for the love of character
Aug. 8th, 2016 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluai've mused, in the past, on how it seems like being too close to your subject can make your writing quality suffer. now i'm musing over a highly-related but possibly-distinct concern: being too close to any one character.
i.
what brought this to mind: maggie stiefvater just hinted that she's starting work on a trilogy centered on one of her characters, ronan.
ronan is a character from her previous tetraology of novels, the raven cycle. and it's somewhat obvious that, despite not being the main character, ronan's her favorite. part of this obviousness, i'll grant, probably comes from the fact i read some of her blog after i finished reading book #3, and on her blog she straight-up tells us how fond she is of ronan, how she probably relates to him more than any other character in the novels. but it's probably noticeable to some extent just from the source—ronan gets the last scene in the series, he has some of the more interesting powers/supernatural shit going on, etc etc—noticable if you're looking for it, but not distracting.
i think ronan is very well-done in the raven cycle, but i question whether he ought to carry his own trilogy.
this is based on a gut feeling, and perhaps not wholly rational. like, paradoxically, i'd assert that the dream thieves is by far the best book of the raven cycle, and it's the one that's most ronan-centric. theoretically, i should be assuming that a whole trilogy of ronan will just be more of the book i liked the most! but i've wondered before if the dream thieves was so good because ronan was not the main character of the overall quartet. the focus on him is surprising in that context, and fresh; bringing his heady personality front-and-center serves as a delightful contrast against the moods we have elsewhere in the series, and—perhaps most importantly—a lot of his story feels very resolved at that point in a way that the other characters' stories don't. i'm worried dragging him out front-and-center will involve rehashing the same themes and development we've already seen, just because those are especially cherished themes; sometimes an instrument sounds best when it's offering counterpoint and not carrying the melody.
ii.
i guess, for a fascinating contrast, i could talk about the hero of runaway horses.
(in case you haven't heard me gush about the author/book before: author was japanese, grew up during world war 2, and was kind of a delicate-poet-turned-crazy-right-wing-nationalist who ended his life in 1970 by attempting a violent coup of the japanese self-defense force and committing seppuku after giving a dramatic speech about rising up to reclaim japan's glory. yeah, really. runaway horses, uncannily enough, is about a college student who convinces a bunch of college buddies that they should... attempt a violent coup of the japanese government.)
you can tell a right-wing nationalist wrote runaway horses because of the material; isao attempts the same kind of coup mishima did later in life. and yet isao seems a little alien, a little eerie, a little too far to touch—if the author loved isao, it's not obvious at all from the source material; indeed a plausible reading of the novel would emphasize isao's foolishness and hubris. at the very least, if mishima did love isao as a character, he stops short of the spills-off-the-page sort of love reserved for a character like stiefvater's ronan.
and yet, runaway horses was an uneven novel. it's one i wrestle a lot with, actually, because i found it weird and stilted in some ways, the pacing was off, the themes are tricky to parse and often contradictory—and yet it might be the mishima novel i think the most about. this stands in stark contrast to something like the dream thieves, which i loved emotionally and unreservedly, and even in stark contrast to the most famous of mishima's books, spring snow, which leans on that most classic of plots/themes, doomed love. (which i guess brings up another question: are the best novels the one you loved the most viscerally, that had characters you loved & plots that soared, or the novels that you wrestled with, struggled to get through, and yet found yourself mulling over for months afterwards—the ones you feel like you don't quite "get," but keep circling back to, because you feel there's something really important to grasp inside?)
iii.
in my RP days, one of my longer-lived characters was extraordinarily charismatic and giving and brave. she had flaws, of course, but she was basically a good person, and so full of energy she leapt off the page. unsurprisingly people were fond of her.
what surprised me, and unsettled me a bit, was when i played characters who were—i hate the term "problematic"; let's go with "vaguely shitty"—when i wrote vaguely shitty characters. these characters weren't hateable in the way that, say, a roald dahl villain is, and they weren't meant to be, but they had various neurotic or cruel streaks that they had no interest in fixing, and while i myself loved them (because i'd created them, spent so much time in their head, spent so much effort figuring out what made them tick), they also scared me a little, made me a little uneasy, because i knew how a a very slight twist of circumstance might give them free reign to show their uglier instincts even more.
one of these characters seemed very widely adored/popular, which bothered me a little. yes, mortimer was in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, but a lot of his difficulties were of his own making, and he had a streak of petty cruelty that made me very scared for the day he actually overcame those difficult circumstances to achieve real power.
maybe people loved him in the same tricky way i did—"i love this character because i know him so well, even though i'm fully aware he has a lot of shittiness in him that i find difficult to deal with." maybe it was just hard for people to see what i knew too well, because his circumstances only rarely allowed him to be a jerk, and such behavior could be explained away as "dude he's had a really shitty time of it lately." but i suspect i probably loved my character to the point that it was hard for others to see his flaws as well. (which i suspect is a trickier thing to balance in RP than in most instances—if i'm writing a story, i have full control over how much screentime each of my characters get, and which interactions i wish to show between them. in RP you mostly just control what thoughts your character has, and the actions they do in response to others, and it's hard to write nothing but one character's thoughts without making that character way more sympathetic.)
