Greetings, my Gidsciples! It’s been quite a while. I took a break off for December, (and accidentally part of January,) but much to your delight, I am back to the blog, and it’s time once again to discuss the things which I, Gideon U. Eklund thinks are important. I’m going to come down from the Golden Pedestal, shift gears back to the usual thing we do around here, and discuss something that I cooked up at three in the morning, (when I woke up to pee, and realized I needed to work on my blog today.)
The thing we will be discussing today is: Writing!
(I know—you’re all shocked and alarmed by this news. Dial it back.)
Being the super-popular, ultra-famous High-Brow Book Scientist that I am, (patent pending,) I’m frequently approached by my test readers with questions regarding characters from the manuscripts I’ve written. Things like:
“Why did this character say that? Do they actually think that way?”
“What’s this character’s favorite TV show?”
“Is this reference a callback to a previous reference?”
“Do they dress that way for a reason?”
“What’s Detective Haberdasher’s preferred hat material? Does it affect his criminal investigations?”
Author’s Note: I bet you weren’t expecting the return of Detective Haberdasher, were you? Of course not—that’s why he’s the best hat-related murder investigator in all of London! …Thursdays at 9.
When readers have questions about a character, or that character’s motivations, obviously they are going to expect the writer to have the answers they seek; after all, the writer is the person who came up with the stuff you’re asking about in the first place, so they should know, right? Well, not quite. One of the things that I’ve realized recently is that readers tend to think that the writer is the end-all, know-all of every character they’ve ever created; as if we were some sort of world-building God who knows every intricate nuance of every being ever put to page by their hand.
Ideally, that’s how it should be, but here’s the thing, readers: The person writing your favorite characters probably does have the answer to that question nagging at the back of your mind—but more often than not, it’s only because you’ve just asked them about it. If you walked up to Herman Melville and asked, “What’s Captain Ahab’s favorite candy?” he would most likely answer with something like, “Why, it’s Flondham’s Sweet Confectioner’s Baking Chocolates, my good fellow,” (or whatever the fuck candy even was back in 1851,) and he probably made that up on the spot, and now it’s official—simply because the writer said it was. No new pages were written, no correctional errata produced, just whatever Herman Melville told some dude on a gentleman’s whim.
Author’s Note: If you actually spoke to Herman Melville and asked him that stupid of a question, you’ve either completely wasted a time-travel opportunity, or are horrifically ignorant of the inherent dangers of standing unflappable in the face of Zombie Herman Melville. Either way, you genuinely need to re-think your life choices.
Now, whether the writer you’re shaking down for answers is making those facts up on the spot or not, you honestly might be helping them get to know their own creations better. Because, dear reader, this may shock you to learn, but we writers don’t know our characters completely from the moment of their inception. That’s a bigger task than many people realize. It’s insane to believe that a writer creates all of that information in advance.
“Why is that so insane?” I’m sure someone is asking right now, (and if they aren’t, I’ve just made them up and I say they are.)
Well, the reason is pretty simple. Characters may be fictional, but they’re still supposed to be believable as people. From your main characters, to your supporting characters, to the convenience store clerk who sells your main character their favorite brand of beer, they’ve all got lives.
Every. Single. One.
Imagine sitting down and planning out the entire life history and personality of every single person in your book. That just doesn’t typically happen. (Some writers may deep-dive in that way, and I can’t speak to that, but mostly they don’t.) It’s more likely that this stuff gets invented on the fly. You craft the characters overall, but they change and evolve from that original idea as the story gets written. This is also how you learn about them during the storytelling process. Yeah—you heard that right. Many writers learn about their characters while writing about them, not before.
A new character is not typically a fully-formed creature; a lot of folks don’t realize this. A newly-formed character is more like a collection of bricks. You’ve got key pieces; a character’s name, their profession, their motivation, race, gender, species, etc.—each one its own big red brick. We know all of those things when stacking the bricks together, but it’s the cement between the bricks which may be a mystery to the person building this wall.
