Character Development

I don't enjoy summer vacation. All this unstructured time gives me the idea that I have nothing to do when, in reality, I have lots of things to do. Go get a haircut. Finish my student loans. Update my resume. Write blog posts. When you're scheduled you find time to do things becuase you know you won't have time later. When you're not scheduled, the famous phrase "Aw, I'll just do it later" becomes later and later and later until you find you've never gotten around to doing it at all.

One of those things for me, unfortunately, has been blog posts.

Melisa, one of my writing class students, wanted to know how to develop her characters better, and I didn't have anything to tell her. How do you teach character development? I've always been told I have well-developed characters, and I'm trying to figure out why that is. What makes someone two dimensional or three? Where does that leap come in?

Storm-brain over at the Veritas Writing site thinks well-developed characters come after filling out a worksheet of things like "Things this character has in their pockets" and "Foods this character will never eat" as well as more mundane questions they might ask you at the doctor's office like "Height" and "Mother's maiden name." Other writers agree with this technique, and I think to a certain extent it helps, but a well-developed character embodies all the things on the worksheet without having them mentioned in the story.

A common mistake that beginning writers make (and I've been there, I've done that, I'm guilty, too) is to create this elaborate mental picture and then share the entire thing with the reader in the first several pages of the story. The reader doesn't care that your leading lady is exactly 145 pounds and her eyes are really cerulean instead of just blue -- they care about her thoughts, her emotions, what she's going to contribute to the story.

In the first few pages of the Rose rewrite, which I'm going to use as an example here because it's recent and people seem to generally like Rhoswen, the reader learns several things about my main character, Rhoswen of Anfalas. They learn she has dark hair, that she's good-natured and kind, that she is tallish (taller than her maidservant, anyway), that she is going to be married to someone she has never met and she's sad about it not because she's afraid of marriage but because she doesn't look forward to leaving her home. We don't know that she's a gardener, that she enjoys playing the harp or that she has a fairly good singing voice because we don't need to know. Her skill with the harp doesn't come up until the fifth or sixth chapter becuase it didn't need to.

When characters are presented for judgement in front of the reader, they say "I did this." Well developed characters say "I did this because..." and give a reason. The reason is not always immediate -- it would have been really easy to write Rhoswen as a woman who was afraid of marriage. But the first reason she gives for being hesitant about leaving home is that she's going to be homesick. She's not afraid of marriage -- she's afraid of childbirth, because her own mother died in childbed. (A little hokey, I know, but my mother's afraid of heart disease because her mother died of heart disease -- it's kind of the same thing, right?)

Long story short, well developed characters have motivation. I have a theory that character motivation is directly linked to author motivation. Why YOU are writing this story will probably have a great effect on how much thought you give to why the characters are doing what they are doing. Oftentimes beginning writers simply want to be part of the story, and this is reflected in the characters they write. Why are you doing this? Because my creator wanted to. They don't have enough internal substance (all those little background details) to stand on their own when they stand before the Writing Gods and are asked to explain their existence.

So, Rhoswen, why are you caring for the wounded in Osgiliath even though it makes you a little uncomfortable?


Well, Reader, I'm doing it because it's something I'm good at and getting better at, because it's part of my duty as the future wife of the steward to care for the people, and because having a job leaves me less time to think about Boromir being gone. At least that last one's what I tell myself, but my freinds don't think it's working.

If you had asked the first incarnation of Rhoswen that question I don't know that she would have had an answer. Actually, the first incarnation of Rhoswen wasn't a healer or a gardener. She didn't have any hobbies. She was a showpiece.

Art imitates life -- My characters are sixty percent me and forty percent who I want to be. When I need to write that forty percent I study the people around me, what I like about them and dislike about them.

Writers need to distill, clarify and collect people as well as experiences, not only becuase it helps them describe things but also because it gives them an arsenal of feelings, emotions and settings with which to play. When I wrote the last chapter of A Rose in the Briars, a chapter that deals heavily with grief and funerals, I thought a lot about all the funerals I've been to and the emotions and actions of the other people that were there. I also used the ten-year old version of myself to write the ten-year old Miriel, who appears at her father's funeral trying desperately not to cry. The observation Rhoswen makes about her ("Why do children think they must take on the world?") was something that was said to me when I was ten and wondering why Slobadan Milosevic was such a terrible, terrible person and Yugoslavia was such a political mess.

Motivation is only one small part of character development -- Does anyone have anything they think I've missed?

The Writing Workshop -- A Reflection

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned – It’s been over two weeks since my last blog post. There’s really no excuse for it other than monumental laziness. In the middle of Midwestern July heat, one finds oneself content to merely sit and wallow and occasionally pick up a book.

Last Wednesday my writing class met for the last time with a grand total of ten participants. It’s been interesting to see who comes back and who doesn’t – throughout the course of the four weeks I had a grand total of twenty-two people  show up, with about four kids who showed up to every class (Melisa, Kahil, Hadiya, and Monica, you’re the best!) and seven or eight more who tried their darnest to make it to at least three because they’d forgotten week one or had to be on vacation. As my grandfather commented, it might have been wiser to charge something for the program because then people would have a reason to come – they’d be "invested" in it.

I didn’t feel right charging people to come hear me talk about writing – for starters, I don’t think what I had to say was anything worth charging for. I was sharing experience, not proven and published fact. If I had a New York Times Bestseller under my belt or a Booker Prize, then yes, I would start thinking about selling the secrets to my writing success. As it is, I was happy I wrote six pages of my fanfic yesterday. My writing is supposed to be non-profit to keep the copyright folks happy and I think that’s the way it’s going to stay.

Over four weeks I learned just as much from my kids as I hope they learned from me. They taught me that it’s unsafe for my voice to talk for an uninterrupted 45 minutes, that this is very boring for middle schoolers in particular anyway, and that one has to be very careful with the way one words one’s advertisements. (Some parents signed their kids up thinking it would be an ESSAY writing workshop, which makes sense, given that all the other teen programs at the library are geared towards school somehow.)

In their evaluations on Wednesday night, they reminded me of many other things as well. Kids need time to practice and share their ideas (“More sharing time, please!”). High schoolers have different writing needs than middle schoolers do (“Grammar wasn’t very helpful – more on character development?”) but everyone can use positive criticism (“Thanks for all the great feedback – really helped my confidence!”). I also learned, once again, that you cannot please everyone – I had high achieving students so elitist in their reading habits I’d never heard of anything they’d read and kids who hated to read whose parents had signed them up in the hopes that I would work some magic on their kids and open books for them. (Newsflash to parents – if your child is in middle school and hates to read, it may be that they have a problem a qualified reading instructor needs to sort out. Also, if they hate to read they will probably also hate to write)

If I do this writing workshop again, I’ll be more selective on age – middle schoolers in one section, high schoolers in another. I’ll make the class longer (an hour and a half) and make sure I have enough handouts for everyone. I’ll request a better meeting space so everyone has a place to write and I'll come to class better prepared than I was this time. I’ll listen better. I’ll remember your names. I"ll always bring pens and paper. I’ll find more resources for different writing development topics like character development so that students with specific needs or wants will be able to get the help they want and deserve. I’ll make them read a little more and have discussions. I'll make your assignments easier and cleaner cut.

My students also told me something I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else – “You’d make a great middle school teacher!” Three or four of my students told me that, and that made me feel really good. Tomorrow I have to go in and take the Praxis, a big liscensure test that will measure whether I can, indeed, begin my student teaching in the spring. Let’s hope for the sake of future middle schoolers in Minnesota and elsewhere that I pass.

New Books, Author Talks, and Fanfic

Let me begin this post by saying that I never buy new books, and when I do, I buy paperbacks. I'm a poor college student and both space and hardcovers are expensive. So when I shell out twenty-six dollars to get a hardcover copy of Rick Riordan's book signed by him (in person!!), it's kind of a big deal for a lot of reasons. I was just as excited as all the ten year olds I was sharing the theatre with, and they were really excited. I got there a half-hour early (the doors opened an hour early) and sat reading my new book against the background of the musical gymnastics of the Tivoli Theater organist and the excited murmurings of the nearly 800 people who'd come to listen to what Mr. Riordan had to say. ( I also observed that I was probably the only college student in the audience, so I don't know what that says about me... or about my fellow college students, for that matter.)

I'm fortunate enough to live in a heavily suburban area with at least one indie bookstore, Anderson's Bookshop, within reach. They're wonderful people there, and they really love what they do. They also bring A LOT of authors to come and sign books, and I got lucky -- Rick Riordan was one of them. So I paid my money and bought my book and went to go hear him speak.  I guessed from his blog that he's a really laid-back, cool kind of guy, and seeing him in person confirmed that for me. (Truth be told, I wouldn't have minded having this guy for a middle school language arts teacher; the teaching profession has lost a special one there.) He basically book-talked his new book, The Red Pyramid, which I thought was funny, since these kids have already both bought it and dragged their parents out on a school night to let them hear the author speak. They're not the ones that need the book 'sold' to them on why it's a good read. But it was good to hear a well-done book talk.

After his prepared remarks, he took a few questions from the audience, most of which I took notes on if I didn't know the answer already. (Ten-year olds ask some really obvious questions sometimes.)

He says he was inspired to write about Ancient Egypt because that was always popular with his students while he was teaching. "Maybe it's the mummies, maybe it's the pyramids -- I don't know exactly why." It takes him about a year to write a whole story, but he's trying to shorten that to six months now that he's writing both the next two books in the Kane Chronicles and the new Camp Half-Blood Series Heroes of Olympus. The title is always the last thing he writes  and the he really made my day by reaffirming something I'm going to share with my writing campers at the end of June.

He said that if there was one thing that he'd recommend to new writers it would be to outline everything that's going to happen in the book before you start writing. That way, he explains, you'll never be stuck on where the story will go next. He talked about how he started writing when he was twelve and there are a lot of stories he never finished, but that's because you're just practicing and you're learning how to write.

A real life example of prewriting! Fantastic! I was really excited for that.

Anyway, I've had a post-it note with a question for Riordan all ready and waiting on my desk since I found out he was speaking at Anderson's -- it was a good question, too, I think. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to ask it to the big group because I think there was a little ageism going on with the microphone lady, but I guess that's what I get for being a college student going to a young adult book signing. The question was this:

Mr. Riordan, on your blog you've made several posts about YouTube videos of tapes of Carter and Sadie Kane that fans have made themselves from the audio clip posted on your website and you say that 'it all must mean something.' I was wondering if you could expand on what you meant by that and what you think of other fan-produced works like fanart and fanfiction based on your work?

Needless to say, I didn't have time to ask all of this in the signing line, so I clipped it down to a very simplistic version of my original question.

Scene.

Me: Mr. Riordan, I have a question. What do you think of fanfiction? [had to add the 'question' marker since I obviously looked old enough not to be the one getting the book signed for myself]

RR: *slightly stressed face, appropriate for a man who's had to sign several hundred books in the space of two hours* Well, you know I can't read any of it, for reasons of copyright and all that, but I don't...I mean...I... I don't like it. It's like someone else trying on your clothes. *gestures with hands as if indicating he is trying to get something slimy and disgusting off them.*

Me: Trying on your clothes. That's a good one. Thanks! *moves along in line and writes this down in notebook*

End Scene.

And it was a good one. In fact, it was a great metaphor. Writing fanfiction and using someone else's characters is exactly like trying on someone else's clothes. I don't think he'd ever gotten that question before (His lack of an immediate answer would seem to suggest this) and I'm glad I asked it for that reason. There are a dozen better ways I might have asked it, whether he was impressed or flattered that children love his characters so much that they want to write adventures of their own for him, but I didn't, and I think that means I got an honest answer.

Does this mean I'm going to take down my PJO fic because I have it from the author himself that he disapproves? Nope. The way I figure, my one lonely PJO fic uses a character Riordan himself used for about a paragraph, and my story uses characters exclusive to PJO for a small fraction of the story. I think it's a fair exchange, more like borrowing a pair of socks from a friend after yours were soaked through than stealing a favorite t-shirt. You return the socks when you're done and thank him for the gesture.

I had a lot of time on the drive home to extend my metaphor, and this is what I came up with.

If writing fanfiction is like trying on someone else's clothes, then isn't writing fanfiction about a dead author's works something like second-hand clothes shopping?

Think about it. Jane Austen's dresses are having the ride of their life right now if that's the case.

All Systems Go!

An update on my summer plans. I've been officially rostered on to the schedule of events for Teens at the Glen Ellyn Public Library  -- my writing workshop has been given the green light and I'm going to be teaching a (hopefully largish) group of teens how to improve their writing the last week in June and the first three weeks of July!

I don't have words for how excited I am!


I've also got some of my freinds lined up to make some short YouTube videos on what they're now doing as writers in College. I've got a comm major who's also in my book arts class now and one of my other English major friends who is involved in our poetry club and our school newspaper! (By the way, if you're an English major friend of mine and you're reading this, email me to talk about doing one of these videos, too!)

We're winding down to our last week of the semester here at CSB; several of my friends have just returned from London where they were studying abroad. It's hard to believe I've been home from Ireland for a whole semester now -- one of my freinds brought back a a whole lot of Digestives, which I practically lived on last semester, and they really brought me back.

Today I learned two new book bindings, one of which I'm going to be using for my final book project, which is going to be printed saturday and bound sunday. Tomorrow I'm turning in a semester's worth of writing prompts and four finished essays for my Writing Essays class. Sometime between now and next Wednesday I'm writing five lesson plans for a unit I just finished timelining this morning. I had no idea how good it feels to have at least a vague idea of how you're going to fill two and a half weeks of classes. And I have a really awesome final project planned!

There hasn't been a lot of time for free writing during all of this -- I posted my one and only Percy Jackson fic to great acclaim last week and I think it's been nominated for an award. I really hope it wins -- I've never been nominated for an online award before. Work is still progressing bit by bit on my Life of Godfrey piece, and I'm hoping I have some time in the carride on the way home to brainstorm a little bit.