WRITING ADVICE: Julie Czerneda’s Writing Workshop! #4 – The Character

In 2005, whilst perusing the shelves at the Hennepin County Public Library, I stumbled across CHANGING VISION by Julie Czerneda (say it: chur-nay-dah), an author I'd never heard of, and was intrigued by the aliens on the cover by artist Luis Royo. It didn’t matter that the book was the second in a series, the cover entranced me and so I read. The book was spectacular, I read others, and fell entirely in love with another series of hers called SPECIES IMPERATIVE for its fascinating aliens and superior characterization. A teacher deeply at heart, Julie Czerneda shares ideas and methodology wherever she goes. On her website, http://www.czerneda.com/classroom/classroom.html she shares ideas for writers. I want to share what kind of impact her ideas have had on my own writing.  They are used with the author’s permission.

“Viewpoint character (protagonist) There should be a good reason the ‘what if ...’

matters to this character.)”

Of everything I do in writing, character is my weak point.

Hmmm. This could explain an awful lot. I have been praised for my ideas, plot, dialogue, imagination, and mood. No one has ever praised me about how real my characters are. In fact, ‘characterization’ is something I struggle with constantly.

It’s not that I don’t know a realistic character when I see one – I do! I know that Lessa of Pern is real; I know that Mackenzie of the Interspecies Union is real; I know Jen Nalynn is real; Miles Vorkosigan is real; Paul Muad’dib is real; Toshio, Tom, and Takkata Jim are real. I read slush for STUPEFYING STORIES (http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/) and reject stories all the time when I can’t see the main character!

So why are they real? What makes these imaginary characters real?

Taking clues from Julie Czerneda’s books as well as from the others I mentioned above, I’ve compiled the following guidelines I have used in my most recent works-in-progress, CARNIVORE’S DEBT as well in a couple of short stories I’m working on:

1)      The character has to be like me in some aspect.

2)     They have to love someone, long for someone, or be leaving someone that they love or long for behind.

3)     They character has to be normal in the sense that they make mistakes, they make smart decisions, and they wonder if what they did was a mistake or a smart decision.

4)     They have to be ABnormal in the sense that there is no going to the bathroom, a little sleeping, a bit of eating, lots of getting hurt several times in the course of a few hours or days, and only doing things that move the story forward.

5)     A character has to have a history implied by everything a reader reads – but without describing that history anywhere in the story.

6)     When illustrating characters in the story, you have to fall back to a poetic description – not a poem, but a paucity of words that only great poets really understand (and by poets I include not only Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare, but Usher and Madonna).

There you go. This is the new meter stick by which I have begun to measure my work. I have been able to go back with a few stories and reengineer them to this meter stick and I’ve SOLD some. My most recent work, listed to the right here, has been written using the meter stick.

There aren’t any novels there yet, but now that I’ve started to have some facility with it – and I’ve analyzed the characters I listed above, I think I’m on my way to getting one published!

Image: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/character-building-word-cloud-29373087.jpg