Tag Archives: character development

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, LonTobyn Chronicle, Tor Books, Writing

Professional Wednesday: My Best Mistakes, Part I

A new month, a new blog series. Not that I’m committing to doing a series every month. Really, I’m not . . . .

[Sigh] What have I done . . . ?

Over the course of my career, which has spanned more than twenty-five years, I have managed to accomplish a lot of things. But it has occurred to me that I have also made some pretty interesting mistakes. And maybe readers would learn something from hearing about a few of them. Certainly they might be entertained. And so, with this week’s post I kick off my “My Best Mistakes” series. I hope you enjoy it.

I’m going to start with a story a number of you might already know from one context or another. If you have seen me on panels or at readings, you might well have heard me tell it. If not, here you go. (And a note pertaining to this post and others to come — I will be telling stories that almost invariably include other people and/or published works of mine that I am still seeking to market. In the interest of discretion, some details of these mistake-stories will be kept purposefully vague. I hope you understand. If you don’t understand . . . well, I really don’t care.)

Children of Amarid, by David B. Coe (jacket art by Romas Kukalis)Very early in my career — like, one book in — I attended a very large convention as a guest. It was by far the largest, best-attended con I’d been, too, and at first I was a bit star-struck by the whole thing. Unfortunately, that didn’t last. Read on.

One of my panels was on character-building. Or at least I think it was. Maybe it was on things that happen to us when we write. Or things we can talk about that will allow an impulsive, full-of-himself-young-writer-with-one-lonely-book-to-his-name to do stupid things. I was on the panel with three other authors. Two of them I didn’t know, though they seemed to be solid mid-list authors, each with several publishing credits. The third was a giant in the field. This writer also published with Tor, my publisher, and might well have been one of their three biggest names. I was nothing compared to this person. I was lint.

Somehow, the discussion turned to that wonderful creative moment when our characters begin to do things that we don’t expect, that we don’t necessarily plan. I have written and spoken about this quite a bit. To my mind, it is the moment when we discover that all the work we’ve done to create realistic characters has paid off. They are acting of their own volition in a sense, though of course we are still creating them. The creation is just happening deep in our hind-brains, making it SEEM that they are independent, sentient beings. That, at least is how I felt — and still feel — about it.

The big-name writer disagreed. This person responded to what I had said about this by telling me, in no uncertain terms, in front of a roomful of people, that if my characters were not doing exactly what I expected, I was doing it wrong. And be “it” this person meant “writing.”

“You are the god of your world,” this person said. “You control everything.” End of story. As it were.

The other two writers quickly dropped out of the conversation. They sat at the panel table, staring at their hands, keeping silent, and allowing this other idiot — ie. Me — to keep on arguing the point. Because they were very smart. Much smarter than me. I. Whatever.

Me? I just kept on arguing with the big name, the person who could crush me and my career like a bug if they chose to. Because I was right and this person was wrong. That’s what I thought. (Still do, honestly, but that’s beside the point.) Finally, in my growing frustration, I said (at volume, with heat) “If you write them like puppets, they’ll read like puppets!”

And then I realized what I’d done. Big name. Room full of people. Me saying, essentially, that this person wrote flat, boring, lifeless characters. Holy fuck.

As I have said before in other venues, in that instant the entirety of my tiny little career flashed across my eyes. I figured I was totally screwed. Worse, I had screwed myself.

Now, as it turned out, I was fine. The conversation shifted to another topic. I kept my voice down and my opinions blandly neutral for the rest of the panel. And afterward, I apologized profusely. The big name author was gracious, kind, generous, and forgiving.

I was fortunate. I also learned a valuable lesson. Panel discussions can grow heated; the best ones sometimes do. But even when they do, we must remain polite, and we must always refrain from making any of our statements sound personal or targeted. Because that’s the courteous thing to do. But also because we are always going to be on panels with a mix of people, some of them less experienced than we are (or at least equally lacking in experience) and some of them more experienced, with greater reach and a greater capacity to hinder our career advancement.

I got lucky that day. The person at whom I directed my statement understood I was speaking without thinking, in the heat of the moment. Other authors might not have been so understanding. I could have done real damage to my career.

So that is this week’s mistake. In future weeks, I will focus on different sorts of missteps — bad business decisions, bad reactions to reviews, etc. I hope you find the stories helpful.

In the meantime, as always, keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: The ABCs of Character

Last week, I wrote about befriending our characters, as a way of using empathy to improve our character development. This week I would like to continue the discussion of character work by taking a slightly different approach to creating and enriching the people we write about in our books and stories.

I first came up with this formulation about a decade ago, while preparing to teach at the South Carolina Writers’ Workshop, which then took place at Myrtle Beach. I have since used it at conventions, in workshops, and in an Odyssey Online course I taught several years ago. I refer to it as “The ABCs of Character,” because it gets at the basics, and because it uses a handy mnemonic.

The ABCs are “Attributes, Backstory, and Circumstances,” and they cover the elements of character that I like to think about as I “build” the person in question.

Let’s start with Attributes: These are basic facts that define who the character appears to be to the outside world. They include, but are not limited to, the following: name, age, gender identity, racial identity, national and religious identities, occupation, family/partnership situation (single, married, married with children, widowed, etc.), appearance (eye color, hair color, body type, etc.) socio-economic status, education level, and pretty much anything else we deem essential to identifying this person. If our world is a magical one, and this person has access to magic, or if it’s a tech world, and our character has special techie abilities, then that information would fit here as well. This is important stuff, but it’s fairly superficial. The deeper issues come next.

