Characters

You must have sympathy for all your characters. Not just the POV character, not just the good guys but all of them. Try taking one of your bit parts, a character who "walks on", interacts with the character and walks off again, perhaps never to show up again. Give him a history, a personality and motivations that make sense. Try telling the scene from his point of view. Practice looking at the action from different perspectives.

I recently pulled out a scene I had written many years ago. In it, the POV is a "swordswoman in a man's world" from Estelle, a country where men and women are treated as equals. She runs into a man who makes a couple of nasty remarks suggesting that she go back into the kitchen where she belongs. She gets mad, invites the heckler to prove his claims about what she is and is not fit for, slices him up a bit and leaves. Just for a lark I decided to rewrite the scene from the man's point of view. The man who took form in my mind was a man whose wife had just run off to Estelle because she wanted to be like my POV. He was drunk and miserable and he blamed my POV for what had happened. Bad combination.

As the events unfolded, I realized that he was somewhat justified. My POV was overly proud and touchy and not mature enough to moderate herself. She made everything seem so easy and she idealized and oversimplified life in her homeland. She was overzealous in trying to persuade other women to adopt her attitude, even when it wasn't appropriate. She always won. She never backed down. Small wonder other women envied and wanted to emulate her.

The man's dialog changed. He wasn't just a single dimensional villain any more, spouting off inflammatory gibberish in order to challenge an obviously superior warrior into a fight so she could triumph over him and feel justified in doing so. He was driven to challenge her because of the wrong that she had done. Now she became the villain, faltering under the weight of his accusations and certainty. She still won the fight, but instead of striding out in righteous triumph she left with troubled eyes and slept uneasily that night.

A POV without real flaws is a POV who cannot change. And change she must, in order for her story to have any real depth. Of course, if you are relying on your plot to carry the story rather than your characters your can get way with it but it seems to me that most editors of speculative fiction are demanding that stories be more strongly character driven.

Your POV should not always win. Try to keep her on the edge. She starts out in a bad situation and wins free. Then she falls into a worse pit. She tries something. She fails. She tries again. She wins, but at a cost. And so on. If your POV character always wins it's going to make everything seem too easy. When she gets in a conflict there will be no tension. Readers know she's going to win.

I once read a novel by a very good writer whose POV character had one major flaw: she always won. If there was a fight she always won it, even though the odds were greatly against her. Every impossible thing that came along she managed to achieve. Any argument she had with men who were far older and should have been wiser had them going away chastened. She was always right. The powerful mage who was her "love interest" always managed to show up too late to contribute significantly to the battle, and usually spent most of his time worrying about her and being amazed at her ingenuity and bravery. By the end of the story I almost hated her. I wanted so badly to see her fail just once. It spoiled for me what would otherwise have been an excellent book.

You can also go too far the other way. Your POV needs to win sometimes. POVs who spend the entire story being miserable and victimized and powerless will make your readers hate you. Nobody wants to be stuffed into the head of a pathetic loser. Bad things need to happen to your POV but the readers should feel that these things are being caused by circumstances beyond the POV's control. They should NOT feel that the problems are being caused by the POV's attitude.

Characters need to have flaws. In a strongly character driven story, it is these flaws, usually one major flaw, that prevents the POV from being able to resolve the conflict. When the POV overcomes her flaw she will be able to resolve the problem.

Character flaws are necessary even in a more plot driven story. Flaws make a character more human and can make it easier for readers to empathize with them. Of course, all flaws are not made equal. A sadistic POV is something usually only found in that brand of story which ends with the POV "getting his". Cowardice is also not a flaw recommended for POVs, nor are stupidity, complete self-centeredness, treachery or deliberate betrayal of friends. Most other flaws can be worked around.

Some writers take the easy path when it comes to villains. They heap upon them all the "unforgiveable" flaws. Such villains torture things just because they hate all things that are Nice (animals, children, helpless enemies, etc) and generally want to rule the world. Then, to heap insult on top of injury, the writers embue their POV with a heaping plateful of virtues garnished with a tiny spoonful of some harmless flaws, usually virtues carried to extremes. Excess humility leaps to mind.

It is a good idea for there to be more to your characters than the readers ever find out. Make up a detailed background and history for each major character, but don't dump it on the readers. Let it influence what the characters do. It's okay to keep secrets from the readers. Maybe your detective loves peppermint because his grandmother used to give them to him, and his grandmother was the one person in his life that he loved. At one point when he is in a stressful situation he pops a peppermint into his mouth and starts to relax. You can tell us that peppermint relaxes him but don't need to tell us why. The feeling that there's more to the character than we see makes him seem more complex and real.

