amanda downum

We’re currently covering characters in the Writing F&SF class, so I thought I’d pull out a little from my notes.

Some simplistic stories have characters that seem like placeholders, as though any individual could fit into that slot. Fairy tales, for instance, tend to have generic characters: the princess, the prince, the witch that have little dimensionality to them. One delightful strategy for working with them, in fact, is to pick a character and flesh them out to the point where they shape the story.

That is the most important thingL: characters must shape the story. They need to influence the action and make the narrative one that could only happen to them.

Let’s take a simple plot: a character must escape zombies. Our first character, a survivalist, keeps two shotguns in her apartment and is steel willed to the point where she is capable of cutting off a limb to avoid infection by zombie bite. The second is a meek-mannered scientist who faints at the sight of blood but is capable of building marvelous devices. The story and what happens in it is very different depending on which character gets put into the situation.

What happens in the story should be the result of what your character does, and her/his actions are dependent on both their personality and what they want. Vonnegut tells us every character in a story needs to have something they want, even if it’s just a glass of water. Because what they want dictates what they will do while their personality decides how they will go about doing it. You’ll also want to keep in mind that humans, like water, follow the path of least resistance. They will usually pick the easiest way before moving onto to something harder if it fails them.

Stuck and wondering what your character will do next? Think about what they want and how they might try to get it. (Then how you will thwart them, because the more you put that character through, the more your reader will come to know and identify with them.)

Look at your favorite characters and see how the writer communicates their nuances. Some of my favorites:

• Richard St. Vier in Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint
• Isyllt Iskaldur in Amanda Downum’s The Drowning City
• Mapp and Lucia in E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series (and you can get all of the books in one delicious heap for $1.99 on the Kindle, which is a great deal)
• Phillip and Lymond in Dorothy Dunnett’s marvelous Lymond Chronicles

Who are your favorite characters and why?

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I’ve read some great stuff in the last month or so, and wanted to point to some books that I thought people would particularly enjoy. Most of these were read on the Kindle, and I will usually link to that version if it’s available.

I loved Amanda Downum’s The Drowning City and The Bone Palace. Her work reminded me a lot of Martha Wells’ richly textured fantasy, and I thought Savedra was the best of any trans character I’ve encountered so far in fantasy. In grabbing links for this blog post, I realized there’s a third, Kingdoms of Dust, so that’s getting snagged right now.

Gemma Files’ fantasy western, A Book Of Tongues, was awesome and features a great character in the form of Chess, a saucy red-headed ex-whore and hexslinger who’s following his lover Rook and the rest of his outlaw band. I’m looking forward to the sequel, A Rope of Thorns, to the point where I am saving it for sometime when I can sit down and happily devour the book in a single setting.

I finally finished up the Hunger Games trilogy with Mockingjay. It’s a good, solid trilogy, but the first remains my favorite.

Joselle Vanderhoof was kind enough to give me a copy of Sleeping Beauty Indeed & Other Lesbian Fairytales while I was at ArmadilloCon. I got very tired of retold fairy tales while working with Fantasy Magazine, but there’s plenty in here doing something interesting rather than just regurgitating the tale.

I went back and reread Barry Hughart’s The Story of the Stone since I discovered it on Kindle, and knew I wanted something good for a plane trip. I first ran across the series in ancient days and still think it’s a lovely piece of fantasy and I wish there were more than just a few books about Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

The same trip was good for reading Masked, edited by Lou Anders, an anthology of superhero stories which is a nice addition to that field and has some stories

Rereads included E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, which I re-read every few years as comfort food, and just love. They take place in early 20th century small English towns and feature village life at its most intensely gossipy and social. I must admit, I read a lot of books with the thought “boy, a fantasy version of this would be great” lurking in the back of my head, and this is one I’d love to see translated, although I think it’d take some major talent to pull it off.