Designing Novels, Part 2: Characters
There was a time when characters didn't matter much in SF. The gimmick and the plot were primary, and the characters were named shadows that moved with the plot like wood chips floating downstream. A lot of the pulp fiction from the 40s and 50s that we now consider unreadable is unreadable for that reason: The hyperdrive is on, but nobody's home.
Although an occasional reviewer will plaster a book for being boring, most of the complaints lodged against modern SF have to do with characters, and what this tells me is that people are now looking for characters more than gimmicks or situations. There's a serious danger here, in that characters without interesting backgrounds or anything to do basically become soap opera, and a great deal of modern SF is costume soap opera, especially series fiction. Situation, characters, and plot are all essential, and in the finest fiction they are woven seamlessly together in a way that makes you gasp when you spin past the last page, wishing it would go on. Of course, one thing that makes good fiction good is that it knows where to stop, even when the readers are left aching for more. The only thing worse than not getting what you want in this case may be getting it.
Alas, nobody's equally good at everything. I'm as bad at crafting characters as I am good at coming up with tech gimmicks. Nonetheless, I've found that I've become better with practice and conscious direction of the characterization process. I need to say here that most of what I know about characterization I learned at the knee of SF writer Nancy Kress, who lived nearby and was a close friend when we lived in Rochester, New York 25 years ago.
Human characters are simulations of human beings. (Most SF aliens are human beings in rubber suits, which is one reason I don't have many aliens in my fiction. Like, almost none.) They have strengths, passions, weaknesses, and personality quirks. You have to be aware of all of these, and keep a character's actions in line with the personality that the reader is given to understand. Good characters grow with the action of the story, as they bump their heads on plot twists and their own limitations, and that may be the toughest aspect of characterization that you'll face.
What I have learned to do, and which works well for me, is to create a sort of character dossier for the most important people in a story. Basically, you sketch out a character's personality. This is not what the person does, but what that person is. It doesn't take a lot of words to do this, and in fact if you run on too long you can get in various kinds of trouble. Here are a couple of dossiers from the novel I'm currently working on, The Anything Machine:
Howard Himmel Banger: Age 14, son and only child of Stella Price Banger. Average height, muscular, shaggy brown hair. Has an inborn talent for pictorial art and illustration but is unsure what sort of career to pursue. Geeky and systematic, he likes to categorize and sort concepts. (His mother is pushing him toward an information science career in content management; basically, to be a librarian.) Prone to nightmares after his father was murdered when he was only seven. A little selfish, less emotionally mature than Gustavia. Not especially confident except when pursuing his passions, and then he approaches mania. Has known Gustavia since they were toddlers in SUNY faculty daycare, and assumes that she will spend her life with him, whether they manage to return to known space or not.
Gustavia Marya "Gusty" Kowalczyk: Age 14, daughter and youngest child of Gustav and Anna Kowalczyk. Short (5'4"), thin, blonde, athletic, gray eyes, pretty without being dazzling. Intends to pursue degrees in economics and business and then teach at SUNY Numenor. Willful, very focused on her studies and her career, and careful lest she make a mistake that will impact her future. Fascinated by animals and the business of agriculture. She struggles with her feelings for Howard, torn between her awakening hormonal attraction to him and her fears that he will not take the place she has outlined for him in her plan for her own future.
The danger in writing character dossiers is not too little but too much. The idea is partly to seed your subconscious machinery with the outlines of a character, and in part to have something to measure a character against as a story unfolds. Both functions depends on how your own subconscious mechanisms work and how you manage them. Characters have a well-known tendency to "grow away" from your original conception of them. This can be a problem, but it can also be borderline miraculous. For example, my early plot outline of The Cunning Blood had no major character named Jamie Eigen. Jamie was at first a nameless spear carrier, a sounding board for Peter while he was in jail. But my subconscious clearly had other plans, and Jamie quickly evolved into perhaps the single most pivotal character in the whole yarn.
Too much detail in a dossier can lead to conflict between what your subconscious wants to do with a character and how you consciously perceive that character. It's best to leave a character dossier a little bit sketchy, so your subconscious mechanisms have room to move. Yes, that's a tightrope walk, and you'll have to zero in on the sweet spot through practice. Again, my intuition is that it's better to say too little in a dossier than too much.
Avoid the temptation to include in a dossier what characters do. Howard discovers the Thingmakers, and creates an index that later evolves into Banger's Big Book of Drumlins ("drumlins" being artifacts produced by the mysterious Thingmakers) but those are plot elements, not character aspects.
Nancy Kress always told me that it's important to understand what each character wants. This is implied by a good dossier, but sometimes it's useful to look at a character from an extreme height: Young Gusty Kowalczyk wants life to be predictable; young Howard Banger wants life to make sense. Most of what they do (and much of the conflict between them) follows directly from those high-level differences. If you can understand your characters that deeply, you can probably do good things with them. So far I'm having a lot of fun, and the story (which is a juvenile; a first for me) is evolving well.
More next entry.