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Characters from out of the mist
I was deeply struck by this passage from Jo Walton's Or What You Will:
There, did you see Giulia come out of nowhere, out of the mist? She wasn't a placeholder, like Tish and Dolly, a dummy moving mechanically until animated. She was nothing, a need for a servant, which Ficino doesn't have, so she had to be an apprentice. She was no more than a requirement for somebody to help poor wet Tish out of her ruined crinoline, and to tell her to disguise herself as a boy, and give her a bit of information about the world. The whole of Giulia's very solid self, all of her ambitions and aspirations, came together out of the mist as her words and actions were written. She wasn't anywhere or anything, and then once she started to speak, there she was on the page, herself, with strong opinions, and five years already studying Greek and magic with Ficino. In intention, she was a job, a role, a menial who would disappear back at the end of the scene with an armload of Tish's damp and discarded garments. She existed simply because no Victorian young lady could undress without help. [...] Now Giulia's a character, as real as any of us, with something to do in the story that is forming....
This is as close as anything I have ever seen to describing the way I do characters. The way I get characters, rather, because "do" implies that I'm taking some deliberate action to construct them, when in reality I simply put down a name or a viewpoint or a line of dialogue on the page, and the person who embodies them blossoms forth like crystals in a solution, forming around that tiny seed, that speck that didn't mean anything until it was written, and now means everything.
This is why classes and articles and such on how to write this-or-that-kind-of characters bounce off me so very hard. I have tried to build characters to fit a story concept, done the "what kind of person would fill this role in this story" approach, but they are flat and lifeless things, not people, certainly not anyone interesting or compelling enough to get me to sit down and spend time with them. But give me a name, give me a statement or an action or an observation, and suddenly there is someone there, someone real and whole and alive. I might not know their favorite color or how they take their coffee right off the bat, but I know them, and if the time comes when I need to know the color or the coffee, it'll be there then.
My housemate tells me it's weird and a little alarming how she can give me just a name and I can instantly give her a character. She once gave me "Oswald". I don't know his plot or his scenario, but he's the director or assistant director of operations for a small British spy agency, and he keeps a pet goldfish because goldfish have a memory only three minutes long, so it's the perfect pet in his line of work and that amuses him, in his reserved and understated way. This was years ago, and he's still here. Ready to go if I ever get a story for him, but in the meantime, feeding his goldfish and knowing the contents of every file on his desk as if they were open before his eyes.
There, did you see Giulia come out of nowhere, out of the mist? She wasn't a placeholder, like Tish and Dolly, a dummy moving mechanically until animated. She was nothing, a need for a servant, which Ficino doesn't have, so she had to be an apprentice. She was no more than a requirement for somebody to help poor wet Tish out of her ruined crinoline, and to tell her to disguise herself as a boy, and give her a bit of information about the world. The whole of Giulia's very solid self, all of her ambitions and aspirations, came together out of the mist as her words and actions were written. She wasn't anywhere or anything, and then once she started to speak, there she was on the page, herself, with strong opinions, and five years already studying Greek and magic with Ficino. In intention, she was a job, a role, a menial who would disappear back at the end of the scene with an armload of Tish's damp and discarded garments. She existed simply because no Victorian young lady could undress without help. [...] Now Giulia's a character, as real as any of us, with something to do in the story that is forming....
This is as close as anything I have ever seen to describing the way I do characters. The way I get characters, rather, because "do" implies that I'm taking some deliberate action to construct them, when in reality I simply put down a name or a viewpoint or a line of dialogue on the page, and the person who embodies them blossoms forth like crystals in a solution, forming around that tiny seed, that speck that didn't mean anything until it was written, and now means everything.
This is why classes and articles and such on how to write this-or-that-kind-of characters bounce off me so very hard. I have tried to build characters to fit a story concept, done the "what kind of person would fill this role in this story" approach, but they are flat and lifeless things, not people, certainly not anyone interesting or compelling enough to get me to sit down and spend time with them. But give me a name, give me a statement or an action or an observation, and suddenly there is someone there, someone real and whole and alive. I might not know their favorite color or how they take their coffee right off the bat, but I know them, and if the time comes when I need to know the color or the coffee, it'll be there then.
My housemate tells me it's weird and a little alarming how she can give me just a name and I can instantly give her a character. She once gave me "Oswald". I don't know his plot or his scenario, but he's the director or assistant director of operations for a small British spy agency, and he keeps a pet goldfish because goldfish have a memory only three minutes long, so it's the perfect pet in his line of work and that amuses him, in his reserved and understated way. This was years ago, and he's still here. Ready to go if I ever get a story for him, but in the meantime, feeding his goldfish and knowing the contents of every file on his desk as if they were open before his eyes.