NOTES: Characters and Viewpoint (1988)

Notes on Characters and Viewpoint (1988) by Orson Scott Card

What is a Character?

1. Actions – What they do
2. Motive – What drives them, what they mean to do
3. Past – What they’ve done, what’s been done to them (Does it loom over them, do they blame it, do the deny it or revise it?)
4. Reputation – What do other character say? (They can fulfill those expectations, or violate them. If they violate them, show how they got the bad rep)
5. Stereotypes – Sex, age, race, creed, class, job (Do they like who they are? Do they respect it? Are they embarrassed by it? Maybe they don’t care? The familiar and comfortable is comfortable but boring. The unfamiliar and strange is attractive and repulsive at the same time. That uncertainty creates tension. When you violate stereotypes, the reader is interested and wants to explore.)
6. Network – Social, family, professional relationships (Do they act differently in each circle? If they are removed from their networks and placed in a new situation/circumstances, how would they act?)
7. Habits and Patterns – What they do routinely unconsciously
8. Talents and Abilities – What they can do well from practice
9. Tastes and Preference – What they are interested in and like (Their interests give them talking points and excuses for certain plot turns)
10. Body – What they look like (Physicality is important and defining only if it affects them greatly)

The THREE QUESTIONS Readers Ask

1. SO WHAT? Why should I care, why shouldn’t I watch TV instead? (You have 3 ¶s in a short and 2 pgs in a novel to catch the reader)
2. OH YEAH? This doesn’t make sense! OR That’s too convenient! (The “plot pattern” or “rules of the game” in your story world must be credulous)
3. HUH? What’s happening? Who’s talking? What are they talking about? (Never a moment of confusion, readers need to know what’s going on and what questions to ask)

In other words:

1. Emotional involvement
2. Belief
3. Understandability

Or to paraphrase St. Paul: Hope, Faith and Clarity

A Thousand Ideas in an Hour

(Keep interrogating yourself from the initial idea spark)

Start with the audience questions but then move into causal questions:

1. What made this happen?
2. What is the purpose?
3. What is the result?

Remember, your first idea is usually a cliché. Keep interrogating yourself until your idea is original. Take stereotypical assumptions and twist it. The two questions that open up story and character possibilities:

1. What can go wrong?
2. Who suffers the most in this situation?

Whoever suffers most is the person who has the most need to change things – that will almost always lead you to the most possibilities, and it usually happens that the character you find this way will end up as the main character of the tale.

The Idea Net - Where do characters come from?

• Ideas from life – People you see, people you know, the person you are.
• Observation of strangers – Watch their actions and fill in the blanks
• People you know – be careful, use only as starting points
• Yourself – Imagination, interrogate yourself, ask yourself “what-if” “how-would-I”
  • Analogy – Boil it back down to human emotions, you don’t have to murder someone to write about a murderer, think about the emotions that lead up to it.
  • Memory – It will be used no matter what, be aware that it is distorted
  • Finding “New” Memories – Use a memory, but then play the “what-if” game changing bits and pieces to a new idea.
• From the Story – As you work on your story, characters will appear
  • Who must be there? Your plot pattern will dictate necessary characters
  • Who might be there? People that are there due to the setting
  • Who has been there? People that we are reminded by from setting and meet in the story. Dead people, past relationships, etc.
• Serendipity – What if? Speculations. What if you lost your eyesight? What if you accidentally threw away something priceless? What if you got to work-at-home?
• Landscape – Picture of a landscape. Wonder about them. Who lives there? Who has died there? How did they die? What do the children play here? Where would they find books? What would they daydream about? What are they afraid of? Where do they refuse to go after dark? What do they dare each other to do? What is likely to be the first job of a person who grows up around here? What do parents fear and hope for their children? Where do people shop or trade? What is the worst thing the weather here does to people? Where do their kinfolk live? What songs do they hear coming through the window on a hot summer night? What do they smell? And how do they feel about the smells, the songs, the weather, their jobs, each other, themselves?
• Names – Think about marriage, divorce, re-married, ethnicity, nationality, race, named after someone. Diversify your names, avoid same first letters, same number of syllables, accents.

The narrator should refer to the character the same way EVERYTIME. Names are not a stylistic device. They are signposts to help throughout the story for clarity.

MICE

Use MICE to clarify your character’s arc.

Milieu

(World Creation, Setting, Culture, STEEP)

Milieu is not about the soul of a character, nor a tense plot. Its main purpose is to explore a WORLD.

