Category: Character Building

On creating new characters midstream

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Okay, so Captain Will Dewar in Theadia is definitely not Space Pirate Captain Harlock, but the gif was too good to pass up, heh.

Anyway, I’m kind of stuck on how to write Dewar, as he’s a relatively new character unlike nearly everyone else in the novel. But in the process, I’m reminded that this also happened back when I was writing A Division of Souls; originally Christine Gorecki was merely a name of an old friend that Poe mentioned during a tense moment to ease Caren’s distress. By The Persistence of Memories she’d acquired a major role.

So why Dewar, anyway? Again, he was originally a one-off, someone mentioned in passing during a conversation between a few flight captains, someone known as being gruff and not entirely friendly but someone who could be trusted. As it happens in this particular revision/rewrite, I need to expand his role as someone willing to take extremely dangerous chances in order to help the main characters achieve their goals.

But who is he when he’s not in uniform? What kind of civilian would he be? Well, I kind of see him a bit like Alan Ritchson’s take on the Jack Reacher character: ridiculously well-built, surprisingly intelligent, yet a bit of a quiet loner. He’s not all that easy to rile up, but you don’t want to be in the same area when he is. I wouldn’t say he has a strong sense of justice, but more like a strong drive to ensure the right thing is done, and done correctly the first time. He craves competence.

All this thought and brainstorming, just for a secondary character! Well, this is why I loved writing the Bridgetown trilogy so much: every character in that universe has a backstory and a reason for being there, and that’s exactly the kind of writing work I love doing. [Why yes, I’m definitely anti-AI when it comes to creativity, why do you ask?] While I do have some idea of who Dewar is and what he’s about, I’m still a bit vague on his reasons for being who he is and why he does what he does, and how he relates to the other characters.

Well, that’s something I’ll need to keep plugging away on, isn’t it?

Real life inspiration

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There’s a little bit of real life inspiration in pretty much everything I write, and I’m sure that’s true for nearly every writer. Every story I’ve written does have at least one moment, scene or setting based on reality.

I wrote the Bridgetown Trilogy when I was working at the Yankee Candle warehouse, and while there aren’t specifically any scenes that take place in such a location, it did inspire a few ideas. For instance, the brief mention of Hallera, a planet where people live within instead of on its surface, comes from when I worked second shift and would look out from the dock bays into the deserted semi-darkness of the rear lot at 11:30 at night. There’s also a newer character in MU4 whose day job is working behind the scenes at the Bridgetown Nullport. Several names in the trilogy are Tuckerized from former coworkers in one way or another.

It also explains why the trilogy also had a lot of characters whose day jobs weren’t high-status and they specifically enjoyed Life Outside of Work. Those who were high-status were there for a reason, and their jobs tied in with the story in one way or another. Call me blue collar if you will, but those office job characters never really sounded like much fun to write to me. Even Diana Meeks in In My Blue World, who crunched numbers for a living, didn’t necessarily like her job and it’s barely mentioned.

Being that I live on the much quieter northwest side of San Francisco and currently work at a supermarket, I’m sure that the world of retail might make its eventual appearance somewhere in one of my projects, whether it’s MU4 or something else. One might see retail as drone-like as office work — you’re just another easily replaceable number, apparently — but there’s also a much closer connection to the Outside World that office work doesn’t always provide. Interesting and unique customers and locals become inspirations for characters and background crowds the more you interact with them. Vendors and delivery drivers become secondary characters with unsung but important roles that could help you out of a tricky plot twist. Coworkers once again get Tuckerized as street names and, if they’re interested enough (like many of my YC coworkers were), they’ll ask how the story is coming along.

There’s something about being a little closer to a community at this level that helps me feel more connected to the characters I create. There’s a shine to them that pulls me closer, wanting to know more about their personal lives and how they interact and interconnect with others. It might not be as glamorous or as high-paying as some of my previous positions, but I’ve become rich in other ways whenever I embrace that kind of connection, and that makes all the difference to me.

Balance…and Barrier

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So, you ask. We’ve shown that the Shenaihu are not the antagonists of the Mendaihu in this universe. And yet…who is?

That’s a very good question indeed, because it took me a long time to figure that out myself. In the Bridgetown Trilogy we learn that the two do not necessarily have a protagonist/antagonist relationship, but one of balance. One exists to balance out the other in some shape or form. Both sides had a reason for doing what they do, whether that action is noble or misguided. But the fact remains that there is balance between the two. It is nuanced and often contradictory, but it’s there and that’s how life is. I thought about this early on when writing A Division of Souls as an extension of the Golden Rule: similarity and difference working together peacefully.