i.
what brought this to mind: maggie stiefvater just hinted that she's starting work on a trilogy centered on one of her characters, ronan.
ronan is a character from her previous tetraology of novels, the raven cycle. and it's somewhat obvious that, despite not being the main character, ronan's her favorite. part of this obviousness, i'll grant, probably comes from the fact i read some of her blog after i finished reading book #3, and on her blog she straight-up tells us how fond she is of ronan, how she probably relates to him more than any other character in the novels. but it's probably noticeable to some extent just from the source—ronan gets the last scene in the series, he has some of the more interesting powers/supernatural shit going on, etc etc—noticable if you're looking for it, but not distracting.
i think ronan is very well-done in the raven cycle, but i question whether he ought to carry his own trilogy.
this is based on a gut feeling, and perhaps not wholly rational. like, paradoxically, i'd assert that the dream thieves is by far the best book of the raven cycle, and it's the one that's most ronan-centric. theoretically, i should be assuming that a whole trilogy of ronan will just be more of the book i liked the most! but i've wondered before if the dream thieves was so good because ronan was not the main character of the overall quartet. the focus on him is surprising in that context, and fresh; bringing his heady personality front-and-center serves as a delightful contrast against the moods we have elsewhere in the series, and—perhaps most importantly—a lot of his story feels very resolved at that point in a way that the other characters' stories don't. i'm worried dragging him out front-and-center will involve rehashing the same themes and development we've already seen, just because those are especially cherished themes; sometimes an instrument sounds best when it's offering counterpoint and not carrying the melody.
ii.
i guess, for a fascinating contrast, i could talk about the hero of runaway horses.
(in case you haven't heard me gush about the author/book before: author was japanese, grew up during world war 2, and was kind of a delicate-poet-turned-crazy-right-wing-nationalist who ended his life in 1970 by attempting a violent coup of the japanese self-defense force and committing seppuku after giving a dramatic speech about rising up to reclaim japan's glory. yeah, really. runaway horses, uncannily enough, is about a college student who convinces a bunch of college buddies that they should... attempt a violent coup of the japanese government.)
you can tell a right-wing nationalist wrote runaway horses because of the material; isao attempts the same kind of coup mishima did later in life. and yet isao seems a little alien, a little eerie, a little too far to touch—if the author loved isao, it's not obvious at all from the source material; indeed a plausible reading of the novel would emphasize isao's foolishness and hubris. at the very least, if mishima did love isao as a character, he stops short of the spills-off-the-page sort of love reserved for a character like stiefvater's ronan.
and yet, runaway horses was an uneven novel. it's one i wrestle a lot with, actually, because i found it weird and stilted in some ways, the pacing was off, the themes are tricky to parse and often contradictory—and yet it might be the mishima novel i think the most about. this stands in stark contrast to something like the dream thieves, which i loved emotionally and unreservedly, and even in stark contrast to the most famous of mishima's books, spring snow, which leans on that most classic of plots/themes, doomed love. (which i guess brings up another question: are the best novels the one you loved the most viscerally, that had characters you loved & plots that soared, or the novels that you wrestled with, struggled to get through, and yet found yourself mulling over for months afterwards—the ones you feel like you don't quite "get," but keep circling back to, because you feel there's something really important to grasp inside?)
iii.
in my RP days, one of my longer-lived characters was extraordinarily charismatic and giving and brave. she had flaws, of course, but she was basically a good person, and so full of energy she leapt off the page. unsurprisingly people were fond of her.
what surprised me, and unsettled me a bit, was when i played characters who were—i hate the term "problematic"; let's go with "vaguely shitty"—when i wrote vaguely shitty characters. these characters weren't hateable in the way that, say, a roald dahl villain is, and they weren't meant to be, but they had various neurotic or cruel streaks that they had no interest in fixing, and while i myself loved them (because i'd created them, spent so much time in their head, spent so much effort figuring out what made them tick), they also scared me a little, made me a little uneasy, because i knew how a a very slight twist of circumstance might give them free reign to show their uglier instincts even more.
one of these characters seemed very widely adored/popular, which bothered me a little. yes, mortimer was in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, but a lot of his difficulties were of his own making, and he had a streak of petty cruelty that made me very scared for the day he actually overcame those difficult circumstances to achieve real power.
maybe people loved him in the same tricky way i did—"i love this character because i know him so well, even though i'm fully aware he has a lot of shittiness in him that i find difficult to deal with." maybe it was just hard for people to see what i knew too well, because his circumstances only rarely allowed him to be a jerk, and such behavior could be explained away as "dude he's had a really shitty time of it lately." but i suspect i probably loved my character to the point that it was hard for others to see his flaws as well. (which i suspect is a trickier thing to balance in RP than in most instances—if i'm writing a story, i have full control over how much screentime each of my characters get, and which interactions i wish to show between them. in RP you mostly just control what thoughts your character has, and the actions they do in response to others, and it's hard to write nothing but one character's thoughts without making that character way more sympathetic.)
no subject
Date: 2016-08-08 10:31 pm (UTC)I think there are innumerable examples in literature, just as many in 'fic (I'm guilty as anyone there) and even examples to be found in, say, fan-translation.