1. Get main character there, give motivation to move around, when you’re done showing the world, bring him home. OR
2. Use character that lives in setting that is “strange” and in his travels he reveals the attitude and expectations of the cultural ambience through his eyes.

The less characterization the better. The character’s main job is to be the reader’s eyes. Characters may be stereotypes (but stereotypes we have never seen before)

Idea

(Information to be revealed, problem to be solved)

Idea is about a PROBLEM or question posed to main character and audience. The answer is revealed at the end.

Again, less characterization the better. Use eccentricities to “sweeten” or add cool. Characters don’t change, but in the process reveal who they are. “True Nature” is the question.

PURE examples:

• Allegories, Symbolism.
• Close: Mysteries, Capers

Character

(Nature of people, what, why, how)

Character is about a PERSON trying to change his life. He finds the present role intolerable, sets out to change. It ends when he finds a new role or returns to old one with new perspective, or despairs in the present.

ROLE = network of relationships with other people and society at large

The story begins when the character reaches the point where the cost of staying becomes too high a price to pay.

1. Cutting loose is easy -> Story about new life.
2. Envisioning role is easy -> But hard to break out of old one.
3. Doesn’t have to mean physically leaving, could mean changing relationship dynamics.

Event

(Everything that happens and why)

Event is about a world that is out of ORDER (imbalance, usurper, injustice, crime unpunished, breakdown, evil, decay, disease, evil force, illicit love, betrayal).

Main character must restore old order or establish new one. These stories arise out of the human need to give meaning to cause and effect. “There needs to be order in randomness”

Characterization levels are up to the author. May be types, and audience gains sympathy by “going through so much” with them. Or good deep characters.

Your Contract with the Reader

If you begin with X, you must end with X

Readers will expect a story to end when the fist major source of structural tension is resolved.

1. YOU WILL END WHAT YOU BEGAN (digressions are tolerated but they cannot be the end)

• Milieu –Explore
• Idea – Discovered, Plan unfolded
• Character – Intolerable Situation -> fully content/resigned
• Event – Unbalanced world -> balanced, justified, reordered, healed

2. Anything you spend much time on will amount to something in the story.

Hierarchy of Characters

1. Walk-ons and Placeholders – no development, in background to lend realism. Perform a simple function then go. As part of the scenery they focus on their own mundane task in their drab costumes. They don’t stay long. Usually stereotypes.
2. Minor Characters – may make difference in plot BUT we don’t get emotionally involved with them, we don’t expect them to keep showing up. Their desires and actions may cause a twist but they play no role in shaping ongoing flow. Does one or two things then goes. Can be elevated placeholders – eccentric, exaggerated or obsessive compulsive.
3. Major Characters – Group of people we care about (love/hate/fear/root for). They show up several times. The story is in one degree or another about them, their desires and actions drive the story forward and carry it through all its twists and turns.
   • CHOICES – affects lives
   • FOCUS – look at, listen to, talk about
   • FREQUENCY of APPEARANCE, ACTIONS – what they say or do

BE CAREFUL!!! In the beginning, all characters are equal.

Tools to help you control hierarchy: • Ordinariness vs. Strangeness • Amount of time devoted to the character • Character’s potential for making meaningful choices • Other characters’ focus on him • Character’s frequency of appearance • Character’s degree of involvement in the action • Readers’ sympathy for the character • Narration from the character’s point of view.

Raising the Emotional Stakes

Suffering

Who gets it? Who deals it? May be physical or emotional. Intensity = emotional involvement, but it must be between trivial and unbearable. If trivial, no one cares; if unbearable, audience rejects it. Suffering loses effect with repetition. If pain, becomes comical; if grief, character appears whiny.

• When pain and grief become unbearable in real life, human beings develop fictions to cope with it – we call it insanity. When pain and grief become unbearable in fiction, readers simply disengage from the story and either abandon the tale or laugh at it.
• To increase the power of suffering, show more cause and effect, not more details of the pain.
• If the character copes with the grief but does not succumb, the reader will succumb
• If the character has good reason to cry but doesn’t, the reader will cry

Sacrifice

The degree of choice in which pain is given or received. Self-chosen suffering for the sake of a greater good is far more intense than pain alone. Deliberate versus accidental.

Jeopardy

Anticipated pain or loss – anticipation more potent than actuality. Threatened or vulnerable characters get “importance points”. Jeopardy magnifies the stalker, the savior, and the prey just as pain and sacrifice magnify sufferer and torturer alike. Note: jeopardy only works to increase tension if audience believes that the dreaded event might actually happen.