This was the question I’d been asking myself: who wants to upset that balance? Whoever that happens to be in MU4 is the real antagonist. The person or group — or even a belief — must have a reason to ensure that the true balance between the Mendaihu and the Shenaihu cannot hold. Which brings up the next question: why would they want to do that?

It occurred to me recently that the answer to that question will not be found in a goal-oriented way. Maybe they are doing this to gain power, but that’s only one of the end results and not necessarily a goal. I started thinking about how in this current political climate, there are those who see progressive movement as a positive evolution, and there are those who see it as a perversion of stasis.

Thus the drive of the antagonist of MU4 (and perhaps whatever comes after it) could be precisely that: a person or a group — or belief — that sees only the perversion and fights to eradicate it. [Which of course begs further thoughts about the balance between those two. But that’s a bit further into this created future.] They want to create barriers that keep this evolution from taking place at any cost.

So far I have two concrete things for this antagonist: a name for the group, and their sigil. And a pretty good idea of how far they’re willing to take it.

Writing New Characters

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Brand new characters are always an intriguing exercise, because I don’t always know where I’m going to be taking them. Some of them, like Caren in the Bridgetown Trilogy, are sort of based on tropes (she was originally a mix of Agent Scully in X-Files with a touch of Captain Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell but became something altogether different). Others, like Zuze in In My Blue World, are characters I already know inside and out before I even start.

While writing MU4, I’ve been introducing a few new characters into the Mendaihu Universe and it’s true, I’m still working out where they’ll end up by the end. I have an entirely new character, Lizzie Kapranos, whose drive is decidedly not like Caren’s; she knows who she is and where she fits in, so her conflict is the refusal to give in so easily to conformity. [Tuckerization time: she’s named after Elizabeth Bennett from Pride & Prejudice and singer Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand. A fierce free-thinker and a bit of an oddball but not without a sense of humor.] Like Miss Bennett, Lizzie is all about staying true to what she believes in. Also like her, Lizzie will (eventually) admit to being wrong when she makes errors in judgement or action.

This might be partly why my word count has been so glacial these last few weeks, as I work out the scene with all that in mind, but to be honest that’s part of the appeal of writing new characters. I get to learn something new about them, and about the story. Their actions will influence what comes next, whether it’s positive or negative. Another new character, Eika, embodies this to the extreme: she’s the id escaping highly restrictive boundaries and set free. Eika is a chaos element in a way, while Lizzie is the stability element. And both characters are completely aware of that role. In the process, Eika and Lizzie are polar opposites but also the key to Balance. And Balance has always been a big part of the Mendaihu Universe.

Do I know where these two will go, and if they’ll ever meet? Maybe? I’m not sure? But it’s in my mind and it’s a vague signpost further into the story that I’m heading towards. And that’s all I really need.

Connections

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what some of the themes in MU4 might be, and I think one of the most important is about personal connections; the ones we make, the ones we destroy, the ones we wish we had and the ones we protect with everything we have.

I posted a rough version of Chapter 1 some months back, in which a young woman named Eika is dropped off in a deserted town and forced to undergo a solo trial to prove her worth as part of the Order of the Blessed Ones. Her story of connection is about the utter lack of it in her failure to live up to her family’s and community’s expectations. In Chapter 2 we’ll see the connection between two new Alien Relations Unit officers, Lizzie Kapranos and Ruu-Sseikassi Tiiegasi, who will have a somewhat unconventional connection with each other that’s different than Alec Poe and Caren Johnson’s in the previous books. And later on we’ll see an arc about Ampryss and Shirai, and how their connections to their original fates have changed because of the Season of the Ninth Embodiment.

I’ve chosen ‘personal connections’ to be one of the backbones of MU4 (and possibly other related stories) partly because of what Denni Johnson did near the end of The Balance of Light: she pretty much broke all the rules and expectations and sent fate off in uncharted directions. Every detail, every question and every choice is related to what connections the characters make, because that is the only anchor with each other that they truly have.

Of course, this isn’t about strict maintenance of those connections…like I said, it’s also about how they can be destroyed, and why.

But then I’d be giving away too much if I kept going, heh.

