Setting as Character: How to Give it Voice

Ace Jordyn Character Craft & Skills Setting and Milieu World-building Writing Tools No Comments

It’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch out for like when the kids are suddenly quiet and that tells you there’s trouble’s afoot.  It’s the  same in a story. When setting is too quiet, your story is in trouble. The problem with setting as character is that setting has no real voice, at least it doesn’t participate in dialogue directly – or does it?

Setting, we are told, must do more than be a background for characters to engage in. It should determine HOW they engage, WHY they engage and REVEAL how characters see their world, themselves and others. Setting is the voiceless character who niggles, needles, exaggerates, creates, destroys, challenges, extracts and dampens. How do you write a voiceless character?

For great ideas and the basics on creating setting and world building, you can peruse our archives. But to understand how to make setting as real and alive as your other characters, here are some things to be aware of:

6) Setting is personal. To understand what is important to POV character ask him how he’d react and feel if his world was suddenly changed or destroyed. What would he miss? What would he fight for? When a person loses their home whether it’s because of weather, war, politics or even choice, there is loss and grieving. That makes setting personal. Does setting herald change or present a conflict? Is there a storm? A volcano about to erupt, a nuclear device about to explode? An impending war? Political change? A lost love? A demand to convert?

2) Setting is the voiceless, albeit dynamic, character with whom the POV interacts and relates to varying degrees. This interaction reveals both the world and the character just as any good dialogue reveals something about its participants. How will the man in a suit react if he finds himself: in the midst of a medieval battle against dragons? Hitchhiking with a suitcase in hand? With an extremely belligerent client threatening a much needed sale? Performing on stage?

Let’s take the suit analogy one step further: Setting is more than just the background fabric of your character’s experience, it is the tailored cloth, designed, sewn and fitted just for him. In the pockets of that tailoring, he carries with him the tools he needs to be his larger than life self or not – sometimes it’s the pockets which are stitched shut or the empty ones that are the most revealing.

3) The POV can only see what’s import to him so we must be able to see and understand his world through his eyes. His experiences and his reactions form his  dialogue with setting. Is a hot sunny day a reason to hide indoors, play on the beach, curse the office job, time for a cold beer in the pub, a perfect day to move the troops? Is a fog depressing or an opportunity for mischief? Thus the reader learns the most about the character and his setting when the descriptions are filtered through his point of view.

4) Setting reveals what is unique an important for the POV thus allowing his voice to come through. Not every character experiences (physically or emotionally), understands or reacts to the same environment in the same way.

5) It’s more than just geography – it’s the sociology, economy, level of technology, religion, politics, societal and personal values of the POV and those he interacts with. These are areas of potential conflict. Just as importantly, setting tells us what we need to know about the POV. What does the world/setting expect from him? Saint or serf? Hero or villain? It can also include sensory inputs: sight, smell, sound, touch, taste, heat, cold, or the passage of time. Remember the suit? In some societies, clothing symbolizes status and what the POV and others wear is important.

6) Setting is active, has impact and can change throughout the story. Is it friend or foe? Is it a place to hide (friend), a fight on a cliff (foe), dystopia (foe), utopia (friend), does it impede (foe) or help (friend) the POV’s plans? How does it help or hinder a POV from achieving his story goal? If it’s too dull, blow it out of proportion to make it larger than life just like you do to achieve maximum impact with plot or character. A POV can always change the setting, or strive to. Change may be societal, political, within a community, family or locales.

Like other characters, setting can based on an archetype. Archetypes typically offer challenges, gifts and opportunities for POVs. Does the the setting in your story have archetypal traits and if so, what can you do to make it a stronger character?

The Sorcerer: a place of magic which has interesting consequences
The Magician: where we can be made to believe anything but is it real? Is the situation sustainable? What happens when the luck wears off? Is this a place of transformation with the gift of power?
The Green Man: a life force that impels growth, vitality but growth has a dark side of death and decay.
The Mentor: possesses wisdom, is a teacher and sometimes a healer. Can serve as a motivator, conscience and gives the hero a gift once he’s earned it.
The Herald: a challenge for change the herald can be a force, a thing, an event (tornado). The herald disturbs, unbalances.
The Threshold Guardian: tests the hero by providing obstacles; not always defeated but the hero learns from the experience.
The Shape Shifter: friend or foe, will the shape shifter help or hinder/betray? Crafty and charismatic, the shape shifter confuses and tests the hero.

So maybe setting isn’t such a quiet character after all. Voiceless in some ways, but it speaks its own extremely complex language. Archetype, friend or foe, setting is a dynamic environment that is as alive as any other character because it illuminates, challenges, and demands calls the POV to action.

Conflicts of Character Design

Character Craft & Skills Matt Jones Storyline No Comments

There are many parts of creating a new novel, and creating realistic characters is probably one of the most challenging ones. Characters need to be believable. They need to have their own personality, habits, and traits that set them apart from others. If done correctly, the reader will be able to relate. They’ll understand and feel concerned. It’ll pull them deeper into the novel and they’ll keep reading to figure out what will happen. If done poorly, it will throw them out of the novel. They won’t be able to believe and before long, they’ll look elsewhere and leave your novel behind.