Sexual Tension

Related to Jeopardy: “jeopardy of sex”. Anticipated possibilities of will they or won’t they. Caveat: If sexual fulfillment dissipates all tension.

Signs & Portents

Fate plays a role: connection between character and world around them. Previously epic storms, flames, thunder and famine; can be subtle drizzle, swelter, sirens and a dying flower.

What Should We Feel About A Character?

If you have conflict, you want your audience to care. Furthermore, you want them to be sympathetic to one.

• Easy: Follow a sympathetic character throughout entire conflict.
• Hard: Lose sympathy for a sympathetic character during conflict. (Easier with a replacement character to root for)
• Daring: Both Prot and Ant are sympathetic. Creates Anguish. Audience cannot bear to see either lose.

First Impressions

• We like what’s like us (age, money, creed, sex, style, attitude, taste) We “hit it off”
• We’re tense around dissimilar people (foreign language, weird culture, closed group, uniform, wrong clothes for occasion, talk too loudly, inappropriate language – too elevated or too low, bad hygiene, accost strangers on the street – people who don’t behave in ways we would) We look past, sidestep, avoid or shun openly.
• Like from first impression: shallow; dislike from first impression: deeper… but both can be overcome with good writing. But weird, unpleasant characters will get you editorial resistance.
• Note: We’re likely to get bored with people that are like us.

Characters We Love

Physical Attractiveness

Effective in film, useless in print. We like to look at them, but when we hear/read about them, we get jealous or resentful.

Altruism (Victim, Savior, Sacrifice):

• Victim: The victim of suffering and jeopardy gains pity, but will seem weak; this adds a trace of contempt, as far as disdain even. Remedy: Show how character had no choice but to put herself in that position, or how courageous they are for not despairing. If the suffering is emotional/psychological, show why she doesn’t just leave.
• Savior: The rescuer is courageous, admirable and responsible. May backfire if victim is already getting out. If the suffering is emotional/psychological, the rescuer may appear to be a meddler. Remedy: Show reluctance to intrude, show situation as urgent, show victim signaling for help.
• Sacrifice: The cause must be ideal, important and right. She cannot choose sacrifice
  • If she desires to have a glorious and noble death
  • To make people like her
  • If there is a decent alternative (In summary, we only like altruism if it they had no choice).

Plan and Purpose, Hunger and Dreams

People never do “nothing in particular” when “something happens”. Give them a sense of purpose, give them everyday life; that makes the diversion much more stressful. Good characters don’t react, they “proact”. Audience sympathy increase with the importance of the dream and the amount of effort the character has already expended to try to fulfill it. If the story is about the character’s plan or want (quest or caper), we’re on their side almost without limit.

Courage and Fair Play

With courageous risk-taking must come fair play. The character cannot gloat, cheat, sneak or use underhanded techniques.

Attitude

(Toward people, himself and events): Doesn’t whine, complain, blame or brag. Takes responsibilities for mistakes, refers to problems with wry humour, and tries to solve them. They are embarrassed by praise and don’t argue or defend themselves when criticized. If someone else is being criticized unfairly, they speak up for them.

Draftee or Volunteer

If the task at hand requires great courage, and it won’t bring much glory – character gains more sympathy if they volunteer. If the task at hand brings fame and fortune – character gains more sympathy if modestly waits to be drafted.

Dependability

Character keeps word come hell or high water. If they break it, they must have a very good reason to and must make up for it. Don’t mistake “lies” for “promises” though. A lie is about the past, dependability is about keeping promises in the future.

Cleverness (Not intelligence!)

Character can never think of herself as superior because she’s smart. He solves problems and knows facts, tools, resources, but does not flaunt it. Any erudition leads to elitism, snobbery and arrogance.

Endearing Imperfections

If the character is too perfect, the audience stops believing in him. There must be small, understandable foibles; flaws that make us LOVE them.

Characters We Hate

Sadist or Bully

Deliberately causes pain or suffering. If he/she enjoys it, we hate them more. The unpardonable sin in fiction: to psychologically torment the little guy. Be aware of the overuse and misuse of this character, and ensure credibility.

Assassin or Avenger?

Audience is never comfortable with cold, calculated murder, but the assassin/avenger can be a hero. Rule of thumb: Murder and other crimes will make a character a villain if done for selfish reasons and if it hurts people who don’t deserve to be hurt. If the crime is to save someone, or if the victim deserves it, it does not generate hate.

Self-serving, self-appointed

We simultaneously resent people who are dull and unambitious as much as people who try to push their way up. We don’t like uninvited, intrusive and self-appointed authority. Usurpers get no sympathy. Antipathy of the self-appointed can be overcome if he proves he deserves his new position, wins the respects of others and ceases to be an interloper – he belongs.