Not Writing / Writing

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Again, I’ve been thinking about how I pulled this off back in my Belfry days.

I’m of course feeling a bit frustrated and twitchy because I’m not getting any new words done. Chapters One and Two are still where I last left them, maybe with a few slight revisions here and there. Why am I getting nowhere with this thing?

But then I remember: starting A Division of Souls was also slow going at first, at least when new words were involved. Those first few chapters were written and rewritten so many times before I could accept them as a true part of the novel. I essentially took the best-so-far version I had and started rewriting them from the beginning.

But that wasn’t all I was doing. I was spending a lot of non-Belfry time working on the world-building. Creating short character studies of the mains and the secondaries, getting to know them better by creating seemingly mundane facts and figures about them. Sometimes they serve no purpose, but sometimes they come in handy somewhere down the line in the most unexpected ways. [For example, I came up with Caren having a scar on her leg from someone shooting at her well before I actually mentioned that fact in The Persistence of Memories.]

So this is what I’ve been doing for MU4 these last few weeks. Creating character studies for the original returning cast as well as the new cast of characters coming in. Some of them are from the several recent outtakes, but some of them are reinterpretations instead. In the process, I’m learning more about who they are, why they find themselves involved in these two important chapters, and what their stories will be during the course of the rest of the project.

It doesn’t quite get rid of that I need to write new words now, damn it! itch, but it will definitely make those new words come easier once I do have the chance to make them happen.

Characters old and new

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Recently I wrote up an entry on 750Words laying out a sort of Where Are They Now? for the original cast of the Bridgetown Trilogy in the current MU4 setting. It was all sorts of fun to do and it even gave me a few ideas for plot points to hit later on in the story! The reason I did this was because I wanted a firm grasp on their roles in this new story (if they indeed have one) as a sort of anchor for the new characters I’m about to bring in.

I suppose this confirms that I do want to return to the original cast to explore the Mendaihu Universe a bit further, but it also gives me a bit of distance and breathing room from the trilogy so I don’t feel like I’m trying to revive a story that’s already been told. The new generation of characters provide me with a way to expand the universe yet keep it connected to its origins. After all, this whole story universe is about connections, right?

Anyway, now that I know where the original cast stands, I suppose I should probably do the same for the next-gen cast, given that I know who they are already (due to previous versions dating back to 2015) and what their goals are. Some of them are already fully fleshed out while others are only a brief idea, but that’s okay as well. Perhaps even newer characters will arise when I least expect it!

On Gender and Pronouns in Character Building

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One of my coworkers at the Day Job goes by they/them pronouns. I do my best to use the correct ones, though I’ll slip sometimes. After working with them a short time and getting along quite fine, I told them to feel free to correct me at any time — in fact, if I slip in their presence, they are free to slap me on the arm. [And they have, much to mutual amusement.] I’ll still slip from time to time, but I think I do pretty well now. In fact, it’s gotten me thinking a lot about others I work with or the customers I meet, wondering if I’m using the right pronouns they prefer, and it got me thinking a lot about how I write gender in my novels.

I’ll admit I didn’t know much at all about the gender spectrum when I began writing the Bridgetown Trilogy back in the early 00s. I mean, I did, but I didn’t have all that much real-life experience at the time to base it on other than movies and books that may or may not have done it justice. I did, however, encourage myself to insert characters with different sexual and/or romantic preferences. Caren, for instance, is bisexual. Sheila is lesbian and Nick is asexual. (Alec is purely hetero but he accepts the entire spectrum, which fits his character.) The closest I got to it was hinting that Colin was a variant of the gender spectrum, which gets explained in a bit more detail in The Balance of Light — the reveal of who Colin really is, and how there are others like them, is actually tied in with the book’s thematic concept of balance.

It wasn’t until maybe the last ten years that I realized that maybe I should expand my central casting a bit more. I’d learned a lot and expanded my knowledge and experience considerably by that point, so it only made sense to use it. In My Blue World, for instance, includes both nonbinary and trans minor characters that I put there for that reason. And in MU4, I’ll be introducing two new soon-to-be majors, one of whom is trans and the other is nonbinary.