Backstory: This is where we start to delve into our character’s past. What has happened to her so far in her life? Where is she from? What kind of childhood did she have? Was she happy? Did she have lots of advantages growing up? Or was hers a more difficult upbringing? Were her parents around? Were they kind? Abusive? Indifferent? What has she survived? Is there darkness in her past?

Backstory is where our character’s secrets lie. And in those secrets may lie the seeds of conflict that will inform our story. This is also where we might find the roots of our character’s strengths and weaknesses. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how very important backstory can be to all that will happen to our character and, even more to the point, how she might respond to adversity.

Finally, we have Circumstance: This is the immediate situation our character finds herself in as our story begins. This is where attributes and backstory meet our inciting event. Perhaps something has happened to change a key attribute. She has lost a job. She has found out her partner is cheating on her. A beloved friend or relation has died. Or… She has won the lottery, gotten her dream job, or discovered that she is the true heir to the throne of Whatever-Land. You get the idea. Big things have happened and her life has changed.

This event, for good or for ill, has dredged up some key element(s) of her backstory — a rivalry with a sibling, a dynamic in her relationship with her family, a buried memory that circumstance uncovers. Or this new circumstance calls on her to draw upon those strengths and weaknesses that are rooted in her life experience. This change, this inciting event, is where our story begins. This is where our character begins to figure out what motivates her, what she wants, and what obstacles she will face in trying to attain her goals.

Pretty straight-forward, right?

Let’s put this technique to use by using Gollum, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as a case-study.

Gollum’s Attributes: Gollum is several hundred years old. He is basically bald, he has overlarge blue eyes. He is small, wiry, very strong for his stature. It would be generous to say that he dresses poorly and in a minimalist way… He likes to eat fish. And he has this Ring that he just loves. A lot. I mean, he really, really loves this Ring. He calls it “Precious” for God’s sake. You might say he’s a little obsessed with it. He has no friends. And he likes to talk about himself in the second person, like royalty. Except he calls himself “Precious,” too. He has issues.Gollum, Lord of the Rings

Gollum’s Backstory: He was once one of the River Folk, a branch of the Hobbit people. His name wasn’t always Gollum. It used to be Sméagol And, to be honest, the Ring wasn’t originally his. It belonged to his cousin, Déagol, who found it while they were fishing on Sméagol’s birthday. When Sméagol saw the Ring he fell in love with it, and he murdered his cousin to get it. His obsession intensified, and the Ring stretched out his life for centuries. He retreated into caves, existed in utter isolation as little more than an animal. He hunted, hid, tolerated the presence of orcs. Mostly he looked at his Ring.

Gollum’s Circumstance: Gollum has lost the Ring and he is hell-bent on getting it back. It seems that is slipped from his grasp and wound up in the hands of — ironically — another Hobbit. He is forced to leave the lonely comfort of his cave and venture once more into a world that he fears, one that looks upon him with disgust and contempt. He is captured by agents of the dark who torture him for information about the Ring, which tells him that others are looking for it as well. He must find it first, even if it means killing the Hobbit or Hobbits who have it.

And there we are. The ABCs of character. Attributes, Backstory, Circumstance. Give it a try. You might find it helpful to conceive your main characters in this way.

Best of luck and keep writing!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: Befriend Your Characters…And Be-Character Your Friends

This will be a relatively brief Writing-Tip Wednesday post. It’s a lazy, hot, stormy day and I’m feeling, well, lazy and hot…

So far this year, I have used my Wednesday posts to offer advice about any number of things, from finding agents and navigating the market to processing ideas and building worlds. I believe every topic I’ve covered is important and useful — I wouldn’t put so much work into these posts if I didn’t.

But I recently realized that I have yet to focus a post on character development. I’ve written about conflict and dialogue and point of view, which are integral to developing characters, but I have not tackled the subject head on. So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be writing specifically about building and deepening characters.

Because nothing is more important to good story telling. For all the time we spend on our worlds, our plots, all the twists and turns and cool stuff we do with our stories, nothing matters more than giving our readers believable, compelling characters. The people in our stories are what captivate our readers. I would argue that they are also what captivate us as we write. I love my worlds and magic systems and such, but I live and die with my characters.

I have lots of suggestions I can make about creating characters, and I will focus on some in-depth specifics next week. For now, though, let me begin with something I have said before at conventions and workshops:

The qualities that make us good spouses, good parents, good siblings and offspring and friends, are also the qualities that make us good writers.

What do I mean by that?

Writing, I believe, is an act of empathy. So is being a good person, a caring companion to those in our lives. When the people we love need our guidance or our sympathy, we do our best to set our egos and needs aside and imagine ourselves in their positions. We draw upon our own experiences of course, and do our best to bring wisdom to their concerns, but we let go of the self and cater to what they require of us.

In the same way, we are at our best as writers when we dive deep into the emotions and thoughts of the people we create, when we put ourselves fully into their minds and their hearts and channel for our readers all that they experience. Put another way, our writing is most effective when we subsume ourselves to our point of view characters.

And so I often tell writers to befriend their characters, to nurture them, to give as much love and compassion to them, even our “villains,” as we do to the real people in our lives. Committing to our characters in that way will make them all the more real to our readers.

In this time of unrest and uncertainty, though, I would add this. I don’t often offer life advice in these posts. It takes enough gumption and hubris to offer writing advice in this environment. But to offer advice for the rest of what we do? What a terrible idea. And yet I would ask your indulgence as I do just that.

Because right now our world cries out for the some level of compassion and love that we ought to bring to our writing. And so I would ask that you “be-character” your friends and loved ones. Be as empathetic in dealing with the people you interact with as you would want to be in creating your characters. The world will be a better place for it.

Keep writing, and be kind to one another.