writing good characters

I’ve still got room in this weekend’s classes, Beginnings & Endings (Saturday morning) and the Character Building workshop (Sunday morning). In the first, I’m going to talk about a number of things, including how to use your beginning to create your ending and vice versa, what your beginning sets up for your reader, what your beginning and ending must contain, how to most effectively use title + beginning + ending, and various other tips and tricks. There will be 3-4 quick writing exercises over the course of the class designed to help you apply what we’re talking about in order to effectively add it to your writerly toolbox.

The Character Building Workshop is familiar to some of you, and I always love teaching it because I come away with at least a couple of wordlumps that end up being part of the current WIP as well as better insight into the characters I’m working with. Come join us if you want a little inspiration for your current project.
Register by mailing me at catrambo@gmail.com or cat@catrambo.com with the name and date of the class you’re interested in. And please feel free to pass this newsletter along to friends and fellow writers you think might be interested!

April Classes
April 16 (Sat, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Beginnings and Endings
April 17 (Sun, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Character Building Workshop
April 23 (Sat, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Creating an Online Presence for Writers
April 24 (Sun, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Description and Delivering Information
April 30 (Sat, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Flash Fiction Workshop

May Classes
May 1 (Sun, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) First Pages with Caren Gussoff
May 14, (Sat, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Moving from Idea to Finished Draft
May 15 (Sun, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Literary Techniques for Genre Writers
May 21 (Sat, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Retelling and Retaleing with Rachel Swirsky
May 22 (Sun, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Literary Techniques for Genre Writers II

June Classes
June 3 (Sat, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Writing Your Way Into Your Novel
June 4 (Sun, 9:30-11:30 AM PST) Moving from Idea to Finished Draft

#sfwapro
Enjoy this sample of Cat’s writing and want more of it on a weekly basis, along with insights into process, recipes, photos of Taco Cat, chances to ask Cat (or Taco) questions, discounts on and news of new classes, and more? Support her on Patreon.

Not the movie. No, that was an okay movie, but this book? It’s pure gold. It’s beautiful. It’s enchanting. You should read it.

What: The Last Unicorn is, as you would expect, the story of the last unicorn. She must find out what has happened to the other unicorns, aided by a fraudulent magician, a fierce butterfly, and a would-be Maid Marian. You’ve formed a story in your head from reading that last sentence. The book is nothing like that. It’s better.

Who: I do not think anyone should call themselves a fantasy writer that has not read this. I’m sure there are reasonable exceptions. But I’m not seeing any of them.

Why: Read this for characters that will tangle themselves up in your heart and never let go. Read it for Beagle’s skill with prose, the sly humor, the sheer beauty.

When: Don’t read this when you are feeling insecure about your own writing, because it will only make it more so. Read it for inspiration as well as entertainment.

Where and how: Copy passages out and try to figure out how Beagle DID that. How the butterfly enchants us in only a few sentences. How the Bull menaces in even less space. (Be aware that Beagle did write about some of these characters again; they appear in novelette “Two Hearts,” which I only see available in The Nebula Award Showcase 2008 and The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Volume 24.

#sfwapro

A bajillion years ago, when you could send the Science Fiction Book Club $.11 and get 11 books back, I signed up, receiving a fabulous armful particularly valuable back in the days when the Internet was just kicking off.

One of the 11 was P.C. Hodgell’s fantasy novel, Godstalk. I recently reread it when I found it and its sequel were available in the form of a single e-book, The God Stalker Chronicles.

I loved that book for its density of innovation as well as its creation of Tai-tastigon, a city is vividly alive as any other in speculative fiction, as evocative as Ambergris or Gormenghast, as alluring and perilous as Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, as historied as Minas Tirith or fictional London or any of the cities George R.R. Martin evokes so well.

And I loved it for its heroine, Jamethiel. She comes to the reader as a semi-amnesiac, unsure of exactly what lies in her past and bearing, as such heroes and heroines often too, a magical object. Or agical objects. Those objects shaped my naming convention for magical objects and remain as lovely as when I first encountered them: the Ivory Knife, the Book Bound in Pale Leather and the Serpent Skin Cloak.

