Tag: character

What the Eye Takes Note Of

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

You can’t describe everything — everything has too much stuff in it.  And even if you could describe everything, your readers wouldn’t stand for it; their minds would buckle under the weight of all the stuff there is in the world.  So you have to pick and choose.  Give your readers not all that there is about something, but two or three things about it to hang their mental image on.

But how are you going to decide what those things are?

Start by thinking about your readers.  They’re going to assume that if you’re directing their attention toward something, then it has to be something important, something that they’re either supposed to be using now or saving for later.  So don’t let them down by wasting their attention on something that isn’t one of those things.

Stuff that they’re supposed to be using for the scene they’re reading right now would include:  a detail that conveys important information about a major character (this one is left-handed; that one is carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster; the other one has one brown eye and one blue eye; and so on); details that help to establish the setting (the floor of the grand hall is polished black marble and the ceiling is painted with a fresco of the apotheosis of King Egbert the Eighteenth); a detail that moves the plot forward (the golden apple has a tag on it saying “for the fairest”; the third red lozenge from the left on the lid of the enameled jewel-box opens the secret compartment.)

Stuff that they’re going to want to save for later might be:  the left-handed man’s ebony walking-stick (which he will use for self-defense in a later chapter); the velvet-lined secret compartment in the jewel-box (which will be used in the next chapter to hide the forged identification papers); the polished black marble floor of the grand hall (where the character with the one brown eye and the one blue eye will slip and fall while running to escape the character who’s carrying the pistol in a shoulder holster.)

You’ll note that some of the details up above are doing double duty — they’re establishing something about the “now” of the story and at the same time planting something that will be useful later.  Good writing is economical like that.

(And no, I have no idea what the story might be that would involve pistols and walking-sticks and forged papers and an odd-eyed fugitive in a land ruled by the descendants of King Egbert the Eighteenth.  But I’ll bet it’s a lively one.)

Character Control

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 5 Comments

You have to keep an eye on your secondary characters, because some of them are sneaky — there’s a couple of kinds, especially, who’ll take over the plot if you let them.

First, you have all those characters whose main role in the plot is to be a source of help and knowledge:  fairy godmothers, wise old men, kindly librarians who happen to have exactly the book the protagonist needs, colorful informants who can tell the detective about the word on the street, and all their fictional ancestors and descendants.  It’s necessary to make them interesting in their own right if they’re going to have more than one appearance in the work, lest their true nature as plot devices be discovered; the danger is that once they’re fully-rounded characters they can start to overshadow the hero or heroine they’re supposed to be assisting.  The cure is to strictly ration their helpful appearances, and to let them be wrong or unhelpful once in a while, so that asking for their assistance isn’t the first thing that the protagonist (and the reader) inevitably thinks of in a pinch.

More dangerous than the helpful secondary characters, though, are the ones who exert such a strong magnetic pull that they’ll warp your intended plot out of shape around them if you don’t watch out.  My co-author and I have had to deal with characters like that once or twice — one of them, we hit on the head with a piece of rebar and put into a multi-chapter coma, and he still damn-near took over what was supposed to be somebody else’s book.  With another such character, we had to arrange the plot so that he was well out of the way of the main action when the crisis hit, because if he’d been in place during the crisis he would have dealt with it handily and there wouldn’t have been another book-and-a-half to the story.

(We also had to promise to write him his own book later, when we were done.  That also works.)