Just reading excerpts from Stiefvater's blog as reposted by someone I eventually unfollowed and blocked on tumblr made me find her an unsettling and not very appealing writer. The way she talked about her work bothered me.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-08 10:52 pm (UTC)the full disclosure here being, i've read five of her books and liked them all; i follow her blog but have rather mixed feelings about it; some posts i like, but some i really don't, for reasons i have trouble placing.
my best guess is, her posts on "here is how i did my career (and so can you)" and/or a chunk of her "writing advice" posts tend to carry a tone/message of "hey i worked so hard and sacrified so much and you can do it too if you just commit"
and while maybe it's helpful advice for some people, it just makes me feel weirdly wound-up and anxious and bad about myself. i'm actually okay with where i am arts-wise right now, when i'm left to think about it by my own devices—while i'm not producing much right now, i'm being very explicit about the time tradeoffs i'm making in my life, and while i don't want to be so consumed by work/birding/etc forever, it's definitely optimal for me right now, given that i have other personal and professional goals. but having someone yelling at me about how i could be sacrificing more and caring harder makes me feel bad for no good reason. not everyone is born with a burning singleminded purpose! not all jobs that pay the bills are inherently horrible! making sure you're keeping your shit together as an adult is hard and also pretty respectable! etc
maybe this is what you noticed, or you noticed other things as well?
no subject
Date: 2016-08-08 11:19 pm (UTC)That combined with a sense of... a lack of self-awareness? It was like the authorly version of some shitty Manhattan or Silicon Valley lifestyle blog, and these tumblr kids were quoting it like it was soooooo inspirational. Made me feel kind of bad for them TBH.
And some genuinely bad prose, which didn't bode well for... reading any actual fiction. There was one Q&A where she answered a query about the lack of POC characters and she had this precious, roundabout way of answering it that was... kind of repellent. IDK, I didn't have much of an impression of her or TRC one way or another but after accidentally following a couple of Manna's SnK buddies who were into TRC I ended up blacklisting everything to do with it and then unfollowing them.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-08 11:22 pm (UTC)that... does explain why i get the same feeling when i read too much hacker news :D;;;
no subject
Date: 2016-08-08 11:16 pm (UTC)In general, I'm more likely to complain about people writing characters that they obviously do not like. I think you should always love a little bit the characters you write to write them well. But you're also right that loving them a bit too much, or in an overly indulgent way, is also not that great. It might make for fun read (unless it's outright infuriating, hi my visceral reaction to Lymond), in a very emotional, for the trope kind of way (and I think that's the sort of things the Raven cycle mostly hit also its prose has some pretensions of more, rather torpedoed by its lack of decent plotting and focus); but it does make it good. I think the works that have impressed me the most were those that managed at once to be starkly critical and tenderly loving with their characters. (I'm think of Utena for exemple, which does some astonishing character work)
no subject
Date: 2016-08-09 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-09 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-09 12:49 am (UTC)You say it's the former, but it sounds to me like the latter. I personally think it's really important to hold onto the shitty sides of characters, the way they're abrasive and uncomfortable and deeply unlike the author or audience, because that's where you get life from. And readers have sometimes reacted with something along the lines of "but why? it's so gross. I don't like this." (See also: Half of FE14 fandom screaming about how Leon's side-note crush on his half-sister is totally unnecessary and they're mad at IS about it.)
I think when someone sides with a character too much, they tend to do many things--they tend to make the character fall in line with what they believe is right, or they make the character more like themselves, or they warp the universe to serve that character. And I think all of these things take away from life. (Incidentally, fandom has been devising increasingly self-righteous ways of claiming that they are Saving The World by doing so.)
I do also think it's possible to get stuck rehashing well-trodden ground with favorite characters, or getting tunnel vision about the relative importance of conflicts, and this is something I know I'm guilty of. When you write for things that aren't bias material, you've got a good gut feel for which parts ought to be the important parts, narratively speaking. When it's your favorite, that tends to be dominated by the aspects of your fav that appeal to you.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-09 12:53 am (UTC)"sides with" probably is far clearer / closer to what the phenom is, thank ye.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-09 12:57 am (UTC)But I've also found myself pulling a character out of a book entirely because I realized I was too fond of the character I'd built to do what the story realistically required (usually when this happens, it's because I've built a lead character accidentally when I meant to just make an interesting supporting character.) Rather than violate the story, I let the character hang out until an opportunity for him or her to be the star comes around, and find someone else better suited to the role.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-09 01:11 am (UTC)On the other hand, I abandoned last year's NaNo Novel midstream because I went too far in the other direction, couldn't get a firm grip on any of my characters, and just straight-up didn't like them or have any investment in them (I'm not sure which came first, not liking them or not having a foothold. Probably self-perpetuating). So, I dunno, writing is hard, there's a lot of variables, delicate balance, yadda yadda I don't have a particular thesis here