Research 3: The Novel's Bible - Characters

In my post Research 2 about creating a hyperlinked Research bible, I mentioned in passing Character Sheets. This post goes into more detail.

When I first started writing (in days of yore) I followed the given wisdom to complete a sheet for each main character in the style of what I can only describe as a Police 'missing person' form: age, height, weight, colour of hair and eyes, any distinguishing features... you get the idea. Basically it's looking at a photograph.

But this isn't what characters are. Characters are fears and motivations and goals; characters are about the previous experiences that have marked or buoyed their earlier years and so fuel their thinking now. They are about what makes them tick, their moral compasses, what would tip them into doing something dastardly or ultra worthy. What they look like hardly comes into it.

By the time I am setting a character onto paper, even if in draft form without a name, there has already been a lot of work done on the storyline, so I have a rough idea of age and gender. I walk about with the person a lot, take him/her on trips to the shops or drives in the car, until the character starts taking on a cloudy bulk that can shrug or give a tone of voice, if not actual words. Then I'll sit and write an overview - his/her Mission Statement. Sometimes the character laughs and I start again, but usually from this his/her inner make-up starts to coalesce. There still might be no name, but his/her Sheet is copied into the bible and a hyperlink is formed from the front index to the character's page.

As general research is added to the whole, character sheets are bulked: work, transport, tidiness (or not), mode of speech. Relationships are noted, past relationships are noted. But oddly enough, not features.

When the writing starts and these characters tentatively move around their world, it is then that individual Character Sheets become individual Continuity Sheets. He feels peckish and reaches for... a pie, a chocolate bar, a piece of fruit. This information goes on to his sheet. She needs to buy a cardigan and... which shop, which colour, which type, goes on to her sheet - always with the adjunct why? It is the why does she choose that colour, why does he reach for a banana that adds psychological depth to the character. Only when he combs his hair with his fingers do I know how long it is, its texture. 

How characters feel about themselves is more important than how they look. I leave physical perceptions to other characters to note - and then I write it on the character's sheet. Reading fiction where characters change their age, or eye-colour, or even name, wrecks the suspension of disbelief. For me, it bins the book.

I wouldn't be without Character Continuity sheets. If you write, do you use something similar?

Wednesday Writing Prompt #8

It's one thing to spring a story from a single given line, but a single given line does not a story make. It is the characters who inhabit that line, who build it as they breathe, that brings that line, that story, to life for the reader.

So how do you build a character? Give him a limp? Give her a giggle? A blue hat? A Bentley motor car?

Are pictures being created in your mind from the images offered? Can you see these people moving? Turning to look at you?

What you are seeing in your mind’s eye is a stereotype, a shorthand sketch, an amalgamation of all your experiences: lived, read and viewed on-screen. These may be good for a walk-on part, but they’ve hardly got the solidity of a character who can face moral dilemmas and act on decisions in consequence. Such characters, such people, are not made as if a patchwork quilt, they are forged through their own experiences, their own emotional make-up.

This means knowing the character, the person, from the inside out, not seeing them from the outside and trying to discern what on the inside makes them tick. It’s not a simple enterprise and it takes time but, for a character destined to carry a novel, I would suggest it is a necessity.

To give a glimpse of the difference such planning can provide, I offer a workshop exercise:

• Physically build a person: height, age, hair colour, eye colour, weight, complexion, gender. That’ll do; it’s enough. Give this person a name. Give this person an identical twin, including the same name: XXa and XXb.

• Give them something simple to do. A logical sequence works well: get out of bed, make breakfast, get ready for work, leave the building.

•  Make XXa an affable, cheery, glass-half-full sort of person, and make XXb an unsociable, disgruntled, glass-half-empty sort of person.

• Write the same sequence from each persona.

It shouldn’t take long, maybe 250-500 words, but it could prove an eye-opener.

Research 2: The Novel's Bible

Research has been filling my days of late, as it does for most novelists. Some of it is dry, some of it revealing, some of it , though interesting, will never make it into the work-in-progress, yet it may prove to be the founding of a future book. 