Oath breaker

As soon as a character betrays a trust or breaks a promise, we take it personally – he is stamped villain status.

Intellect

We’re afraid of and resentful of people who know more than we do, and when they act as if they think it makes them superior to us, we hate them.

Insanity

We are afraid of people who are not in the same reality that we are. Our immediate reaction is to put them away at any cost. On stage, physicality is easy, but on paper, try to show her strange perception of reality – her delusions and paranoia. If the madman gathers followers, we are terrified.

Attitude

Mirror image of the likable attitude. Unable to laugh at himself. When things go wrong, he whines, complains and blames everyone and everything but himself. When things go right, he takes all the credit and boasts about it. He has no regard for people’s feelings, judges without listening and never trusts or believes anybody. He treats rich/influential people differently. He is a flaming hypocrite. In short, he treats other people as if they exist only if they serve his purpose.

Redeeming Virtues

While readers will eventually get sick of a hero who’s too good to be true, they almost never refuse to believe in a villain. But you still must make honest depictions of your villains.

Remember, everyone is the hero of their own story. Everyone feels justified for their actions and has internal logic they believe to be noble. He may fancy himself a benefactor, or that his innate superiority gives him the right to exploit, or feels past ill treatment/suffering justifies the harm he does now, or feels everyone else is putting on an act.

You can never get the audience to like your villains, but they can be respected.

Hero & The Common Man

Don’t let this pendulum bother you: use both and balance it, you can show the grittiness of extraordinary people. Ultimately however, you still need to awe your audience. Without awe, there is no audience. We need characters that are like us, but we quickly lose interest if the character is somehow out of the ordinary.

We read stories to get experiences we’ve never known firsthand, or to gain a clearer understanding of experiences we have had. We identify with heroes. The hero shows us what matters, what has value, what has meaning among the random and meaningless events of life. The hero must have some knowledge or insight we don’t understand, some value or power that we do not yet have.

No matter how realistic you swing, the romantic impulse remains. “Realistic” common man heroes face uncommon problems, always seem to be extraordinarily contemplative and perceptive, always seem to reach a moment of epiphany in which they pass along a key insight to the reader.

The Comic Character

THE COMIC CHARACTER: CONTROLLED DISBELIEF

Comic characters must be believable enough that the audience will say, “Yes! Isn’t that the truth! Isn’t that what always happens! I’ve known people like that! That’s exactly what happens to me!” Yet the same characters must be unbelievable enough that the audience doesn’t feel obliged to empathize with them. The characters must constantly give the audience permission to laugh at their misfortunes.

• Doing a “Take”: Traditionally, talking directly to the audience. But subtler now, a “look” at the camera. Another character would say/do something so wrong, so rude or so outrageous, and the character would do a “take”. On paper, you use little devices that indicate you’re talking to the audience – “of course”, a break, anything that makes you pause from the dramatic flow.
• Exaggeration: Exaggerated description – we know it’s not really like that. But the narrator takes the small things and blows it out of proportion. Note: Don’t laugh at your own humour. Don’t’ do a take. Don’t let the reader think the narrator thinks it’s funny.
• Downplaying: Reverse of exaggeration, take important problems and downplay them. The character is amusingly nonchalant to things that would normally infuriate us.
• Oddness: Dressed inappropriately. Can be used for minor characters only. If used on major, they are diminished.

The Serious Character

THE SERIOUS CHARACTER: MAKE US BELIEVE

The one thing you can never do is appeal to the facts. Fiction doesn’t deal with what happened once. Fiction deals with what happens. Your job is not to create characters who exactly match reality. Your job is to create characters who seem real, who are plausible to the audience.

You must provide the audience with details that seem familiar and appropriate, so that they are constantly saying to themselves, “yes, that’s right, that’s true, that’s just he way it would be, people do that.” With each “yes” the audience becomes more convinced that you are a storyteller that knows something.

Relevant Appropriate DETAILS

Elaboration of Motive: If you don’t elaborate, audience assumes a single, cliché motive. To make your character more real, give them complex, even contradictory motives.

NOTE: Each new revelation of a main character’s motive is not a simple matter of adding more information – it revises all the information that has gone before. Events that we thought meant one thing now mean another. The present constantly revises the meaning of the past. COST: each discovery of motive requires examination, which takes away from action time.

Attitude: Attitude is the other side of the coin of causation. Motive tells why he acts as he does; attitude is the way he reacts to outside events. When strange and important events occur, the character must react. IN PRACTICE: Add internal monologue and emotions to actions that occur around them, add colorful perception.

