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fe-bruary, post yksitoista: writing characters
Was talking with a friend about the relative difficulty I have with writing various characters, and realized, hey, this could be an fe-bruary post.
So, ranked from easiest to hardest, this is how difficult I've found it to write various characters. Note that doesn't imply that any of these characters are the easiest or hardest to write in general (my writing experience may be very different from anyone else's), and in some of these cases it may simply be I wrote a character in a particularly easy scenario (i.e. writing Nailah doing stereotypical badass things is likely much easier than other, more nuanced takes on Nailah). Also it certainly doesn't mean anything like "which characters I write best" or whatever—this is more about how hard the experience of writing them is, regardless of how well or poorly they ultimately turn out (and some of these have turned out badly indeed).
So yeah, the list:
Nailah. Jeez she just leaps off the page. And she's terrific fun while she's at it.
Leonardo. They really don't establish much for him, so you get to make all the things up :P I mean, they do give you a bit (more cold/serious than Edward, ambivalent feelings toward war in general, etc), but it's not too hard to build a plausible characterization around that.
Rafiel. I don't want to say there isn't much to Rafiel, because I do think there are some really fascinating facets of his relationship with Nailah, his sort-of hostility toward Hetzel, etc... but at the same time, he acts reasonably level and serene in like 95% of scenarios, and it's not too hard to follow his thoughts the other 5% of the time.
Zihark. The difficulty here mainly comes from the fact that I was writing quite a lot of him for a longfic, and thinking through all his backstory, figuring out his reaction to a fairly involved set of extra-canon circumstances, bla bla bla.also I freely confess I have a tendency to make him overly badass/dramatic that I'm forever struggling to rein in oops
Soren & Ike. Gosh, it's been so long since I've written them that I almost hesitate to place them on this ranking chart, but. I recall finding them more difficult than Zihark, though only slightly. The real headache with them, amusingly enough, is that there's so much damn script for the both of them, which meant I was forever having to flip back and make sure I hadn't overlooked some important facet of their personalities.
Volug. They give you just enough information on Volug to fuck him up good. We're given that he has a wry sense of humor, that he's very loyal to Nailah, he understands common tongue but rarely speaks it... that's the bulk of it, really. So what you're really reading is a vague aura and trying to write a character that fits most people's interpretation of that aura, or something. It's hard to tell if he should veer more toward wry humor or animalistic pride or what. I'm not sure if I've written him in a way that was wholly satisfying to me, yet.
Reyson. I'm not even sure if I could put words to what I found so tricky about him. He seems like he should be a pretty straightforward pretty-boy-with-a-sharp-tongue, but it was hard to get in his head for any appreciable period of time. Maybe it was tricky since I was writing him in a pretty vulnerable position, idk.
Oliver. It's hard to justify his creepy obsession in a way that isn't just "LULZ OLIVER LIKES PRETTY THINGS HE SO CRAY CRAY." I mean, that works fine if you're throwing him in as a joke or a one-note villain (i.e. the way canon handles him), but if you're going to take him seriously, I find that sort of unsustainable, and you have to figure out exactly what sort of crazy he is. Probably 80% of the difficulty was I was writing him from Reyson's perspective and he was pretty mega-freaky from that vantage point. (Earlier drafts of "Delicately, Madly," I explored giving Oliver's obsession a sort of creepy-gropey-sexual edge—headcanon-wise I'm pretty convinced that would actually be an element in most captive herons' lives because like come on it's an entire race of defenseless pretty people, and the game just neatly avoids mentioning anything like that—but that's a route I ended up ditching in the final fic because (a) that probably wasn't faithful to Oliver's character, (b) I wanted to make the fic more about Reyson's growth/arc than just bad things happening to Reyson, and (c) writing it freaked me out, but yeah, it colored my feelings about writing Oliver thereafter.)
Naesala. Never writing him again if I can help it. What the fuck is going on in his head.
So, ranked from easiest to hardest, this is how difficult I've found it to write various characters. Note that doesn't imply that any of these characters are the easiest or hardest to write in general (my writing experience may be very different from anyone else's), and in some of these cases it may simply be I wrote a character in a particularly easy scenario (i.e. writing Nailah doing stereotypical badass things is likely much easier than other, more nuanced takes on Nailah). Also it certainly doesn't mean anything like "which characters I write best" or whatever—this is more about how hard the experience of writing them is, regardless of how well or poorly they ultimately turn out (and some of these have turned out badly indeed).
So yeah, the list:
Nailah. Jeez she just leaps off the page. And she's terrific fun while she's at it.
Leonardo. They really don't establish much for him, so you get to make all the things up :P I mean, they do give you a bit (more cold/serious than Edward, ambivalent feelings toward war in general, etc), but it's not too hard to build a plausible characterization around that.
Rafiel. I don't want to say there isn't much to Rafiel, because I do think there are some really fascinating facets of his relationship with Nailah, his sort-of hostility toward Hetzel, etc... but at the same time, he acts reasonably level and serene in like 95% of scenarios, and it's not too hard to follow his thoughts the other 5% of the time.
Zihark. The difficulty here mainly comes from the fact that I was writing quite a lot of him for a longfic, and thinking through all his backstory, figuring out his reaction to a fairly involved set of extra-canon circumstances, bla bla bla.
Soren & Ike. Gosh, it's been so long since I've written them that I almost hesitate to place them on this ranking chart, but. I recall finding them more difficult than Zihark, though only slightly. The real headache with them, amusingly enough, is that there's so much damn script for the both of them, which meant I was forever having to flip back and make sure I hadn't overlooked some important facet of their personalities.
Volug. They give you just enough information on Volug to fuck him up good. We're given that he has a wry sense of humor, that he's very loyal to Nailah, he understands common tongue but rarely speaks it... that's the bulk of it, really. So what you're really reading is a vague aura and trying to write a character that fits most people's interpretation of that aura, or something. It's hard to tell if he should veer more toward wry humor or animalistic pride or what. I'm not sure if I've written him in a way that was wholly satisfying to me, yet.
Reyson. I'm not even sure if I could put words to what I found so tricky about him. He seems like he should be a pretty straightforward pretty-boy-with-a-sharp-tongue, but it was hard to get in his head for any appreciable period of time. Maybe it was tricky since I was writing him in a pretty vulnerable position, idk.
Oliver. It's hard to justify his creepy obsession in a way that isn't just "LULZ OLIVER LIKES PRETTY THINGS HE SO CRAY CRAY." I mean, that works fine if you're throwing him in as a joke or a one-note villain (i.e. the way canon handles him), but if you're going to take him seriously, I find that sort of unsustainable, and you have to figure out exactly what sort of crazy he is. Probably 80% of the difficulty was I was writing him from Reyson's perspective and he was pretty mega-freaky from that vantage point. (Earlier drafts of "Delicately, Madly," I explored giving Oliver's obsession a sort of creepy-gropey-sexual edge—headcanon-wise I'm pretty convinced that would actually be an element in most captive herons' lives because like come on it's an entire race of defenseless pretty people, and the game just neatly avoids mentioning anything like that—but that's a route I ended up ditching in the final fic because (a) that probably wasn't faithful to Oliver's character, (b) I wanted to make the fic more about Reyson's growth/arc than just bad things happening to Reyson, and (c) writing it freaked me out, but yeah, it colored my feelings about writing Oliver thereafter.)
Naesala. Never writing him again if I can help it. What the fuck is going on in his head.