Don't make "story puppets" out of your major characters. Story puppets are characters who behave the way the story requires them to, rather than the way they *want* to behave. They dutifully take the required actions to advance the plot and feel the appropriate emotions, but the actions are driven by the plot and the emotions are created to explain the actions.

You can avoid story-puppeting by creating your characters in complex detail. Give them histories. Give them likes, dislikes, hopes and fears that have nothing to do with the story. Start out with the elements which are required of them in order to make them fit into the story and then put the story aside while you create them.

Use one of these questions as a starting point, and then answer the rest from the first:

• Where was he born? What was it like for him growing up there?
• How did he get along with his parents? What did he learn from them?
• What problems tormented him in his childhood? How does that affect his adult life?
• Who were his role models? Why?
• What makes him feel afraid?
• What does he love enough to sacrifice himself for?
• How does he deal with anger? What makes him angry?
• What was the greatest turning point in his life?
• What was the one thing he did that he is the proudest of?
• If he could go back in time and take back one action, what would it be?
• If he could change one thing in his life or himself what would it be?

Let's take an example. Keep in mind the fact that I am a character driven writer, which means that I create my characters, then write stories about them. Plot oriented writers may not find this very useful.

I decide to write a story about a hero whose father was slain in cold blood when he (the hero) was quite young. The hero has waited all his life to confront the man and avenge his father's death. It's easy to spend a lot of time on the hero, but what about the antagonist? If I was to take a simplistic approach, I'd say the antagonist is a sadistic, nasty person who likes killing people. Or perhaps he always hated the man's father because of jealousy or some other pettiness.

But I want to give him more depth. I select as a given that the man deals with anger by lashing out to destroy whatever made him angry. What makes him angry? Everything. Now, I need to figure out more about this person. Why does he lash in his anger? Because that's what his father did. Why is he always angry? Because it makes him feel powerful to act like his father. Then go on to the other questions. He fears powerlessness. He is proud of having beaten his father nearly to death (rite of passage). The one thing he regrets is that he didn't do it in time to save his mother.

Now, when the hero goes to confront him I know he's going to react with a hair trigger temper and there probably won't be a lot of talking before the fight. I also know that the villain isn't going to have a lot of friends, though there may be hirelings who are afraid of him. I can also figure that he's the sort to fight the hero directly rather than siccing his flunkies on him. The hero is probably going to win because of his great swordsmanship and righteous anger.

Let's say this doesn't work. My hero is a more serious, compassionate man who is going to try to talk to the villain. I know that if the hero brings up mothers, perhaps his own mother, he's going to hit the man in a vulnerable spot. I also know that if my hero is a heroine the man may not be able to fight her.

Let's say I want a less physically violent story, or one which ends with redemption rather than death. I need an antagonist who doesn't deserve death. So I start out with the premise that slaying the hero's father was the one thing the villain did that he regrets the most. The slaying was an accident, but he ran away because he knew nobody would believe him. He was an outcast all his life and the hero's father was the only one who gave him a chance. He can't bear for others to see the pain it causes him so he he has spent a lifetime proving that he is what others believed him to be. See how this changes the ending? The dynamics between himself and the hero are going to be quite different, as the hero comes to understand what happened even though the man strives to hide it from him. The hero wins in the end, redeeming the man's life because of his compassion and understanding.

Now, just for fun, let's toss in a random starting premise. Killing the hero's father is the thing the antagonist is the proudest of. Why? Because it proved that he was the "best"? That would make him a shallow man that deserves to be ignomiously defeated by the hero. Or maybe because the hero's father was an evil man who turned a benign face to the world. Now, the story becomes one of discovery and self realization. The hero must come to terms with the fact that the father he has been convincing himself he adored was actually not a nice man at all. Or maybe the antagonist is a psychopath who only *thought* the hero's father was evil. That story might end with the hero choosing not to kill the miserable, psychotic antagonist, thereby proving himself the better man.

Obviously, you only want to give this level of detail to major characters. The amount of detail you give about a character is a clue to the readers as to how important the character is in the story. If you give a lot of detail about a person who only appears once they are going to feel mislead, since they would be expecting to hear more about him.

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