The Remembered Past

In the romantic tradition it is okay to have character come out of nowhere with no family or friends, lonely drifters… but in order to create a realistic character, they need to have a past.

• Flashback: most obvious, but overused and least effective (It stops the action). Thin line between additional information and only information -> Does it add to the present action, significant action at that? If it doesn’t anchor us to the present action, we don’t care about the past.
• Memory as a Present Event: Slightly more effective. Have one character tell another a story out of the past. Story must relate to recent action. Memories may help in key decisions, but must be prompted by recent events, it can’t be “convenient” like dues ex machinas. It should be a memory of something the character never understood; new information or a new experience that changes the meaning of the past event. She isn’t just remembering, she is revising.
• Quick References: short memories, okay to be unimportant – adds spice and colours.

Implied Past

Give readers a sense of character that has already lived a full life without telling them exactly what that past was.

• Expectation: What a character expects will happen in the present tells us instantly what has happened before in the past. How do people react? In acting, what do they expect from other people?
• Habits: The results of routine patterns in our past, sometimes surface inappropriately in our present daily actions.
• Networks: Past connections will show up unless you pull your character out of his milieu. These relationships will add to the character and may even be relevant to the story.

Justification

There is nothing that you can’t make into a believable story; you just need to be ready to work at it. Important actions that solve conflict should be justified previously in the story. A character can’t conveniently pick up a new skill or talent to solve a problem.

The more bizarre and unbelievable the character’s behavior, and the more important it is to the story, the earlier in the story you have to begin justifying it and the more time you’ll need to spend to make it believable. You character shouldn’t be able to use martial arts, speak German or hack a computer without justification.

##Transformations

• Physical – childhood -> teenager -> adult -> senior, weight, mustache, hair style, wardrobe
• Roles – wealth, moving, parenthood, job, management.
• But the most disturbing of them all – when basic human nature changes, the reliable one lies and is not sorry, the one you loves is cruel without reason, the boring one becomes fascinating, the failure does something admirable and fine.

Why People Change

We never really know, but we assign names for these changes to reassure ourselves – mid-life crisis, growing up, going through a phase, nervous breakdown, finding herself, a selfish streak, showing his true colors, born again, going off the deep end. With a name, we can assign a cause, but the reasoning is always nearly never known.

We try to bind people into their roles so that we can be sure of them – slavery, serfdom, fealty, oaths of office, contracts, unions, corporations, laws, marriage, going steady, flattery, hypocrisy – all our strategies for controlling and predicting what the people around us are going to do. Yet still these people surprise us – escape, revolution, betrayal, lawsuit, strikes, sellouts, crime, divorce, faithlessness, gossip, confession – and we have to revise again our understanding of the world.

One of the reasons fiction exists at all is to deal with that fear of inexplicable change, that uncertain dread that lurks in the background of all our human relationships. Because fiction lets us see people’s motives, the causes of their behavior, these stories about made-up people help us guess at the motives and causes of real people’s behavior. This doesn’t mean that your fictional characters have to change. One of the common themes in fiction is that people’s fundamental natures don’t change, no matter how much you wish they might. If they ever seem to change, it’s because you didn’t really understand them in the first place.

You Can’t Change

The characters are not transformed, they are unmasked

1. Your story is about who they are from beginning to end, trying to change, but can’t and must return to their true selves.
2. Your story is about them seeming to change, but it was their true nature all along. They were just never given the opportunity to run their lives as such.
3. Your story is about people that want to change, but can’t until they discover their own true nature. They their outward pattern starts to synchronize with their inner nature.

Other Things Change You

People change, but for causes beyond their control

4. Your story is about people – who are really animals with basic survival needs – trying to rise above their base natures, or vice-versa (someone noble but must still feed his animal needs). In either instance, an attempt to rise, or a lapse of civility occurs… indicating change in nature
5. Your story is about people that change due to they way they’re treated by others. This might be training, education or pressures of the world around them. By changing someone’s environment, you can change them.

You change yourself

We change ourselves by an act of will

6. Your story about someone who hungers for change. They succeed through force of willpower.

Justifying Changes

• You don’t necessarily have to show us the cause of change before he changes, or even at the same time. But if you don’t show the cause, you need to signal your reader that you’re aware your character is behaving strangely, so that the reader knows that the cause of his changes is a mystery that will be resolved sometime before the end of the story.
• The more important the character and the greater the change, the more time you will have to devote to explaining the transformation.