Their bearer enters the city of Tai-tastigon and swiftly is embroiled in the doings of several groups of characters, including the staff of a local tavern, the Thieves Guild, assorted priests and gods/goddesses, the rooftop-dwelling Cloudies, and assorted bandits, allies, and felines, all of whom turn out to be more connected and in more mysterious ways than one would expect. I am an inveterate re-reader. More so in the days when I didn’t have the ability to download just about anything from the Internet, but even so still a habit I indulge in. Godstalk stood up to multiple rereads over the decades and shaped my expectations for fantasy novels ever since. It set a pretty high bar.

I loved Godstalk to death and managed to find its sequel Dark of the Moon much later. It always frustrated me not be able to find others in the series. Therefore I was overjoyed to find out that that not only were there more in the series but that they were available in electronic form. I’m halfway through the third book, Seeker’s Bane, and looking forward to the next three.

One of the things that makes returning to the book so satisfying is the heroine Jamie. Her flaws as well as her strengths are written deeply, shaping her actions inevitably and eloquently. The author takes us deep into Jamie’s head, letting us watch her development as well as her struggle with her complicated existence.

The main source of Jamie’s struggle is her adherence to the Kencyr code of honor, a trait that makes her a hero in the classic sense, someone to look up to and emulate, and which often talks directly about the nature of honor. Here’s a passage I just hit in Seeker’s Bane:

Trust honor, Immalai had said.
yes. For her, balanced on the knife’s edge, honor was more than life, its loss infinitely worse than death. And part of honor was taking responsibility for one’s actions and choices, over and over, as long as one acted or chose.

Jamie is complex and compelling. Her twin brother, Tori, begins to share the viewpoint in the second book and is interesting in his own right, but Jamie is rightly the core of the series. As I’m reading through the series, it’s a pleasure as a reader to watch her history unfold even as her personality is sharpened and shaped. As a writer, it’s a terrific lesson on the effectiveness of going deep into a character’s head.

Fantasy books and series that share this depth of character development:

• Carol Berg’s Collegia Magica
• Jo Clayton’s Diadem series
• Amanda Downum’s Necromancer Chronicles
• Tanith Lee’s The Birthgrave
• Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser
• Any book by Martha Wells, but particularly The Element of Fire

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?

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

We talked last week about story shapes and arcs as well as what gets set up in the beginning of a story. This week we talked about characters and dialogue, and how the first shapes the story. One of the points made was that a character is not something you stick in a slot of a story – the character shapes the entire story. For example, the story of someone encountering a werewolf is very different if your protagonist is a little old lady who hates dogs because they’re messy than if that protagonist is an emo-teen determined to become a werewolf in order to get revenge on someone that wronged them.

The main character usually changes in some way over the course of the story, but that change must feel organic and natural. You can set up a big change of mind with foreshadowing and having them change on some smaller matter, showing that such change is possible, so it doesn’t throw the reader out of the story when it occurs.

We discussed approaches to learning more about your characters. I recommended the book Writing The Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, which talks about writing characters who are a different sex, race, or class background than yourself. I also recommended people-watching and reading pop psychology (or even more sciencey stuff, which will provide all sorts of story ideas.

One of the quickest ways to turn an editor off is with improperly punctuated dialogue, so learn the rules and use them. We went over things like speech tags, how to punctuate internal dialogue, why you don’t need to come up with a bunch of synonyms for “said,” and how to make voices distinctive. I suggested that people watch the wonderful adaptation of Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” – here is the original text, and here is the film made from it.

If you really want to focus on dialogue, read good plays, which are pure dialogue. If you want to write in a particular historical voice, one of the best ways is to read deeply in that period so you absorb it. Doing so may make you aware how much what we read and watch creeps into our writing – that’s one very good reason to read some high quality stuff now and again.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.