Post #134 August 13 2018

“Series Characters”

One of the most enjoyable aspects of popular fiction is surely reading about the exploits of continuing characters.  So many of our most beloved fictional characters are series characters: Sherlock Holmes (relentless investigator), Tom Swift Jr (boy genius), James Bond (suave secret agent). As a writer, however, there are some best practices that should be followed in developing what you hope will be a continuing character or characters. 

1. Background and biographies.  I can’t emphasize this enough.  Write up a fairly detailed background bio on your proposed character.   Give him or her or it a history.  When I do this, I start from the day they’re born.  I describe what their childhood years were like, who their friends were, what they loved to do.  I particularly like to create some kind of formative experiences in their history that helped make them what you read about in the story later.  If you do this diligently and with enough detail (for me maybe 5-10 pages is enough), you’ll find it suggests plot points, story complications, relationships and other possibilities you can use in your series of stories. 
    
   Here’s some of what I wrote in my bio about Time Jumpers Captain Monthan Dringoth:

Dringoth imagines himself a military expert and seeks out experiences that have some hope of bringing recognition, glory and fame.  He comes from a family where the parents, Pyotr Dringoth and Natalya Dringoth, were famous in their fields of expertise.  Pyotr was a great explorer of backwater worlds and satellites in the outer system of Sturdivant 2180, which has some twenty planets and thousands of moons and satellites.  The only more famous person on Keaton’s World was General Oscar Keaton himself, who led the colony-founding expedition (“First Fall”) to Sturdivant’s fifth planet several hundred terr before Monthan Dringoth was born.  Pyotr Dringoth was best known as the discoverer of the great underground ice labyrinth called the Hollows, part of the icy satellite called Gibbons Grotto in the outer system of Sturdivant.  This dwarf planet is hollow inside with thousands of kilometers of caves, caverns, grottoes, mazes and warrens.  

Monthan’s mother, Natalya Dringoth, is a biochemist and neuro-engineer, perhaps best known as the discoverer/creator of scope, a mildly addictive compound that has become essential for preparing Umans (and other sentient beings) for mind uploading, a process known as The Switch. 

With two famous parents and some overachiever siblings, Monthan had to get out and left home for Frontier Guard at an early age, signing onto a freighter crew making the rounds of Sturdivant’s worlds.  Initially, a robotics’ mate, he worked his way up over a number of years into positions of command.  Ten terr after joining the Guard, he went through officer candidate school (OCS) (on Telitor, a nearby world of the star-sun Delta Recursa III). About five years after that, he was given command of small corvette called Lalande, which he skippered for another five terr, until a navigation error under his command caused the corvette to crash into a small asteroid in the Boru system.  Extensive damage to the ship led to an investigation and Dringoth was found to be negligent and at fault.  He was cashiered from Frontier Guard.

1. Give them a big problem. If your main character suffers from a fear of enclosed spaces, develop your plots to where they sometimes wind up in enclosed spaces…then let the character respond as your bio indicates they would.  In my upcoming serial Time Jumpers, one of the main characters is Monthan Dringoth, a jumpship captain (mentioned above).  Dringoth came from a family of famous parents and part of what motivates him is doing things and going places to get out from under the burden of their celebrity.  I have tried to develop story complications that put him in situations where he responds in a way calculated to be as different from his parents’ experience and what people expect as possible. 
2. Make notes on what happens.  This is an issue with serial stories.  When I mention James Bond, what comes to mind: vodka martinis shaken not stirred, hanging out with beautiful women, casual violence.  The author Ian Fleming undoubtedly had to keep some kind of notes on the little details, quirks and idiosyncracies of Bond, just to keep it all straight through a series of stories.  Consistency equals believability in series stories.  You can’t have your main character climbing buildings like Spiderman in one episode and being afraid of heights in another, at least not without good reason.  Take notes or develop in your bios how your main character dresses, eats, relates to others, and goes about solving problems, even how they part their hair could be important. 
3. Let yourself be surprised. Sometimes characters surprise us.  Some writers like to plot out every little detail and every minute response of their characters beforehand.  While I am kind of like that, there is room to allow the character to surprise you in how they react to a given situation.  If they surprise you as the author, they may well surprise the reader to.  As long as it’s believable, it’s okay.  Give your characters latitude to stretch and be a little unpredictable.  But be sure to lay the groundwork for this somewhere earlier in the story.  You can’t have a character acting so far out of character that it’s not believable.  That’s how you lose readers. 
4. Decide how much your characters will grow or change…beforehand.  Real people change and grow as they experience life and resolve life problems.  Their core personality stays the same but as they accumulate wisdom and hard knocks, they can and should evolve to become a little wiser and more knowledgeable about themselves and others around them.  Your characters should be this way too but you should plot out the basics of this growth ahead of time.  Remember that we do like series characters for their familiarity and predictability, but some change is expected, especially when confronted with new challenges.  I’m not sure how much change and growth I really witnessed in James Bond, but there are exceptions to every rule.  As a general rule, let your characters have room to grow, change and learn, while keeping track of the basic details.  Your readers will like that.
    
   Obviously, there are plenty of good and bad practices that could be followed in developing and sustaining series characters.  We’ll explore these more in upcoming posts.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 20, 2018.  In this post, I want to continue following the idea of serialized stories and see how your fictional setting can support the unique requirements of this fictional form.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.