Encoding Character, Signals and Signs
Today, while chatting with an artistically-inclined friend about a story she's writing, I encouraged her to introduce a few of her characters to me.
For Gentleman Number One, I got a bit of physical description, a bit of 'mobile' description, some movement and speech identifiers. And then we arrived at the character's house, and she informed me that he had an extensive post-modern art collection, including pieces in the Fauvist and Cubist styles. I twitted her about it at the time --"Art major."-- but the moment stuck with me, and now I'm curious: How do you use specialist knowledge or personal obsessions in telegraphing character? How do you use them to teach yourself about the character --and, in fandom, to differentiate or identify with the canon?
I'm not necessarily talking about specific physical traits, here. Depending on the community, readers will interpret a character who shaves her head in different ways, but that's because we all have some kind of cultural preconceptions (justified or not) about what the inclusion of that detail says about the character. (And, if that's a new element to a fandom character, about what that deviation means.)
But what about the Fauvism-details, the ones that arise from your research or your personal bents? I've got an unhealthy relationship with niche perfumes: when I write that a character wears Guerlain's Jicky, or when I sit down to write my ex-monk character while wearing a scent that reminds me of incense in a Catholic church, I'm trying to convey information about who that person is. At the same time, these references may be too encoded to reach any more than a percentage of my readership. Does that make them wasteful or distracting? Do they still have some effect despite the fact my reader may never have smelled Jicky or may (like me) need to Wikipedia Fauvism?
And to loop this around back to fandom: while your views may vary, I tend to think that every fandom author has a dual task. On one hand, to preserve and express characters in a way that acknowledges their canonical characteristics; on the other, to reinvent that character in a way that's illuminating and in some way deviates. One of the simplest ways to do this --and one of the ways that leads to the least tension with canon, while still allowing room for writerly intervention-- is to introduce fields or details that weren't "spoken-to" in the source material. My version of Riza Hawkeye has five or six little volumes of poetry that she takes with her from assignment to assignment. She's no great reader otherwise, and she doesn't even open these that often, but that's because she has their contents down by heart. This interpretation of Riza Hawkeye likely disagrees with many people's readings, but it doesn't disagree with canon because FMA hasn't ever had to raise or dismiss the issue; meanwhile, I fell on those details because of my absorption with WWI poets, Sassoon and Co.
I don't have a clever conclusion for this, just the questions I asked earlier, and a desire to know others' process: how do you use obsessions to telegraph details about a character to a reader or to differentiate a character from their canonical depiction? To yourself? Or do you? What are your obsessions, and how (or do) you use them as critical tests for character?
For Gentleman Number One, I got a bit of physical description, a bit of 'mobile' description, some movement and speech identifiers. And then we arrived at the character's house, and she informed me that he had an extensive post-modern art collection, including pieces in the Fauvist and Cubist styles. I twitted her about it at the time --"Art major."-- but the moment stuck with me, and now I'm curious: How do you use specialist knowledge or personal obsessions in telegraphing character? How do you use them to teach yourself about the character --and, in fandom, to differentiate or identify with the canon?
I'm not necessarily talking about specific physical traits, here. Depending on the community, readers will interpret a character who shaves her head in different ways, but that's because we all have some kind of cultural preconceptions (justified or not) about what the inclusion of that detail says about the character. (And, if that's a new element to a fandom character, about what that deviation means.)
But what about the Fauvism-details, the ones that arise from your research or your personal bents? I've got an unhealthy relationship with niche perfumes: when I write that a character wears Guerlain's Jicky, or when I sit down to write my ex-monk character while wearing a scent that reminds me of incense in a Catholic church, I'm trying to convey information about who that person is. At the same time, these references may be too encoded to reach any more than a percentage of my readership. Does that make them wasteful or distracting? Do they still have some effect despite the fact my reader may never have smelled Jicky or may (like me) need to Wikipedia Fauvism?
And to loop this around back to fandom: while your views may vary, I tend to think that every fandom author has a dual task. On one hand, to preserve and express characters in a way that acknowledges their canonical characteristics; on the other, to reinvent that character in a way that's illuminating and in some way deviates. One of the simplest ways to do this --and one of the ways that leads to the least tension with canon, while still allowing room for writerly intervention-- is to introduce fields or details that weren't "spoken-to" in the source material. My version of Riza Hawkeye has five or six little volumes of poetry that she takes with her from assignment to assignment. She's no great reader otherwise, and she doesn't even open these that often, but that's because she has their contents down by heart. This interpretation of Riza Hawkeye likely disagrees with many people's readings, but it doesn't disagree with canon because FMA hasn't ever had to raise or dismiss the issue; meanwhile, I fell on those details because of my absorption with WWI poets, Sassoon and Co.
I don't have a clever conclusion for this, just the questions I asked earlier, and a desire to know others' process: how do you use obsessions to telegraph details about a character to a reader or to differentiate a character from their canonical depiction? To yourself? Or do you? What are your obsessions, and how (or do) you use them as critical tests for character?