My first post in my series of How
Not to Write a Book, where I’ll give out tips to amateur writers. Now, I’m
hardly an experienced writer, but I’ve made these mistakes before and I thought
I should share how to avoid or rectify them.
Today’s post: Characterisation,
specifically dealing with long lists of characters. There’ll be more than one
post on characterisation, since this is, I think, my strong suit.
Right, so more than a few writers
have a large cast of characters. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem
is how you develop the characters, and how they fit in with the ‘bigger
picture’. A lot of the time, you can find yourself with a huge arsenal of
characters, all playing a part in the story, and you’re loathe to let them go. Sometimes
you can pull it off. Most of the time, you end up with the Seven Dwarfs.
The Seven Dwarfs is basically when
you’ve got a load of characters that have one trait only. It happens when
you’re afraid of adding conflicting traits to characters, and decide that
instead of ‘messing up’ that character, you can create a new one. For example,
you’d like to create a male character who is romantic, for some important
purpose in the story (give me time… I’ll think of one). You’d also like a male
character who is short-tempered and snarky. And another character is created.
I had this problem plenty of times
in the past. I was afraid of making my characters copies of each other, and so
I worked to give them all different qualities. Two characters couldn’t be fiery.
The heroine was a simple girl who liked sewing, and of course she couldn’t be fiery either.
I got over that problem. I think
the main thing that helped was to just look at life. This might be the
plainest, most overused piece of advice ever, but it’s true. My sister’s
short-tempered, bitchy and superficial, but she’s also selfless, giving and fun.
If a person can have clashing qualities, why can’t a character? If you can work
on creating deeper characters, you’ll find that you might not need so many.
I axed a character from my novel, and pushed another one further into
the background. I didn’t like doing it, since I loved both those girls, but it
was necessary. I’m also in the process of picking out unnecessary gods. They’re
a set of seven, but I know now that they don’t all need to be equally main.
And now another problem: condensing characters. I don’t mean that
literally– don’t just take two characters and mush them together, to try and
get all of their qualities in one. You don’t really need to. If you develop a
single character far enough, they’ll eventually cover another one’s job. (I’m
trying to articulate this as clearly as I can. I think I’m failing).
I wanted this post to be a bit
longer, but I can’t seem to increase it right now XD. Like I said before, I can’t
quite get what I’m trying to say across. I am a failure of a writer.
The next post is going to be about actually developing
your characters, to get them to fulfil their roles and more, and that post is
going to be longer and more detailed. So please check back again. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment