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Quick Characterisation

Mary: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, Patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.Patreon.com/WritingExcuses.

Season 13, Episode 9.

Brandon: This is Writing Excuses! Quick Characterisation. Mary: 15 minutes long. Dan: Because you’re in a hurry, Howard: and we’re not that smart. Brandon: I’m Brandon. Mary: I’m Mary. Dan: I’m Dan. Howard: I’m Howard.

Brandon: And we are talking all this month about side characters. It’s a topic we’ve touched on before in Writing Excuses, so I wanted to get to something specific about side characters this week. I wanted to talk about how we characterize people quickly.

Because sometimes you just don’t have a lot of space to dedicate to these side characters. So let’s say you only have a couple of sentences to characterize someone. Dan, how do you go about doing it?

Unexpected Aspects

Dan: The cheap and dirty hack that I use is just to give them something that is in my opinion unexpected. Based on what their role is or what their situation is in the story, I will throw something else weird on top of that so that you’ll remember... “Oh yeah! This is that kid, but also he really likes this one strange thing.”

Brandon: Right. You put them in conflict with the reader’s expectations. It’s a really good way to make someone memorable.

Mary: One of the things that I try to do is that thing, except not just the reader’s expectations but the point-of-view character’s expectations. Because using that allows me to slide past some of the “I am telling you what this character looks like.”

It also allows me to then convey information about my main character. Which, when I’m writing short fiction, I have to be able to get every sentence to do double-duty.

Memory Hacks

One of the sneaky tricks that I will use sometimes is, I will use some of the tools that people use to remember names in real life. If the character says their name, I will slide a detail in that is alliterative, without... Dan: Without drawing attention to it?

Brandon: Wow! That’s interesting! Oh... Howard: I feel manipulated now...

Dan: An example? Mary: Monty with a mustache. Dan: Monty with a mustache. Okay. That’s awesome! Howard: Howard with the hairless. [others laugh] Mary: Hairless Howard.

Mary: And there are other “Memory Palace” kinds of things that you can do with that too. Brandon: Right. Make the guy named Jim a Butcher. [Dan laughs] Mary: Yeah, actually that would totally work.

So I’m terrible with remembering names, and that’s when I’m meeting someone in real life. So I was taking a class on how to remember names--and it doesn’t help me actually, that much. It’s a little better.

But I suddenly realised that these were all very useful tools for cementing a name with the reader. So if I have a character who is a jeweler, then one of the details that I’ll call attention to is the earrings that are hanging from her pendulous earlobes. And if I have named her Patricia, with the pendulous earlobes... Howard: Or Pendularia. [Brandon laughs] Mary: Or Penny.

So that is very sneaky. I do not deploy that all the time. But that is a trick that works distressingly well. [laughs]

Howard: I think I got better with side characters once I realised that I wasn’t good with names and I wanted to be, and I started practising any time I was in public.

I learned all the names of people at the place where I got salads. And in the course of doing that, they always gave me the best strawberries--because I was the guy who came in and knew everybody’s names.

They’re all wearing identical clothing. They’re all working this salad line. But in the course of learning their names, I forced myself to remember some of these details. I taught my brain that this is important, and I started retaining that information. It’s fascinating that the two seem to be related.

And I will often see in movies, when I can’t tell two side characters apart I know they’ve done it wrong. Because I’m pretty good at tracking those things. And if I can’t tell, then it’s not been done right.

Dan: The one counter example being something like Crab and Goyle from Harry Potter, who are supposed to be pretty interchangeably faceless.

Brandon: How do you characterize people without viewpoints?

Let me explain this. I find it, as a writer, really easy if I give myself a brief viewpoint through someone’s eyes to dig into their backstory and discovery write who they are... Mary: Luxury! [laughs] Brandon: Right? And suddenly they come to life. And if I don’t have the viewpoint, then I have a lot of trouble with that.

Mary: I will go ahead sometimes--even when I’m doing short fiction--I will do a bit of an exploratory scenelet thing from the other character’s point of view. Usually the same scene that I’m writing. Especially if I’ve got a character that is being very flat. Which still happens sometimes--you’re just not getting traction on them. And so I’ll do exactly that.

I’ll write that scene from their point of view, which helps me figure out what their motivations are, and some of the physical body language that they’re going to be using. And then I’ll flip back to my main character, do the scene again incorporating the information that I’ve learned.

I don’t do that every time, but it’s a very useful exercise to engage in sometimes.

Brandon: (To Dan) I’ve seen you do something similar.

Dan: Yeah. This is such a dumb little thing. The thing that I do all the time, is I will play “Two Truths and a Lie” with my characters. Because then I get to know things about them, and I get to know what kind of things they would lie about. And It’s fascinating!

I think at this point, I’ve done it with all of my Young Adult series. The one I’m writing right now, I actually put a scene into the book because I find it so interesting. But just to watch them tell truths and tell lies... inevitably I’ll have one character that tries to cheat... and it just tells me a lot about who they are very quickly.

Mary: I want to point something out that you said, about what are the things that they would lie about and why would they lie about them?

I think that when we have characters who wind up dropping into being just a single quirk... I think one of the reasons that that happens is because we’ve thought, “Oh, I’m going to do that quirk. I’m going to give them this quirky thing.” The Flanderization...

Brandon: Yeah, we’ll going to talk about Flanderization in a minute. But we can just dig into it right now. Why don’t you just tell us what Flanderization is?

Mary: Flanderization is referring to the slow evolution of a character into just being a quirk. It relates to what happens to the character Flanders on The Simpsons--that he started out as being this very rounded character, and eventually became a single joke.

Brandon: Because when people saw him come on the screen, they all wanted him to “do his thing.” So he “did his thing,” and the writers all just had him “do his thing.” And then he stopped being a person and started being a quirk.

Mary: Right. So I think one of the things that you can do to keep that from happening is to figure out why your character does that thing, and then only deploy it when the triggers happen.

If you want them to do it, then you have to give them the trigger. And the trigger then has to be coherent to the rest of the story. And it also makes the character more rounded. Because whatever reason they have to do “that thing,” the same reason is going to motivate a lot of different choices.

Brandon: Next month we’re going to dig into this idea really deeply. We’ll do an entire podcast on the idea of characters who are self-contradictory, or characters who wear different hats in different social situations and act differently in those social situations. Mary: Spoiler Alert: everyone does. [all laugh] Brandon: Yeah, we’ll dig into this a lot.

Let’s go ahead and stop for the book of the week. And you’re actually going to tell us about Brimstone?

Book of the Week

Mary: Yes! Brimstone, by Cherie Priest is fantastic. It is a story set right after the First World War. And there are two main characters.

One of them is a young woman who is a medium, and she has travelled to this new small town to learn how to use her powers. And it’s a real town that really had a spiritualist movement in it, and still does.

And then the other character is a man who survived the war, and has come back with a ghost. But he doesn’t realise he has a ghost. Things just keep catching on fire. It’s their interaction, and figuring out what it is that is haunting them and has come back with him from the war.

The characterisation in this is so rich. It’s a huge cast, because she’s in this small town filled with spiritualists that she’s meeting... It’s this very huge community. Each character feels distinct and individual--even the ones that are on the stage just for a few moments. Even the ones that actually never come on stage because they’re dead already. It’s wonderful storytelling.

Brandon: Brimstone. Mary: Brimstone, by Cherie Priest. Dan: And if you’ve never read Cherie Priest, she’s one of the few writers that can hook me from the very first sentence of a book. The writing itself, the language, is incredible. Mary: And it’s written in an epistolary form so that each character... what you’re reading is their journals.

Peekaboo Moments

Brandon: So one of the things I’ve learned over the years for characterising side characters in specific, for doing things quickly, is what I call “Peekaboo Moments.”

It’s a measure of great gratification as a writer, when occasionally someone will come up and say “Oh! This little side character just came to life for me!” And almost always it’s somebody where I’ve done one of these Peekaboo Moments.

Where you are writing a story, and in general you’ll describe the scene and then focus in on the main characters and have the conversation or the conflict or things like this, and everything else fades to background--even some of the side characters who are coming in and interacting with them.

And what I like to do is occasionally say, “No, we’re going to add a splash of colour to this specific scene, to this specific person. We’re going to fade them from the black and white background into the characters paying attention to them and saying: ‘Oh, this person wasn’t what I thought they were. This guard who’s standing guard at the door isn’t the person I thought they were.’” While they’re waiting, they’re standing there juggling or something like this.

What I try to do in these Peekaboo Moments is show a moment of humanity and backstory and passion from somebody who’s not related to the main story at all. Just so that you get a glimpse that, “Hey, all these people populating this world have their own motivations and their own passions.” And I find that the occasional use of one of these can really add a lot of vividness to your story. Or using them with a character who’s often in the scene but is never the main character.

The reader will take that character, and take that image of them, and bring it to the next scenes where they’re in... They’re like, “Oh yeah--this is the person who has twin daughters and is always on the lookout for two copies of things, because they like to give it their twin daughters.” I don’t know... something like that that gives humanity to the background characters.

