Characters, Characters, and More Characters
One of the principal differences between fiction and non-fiction is the role of characters. Yes, we can have characters in non-fiction, but generally they're not fully developed—being there only in service of an example.
In fiction, however, the characters and their development are often the entire point of the story. So how does an experienced non-fiction writer learn to create "real" characters?
In my case, I start a novel by creating a database with four sections based on Orson Scott Card's MICE model: Milieu, Ideas, Characters, Events. Here, I'm just writing about the Characters section, where I have a data area for each character, no matter how minor. At the start, I fill in what I think I know about the character, but this rough sketch will undoubtedly change as I write the story and begin to know my characters better by their actions.
Some of these changes are obvious. A character may start out as six feet tall, but, in the course of the story, hits his head when passing through a normal door, he will have to be taller (or else I have to change the event).
Not only must the character be consistent with the story, she must also be consistent with herself. For instance, if she's Japanese-American at one point in the story, she'd better not be Chinese-American somewhere else (unless it's a story about identity change).
It's no so easy to check a 400-page manuscript for consistency in all the characters. That's especially true if you want consistency in their patterns of speech and gestures, so for some time, I sought a tool that would help me with that task.
It turns out, as so often happens, that I had such a tool all along, though I didn't know how to use it. The tool? My word processor—in this case, Pages, from Apple.
Seeing and Hearing One Isolated Character
Pages allows me to define numerous font styles. The obvious use of STYLES is to develop a consistent appearance in a document. All chapter headings have one appearance. All computer text, another. But for character consistency, I'm not particularly interested in appearance. For the most part, all characters' speech looks the same—Times New Roman 14, for instance. But if the book were being read out loud, each character would sound different.
Because I have only the words to work with, not their sounds, I have to distinguish my characters through their word choices, their grammar, and their gestures. In 400 pages, I create all these factors, but it's hard to make them consistent. I try, but I generally fail.
So, to help me see my failures in creating a consistent character, I give each character a different style. In my novel, First Stringers, the protagonist is Ember, a blind young woman with the power of heat and cold. For her, I create a style called EMBER One of her teammates is Gina, who has the power to read and influence emotions. She has a style called GINA. Whenever Ember speaks or gestures, that text is styled EMBER. When it's Gina talking or acting, the text is styled GINA. Similarly, other characters (Bolton, Cathy, Jakes, ...) each have a personal style—and all these styles are Times New Roman 14.
If They're All the Same, What's the Point?
Though each style has the same font and size, I can change their colors at will. So, if I want to see every one of Ember's words and gestures, I simply modify her style to have a different color from the original black—red, for example. Instantly, I can see all of Ember's behaviors standing out in red from the remainder of the text. I can even eliminate the distraction of the rest of the text by making the other styles have the color "White." Now all I see are Ember's words and actions—nothing else on the page.
Using this technique, I can study one character at a time, or even two characters together. For instance, I might discover that both Gina and Ember use "darn" and "damn" as cuss words. I didn't realize that when writing their words, but now I can see the pattern much more easily. I could decide that Gina is more of a "damn" person, while Ember, raised in a highly cultured environment, is a "darn" character. Using search-and-replace, I can easily change Gina's darns to damns and Embers damns to darns.
That's just one simple example, but once I can see all of a character's actions isolated, I'm able to detect all sorts of patterns. Or, by visualizing two characters together, I can see where, say, Ember speaks or gestures differently when interaction with Gina than she does when interacting with Bolton.
Making It Work for You
The best way for you to see what this tool can do for your writing is simply to try it out, to experiment. Most of the common word processors have this ability to style individual characters, so the only cost to you is the foresight to create and use a style for each character, or perhaps only major characters.
And you will find other ways to use this tool. If, for instance, you're color-blind, you might instead use font-size or font itself to break out once character's words from the rest.
Give it a try, and let me know what useful variations you invent.
4 comments:
Wow, that's a real help. I have a tendency to write long passages of dialogs between two characters, and rather than label each speech with "he said" and "she said", only labeling the first and last and leaving it up to the reader to follow it. After Raymond Chandler.
I'm moved to look up the MICE model, since you have made me realize that my method is more madness and intuition (taught by a lot of reading) than actual method.
Interesting idea.
But when you "white-out" everyone else's text and see only Ember's, you have a lot of blank spaces on the screen and printed pages (oh the waste of paper!).
How about this?
Write in ASCII (vim editor of course :-), use tags like ember.../ember,
write a utility that pulls the text tagged of you choice. Plug that pulled text into the MICE database for the character Ember.
This may be a lot of work, but it may also be worth the effort. Or this may just be the musings of an engineer and programmer who likes to write software as well as fiction.
Dwayne, I agree that if I printed the Ember-only text from Pages, I'd get a lot of wasted paper with white space. That's one reason I don't print this form. Instead, I view it on screen, which also lets me quickly make the surrounding text visible if I need to know the context of a particular Ember speech or action.
Even so, there's sometimes a lot of white space to scroll past on the screen, so I would appreciate the ability to select on color (or style) can copy just that selected text to another file, perhaps for printing. I believe other text processors (like Nisus) have this ability. Perhaps Pages does, too, but I haven't found it.
Interesting use of an application of styles Gerald... I've been a big fan of styles for years (even before desktop computers), and cannot imagine why so many people seem to overlook them.
To avoid the white space, consider redefining the other styles to hidden text. That way you end up with only, say, Ember's dialog.
In Word (my main tool), a style can be based on another style, so I set character styles to be based on a "placeholder" style. This way, if I change the placeholder attributes -- to hidden text for example -- I would then need only alter the Ember style to non-hidden.
I work a lot with multilingual documents, and have various character styles to tag foreign terms. As in your example, the normal appearance is the same as the body content, but the language attribute is set differently for each one. A click of a macro button can alter the style definition to reveal all the French-tagged content (as blue) or Spanish (as green), etc. This is particularly useful for managing spell check, because the language attribute is otherwise invisible.
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