Writing is Cake

Like a lot of writers, the ideas are the things that get me excited. I get partway through a project and one, two, or ten new ideas pop into my nogging begging for attention. The crazier and more cosmically weird, the better.

This creates two frequent problems for me. The first is that I struggle against rewriting, because I want to move on to the Next New Idea. The second is that I get wrapped up in my idea and wander around in a landscape of pretty colors but little substance. I’ll save the first problem for another post, and talk about how I try to keep myself grounded through a story.

Don’t get lost in the backdrop
Your story rides on the backs of your characters, and the rest is window dressing. Science-fiction is misunderstood by a lot of people who seem to mistake it for an end unto itself. If you look at truly good Sci-Fi (Firefly, new Battlestar Galactica, original Star Wars) you see that the future is secondary to the tales being told. The original Star Trek was pitched at a “wagon train to the stars” to sell it to executives, because the producers knew the backdrop didn’t matter. Kirk would be Kirk in any time period.

Turn your characters loose
I’ve become a huge fan of Y: The Last Man. It’s a 60 comic series with the incredible premise of every male mammal on the planet has died except for one young man and his monkey. It’s a wild idea that could easily run in a billion different directions, but the author keeps it tight by focusing on the characters. They are far more than 2-D caricatures, with clear perspectives and goals. They keep the story grounded.

Don’t tell everything
In Y: The Last Man, you often get glimpses of other stories going on. Some come from incidental characters the protagonist and friends run into, and others are just glimpsed in the background. The author gives a taste to remind you there is a whole world at work, but rarely does he go off on a tangent. There are still a ton of other tales to tell in this incredible world, but we’re not here to read about those right now.

This is a tough area for me, but one I love to explore. Hopefully I will develop enough skill to be able to harness my ideas into something valuable on a regular, or even occasional, basis!

When I write new characters, their biggest problem is usually that they’re all me. I may be a bit of a character in some senses of the word, but lacking a well developed multiple personality disorder there is just one of me rattling around in my head. As the characters make it from my ideas to the page, they end up sounding somewhat the same.

How to take all of these imaginary creations and make them distinct, colorful, and engaging? This is something I’m still developing, but there are a few techniques I try.

Start with Archetypes
This one is tricky because you don’t want your characters to end up as stereotypes, which is in the same neighborhood. A stereotype is a simplified concept that is never fleshed out past two dimensions, but an archetype can give you a nice placeholder to fill in later. Is your character the Wisecracking Sidekick, the Bully, or the Wounded Child? Give yourself a sketch to hold them in your mind as they develop.

Here’s a great list of archetypes to give you some ideas.

Keep their Goal in mind
All of your characters should have some objective, some driving need, as they move through your story. Your character isn’t going to forget what they’re after, and neither should you. Keeping their goal in mind when a character is on the page helps keep them from getting sidetracked into irrelevant scenes or subplots.

Steal their face
I don’t do this one often, but many of my friends swear by it. Look through websites and magazines and find someone who looks like your character. It may be the famous actor you want to play that character in the movie adaptation of your work, or just a picture of a random person who has just the right smirk that you see your character having. Either way, having a clear image of the character helps make them more real and easier to write.

I like to use Flickr for browsing images of people for ideas. Here’s a search for “clever man“, for example.

Backstory
This one almost goes without saying, but it is tricky for me when I start out. If I sit down and write a lot of backstory about a character I’m still discovering, I may not find him to be the same person I envisioned when I get back to the story itself. That’s not always a bad thing, but can be frustrating. I usually write the characters a bit first, either in the story or screenplay, then go back and start writing backstory based on what I’ve developed so far. I make it an iterative process rather than something I do as Step One.

Whatever method you use, keep working at your characters. If you can’t tell them apart by the time you’re done, odds are your audience won’t either.