Exploring Personality: Part One -- "Who Am I?"

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde

The search for self is central to the human condition. Selfhood is our first great struggle in life. Differentiation. "Who am I?" "Why am I?" I am not just an extension of my mother and/or my father. Okay, well, after potty training, the struggle to establish an independent identity, to become "me," is our first great obstacle in life. Some people, perhaps most people, as Oscar Wilde says, never become "I;" they remain, in some form or another, "we" and "us."

Actually, that's a true thing that most people never really become themselves, but we'll get to that and the research around it later in this series. However, it is that thing, that thing where people are mostly other people that has always struck me about the Bible's use of the term "sheep" in its description of humanity. But I digress...

The issue for writers in all of this is not that most people are other people, it's that most characters are other people, namely the writers. Mostly, the characters that writers write are just... themselves. This becomes especially true of first person. No matter what you say or how much you protest, it just lends itself to it. This is why most first person narratives sound so much the same, they are characters that are extensions of the authors who are like most other people.

But it's not exactly fair to pick on first person exclusively as there are plenty of third person stories with completely bland and same characters. For instance, all of the characters in Madeleine L'Engle's Time books act identically virtually all of the time. The only real difference is Meg's insecurity about how she looks, etc, and that is only in A Wrinkle in Time. After that book, she falls into pattern with everyone else and their completely rational way of speaking. If you remove the speech tags from their dialogue, there would be almost no way to tell the characters apart. [Yes, I'm picking on L'Engle because I'm waist deep in her series, right now, but I could give plenty of other examples.]

The thing that makes books great is great characters. Characters that are completely themselves. Characters about whom you cannot say, "Well, this character is just like this other character." Great characters can make a weak plot shine. In fact, David Eddings, in The Belgariad, purposefully uses the most cliche fantasy plot arc possible, but his characters are extraordinary, which makes the series one of the best fantasy yarns I've ever read. Each character was an individual with its own quirks. However, in his later writing, all of his characters merged into just one character with different names, so much so that it didn't matter what name you attached to any given piece of dialogue. All of the characters were busy being the "clever one."

When I think of books I've really enjoyed, it very often focuses on having enjoyed specific characters. Like Tom Sawyer. The book is nothing without the character of Tom, possibly the greatest conman character ever created. Tom gets himself into trouble. A lot. And so does Huck, but Huck and Tom get into different kinds of trouble, because they are not the same at all. It is that they are different that makes them stand out as great characters in American literature.

It's also the draw in the Harry Potter books. You don't just have Harry and different shades of Harry. If you take out the dialogue tags, you can still tell when Hermione is speaking as opposed to Harry or Ron. Or, even, Luna or Neville. Each of Rowling's characters is its own person.

Having written a book with multiple first person perspectives, I do have some experience with this. As I've mentioned on my own blog (StrangePegs), the book The Pigman by Paul Zindel was a big part of the inspiration for the format I chose. At the time, it was the only multiple first person book I knew of (who knew it would become a "thing"?), and I wanted to experiment with that. In Zindel's book, each chapter starts with the writer of that chapter saying something like, "Hey, this is Lorraine," or, "It's John, now." It was necessary, too, because, mostly, if you take out those introductions, the chapters feel pretty much the same. I knew I didn't want that. I didn't want to have to "greet" the reader at the beginning of each chapter.

Not using any kind of intro meant that I was going to have to make sure the tone of each chapter was significantly different from the others so that the reader would be able to tell who was talking fairly quickly. And I think I did that. I mean, readers have reported distinct favorites in regards to the characters, and I don't think that would be the case unless there was significant differences between the ways each characters "talks." Adults, especially adult males, tend to favor Tom; kids tend to favor Ruth. Only a few people have told me they favor Sam (unless it's to say they like Tom and Sam, or Ruth and Sam). No one has told me they didn't like Sam, though, and I've had more than a few people tell me they found Ruth to be completely annoying. So I think I did my job.

Of course, I cheated. I used my kids as the templates for each of the characters, so I was using a real personality to start from. Of course, that's not really cheating, because some of the greatest characters in literature have been based on people the authors knew. It's a normal thing to do.

But what if you don't want to be so direct? After all, some people get upset when they read your book and find that they're in there. Where do characters, where do personalities, come from? How do you write them so that they are not just extensions of yourself? And how do you write them so that they stay true to themselves so that you don't lose your audience by having a character do something to which the audience reacts, "Oh, she would never have done that!" That can be a killer.

