Character Dynamics

It is a truth universally acknowledged that new writers have lots of really good ideas for new characters. Wait. That came out wrong. New writers put far to many characters in their books. I actually mine my first two books for characters to reuse.

The rule that many characters is wrong is one that I would encourage you to break. But before you do, practise and understand character dynamics.

Unless characters are joined at the hip (Merry and Pippin), each character has his own story. So if you settle on nine main characters, you will have nine stories to write (or eight in the case of LOTR). When the characters are together they will share the same story — so this makes it a little easier. When they are separated, there are TWO things to keep track of. The first — that most people get right — is spacetime. You have to keep track of where they are in space and how long it has taken them to get there. Fantasy writers are really good at space but hopeless at time. Chicklit writers seem to be the reverse. The second — that less people get right — is character dynamics.

Character dynamics manifest in two key ways, continuity and discontinuity. (The former seems to be harder for new writers.)

When characters who form part of a protagonist group or the protagonist's frequent entourage are established, their emotional relationship with the other characters should also be established. The development, evolution or steady condition of this emotional relationship should continue consistently. Example: brothers whose relationship is established as one of uneasy and unequal competition should continue in that competition until something occurs to alter the dynamic. Let's imagine they survive a dangerous encounter: subsequently, both attaches more value to his brother than to his own superiority, so rivalry diminishes, however we still expect to see occasional echoes of their former relationship.

Now the more characters you have, the more stories you have to write, and the more character dynamics you have to manage. Lets add a bit stat math to the question. Combination (nCr) determines how many different character relationships there are in any group. Taking Merry and Pippin as one character you get:

{Frodo, Sam} {Frodo, Gandalf} {Frodo, Aragorn} {Frodo, Merry & Pippin} {Frodo, Boromir} {Frodo, Legolas} {Frodo, Gimli} { Sam, Gandalf} { Sam, Aragorn} { Sam, Merry & Pippin} { Sam, Boromir} { Sam, Legolas} { Sam, Gimli} { Gandalf, Aragorn} { Gandalf, Merry & Pippin} { Gandalf, Boromir} { Gandalf, Legolas} { Gandalf, Gimli} { Aragorn, Merry & Pippin} { Aragorn, Boromir} { Aragorn, Legolas} { Aragorn, Gimli} { Merry & Pippin, Boromir} { Merry & Pippin, Legolas} { Merry & Pippin, Gimli} { Boromir, Legolas} { Boromir, Gimli} { Legolas, Gimli} 

In all, 28 character dynamics. That's 28 stories for the character relationships alone. If, heaven forfend, you start to think about three way dynamics, you get 56 combinations. Tolkien wisely avoids some of the combinations above, and others he only touches on very lightly. Those that he does develop, he develops thoroughly. Those that he does not, he leaves well alone.

I find a helpful way to think about character dynamics is as a soap opera. Soap operas (and teen drama series) focus on character dynamics to the exclusion of plot - the whole key to continuity is the established relationship between characters, to such an extent that a moment of drama can be created by nothing more than having two characters whose history we know well meet in the street. Imagine Alexis and Crystal bumping into eachother in Starbucks.

Character discontinuity occurs when characters are separated, and undergo change, development or evolution while separated. When they meet again, their dynamic is altered. While this is more difficult to write convincingly, it is a ball that few writers drop, largely because it is a case where character dynamics influence plot dynamics. It's also, however, something that happens a lot more often in Real Life — but in real life its effects are generally subtler.

Character proliferation often arises from the naturalistic fallacy that I discussed a few days ago. RL is full of people that we know well. It is reasonable therefore that in a story that takes place in the protagonists' home town, we will encounter an awful lot of characters, and many of them will influence the plot. To avoid proliferation, one of the storyteller's friends is recombination. This is taking several real people whose influence on the protagonist is similar and combining them to make one character. The other is using characters as emblems of their group – so make only one jock, one cop, one storekeeper – but let them voice the opinions and deliver the influence of the crowd they represent.

Finally I would advise every storyteller to be very clear on who is an agonist and who is just a character. A character is anyone who is established (described and depicted) for present or future use.  An agonist is any character whose words or actions influence the plot, either directly or indirectly. Sometimes an agonist is a character we never meet, such as the hero's father who we get to know through the hero's reminiscences or reflections. Sometimes they are obvious, like an antagonist.

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A footnote about Points of View. I'm sure I will talk about this more. Strong POV is when the author consciously chooses to narrate only what a specific character sees, experiences and knows. When the author uses strong POV he will typically point it out explicitly. There is a bit of a fashion at the moment to use strong POV, but where each chapter uses the POV of a different character. When this is done, the character's name is usually used in the first sentence of the chapter. Or the chapter title is the character name — a device that I think belittles the reader's intelligence.

Using this strong POV technique when there are many characters can work well, as long as the writer restricts himself to using only principal characters who are going to develop through the course of the story. When there is a chapter devoted to the POV of one random agonist, I guess it's okay, but it starts to get both difficult and (sometimes) annoying when every agonist has to have his own chapter, or worse, a random character gets a whole chapter to his POV because the author knew there was something the reader had to know, and none of the main characters were present to witness it. If the latter happens, then the plot is not compatible with the narrative technique, and one of them needs to be altered.

