Saturday, April 28, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 25
How deep do you delve into your main
character(s)?
It’s a question that faces all novelists.
Revealing character has a spectrum from the implicit to the direct but usually
it has to be some mixture of the two. By implicit (in the extreme) I mean that character is being explored
through actions and without the author adding his or her pennyworth through
direct descriptions of people’s traits and attitudes. The reader makes up his
or her mind through the accumulation of evidence as the book marches on. At the
other extreme, the entire character is laid on a slab and forensically
dissected in a ‘pre-mortem’, so to speak.
Most readers appear to like some balance
between the two. They like their characters introduced as they enter the fray of
the narrative so that they can ‘see’ them and sense the same kind of
information they would get at a first flesh and blood meeting. Then they would
like them to develop as they navigate the extraordinary circumstances you have
arranged for them. A well described character at the outset, who does not
develop, results in the novel’s hold on the reader being entirely dependent
upon the intricacies of plot, like in an Agatha Christie. Do we learn that much
more about Poirot than we gain in the very first pages he graces? Poirot’s
adventures are more like crossword puzzles than an illuminated manuscript. The
characters are roughly daubed and tend to be stereotypes.
Here is how I introduce the Historian in
Azimuth:
If a man could be said to be constructed from the
tools of his work, then Kamil was just such a man. He laboured with pen and
paper and from them he built history. His flesh was as dry and pale as bleached
parchment, his blood so dark it could have been extracted from crushed beetles
and yet his intelligence was as sharp as the knife he used to give edge to his
quills…”
Kamil is a typical scholar of the period,
fat and preoccupied with library affairs. Over the 920 pages he becomes a
detective, falls in love, faces death and… commits acts of which he is less
than proud. All the while we are privy to his inner thoughts about what he has
to face. At the end I was very tied to him. He was more real to me than many
acquaintances. But I am just one reader of my work. And it is for you to
determine how three dimensional he becomes.
When you are editing your book, it is worth
tracing whether the events you have included in your narrative are leading gradually
to greater understanding of your dramatis personae or leaving abandoning them as two dimensional ciphers.
www.azimuthtrilogy.com (for paperback and PDFs)
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle Amazon
Azimuth by Jack Sanger Books 1, 2, 3 on Kindle Amazon
Labels: Writing. Depth of character.
<< Home