Dan: One of my favourite movies is Brick, by Rian Johnson--which is basically a Film Noir but set in a modern high school. And as much as I love it, I could not tell you who any of the side characters are except for one drug dealer, who pauses somewhere around the second act break, and gives a little monologue about how much he likes the Lord of the Rings books. And he’s such a beautiful character because of that moment. It’s amazing, how much richness that adds.

Howard: One of the tricks that I use is having the characters justifiably talk about each other. The 18th Schlock Mercenary book... one of the scenes, the company’s about to take a job and our protagonist is talking to her sister, and her sister is saying she needs medical help.

And her sister’s saying “I need medical help.”

And she’s saying “Well I’m not a doctor. Why are you calling me?”

“Well, you work for a mercenary company. You’ve got battlefield medics, don’t you?”

“Well yeah. Our doctor. I guess she’s okay. But our battlefield medic is like a walking cutlery station.”

And then we have the battlefield medic show up behind her and say, “Saved your life.”

And Schlock says, “She also hears really well.” [others laugh]

And now we have, in two panels, insight into five characters. And okay, it helps that I’m able to illustrate them so some of the context is here... Brandon: Luxury! Mary: Yeah! [Dan laughs] Howard: But I did it specifically... and I’ve got a spreadsheet for this. I did it because I knew these characters are all going to be critical to this story, and I need to introduce the reader to them early in a way that is memorable... Brandon: But doesn’t take a lot of panels. Howard: Yeah. And it took two panels.

And while this is happening, we are moving the story forward by establishing why this job is going to make sense for the company to take.

Brandon: I was going to give the warning that you can’t do this too much, in most books. If in every scene, you’re spending a paragraph on five different side characters, then suddenly the point of quickly characterising... Mary: Paragraph? Luxury!

Brandon: But there are some books where this is kind of the way the book is. We’ve recommended the Golem and the Jinni on the podcast before. And I read that because you guys recommended it. And it is a story mostly about the side characters. And on this page you will spend three pages on this side character. On this one you’ll... And they just are there populating the story, and constantly interacting with the main characters. But the main characters are almost there as an excuse to explore an entire community.

Mary: And I think one of the reasons it works in that book is because everything is new to the main characters. Because the P.O.V. focusses on “Who is this interesting person I have encountered, that is unlike anything that I have ever seen, living a glass bottle for a thousand years?”

There are many other books that do that where it does not work. It is not compelling and engaging. Brandon: I would agree.

Side Character’s Lives Matter

Mary: One of the things that I will do sometimes is think about what the character was, or what they were doing before the protagonist walked out on stage. Because I think one of the things that will make a character seem flat is when they have just been waiting for the main character to appear.

You don’t even need to give the character a name, or anything like that. But if the main character walks in and the clerk behind the counter wiped mustard off her mouth and then smiled brightly. “Can I help you?” That character already feels more real and compelling.

Brandon: That’s a really good tip.

I think we’re out of time. Howard, though, you’ve got a really good thing that cartoonists use.

Silhouette Test

Howard: Oh yeah. The Silhouette Test. Cartoonists, comic book writers, anybody who’s working in sequential art where there are characters... Mary: And puppeteers! Howard: And puppeteers! If you’re going to keep these characters straight, they have to be able to pass the Silhouette Test. Which is where all of the details of the characters are removed, all you can see is the outline or the filled outline--just the silhouette. And if you can’t tell them apart, something has to change.

I ask myself this all the time--what is the prose equivalent for the Silhouette Test? And what I’ve kind of boiled it down to is the adverbs and adjectives that I so rarely let myself use when I’m describing characters... which are the ones that I would only use on character A, and would never use on character B? And just make a quick list of those adjectives and adverbs. And once I have those, when I am writing the characters those adjectives and adverbs need to disappear--because you expand them out into other things.

Brandon: So your homework is, come up with those. You don’t necessarily always want to always describe somebody that comes on screen as “greasy.” But if on one scene they’re the only person who’s eating a big hamburger and dropping bits of it to their jeans, then that image you could use repeatedly.

Howard: Your homework: Take your cast of characters and make their adjective-adverb list so that in terms of those words, they are passing the Silhouette Test for you.

Brandon: That’s great! This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write!

Mary: Writing Excuses is a Dragonsteel production, jointly hosted by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Taylor. This episode was mastered by Alex Jackson.

#article #on #writing #side characters #characterisation

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