Hold Onto This; You’ll Need it Later

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character building, character development, it's called thinking, lazy writing, rules to write by

I realized the other day that many, if not most, of my pet peeves in writing can basically be summed up in a giant lump category of “characters who are written badly”.

I realized two and a half seconds later that just leaving it at that is only fractionally more useful than announcing that I don’t like bad writing. Not because “bad writing” is an invalid marker to place on something, although it would be interesting to get into a debate a la Dead Poets Society about whether or not such an objective judgement can be passed. It’s more that saying “I don’t like bad writing” is a little bit like saying “well, days where I’m in a lot of pain are worse than the ones where I’m not.” Yeah, and …?

So in the spirit of being not only accurate but useful, I’ve been trying to break down what it means when I think that a character is being badly written.

My previous post on context took a look into one way that characters can be crippled by their writers. This time, I want to look at another problem otherwise awesome characters can find themselves afflicted with: the Problem of Application. I don’t really have a rule for this, some specific way to avoid committing this error as a writer the way I did for the last one. If I stumble onto some convenient trick I’ll come back and add it in, but for the moment all I really have is the oh so helpful “think before you write!”.

Well, maybe being aware of a problem is the first step to resolving it.

Life is complicated. No amount of preparation is going to be able to set you up with exactly the right knowledge to handle every specific situation you’ll ever encounter; that’s why schooling is so much about teaching people how to learn, giving us the tools so that we can be equipped to find the solutions to problems we don’t even know can exist until we run headlong into them.

Far more important than the ability to handle any one specific situation, then, is the ability to take what we know from the rest of our lives, extract the parts that can be relevant to what we’re dealing with now, and piece them together into a working framework to apply to strange new dilemmas.

A lot of characters in fiction seem to have skipped class the day this was taught.

Instead of using basic reasoning skills, any number of otherwise intelligent characters will look at a new situation and freeze up when confronted by the unfamiliarity. Sometimes, of course, this is reasonable: someone from a small farm in a township that functions mainly on a barter economy probably won’t have much of a concept of interest, and the local peddler in a fishing village can’t really be expected to understand the finer points of taxi etiquette.

But it goes beyond that. I’ve lost track of how many times someone from a fairly smalltown environment finds themselves in a more urbanized setting and can’t understand why they’re not allowed to just waltz right in and talk to the chief of police, or the president, or some other high-level official. A seemingly-competent adult leaves their small community and finds – oh, the horror – that here in the big city we sometimes have to ally ourselves with people we personally dislike in order to advance larger goals. They seem shocked to learn that sometimes, favours come with nasty costs, or that sometimes people do unpleasant things and it’s just business.

So, what? Am I supposed to believe that these people have never faced similar situations before?

Did the mayor of the local village never tell his assistant “I’m sorry, Henry, I’m busy with important things, anyone who wants to talk to me will have to wait until later this afternoon”? Has no one in their rural village ever had to present a unified front with the horrible neighbours to convince the local officials that yes, there really is a crime problem and yes, it’s really worth bringing in a constable? Have they never received “help” from a friend or a relative, and then turned around a month later and found themselves caught up in some passive-aggressive guilt trap?

No, none of these situations are quite the same as being told you have to take a number to see a clerk to make an appointment to see the secretary to make an appointment to see the Vice President’s second cousin, or having to smile and shake hands with the wife of the man who ordered his troops to withdraw rather than coming in to save your village from the evil dragons. There are bound to be differences, both in specifics and in scope.

But that’s part of life! Part of growing up is learning to accept that the things you thought you knew as a child (your parents know everything, summer days last forever, you have to finish your vegetables) aren’t quite as immutable as you’d first been taught. As people, we learn to adapt. That we don’t do it perfectly, that some of us are better at it than others, doesn’t change the fact that it’s a fundamental part of human nature.

It’s that, more than anything, that makes the “Character learns that sometimes life is complicated and that they can’t just get everything they want” seem so tedious: because most of the time, the character is already clearly well aware of that in pretty much every other aspect of their lives!

Watching a character I’m supposed to like or respect struggle with the fundamental concept that cities have bureaucracy, or that politics involve some people who aren’t nice, doesn’t give me a sense of struggle or legitimate frustration. It just smacks of an author who wanted some tension and couldn’t come up with a real conflict. The problem with undermining a character that way is that instead of offering an opportunity for actual growth, we’re left in a situation where the best we can really hope for by the end of the point of tension is for the character to have worked their way back to their previous level of competence. I’m not proud of them if they succeed, just wearily relieved that they’re done being idiots. And if the author screws it up and they fail, there goes one more character I used to like.

Life is frustrating. New situations are scary. There are plenty of ways to shake things up when characters are surrounded by the unfamiliar. But really, if your character is flustered by a bit of red tape, how are they going to react when it turns out that the local general store is secretly run by demons? You only get to pull the same trick once or twice in every story, don’t waste it being lazy.