Despite there seeming to be an awful lot of it, I always harbour the niggle that I've never found enough. It's not that I fear my characters will open their mouths and utter an anachronism, more the chance that I might have missed that jewel of a sentence which will align planets and produce a whole new scintillating sub-plot. Or future book.

However, that is no problem at all set against using the research collected. For a start, it is never ever gathered in any useful chronological or subject order, can come from absolutely anywhere, and is therefore often committed to any number of notebooks, my mobile's voice-recorder, camera or, as happened this morning, on the back of my shopping list while at the local supermarket (goodness knows what security surveillance thought I was doing). Reading and digesting this for a general overview is one thing. Making it all easily retrievable to check a single fact is not. 

Some writers swear by using spreadsheets; I swear at them. Some writers use a ledger, though I eschew this as I could see myself spending half a day riffling through the pages trying to make sense of my hand-written scrawl. For me it is the ubiquitous Word, though any word processing software would do as long as it supports Bookmarks.

Bookmarks linked to passages via internal hyperlinks have saved my sanity. As it grows it becomes my Bible, a one-stop shop for not only research information but continuity issues, or, to be precise, to ensure that continuity issues don't develop.

The front page, page 1, starts the hyperlinked sections index. Next comes a Statement about the book (think of a company's Mission Statement). At the moment I am writing Pilgrims of the Pool, Book 3 in the Torc of Moonlight trilogy, so I have a statement about the entire over-arcing story, and a statement covering each of books 1 and 2. Then come the character sheets, then starts the Research. As the books cover both a contemporary and a historical setting, there's Research: Historical and Research: Contemporary. 

Into this shell is drip-fed my gathering research information, with sub-headings being bookmarked and added to the at-a-glance Index as research information accumulates. A lot of it, especially background information, consists of web-links with explanatory notes, supported by linked Evernote pages, but there will also be notes to image files, physical books on my shelves and in the public library, or to the vertical magazine holder sitting at the back of my desk slowly filling with newspaper cuttings, brochures and photocopied information, grouped into labelled transparent pockets. Some of this may well have started gathering before I was halfway through writing the previous book. I never snub research information just because I'm not ready for it at the moment it pops up.

With all this a mere click away I can let go the mental reins and immerse myself in the characters' stories, and create.

If you're not certain you've given research your best shot, I can recommend April Taylor's ebook Internet Research For Fiction Writers. The author was an information officer before becoming a novelist, and hearing how she manipulates the internet for information was a revelation. The book  became my Bible2.

Follow on to Research 3 Adding Character Sheets to the Bible

Research 1: Is It Necessary For Short Fiction?

The actual question asked was But you don't research short stories, do you? How to keep smiling when you've just been given the cue for an eye-roll?

I'm at the polishing and finding-a-title stage of a long short story, or a novelette, or a novella, depending which piece of string you measure with. It started with a target of around 3-4,000 words but has come in at 17,500. Is this a problem? No, it means that I can market it as a stand-alone title. However, it would have become a huge problem if I'd pulled it all from my mind without the benefit of supporting research.

Note the operative word: supporting. Research helps a fiction writer create and maintain a world that is not their own, and worlds are much smaller than most new writers believe. 

The story is conveyed in the first person via a female character who is an assessor of paintings. I am female living my own first-person life, I've seen paintings in galleries and I've visited the sort of building where the action takes place. The rest can be fudged, right? Wrong. 

How the character thinks, how she views colleagues and clients, her background and training, the terms she uses, the elements she's looking for in a painting, her tools... these are what make her a three-dimensional character and not a cardboard cut-out tripping over her own gaffes. And it really matters when using first person viewpoint, because the reader is very close in to the character, not just hearing her voice but seeing through her eyes and sharing her thoughts.

Three-dimensional characters also have a tendency to wrap themselves in a three-dimensional setting, so the two become self-supportive, and contribute to the reader's suspension of disbelief. That's why, when I took a breather in the writing, I found I had twelve tabs open on my screen.

So no, I don't research short fiction - much.

PS: If you're interested this is the story. 
You'll find more info about it under Chillers: