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JM on Descriptions & Characterizations
January 2003
As posted on the Simon & Schuster Bulletin Board
quote:
As one of the few men who post here on the BB, I wanted to thank you for your inspiring words regarding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack: http://bbs.simonsays.com/bbdocs/Forum5/HTML/007010.html I first read these words while deployed in a small country north of Afghanistan and immediately posted a portion of your message outside my office. Many people stopped by and read your insightful words...all of them loved the message!
I cannot tell you how much it means to learn that you and some others with you in the Middle East actually found something worthwhile in what I wrote in that message. I have never felt so inept as I did when I was writing that message.
Thank you for that.
On a more positive note--certainly a more amusing one--one of my favorite treasures is a clipping from the front page of Stars & Stripes during the Gulf War. (I think Stars and Stripes is the name of the newspaper that goes to our military personnel?)
The clipping is a large picture of a woman, a US Army corporal, sitting in the desert sand with her back propped against one of our tanks. Her rifle and helmet are lying beside her. She's completely engrossed in the new novel she's reading. It was one of mine that had just come out in paperback.
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Do you ever struggle in describing specific features of your characters without overusing them from book to book?
Do I ever struggle in describing physical characterstics. DO I EVER STRUGGLE doing that?? Oh My God! I'd rather write 50 lines of dialogue than 3 sentences describing someones face or body. What makes that so funny (or pitiful) is that this is something most romance writers can do ad infinitem and effortlessly--and love doing it. They can do it in almost poetic terms, and I love reading it.
When I sit down to write it, it feels awkward and trite to me. The more books I write, the more I subconsciously dread it and try to avoid it. I mean, how many ways are there to say, he was handsome and had a strong face? When I first began writing, I did a whole lot of it throughout each book. You'd think it would get easier, but it gets harder. I guess it's because I know in advance I can't possibly describe any feature in a way that hasn't been done hundreds of times before.
The other thing that is a labor for me (not a labor of love) is moving a character across a room or moving his/her limbs. I have a literal mind when I'm writing. I know it's good and visually right to say "he propped his hip on the edge of the desk," but so help me...when I try to write this, I picture a guy taking his hip out of the socket and propping it on the desk."
Ah, but dialogue...writing witty, sophisticated, angry, happy dialogue...that all comes so easily to me. I revise almost everything I write over and over again--but not dialogue. I rarely need to change a word of it. I could write all the dialogue for one of my books in a month easily, and have a wonderful time doing it. But do you know what I agonize over? The adverb that describes how the person said it! Go figure. 
My dialogue is what's made my books stand out, I think. Unfortunately, dialogue has to completely suit the character and the mood and move the plot. So I can't write the dialogue until I know the character, the mood, and most awful of all--the plot.
Alas, writing is not nearly as easy as it seems.
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I immediately noticed how well you "build" the characters. I felt as if I could actually visualize their very being...simply from your very descriptive words.
If you have the time, I'd like to ask the following questions: How difficult is it for you to "build" characters? Does it take a large portion of your time when writing a book or is it something that comes very easy to you?
My answer here excludes physical characteristics which I addressed above. With that understanding, then I would have to say that *most* characters are fairly easy for me to build/develop, particularly secondary characters.
Non-published authors are always advised to know everything about their characters "including their favorite perfume/after shave, favorite foods, favorite colors..."
I have to tell you, Steve, I think that advice is thoroughly silly, **unless a character's favorite food/scent/color is going to become important to the plot either for humor or otherwise.** I make that stipulation because it so happens that my heroine's love of pears in STWOM is actually very significant to the plot. (It's significant enough that I just received a gorgeous basket of unusual varieties of pears from my publisher to celebrate STWOM's completion.)
To develop (build) a *primary* character, I need to know only one thing about him/her, but I need to know all about it, and that one thing is their early life. I need to know what they were like as a child/adolescent/young adult. What was their home life like? What were their parents and siblings like?
You can decide that in reverse order, if you want. For example, if you've decided you want to write about a hero who is an embittered, athestic cynic, then fine. Now construct a life for him in your mind that could have *reasonably and understandably* made him that way.
I'm assuming throughout this message that you're thinking of writing. If you aren't, I apologize for going into so much needless detail.
Assuming that you are thinking of writing (and/or that others reading this are thinking of it) then I would refer you to the prologue of PERFECT and Chapter 1 of SOMETHING WONDERFUL for an of how this is done when developing a difficult/troubled *hero.*
For creation of an unique, but believable heroine, check out Chapter 1 of PERFECT and Chapter 2 of SOMETHING WONDERFUL.
That prologue and those three chapters I mentioned above exist specifically to prove to the reader, in advance, that these same characters will *believably* become the adults I'm going to write about.
A hero who is a cynic without any known reason to be a cynic soon becomes an irritating, unlikeable character.
In ONCE AND ALWAYS I waited so long to explain to the reader why Jason was the way he was that readers got very angry with him. What saved him from being detested instead of loved by readers was the sheer drama of his early life when they finally discovered it and then saw his scars.
In PARADISE I had the opposite problem. I wanted to write about an heiress who was gorgeous and yet very sweet and down to earth. In order to make such a heroine believable to readers, I showed them Meredith's childhood and her life with her father for several chapters in the beginning of the book.
So the short answer to your question is that you can create any kind of *primary* character you want as long as you also create (at least in your mind) a background for him/her that suits the adult he/she becomes. And you need to be very clear on the general facts of it, otherwise, your character will loose his credibility and act of character--and in so doing, drive you crazy while your writing.
As to secondary characters, that's much easier. You build a secondary character "on the fly" to serve whatever purpose you need at that place in the novel. If you need to break up the pathos with some humor, and you're writing a military novel--toss in a sargeant with an attitude or a grandfather who constantly gives unwanted--but occasionally sound advice to his son the general.
That should cover the entire issue of characterizations for everyone on our bulletin board.
~~ Judith McNaught on Simon & Schuster's SimonSays Discussion Board
