Post #199 January 20 2020

“Characters, Characters, Characters”

Today, we conclude our study of good storytelling practices with Point #10, which is all about characters. 

Even if you have a plot-driven story, your characters are what make a story really shine. A bland or passive protagonist makes for a boring story. Interesting and unique characters are memorable, if not timeless, even when relegated to smaller roles. Go the extra mile to give each character distinction, depth, and history. Consider writing character bios for each member of your cast and see if it gives you further insight into how to portray them.

Let’s look at some of the details.

1. Remember that readers live vicariously through your characters.  It’ll be easier for them to identify with a character if you’ve done your homework and made the character seem real to them.  But the devil is in the details.  Don’t spend so much time describing the character and his or her background that you forget to tell the story.  Perhaps the best way to remember this is to remind yourself that character is best revealed through action and how the character responds to the challenges he faces trying to achieve his goal. 
2. In developing your character(s), strive for the unique and memorable.  What sets this person apart from others?  Why should I care about what happens to this character?  A unique and memorable character is a little different, a bit off-beat, perhaps, displaying attributes such as physical characteristics or attitudes or a manner of speaking that sticks in your memory. Toward that end, one way to do this is to—
3. Recall from your own life people you have known who really stick out.  I remember my senior-year typing class teacher in high school.  One: she was black (unusual in Atlanta, GA in the late sixties).  Two: she was extremely friendly and encouraging.  Three: (most important) she knew I was smitten with a girl in the class and pestered me to ask her to the prom. Her name was Miss Simms.  I recall her fondly even today for all these reasons. 
   Ask yourself this: why is James Bond so memorable?  Or Harry Potter?  Or Tarzan or Tom Swift, Jr?  They are well described.  They act consistently across a number of stories.  With series characters, all the author has to do to invoke a character is mention a few traits, just a few words…”shaken, not stirred,” for example.  We remember these characters because they are well-drawn, they are different in engaging ways and unique in their outlook on life, not to mention in their actions in the stories.   
4. How much detail should you put in your story?  I strongly recommend writing character bios for your main characters.  You don’t have to use every single word or incident from the bio in your story but at least if Og and Grog both have blond hair and moles on their left cheeks, you’ll be consistent in how they’re described.  Readers notice that sort of thing.  Even better, some times in the process of developing a character and writing a short bio, plot points will jump out at you and suggest ways of steering the story that you might not have considered.
5. Here’s an example from a science fiction novel called Monument I’m writing now that illustrates what I’m saying:   
   Octavio Morales Patron
   Age: 50-ish
   Height: 5’9”
   Weight: 285 lbs
   Hair: Bald
   Face: Olive complexion, round and red, splotchy with nanoderm patches that aren’t working
   Other Distinguishing Features:  huffy, wheezing kind of breath; crushing hand grip; small slits for eyes, lost in extra folds of fat around the eyes; smile that vacillates between a smirk and a sneer.
    
   A Short Biography:
   Octavio Morales Patron (aka O.P. or Octo) fab lord, scope dealer and smuggler, scoopship fleet operator and shipping magnate, transmuting plant owner, terreta developer and influence peddler in the halls of the InFed Council.  Patron is the one who gives Dugay the commission for the Outer Ring project.
   Many words could be used to describe Patron: larger than life, boisterous, rambunctious, loud, obnoxious, annoying.  All of them would be true.  Patron lives aboard a luxurious personal terreta called Zanzibar, orbiting in a cycler orbit between Earth, Venus, and Mars.  It is a pleasure palace worthy of Kublai Khan, whose history has often fascinated Patron and whom Patron often fashions himself after.  He sometimes thinks of himself as a latter-day 23^rd century Khan.
   Patron’s initial fortune came from his father Julio, an early sunpower investor.  One of Julio’s legacies was to will ownership of several sunpower stations to his children.  OP has a sister Eugenia and a younger brother Oscar (now deceased).  He owns ten sunpower stations—known locally as the Sunflower Group—which beam power to customers all over InFed.  Most of the Sunflower stations are inside Mercury orbit.  These stations are the source of his original wealth.
   OP was born on Earth itself, in Buenos Aires, to Julio and Constanza Morales Patron, in the year 2195 CE.  But as a child, he was relocated to the family terreta Cordoba in halo orbit around Earth-Moon L3 and this is where he grew up.  Patron is a creature of space, or at least non-Earth and now can no longer return to Earth due to its powerful gravity well.
   Today, Patron’s most lucrative business after sunpower is smuggling, something which InFed tries to control but mostly winks at, for OP has supporters even among SpaceGuard and Frontier Corps.  His smuggling includes scope, illegal fabs (nanobotic fabrication systems) and many contraband goods to a variety of settlements especially along the borderlands of InFed, along the inner ring of the asteroid belt. 
   Another source of wealth for Patron are his multiple shipping lines, notably the Patronic Line, consisting of dozens of scoopships, dredges, transmuters (factory ships which take elemental materials and use nuclear reactions to transmute them to other elements), container ships and even a small cruise line for high-end tourists (Cabalgada or Cavalcade).  He is a powerful fleet operator across the spaceways of InFed with interests everywhere, one of the biggest, and this gives him great influence inside InFed, especially with the Secretary-General and the General Assembly.  His own personal cruiser Bolivar is a scoopship extensively modified to serve as a sort of floating office for flitting around his varied interests from one end of InFed to the other.
   One of OP’s later businesses is to finance the development and sale of dozens of terretas all over InFed, making him sort of a land developer and which is the initial impetus for the idea of the Outer Ring…to outflank the Concordance and ensure a long-lasting supply chain of materials and resources for InFed well into the future.  His latest project is a sort of planned development of terretas called Elysium, mostly located in orbit around the Sun near the Sun-Mars L5 point, trailing Mars but easily reachable from many points.
   OP wants a name architect-developer for the Outer Ring (so does InFed) and that’s why he pursues Philippe Dugay so assiduously.
   All of these business interests give Patron a strong voice inside InFed government, and he uses that influence to buy politicians all the time.  It doesn’t hurt that he has had off and on relations with one Katerina Lind, daughter of InFed founder Arthur Lind and an early sunpower developer himself.
   OP has been married and divorced five times and they were (in chronological order): Ria, Khamis, Selene, Marguerite, and Fumiko.  He currently has two mistresses Eva (who lives with him at Zanzibar and Dolores, who resides at Copernicus City, the Moon.  They both know of each other and have communicated remotely at times.  They aren’t exactly married to OP but the relationships are more than just friendships. Both want to become pregnant by OP to strengthen their hold on him but OP is notoriously careful about this. 
   OP views his Outer Ring project and his association with Philippe Dugay (if he can be convinced) as the capstone project of his career, one which will cement the names of both for all history, for Patron has become increasingly concerned about his legacy.
   He is pondering letting Eva and Dolores become pregnant by him, so as to have sons to leave his empire with.
    

I don’t need to have any more details on this character to have a good feel about what type of person he is.  And I only do this for major characters in my story.   With this, I have enough background on Octavio Patron to reliably and consistently sketch him out whenever I need him to show up on stage.

This concludes our brief story lab.  I hope discussing these 10 points of good storytelling practices will help you in all your future writing endeavors.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on January 27.  In this post, I’ll provide a re-cap of my writing activities and results for year 2019.

See you then.

Phil B.