I realize that some writers are worried that they’ll do it wrong: placing this kind of person in there for the gold star (Hey look, I’m inclusive n’ shit! Gimme a cookie!), creating this character for manufactured conflict or drama (the minor role/target that ends up dead because Real Life Is Gritty), or something similar. I knew I’d fall into that same trap if I overthought it or constantly worried about it, so the way I approached it was to approach the way it is in real life: hey, some people are just trans or nonbinary or queer or whatever, simple as that. No literary reason except that’s just who they are, and that’s how life is. I do expand on their character description as necessary to ensure they read as such, but I’m always conscious of making them realistic instead of a caricature or a stereotype. I don’t create these characters for political reasons, because that’s not the kind of writer I am (and believe me, I’ve tried that route and I am absolutely terrible at it). I create them because it’s like meeting my coworker for the first time: they just happen to be such, and it’s up to me to honor that.

And just like my coworker, I have to make sure I use the correct pronouns. In Theadia one of the main characters is nonbinary and I had to make sure I constantly used they/them. And yes, I did have to fix it in a number of places during revision! I totally understand that when you’re taught that he/him and she/her are the socially correct defaults, it’s sometimes easy to forget when you meet (or in this case, create) someone who doesn’t go by that default. It’s not about going out of your way to please them; it’s just about creating an alternative to make it work for both sides.

Writing new characters

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Meryl Stryfe and Milly Thompson from Trigun

One of my current projects has had quite the interesting evolution. It had started off in 2019 as a simple light-hearted litfic story that happened to take place on a space station, but after several failed attempts, cast changes, and three mixtapes, it’s turned into something altogether different. The two main characters, BFFs slightly inspired by Meryl and Milly from Trigun among other things, are the only two people that have survived to the current version. Two characters who are just doing their job and get involved in something WAAAAAAAY out of their league, yet it wouldn’t be the same without them. One character is boisterous, kind of silly, but she always has your back; the other is straitlaced and serious, but will often come up with the most unexpected and deeply unstable ideas. That’s Althea and Claudia, the two main characters in my story.

These two goofballs remind me just how often I love creating and writing new characters that just resonate and take on lives of their own. It’s rare, but sometimes I know exactly how these characters would act in any given moment, any given situation. They might be slightly based on or inspired by real people or someone else’s characters, but I’ve made them my own by giving them the exact personalities I expect them to have. I even know that they must have a pet Maine coon cat (I spoke about Grizelda a few weeks ago) and they’re both the biggest nerds ever. They’re not only BFFs from childhood, they love each other dearly and are everything except married at this current point of writing. Writing them together has always been a joy and rarely frustrating.

Mind you, the story itself is in its very rough draft form at the moment — let’s just say there’s an extremely frustrating chapter I stopped a while back and put a big [WRITE THIS LATER] on it — but I’m happy to say that thanks to these two women, I know where it’s all supposed to unfold and what their roles are within it all. They’re sort of Reluctant Heroes, I suppose, but I’m trying not to lean too heavily on any one trope for them. They’re the ones who’ll come up with That Insane Idea That Just Might Work, but they’re also the ones wondering why the hell they got involved in the first place.

So yeah…I could say that I feel like I’m still scrabbling, still trying to find my way and making some of it up as I go along, but with these two goobers as my leads, I think I’m in good hands!

Cattiness

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Image courtesy of bluehedgehogs on Imgur

There is really no reason why one of my recent novel projects has a Maine coon cat in it. I mean, other than the fact that I’m surprised I never had cats in any of my previous books or stories, given how much I love them.

Okay, maybe there is a reason, but it’s not a Chekov’s cat. It’s just that the comically large, floofy and cranky kitty happens to be the pet of the two main characters. [Her name is Grizelda, by the way, Grizz for short.] I had no real plans to have the cat get involved in any of the shenanigans that unfold in this novel other than having one of them be the doting mom (fussing and giving scritches and belly rubs and letting her sit on the kitchen table when she shouldn’t be up there) and the other be the mom with withering patience (pulling her off said kitchen table, ensuring she gets fed on time, lines up appointments with the vet).

My point being, this is the first time I’ve used a living being as a way to show part of a character’s personality. They both love Grizzy despite her incessant crankiness and chattiness. They both care about her and miss her dearly when they head out on what is initially a few weeks’ vacation, and worry about her when said vacation ends up being longer than planned. Grizz doesn’t have a role like Einstein the dog does in Cowboy Bebop; she’s just there doing cat things and living her best cat life — including making sure her humans behave, don’t get into trouble, and feed her every now and again.

And, no big surprise, the Grizelda scenes I’ve written are always a joy to write!