Forgotten Characters

I’m coming to a point in the book where there are multiple conflicts between several of the main and secondary characters.  There’s just one problem.  I forgot about some of the characters.

The beginning of the book introduces the main characters, including all the characters involved in these conflicts.  After that, several of them just disappear.  The characters don’t have a major role in any of the main events that already happened, but they’re pivotal in the events to come.

Part of the problem is that there’s a disconnect between the characters and I.  This includes one of the main antagonists (there’s an intra-kingdom power struggle that occurs during a war — the power struggle doesn’t really occur until the second half of the book, and his role is ancillary at best in the first half).

It’s one of those things I just can’t believe happened — I got so wrapped up in some of the earlier events, but these characters still needed attention.  Now I’m finding that I have to go back and fill in these chapters — some of their backstory needs to come out before I can get to the conflicts, and the place that makes most sense to do it is earlier in the book.

I’m not sure if this was a planning failure (I’m not a huge fan of the chapter-by-chapter outline, just a more generalized “this is the order stuff is going to happen in outline”), or if it was just that the other characters were so insistent on telling me their story that it consumed my writing and the forgotten characters just couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

So here I am, going back into the first half of the book and adding additional material.  I don’t consider this a “revision-addition” (the sections that you add after you read the entire book and realize that you should spend more time on X), because its fairly essential to the unwritten portion of the book.  That said, I’m not going to worry too much about where I place them in the book — as long as they fits in the overall timeline — because I can always move these chapters around a little during the revision stage.

Before I can do any of that, however, I have to apologize to the characters and hope they’re still willing to share their tales.

My opening paragraphs

Several of the bloggers I read have posted their opening paragraph(s), including Diane Gallant, Ken Kiser, and Alex Moore (among many others that I would list here, but it would take a while).  I’ve decided to post mine (though I do note that this is the first draft, completely unedited).  Here are the first (roughly) 200 words:

            Alucius stabbed his pitchfork in the ground.  With a heavy sigh, he wiped his brow.  The sun was hidden behind the clouds, but the air, like his shirt, was soaked with humidity.  It would rain soon, good for the farms.  Of course, this meant that his work had to be finished before the drops began to fall from the sky.

            He picked the fork back up.  His broad, strong shoulders flexed under his ripped and dirty shirt as he turned the earth.  Alucius had been at this all day, and the hours seemed to drag by.  He was a farmer by necessity, but hated working the ground.

            His father had passed away a year ago.  He owned nothing but the farm, and had but one son to take it over.  Alucius’ mother and sisters were dependent upon him, and therefore he was dependent on the farm.  So from dawn to dusk he was out here, tilling, planting, weeding and toiling.

            Everyday, around noon, Alucius took a break.  He would eat whatever crumbs he had scrounged up that morning and look to the west.  There, he would see Haandor, the bejeweled city.  He’d always sigh and look wistfully.  The city always captured his dreams and consumed his waking thoughts.

Enjoy

What drives your characters?

Everybody is driven by something.  Sometimes, we’re driven by inertia, but that’s still a driving force (though it seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me….).  Look at any action in your life, and there’s some driving force behind it.  Eating?  It’s often driven by hunger.  Watching the game?  Driven by the need for entertainment.  Writing?  Driven by the writing bug.

Your characters need an impetus too.  Too often, characters appear to be driven by “the world needs me to save it” and go from there.  Personally, I think that’s a weak out for the character’s driving force.  Even the cliché “I have to save my one true love from the evil villain” (evil villain is redundant, yet appropriate) is a better impetus.

When you’re developing a character, give some thought to what drives them.  It should give you insight into the character as a person, and help you with developing their backstory.  You should be able to succinctly describe a character’s motivation, and it should have a connection to their backstory.

I often like to stop and review a character’s motivation and think “what would they choose and why?”  It helps me get through difficult passages when I’m writing, because sometimes we lose sight of the characters as people, and think of them as driving mechanisms for the story we want to tell, not the story they’re involved in.  So what drives your characters?

Showing some weakness

I’m currently at a point in the book where I delve into several of the characters back-stories to help give them depth and create a connection with the reader.  One of the things I’ve found is that you really need to provide weaknesses for the characters, because you want them to seem human (particularly since my main characters are all human).  One thing that will turn me off of a book quite quickly is when the main character is flawless (I would also note that this is also true of ancillary characters, though it would generally take multiple transgression here to turn me off of an otherwise good read).  It removes a sense of reality that I feel is necessary to connect the reader to the prose.

Of course, the opposite of the flawless character is the overly-flawed one.  All characters need a flaw — every person you know has one, every character you encounter in a book should as well.  The flaw, however, must be something that can be overcome by the character — this struggle helps define the character.  On occasion, you encounter a character that has so many flaws that overcoming those flaws seems unrealistic.

Generally, I try to limit each character to one major and one or two minor flaws.  The major flaw is something the character has to overcome (this is the point I’m at in the novel for several of the characters).  The minor flaws are some of the things that just make those characters unique — they’re usually personality quirks and don’t have a major impact on that character’s actions.

Think back to things you’ve written, or things you’ve read.  Think about your favorite characters.  What were their flaws?  How did they overcome them?