“Why, whatever do you mean?” asks the annoying, made-up person who usually asks these questions in my blogs. Well, Brenda, (because we all know you’re named Brenda, you pretentious whore,) I’m referring to all of the small details which emerge when writing a story. If a character walks into a bar and orders a drink, you may need to know what drink, and you’ve never thought of this before. Suddenly, you’re sitting at a keyboard, staring at a partial sentence starting with “Can I get a,” and looking up different drinks to find one which suits your character at that point. (Ian Fleming never had this problem, I assure you.)
Author’s Note: My personal go-to drink is a gin and soda, easy on the gin, with two lemons. I’m a lightweight, but I feel classy when I have one in my hand; like a for-real grown-up.
There are times like the aforementioned drink order, when you will need to come up with something on the fly that inadvertently helps shape the character. I had a scene in a manuscript I’m currently working on, where one of my protagonists goes home for the night, and goes to bed after setting up a flower in her apartment. Seemed simple enough, right? Until I realized that she had no apartment, or evening routine, or anything. I realized two things:
A) She needed to do stuff in the apartment, so I couldn’t just drop the scene with “she went home,” and not go through the rest of it like I’d intended, and,
B) There were going to be other scenes taking place there later in the book, and I knew this, but I had yet to even brainstorm what the place was going to be like.
I found myself having to invent a poor, single woman’s apartment. I made it a studio; I threw in a bed with no frame, laying directly on the floor, a single walk-in closet full of clothes, and made that the only real evidence that she spent money on anything. I decided to make the place a little untidy, with unwashed dishes in her sink. She named the cockroach who lived there, but wasn’t sure if she was only naming one, or naming several different cockroaches the same name. She had a little TV, and she watched Spanish-speaking telenovellas with no subtitles, because she made up her own stories while she watched the show.
Just by doing that, she suddenly had more depth. We now knew she liked to look good as a rule, that she was too poor to own a proper bed frame and her wardrobe, she wasn’t obsessed with cleaning too much, and sweet enough not to crush a bug simply for existing; instead, naming it and making it her little, honorary roommate. I had no idea she’d turn out that way when I first created the character, and suddenly, she developed into a slightly different person than outlined.
This applies to questions I get asked, too—sometimes, my readers will find a decision doesn’t make sense, based on what they’ve come to know of the characters so far. They’ll ask me about the motivations of that particular decision, and I may throw out an off-the-cuff answer that I think works. However, in doing so, I’ve shaped the character’s personality again, and it will fuel how I write that character going forward. Sometimes these questions will completely change my original approach to a character’s personality; and it should—that’s how characters get fleshed out.
So, I guess what I’m trying to tell you all through this rambling mish-mash of a blog post, is that, should you run into Zombie Herman Melville, or a writer you know and/or like, don’t be shy to ask questions. Sometimes being asked, “what made you dress this character in a red silk thong,” may end in the writer saying, “Shit, I don’t know. I was drunk, and it seemed hot,” but it may also make the writer think about that particular decision in a way they never bothered to before, when they first slapped the words “red,” “silk,” and “thong,” side-by-side.
Why did a character decide to let a bad guy live, when he’s normally a murder machine with everyone else? Could he have begun to grow tired of all the killing? Was the bad guy someone he had a connection to personally? Had he already hit his murder quota for the day? Sometimes these questions really help us to get to know the characters we’ve invented. Sometimes they don’t—they just make us shrug and go, “Umm… because?” But you’ll never know if you don’t ask, and we may never learn the answer if we don’t have to make one up.
Until next time, dear readers! Keep those questions coming! Just… y’know… maybe don’t make them weird, creepy underwear questions.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to procure a fresh box of Flondham’s Sweet Confectioner’s Baking Chocolates, and a red silk thong. I don’t have to explain my personal life to you.