For the next... while, we'll be talking about personality, the different types, and how to design your characters and have them behave in manners consistent with those personalities. I hope you'll come along.

When the Tracks Don't Meet (or Travelling At the Speed of Plot)

Have you seen that cartoon of the train tracks being laid? They're coming from two different directions, but there's a problem: The tracks don't meet up in the middle the way they are supposed to. I think there are a bunch of guys standing there scratching their heads. Or something.
Yeah, I would have liked to have posted the image here, but I couldn't find it. You'll just have to pretend.

Usually, where books are concerned, those kinds of things are called "plot holes," but, really, they're not the kinds of things I would call "holes." They're just pieces of... let's call them "discontinuity." I hate them more than the plot holes, I think. Oh, you need me to differentiate?

Okay, let's say your protagonist loses the keys to his car in chapter two but, in chapter five when he's running from the bad guys, he fumbles them out of his pocket: That's a plot hole. And that's not what I'm talking about in this post.

This is what I'm talking about in this post:

When I was in high school, I had an after school baby-sitting job, and one of the things I "got" to do virtually every day was sit with the younger of the two boys and watch He-Man. I hated He-Man. I good example of why is related to the picture above. One day on He-Man, he would lift a mountain. He would struggle with the mountain but, eventually, he would pick it up and throw it. The next day, he would pick up a boulder, and would struggle just as much with the boulder as he did with the mountain. Why? Was the boulder made of dwarf star matter? I kind of doubt that. It just served the "story" by making the moment more tense if it was difficult for He-Man to do the job, no matter how easy it should have been for him.

It drove me crazy.

For those of you who follow my own blog, StrangePegs, you'll know that I've been reading and re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's Time series. She does this stuff all the time, stuff where things don't quite connect.

For instance, in A Wind in the Door, there's a section where Meg and her companions go into one of Charles Wallace's mitochondria. L'Engle goes to great lengths to tell us how much faster time moves inside the mitochondria than it does in the outside world. It's a huge difference, something like 10 years in the mitochondria is only one second of real time. After going to all of that explanation, she proceeds to move back and forth between what's going on with Meg in the mitochondria and what's going on with Charles Wallace and his mother in real time. Meg and everyone with her would have been dead of old age based on the real time passage.

Another example is from Many Waters (review forthcoming). At one point, one of the characters is having a baby. At the same time, there's an interaction happening with Sandy and Dennys that happens in one evening. The birth, which happens within the time frame of this one evening, somehow lasts for three or four days. And don't even start me on the fact that Dennys and Sandy, older teenagers (maybe 17?), act like they are about nine when it comes to girls: "Sandy got a funny feeling inside when he looked at her." Her being the naked girl talking to him. A "funny feeling." Or something like that.

However, the thing that inspired this post came from one of today's fantasy giants. Now, I haven't read A Game of Thrones -- and I don't really intend to -- but I do watch the show, mostly because my wife likes it. There's a point (during season two, I think?) when the castle is being attacked by Stannis and there's absolutely no hope that they can defend it. There's no hope because no one is close enough to come to the rescue. However, Tywin shows up anyway and saves the day, even though he was much too far away to get there over night. Then, I read an interview with Martin in which  he said something along the lines of, "I don't bother with distances in my books. If I need someone to be somewhere, I just pick them up and move them there." You know, like a game of chess in which you can move any piece to any location on the board any time you want to.

I call it "traveling at the speed of plot."

And, you know, on the one hand, I get it. It's your thing; you do with it what you want to. However, when you set up rules for your thing, you need to follow your own rules, and Martin does have rules in his world which are pretty much (except for the dragons and zombies) the same as the rules in our world. That means people can't teleport. They can't travel by magical means. And the don't have horses that travel at the speed of sound. It's bad enough that they use birds to deliver messages which are pretty much as fast as telegrams.

Honestly, I don't have patience for this kind of stuff. It's sloppy writing; I don't care how successful it is. Most people either don't care or don't notice, I suppose, but it doesn't make it not so. The thing is, it doesn't have to be that way. All of these things, with a little more effort to bring them into alignment with the rules of the worlds the authors have created could be that much better and not alienate people like me.

Actually, it's one of my biggest rules of writing: Follow your own rules.

And when I say it's "one of my biggest rules," I mean it's one of my biggest rules. One of my rules because, other than just doing the writing, every writer has to figure out his/her own rules. I suppose that makes it one of my biggest rules of reading, too. So be warned! If your book doesn't follow the rules you have set up for it, I'm not going to view it favorably.