Weird Words #2 - Exquisite

Wonderful word, this one. Common usage is as an alternative to "great" that sounds more expressive.

1. Executed with exquisite skill. 

Coupling 'executed' with 'exquisite' and the further x of 'skill', and the whole phrase is redolent of finesse, precision and expertise.

2. The exquisite pain of romance.

Here the usage is possibly just the same - 'exquisite' is being used as an emphasizing word that has neutral connotations. Compare it with the following;

3. The wonderful pain of romance.

4. The terrible pain of romance. 

'Wonderful' and 'terrible' are both providing emphasis, but the former with a positive slant, the latter with a negative. It is conceivable that the writer of 2 was aware of the precise denotation - even the derivation - of the word, but you can see how it may be used as an alternative to 'consummate' (adj.) which just means "complete" or "full" - or as a truss-word - it strengthens the structure of meaning without adding details.

One of the consequences of the use of exquisite purely for emphasis is that the adverb exquisitely often ends up as a fancy alternative to very. This, in my opinion, is a pity. 

Consider the "standard" definition of exquisite which is "fine, precise, detailed, delicate", the which arises from the etymology, which means "sought-after". Here's why I think it's a wonderful word. If you didn't know the etymology, you are probably still using the word correctly. Consider 1 in the light of this; 'exquisite skill' would likely increase the value of whatever is being done so skilfully, hence make it more sought-after. Consider 2, and romance is certainly something that continues to be sought, even once we know that it can be painful. 

The reader who appreciates the meaning of exquisite will feel that it has added meaning in these cases, whereas the reader who does not will not be further enlightened by your usage, but will nonetheless get a sense of what you seek to say.

This sense of rarity gives exquisite its connotation of desirability, and explains why the bad guy often uses it to describe unpleasant things. It's because he's educated, probably British, and he knows what it really means, but he's messing with the hero's head because he knows that the hero is blue-collar and thinks that exquisite means expensive.

5. You will be tortured exquisitely until you talk.

Amazon Tagging on the Moon

A couple of days ago I was involved in a brief exchange of view on the meaning of the word "erotica" - used to tag novels on Amazon. Tagging is when readers select a category for a book, so other readers interested in the category will be able to find the same book.

During the exchange, which took place on Kindle Boards, I was caught out being knee-jerk defensive over the meaning of a word - and I was a little impolite to boot.

This rather brought me up short. I am somewhat inclined to pontificate (that's what this blog is for, after all), so I need to be called on it from time to time. After all, I am all for definition by consensus and I support rather than resist changes in meaning.

In UK English, hopefully, is used idiomatically to mean 'I hope', as in "hopefully it won't rain tomorrow". People of my parents' generation (including one or both of my parents) are sometimes offended by this, and almost always take a dim view of it. Decimate means to reduce in number by a factor of ten. It is usually used in modern English to mean "destroy", "obliterate" or just "defeat". As far as I'm concerned, that's just fine.

Nonetheless, I did get uppity about "erotica" being used to mean "anything that can cause sexual arousal in some people". I'm well aware that most of the time in English, erotic is used as a fancy synonym for "sexy". And most of the time, I suspect, that usage does no harm to the general (if rather vague) denotation of erotica.

If I got uppity, it was not, at the time, justified. But it set me wondering whether there were situations where defending the nuance between two very similar and highly subjective terms is justifiable. I think it may be that in tagging on Amazon, a case can be made for some sort of moderation of meaning. I suggest that in tagging a book I'm not just saying what I think of it - as I would if I used the same term in a review. The act of tagging is one of communicating - of suggesting, proposing, offering - the content of a novel to other potential readers.
If I tag Judy Blume's Forever as "erotica" because it contains a positively portrayed sex scene, then I am doing a disservice to Ms Blume, all her readers all her potential readers. Because her book is not about sex. Nor is it any kind of exploration of the psychological, emotional, physical or sentimental content of sex, even though each of those does feature. I am also doing a disservice to all those readers who are looking for "sex presented in a literary context as opposed to explicit pulp titillation" - the former I would describe as erotica, the latter I would describe as porn.

Thinking about this post, I began to realize just how difficult it would be, even dealing with tags that are not already muddied with the coyness derived from taboo. If you tag a book "horror" because you find it horrifying, someone else tags it "violence" because although they were not horrified, they were aware of a level of violence that they felt needed signaling. I for one don't find "Lady Chatterley's Lover" either erotic or sexy. I believe it is classed as the former because it was written by an established writer of literary fiction, but contains sexual words. Which would show that the traditional means of classification is itself corrupted with prejudice and favour.

On the whole, in the end, I come down in favour of consensus definition. At least on the Amazon page you can see how many times it has been tagged with a given word. I do worry that most of what is tagged as "erotica" is actually porn - Amazon.com has 2500 titles tagged as "porn", but over 24000 tagged as "erotica". Those numbers aren't enough to convince me that my understanding of the meaning of erotica is wrong (or even that its meaning is changing). They tell me that the American public is more comfortable buying something labeled "erotica" than something labeled "porn". Valuable information in my opinion.

For your consideration, I have linked to a collection of stories that is resolutely "erotica" in the Old Skool sense.