I’m sure every reader is used to this scenario. Pick up a book off a book-store shelf. The blurb is great. The cover art is wonderful. The first chapter reads like a publisher’s wet dream. So, reader buys book. Book goes home, reader starts to get to know book.
Reader, at chapter five, detests character. Reader takes book back.
Plot, style, all of these things are certainly necessary. But I have put so many books back, and sold so many more to used bookstores, just because the characters flat-out sucked. Books by very popular authors in fact, have been returned.
I’m not the world’s hardest sell. I liked ‘Hancock’ tremendously, and endured sarcasm for weeks over that. But ‘Hancock’ was a good character! The characters of Hayden’s ‘Rhapsody’ books are good characters. The quirky, weird people of Jonathan Carroll’s book are amazing characters. These are some of my favorite books, simply because of the characters. I love the world, I love the writing, but I would have put ‘Rhapsody’ down if Ashe hadn’t grabbed me by the throat.
I received a comment on Abadinur from one of my test readers, calling Amarog ‘a great literary character’. It surprised me really. I thought Amarog was good, but not spectacular. My spectacular characters were supposed to be the witches. Instead, here’s big, super-power Amarog who doesn’t have much of a journey in the book, and he’s the literary character? Oh. Obviously I need to ponder this a little.
One of the cardinal rules of writing is to observe the people around you. People-watch, people-listen, people-write. I sit at coffee shops, I eavesdrop at restaurants. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there aren’t that many characters left in the world. There are a lot of people, but not many characters.
Our society has stopped admiring individuality. We give it a lot of lip-service, and maybe there’s no more conformism than there ever was. Maybe it’s just that I work in Soccer-mom/upper-middle-class heaven that I’ve gotten jaded. But I look at my past and there are so many interesting people there! Where have they gone? These are the people I based my characters on.
My crazy uncle, who was a sniper in Vietnam and now believes that contrails are going to end the world. The incredibly devoted Czech preacher and his wife, who corresponded for years before they married, and who remained together until his death of Parkinson’s. The people who randomly started telling me about their lives in the grocery store, or at the gas station while I was locked out of my car. These are just a few of the people I look at.
When I wrote Amarog, and to some extent Aleshan from Shadow and Soul, I looked close to home. My grandfather’s unflagging sense of right and wrong, and his father’s temper and pride. Two friends that I love more than I should, both army vets with scars that don’t show through to the outside, but who’s worst scars aren’t from war, but love. A man who buried both his daughter and his murdered wife, who was barely saved from an act of vengeance, and who took a job working with terminally ill children to learn how to heal and love. 20 year old men who might have been partying and getting laid, but who were instead changing teenager’s diapers and leading them in sing-alongs and learning more about compassion and personal strength than most people learn over a lifetime. Men who are a dying breed. Those are the literary characters, and I just watch them and learn. Those are the men I base my ‘heroes’ on.
People aren’t ‘good’ and they aren’t ‘bad’. A character that is ‘good’ is indeed a character, and while he may live in imagination, he’ll never make it off the page. Same with a villain who is pure evil. There is no such thing in humanity, in my belief.
One of the most stunning villains I’ve read was in Anne Bishop’s Belladonna. The Eater of the World. Pure, total, malevolent evil. It wasn’t a person, it was a force. You despised it. *SPOILER! And then it meets something more evil, more cruel, and it becomes understandable and relatable. I hated that book for making me feel pity for something that was beyond evil. Brooks’ demon from ‘Running With the Demon’ was similarly understandable. With both of them, once I got started, I couldn’t stop.
One of the most heart-wrenching heroes I’ve read was Charles de Lint’s* ‘Jack’. Shiftless, restless, temperamental. He left his daughter, his wife went crazy. His daughter was maybe a little bit crazy too. He was relatable. For me, he was a character I could very much relate to, for my own reasons. But beyond that, he was flawed, maybe a little broken, but he got over that, got his power back and saved the day.
(*For the record, de Lint is one of those authors I would recommend hands-down to anyone. I’ve studied him since I first came in contact with his stories. His female characters are brilliant, he understands the archetypes of Trickster and other folk-tale creatures and uses them to brilliant advantage.)
There are some people who really are good, and bad. Not all good or bad, but mostly. I knew one of the good girls as a child. As sweet and amazing as anyone could be. I’ve been fortunate not to know anyone really ‘bad’, at least close and personally. Weak and contemptible, yes. But unless something changes them inside, those aren’t the characters a reader is going to remember.
A lot of things go into making a ‘real’ character. But a character is one place where I believe reality should triumph over fiction, where the motivation should be drawn from the solid world. Fantastic elements can certainly play a part, and should in fantasy, but the motivations should be simple and relatable.
Real people should inhabit the pages of a story. Not Disney princesses and cartoon villains.
