff is going to happen to. 

Do I struggle? Sure. Mostly because I worry about being heavy-handed with characters. I want to give them eccentricities and habits and layers; I want to make them strong and larger-than-life. But doing that without alienating a reader by creating someone too quirky or super-human requires some amount of literary tightrope walking. Tip over too far in one direction, and both you and your character will fall flat. Remember:

Get physical, but don’t overdo it

Readers want a sense of what your story people look like, but that doesn’t mean you need to hit them over the head with every detail down to the length of your character’s eyelashes. Sketch in broad strokes, and leave some to the imagination.

Give them background without an info dump

Your characters’ experiences make them complete people and motivate choices and actions. So give us some clues from the past. Was your MC the last person picked for the gym class team? Did she fall head over heels in love and have her heart rent in two? Has he committed a past crime? Tell us—just not all at once.

Flaws aren’t just for real people (or Oedipus)

Bring the people in your story to life by making them real. Give them a few hang-ups, a neurosis (or two), maybe a bit of a dark side. You don’t need to go overboard with flaws fit for a Greek tragedy, but if your MC is a wee bit screwed up, readers will relate.

Make them memorable

Whether they’re pleasingly plump or wasp-waisted, have a bizarre preference for drinking gin and grapefruit juice, never learned how to drive a car, or speak five languages fluently—it’s your choice! Dive into your imaginary junk pile of quirks and grab some to turn those characters into people your readers won’t easily forget.

Christina Dalcher, Ph.D. (@CVDalcher) is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonetics and phonology. Her research has covered the physical, cognitive, and social forces contributing to sound change in Italian and British English dialects. Christina’s first novelLucky Thirteen—an adult thriller featuring (you guessed it!) a linguist—is represented by Alec Shane of Writers House.Top photo by Flickr user blavandmaster.

Choose Your Camp: Why Characters Are Your Story Core

Camp NaNoWriMo begins in April! In the spirit of friendly camp competition (and inspired by one of our favorite scenes in Scott Westerfeld’s Afterworlds), we asked our

friends to Choose Your Camp. Today, Sharon Cullen, Wrimo and author of His Saving Grace, shares a final argument for Camp Character:When I was told I had to pick a camp, it was a no-brainer for me. Camp Character all the way, baby! I didn’t even have to think about it. In my mind characters are the driving force behind any timeless story. I don’t care what genre or what time period we’re talking about, it’s the characters we connect with.

When I was trying to decide what to write about I started thinking of my favorite movies. I picked a few and tried to place them in different settings and time periods. You know what? Setting didn’t matter. Time period didn’t matter…

Let’s take The Breakfast Club as one example. The movie is about high school kids forced to spend a Saturday together in detention. There’s the brain, the punk, the princess, the athlete and the psycho—all different stereotypes, taken out of their comfort zones and friendship circles, forced to face their own prejudices and beliefs. And they discover they all have more in common than they thought.

What if you took those characters and placed them in today’s high schools? Or you took similar characters with similar backgrounds and forced them together in a historical novel?

The story wouldn’t change at its core because it’s about the characters’ journeys—the characters’ thoughts and feelings, their paths to self discovery.

Let’s try a different movie. Grease. An oldie but a goodie. It was filmed in the ‘70s but takes place in the ‘50s. The story is about Danny, a leather wearing hood, and Sandy, a goody two shoes girl. Both from different social spectrums and completely different backgrounds. They like each other but it’s not “cool” for them to like each other. 

What if that movie took place now? Oh, wait. It did in the ‘80s with Pretty in Pink. What if that movie took place in a historical time period? Oh, wait. Romeo and Juliet.

These story types are timeless because of the characters. Because you identify with the characters’ dilemma—their forbidden love. You root for them to get together because you love the characters.

Characters are who we, as readers, connect to. You can have a brilliant plot, you can create a diverse, wonderful world to put your characters in, but if your reader can’t connect to your characters, then the story is lost.

When I first started writing I knew I wanted to write emotionally packed stories. I wanted my readers to cry and laugh with my characters. That can’t happen if you don’t have a character that a reader can connect to.

My latest release (written as a NaNoWriMo novel in 2013 and published in 2014) is about a hero with a brain injury acquired in the Crimean War. The story obviously takes place in 19th century Victorian England but it’s a story that could easily take

place in the 21st century because it’s about characters fighting to find a new normal after such a devastating injury.

Without characters you have no story.

So Camp Character wins, right?

Sharon Cullen is published in historical romance, romantic suspense, paranormal romance and contemporary romance. Her 2013 NaNoWriMo novel,His Saving Grace, was published in December 2014 and her 2014 NaNoWriMo novel, Sutherland’s Secret, will be published in 2016. She lives in southwest Ohio with her brood although her dream is to someday retire to St. Maarten and live on the beach. Top photo background by Flickr user ettiz.

Choose Your Camp: Practicing Empathy for Your Characters

Camp NaNoWriMo begins in April! In the spirit of friendly camp competition (and inspired by one of our favorite scenes in Scott Westerfeld’s Afterworlds), we asked our

friends to Choose Your Camp. Today, W. C. Bauers, author ofUnbreakable, shares why writing characters is all about listening:I’m drawn to character-driven narratives so bunking at Camp Character was the obvious choice. Besides, the campers in Plot wouldn’t stop playing Elvis’s “A Little Less Conversation (A Little More Action Please)”. I walked in, heard that, and turned around. 