Thoughts?

Context Matters

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character building, character development, it's called thinking, reading, rules to write by, tips, tricks, writing

I’m not really a creative writer.

I know a lot of people who talk about writing like it’s some sort of almost magical experience. They sit down to write, and stories flow out of them like water or rainbows or metaphors. For me, it doesn’t work like that. I build my stories from the ground up, adding plot elements, characters, themes, settings, like bricks with logic and instinct as mortar, until I have something solid and serviceable that won’t fall down when I slam the door too hard.

Not to say that I don’t have my moments where inspiration strikes and everything falls magically into place. It’s just that those moments tend to come during the interior design phase of my little metaphor, after the foundation – and the walls – are firmly grounded.

I’ve got any number of little tips and tricks I’ve collected, learned, or invented over the years when it comes to setting those first stones, and part of what I enjoy best about reading is learning new ones. About two years ago I stumbled onto the maxim that’s been at the heart of character development for me ever since, three questions that can make or break almost any action in a work:

1. Why does the character think they’re doing what they’re doing? (Occasionally swapped out with: ‘Does the character know why they’re doing what they’re doing?’)
2. Why is the character actually doing what they’re doing?
3. Why do you, the author, have the character doing what they’re doing?

I might go into this little holy trinity in more depth later, because every time I go through it I find it raises more questions than it answers, but I know I’m not the only writer to think of them. Today, though, I stumbled across a fourth question that is, I think, almost as important as the other three. It acts more as a corollary to question #1, but opens a whole new set of doors as soon as you step through:

4. What is the context, such that the character is both able to imagine and capable of doing what they’re doing?

It’s a question that comes up a lot when dealing with villains, or at least it’s a question that ought to. A peaceful town where the population seems to care about each other and value love, justice, and puppydogs is plagued by That One Guy who kicks kittens, molests tavern wenches, and threatens any farm boy who even looks at him wrong with a whipping or even death. A trained army officer with accolades and a dozen battles under his belt decides that the mission can go to Hell because his girlfriend is missing and she is the only thing that matters. A ranking official in a city where foreigners are uneducated and treated like dirt ignores a well-spoken foreigner when she walks into his barracks bringing a message of terrible danger, because “what would an uneducated barbarian know?”.

There are, of course, instances where those things happen. Some people have power and influence enough to be above the law, and are able to violate both official rules and custom with impunity. Sometimes, people make rash decisions against their better judgement. Some people, when faced with a strange situation, would rather pretend it doesn’t exist than contemplate its implications.

But not very many.

The problem is that these bullies, hotheads, and jerks come from the same stock as the rest of the world. They were raised knowing the same laws, exposed to the same context. They might have gone their own way when they were younger, deciding that the adults around them just didn’t understand or hiding their beliefs from the people who could stop them, but by the time a person rises to some degree of prominence they tend to be under a considerable amount of scrutiny. A man who threatens to kill passing farmboys in a place where murder is illegal should, by any logic I can think of, be under the close watch of the local law enforcement. A man who regularly beats people for no reason would be in jail, unless there’s some damn good reason presented to explain otherwise.

The same goes for the soldier who abandons his calling whenever something tugs on his heartstrings, or the officer who ignores advice without bothering to check if maybe he’s going to get everyone killed. Anyone so willing to abandon common sense for either firebrand emotion or haughty disbelief would probably have made a major mistake early in their career and faced the consequences for it. While these types of characters are clearly designed to offer me, the reader, a point of tension, when they’re thrown in without any explanation for how they’ve been able to survive their own idiocy I just find myself wondering what’s wrong with the world.

Antagonists are necessary, and it’s not reasonable to expect a writer to plot out the full life story of every character who crosses their pages … but no character is above the application of basic logic. Whenever someone does something, especially something that will have a major impact on a main character, it’s important to stop and think:

• What would happen if the protagonist tried something like that? – Generally speaking, the protagonist would usually find themselves in deep trouble faster than they could blink.
• Could anyone else get away with it? – Maybe any noble can treat any peasant like dirt, maybe all military officers are immune to making rational decisions.
• Why, or why not? – If the answer is “because if everyone acted like this, society would fall apart” it’s a pretty good sign that someone’s behaving unreasonably.
• So what makes this character an exception? Why haven’t they suffered lasting consequences? – Does the king owe him a debt? Is she blackmailing people? Does the city have a ‘one idiot per company’ policy in its municipal guard?
• What are the other implications of that? – Anyone who can bully whoever they want probably does, all the time. They’re probably dangerous, terrifying, and people around them should treat them as such.

Obviously, not all of these questions are going to get answered on the page each time … but I think if more people stopped to think about them more frequently, those annoying petty villains might get a little bit less obnoxious.

Besides: what’s more satisfying to read, the hero suffering under and barely managing to overcome a stuffed-shirt bully boy, or the hero matching wits against a credible threat and triumphing?