I
am participating in NaNoWriMo this month, so I may get erratic with these blog
posts. Never fear, if that happens, I’ll be back shortly.
Follow
my progress with The Quick and the Dedd at my “Write Away” blog at
www.samwriteaway.blogspot.com
I
modified a blog post from February, 18, 2010 on on character and characters.
Original post at www.samwriteaway.blogspot.com
Thursday,
I am traveling to Iowa for my brother’s wedding, so I will post again in a
week.
I took classical Greek in college. I loved it, sort
of like doing word puzzles. What letter is this squiggle, what is the meaning
of that series of squiggles? One thing I learned was that spacing between words
and punctuation were relatively modern conventions meant to make literacy more
accessible for larger numbers of people.
Since few Greeks learned to read, it was assumed
they could figure out the meaning of the text. Admittedly, Greek was a highly
inflected language (word endings signaled part of speech, verb tense, etc.) so
an ancient Greek kid just had to attend to those things to make sense of the
sentences.
I guess. I used to be a first grade teacher and
someone who worked with struggling readers, so there had to be some problems
with that theory (or why invent spacing and punctuation).
I digress. Heraclitus was a pithy kind of guy, lots
of quotes are attributed to him. Like the one above. Tammy Greenwood (Two Rivers), one of my session
presenters at a Southern California Writers Conference session used the quote
of this blog title as she discussed a topic many conference sessions addressed.
At heart, a novel is about characters. The plot is
just a device for showcasing their human frailties and strengths. The humanity
of the characters is what keeps us reading, not that they solved the problem in
this book, or didn’t. It is the quest to solve the problem that reveals those
aspects of the characters we can relate to, or not.
Tammy said, “Getting to know your characters is your
main job as a novelist.” Until you know your characters as well as you know
your best friend, you can’t reel in the reader with characters who don’t jar.
That got me thinking.
Even when the reader doesn’t know what a character
will do, once the action is revealed the reader knows it was an appropriate
action. One of the roads the character could have taken on the way to
resolution. And, if it is not a consistent action, the author reveals something
about the character that justifies an act seemingly out of character (so to
speak).
I am thinking about some of my WiPs that are giving
me fits. In every one (so far), I am struggling because the characters are the
glue holding my great story premise together, not the propelling force that
will move the action forward. So, looks like I am going to be spending a lot
more time in conversation with Alli, Isabella, Carrie, Lucinda, and oh, so many
others.
Character IS destiny. Who they are, what they need, how they react.
That is what makes a novel compelling.
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