Then I headed toward Setting. As I approached the cabin a few campers saw me rubbing my hands together for warmth and waved me over to the fire. But they wouldn’t stop stoking the flames with adverbs. It was a lovely fire, but the crackle of “lys” was overwhelming.  

Character is irreducibly complex. The build-a-bear method of developing character sounds promising enough, but it never worked for me. Writing character is less about assembling a list of traits about your protagonist, and more about going on a journey with her, getting inside her head, and listening to her before writing about her. Perhaps most of all it’s about practicing empathy.

When I first sat down to write Unbreakable, all I had was my main character, Promise. She’d just come of age. She was thinking about her future and what she might become. Then raiders hit her home world and murdered her father. Because she’d lost her mother years before and had no other family to speak of, Promise didn’t know what to do. She was traumatized and angry. She came to me looking for an out. I wanted to tell her story. Unbreakable started that way. Me listening; Promise speaking. She told me she was tired of living like this and that she didn’t think she could go on. I suggested she join the Marines, get off-planet and see the ‘verse, and live life on her own terms.   

I’m leery of methods or proscriptive approaches to writing characters. I just don’t think a one-size-fits-all works. Writing a synopsis is straightforward enough: start at A and by the end of the novel your protagonist better be at Z or she’s in a world of hurt, and you as a writer have an unfinished, unsaleable book. 

Writing an engaging character is altogether different, even counterintuitive. It’s a process of discovery. My agent gave me some wonderful advice about this, really the best I’ve heard on the subject. She told me to write my first draft to get to know my characters. Then, go back and revise with the benefit of hindsight. 

Characters are like real people. They grow and change. I had to take that into account as I edited Unbreakable and prepared it for outside eyes.  

I’d also recommend practicing self-doubt as you write dialogue. We all know the saying about showing verses telling. Good writers show while they tell—at least that’s what I’m striving for—and they don’t blindly tell their characters what to do, what to say, or how to say it. Rather, they let their characters speak for themselves. 

Character is voice. As I wrote Unbreakable, I kept asking myself if Promise would say this or that. Would she say it with different words, or a different tone of voice? How? The last thing I wanted to do was put words into her mouth and trample her unique voice.

W. C. Bauers’s interests include Taekwondo, military history, and French-press brewing. He lives in the Rocky Mountains with his wife and three boys.Unbreakable is his first novel.Top photo by Flickr user WherezJeff.

Choose Your Camp: 3 Tips for Creating Indelible Characters

Camp NaNoWriMo begins in April! In the spirit of friendly camp competition (and inspired by one of our favorite scenes in Scott Westerfeld’s Afterworlds), we asked our friends to Choose Your Camp. Today, Stacey Lee, author of the soon-to-be-released Under a Painted Sky shares why she’s a champion of Camp Character, and how she creates strong characters:For me, characters are the key to making stories memorable. We measure characters against ourselves. Egocentric creatures that we are, the more something relates to our lives, the more we remember it.

I haven’t the foggiest idea what happens in Jerry Maguire, but I do remember the determined sports agent yelling “Show me the money!”  

I read The Hobbit twice, but still can’t tell you what happens beyond orcs chasing hobbits. However, the good-natured and loyal Bilbo Baggins, and the irritable yet charming Gandalf are indelibly inked on my heart.

Some people like to divide books into two categories: those that are character-driven, and those that are driven by plot. But to be compelling, even a plot-driven story requires well-drawn characters (just as a character-driven story still requires a plot). So let’s talk about how to create a strong character.  Here are my three down and dirty tips:

Steal.

If you don’t already have a character in your head, I highly advise stealing one. There are nearly seven billion people in the world, and surely, one of them can serve as the basis for your character.  

Maggie Stiefvater said, “I steal a human heart for each of my characters.  I might wrap them in a very different set of details than that real-life model, but they all start as someone real.”  

Watch the news, eavesdrop on the people at Trader Joe’s, go to all the parties. Your characters are out there, waiting to be discovered.

Take a personality test.

The internet is full of personality tests. You can sort yourself into Hogwarts houses, or find out which ’80s star is most likely to play you in the Lifetime movie of your life.  

Use the tests to find out about your character. Or use them to find out about yourself, which can sometimes be the same thing. Just don’t send it to all your Facebook friends because that is how productivity stops in the world of writers.

Make them imperfect.

While virtues may be admirable, weaknesses are relatable, and relatable means memorable. Weak spots can be physical (Crane-man’s shriveled leg in A Single Shard, Piggy’s nearsightedness in The Lord of the Flies), or mental (Tom Riddle’s fear of dying in the Harry Potter series, Jo March’s hot temper in Little Women).

I recently read a book debuting later this year called The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly by Stephanie Oakes where the main character is missing her hands. Why give your characters these flaws? They’re an opportunity to dig deeper. How has that prosthetic leg affected Augustus? Is it something he’s self-conscious about?  And why the heck is Minnow missing her hands? This is backstory we want to know.

As a last point, I want to mention character arcs, a topic that requires a post of its own. Once you have defined your characters, you must use your plot to help them grow. Not all growth is transformative, and sometimes, a character’s growth is simply to remain steadfast. Now go forth, and create your army!

Stacey Lee is a fourth generation Chinese-American whose people came to California during the heydays of the cowboys. She believes she still has a bit of cowboy dust in her soul. A native of southern California, she graduated from UCLA then got her law degree at UC Davis King Hall. After practicing law in the Silicon Valley for several years, she finally took up the pen because she wanted the perks of being able to nap during the day, and it was easier than moving to Spain. She plays classical piano, wrangles children, and writes YA fiction.Top photo background by Flickr user frix.cz.