When I create new characters, I focus on the conflicts. Everyone has conflicts they face and have to deal with. It’s the sum of all these conflicts that can lead them on the road of hero or villain. These conflicts will generally take on the shape of external and internal, two sides of a fight that is always raging in everyone.

Internal conflicts are anything that tears your character apart from inside. This can be dealing with a phobia, memory, or other psychological barrier. It can be need to be the best, or look the prettiest. It can be the fear of the dark that makes your character abandon others he could easily save. Or the pride that keeps him from admitting he was wrong. The internal conflicts are generally the deeply ingrained problems that the character spends the entire novel attempting to overcome.

External conflicts are everything else that keeps your character on track. The broken home he has to deal with, the abusive parents. They can include the weather, environment, wild animals, or other characters. Anything that goes against what the character would do and forces them to make decisions.

When you create a new character, consider all the conflicts that they have to deal with. Write them down and keep them in your mind as you write them. They’ll keep your character constant and provide motivation to act, even if it’s running away. Once these conflicts are established, your character can show true heroism by not only saving the day, but by having to overcome their natural reaction to do so.

Walking the Tightrope – Making Characters Real Without Making Them Really Boring

Character Leigh Galbreath 1 Comment

We all face that struggle of how to make our characters into people, but if you are one of those writers who have tried to take a real person and plop them onto the page, you might have come to the startling realization that people do not make good characters. Real people are confused, slow to act, distracted by the everyday, often don’t know what they want or what their purpose is, thus making them, quite frankly, too boring and unlikable to serve a story.

So, this got me thinking. What is it about a character that makes them seem like people when real people make such bad characters?

I think it comes down to characters being not so much fictional people as distilled people. Characters are us, stripped down to the core.

Emotionally, people are unfathomable. We have so many layers to our psyches even we don’t know it all. Yet, when constructing a character, we writers like to start out with the barest sparks of a person. We trap our characters in roles and archetypes and then fill them out just enough to make them seem realistic without diluting them so much that they become one of us confused, distracted, and oblivious people. The trick, I think isn’t so much the creation. You can make a character as complicated and convoluted as you like. The tick is what you put on the page. As I’m sure we’ve all heard, what’s on the page is barely the tip of the iceberg. While the reader rarely gets to see everything below the waterline, it still has to be there, peaking through even when no one is really paying attention. It’s easy to get carried away, plastering every nook and cranny of the character’s psyche on the page. Where a writer puts the waterline is a personal choice, but real people have unknowable depths that even they aren’t aware of. It’s important that the character (and therefore the reader) be forced to figure things out without it being blatant.

But also, the moments that we choose to show the reader are also stripped down. I mean really, how many stories are about a person who has to deal with everything that a real person has to deal with. Most of use have multiple conflicts. Mortgages, injuries, family disfunction, bad coworkers, and what have you, all at once, all the time. Characters don’t. These issues are only important as long as they impact the story, and usually one or two at a time as the story dictates. As soon as one stops being relevant, it miraculously gets rectified one way or another, and we move on to the next. Thus a breakup or moral dilemma becomes all-encompassing – as if nothing else is happening in that character’s life, or the lives of the characters they interact with. Characters skip over the boring parts with such regular alacrity that those issues don’t exist for all intents and purposes.

And, yes, that scene where the character wakes up in the morning an goes about his normal day might indeed show how lonely yet witty and intelligent he is, but how does that serve the story, and therefore the character? Stories are, for the most part, about people doing something important. Maybe it’s a small thing, that only really impacts the character, or something big that saves the world, but in the end, the character and the story have to go hand in hand. What the reader is shown is hugely important as it both drives the story forward, but also deepens our relationship with the character.

Maybe part of the reason we like characters to be stripped down people is that we like having something knowable and explainable when real life isn’t. It’s nice to visit a world were things make sense. Maybe we human beings are just not capable of understanding ourselves well enough to make reality more appealing in the written form. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just overthinking things.

As a writer, I know that creating a believable character is very much like walking a tightrope. A little too much leaning either way, and you fall into confusion or boredom or, if you’re really unlucky, both. Yet, if you can find the right balance, it feels like the characters are real. Those are the ones that stay with you.

Good Gone Bad and Bad Gone Good

The Writing Life No Comments

goatee[For the sake of thoroughness, I’ll go ahead and put up a spoiler warning for Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in front of this post, though I think the statute of limitations on those series has long since expired.]

Everyone loves a good redemption story. No wait, scratch that. Everyone loves a good fall from grace. Or maybe it’s both?

We’ve already heard Jace talk a bit about why to avoid all good or all bad characters. Giving your heroes flaws and your villains virtues makes them feel both relatable and real. But keep in mind that it’s not enough just to have characters with a little gray in them. Your character has to change with the story. If they end the story in the same mental and emotion place as they started, you aren’t writing a real story, you’re writing a sitcom. An 80’s sitcom.

So static characters are boring, check. Change is good, check. Well-written characters change some by the end of their stories. A protagonist will walk into the fires of conflict and emerge reforged, or some such blacksmithing metaphor. But sometimes readers get bored with a little change. Sometimes you have to go all the way. Think your Jaime Lannisters and your Walter Whites. But how do you do it well?

The rules are surprisingly similar regardless of direction. In fact, they are the same rules as those for any decision a character makes. In order to make a character’s actions believable, you have to plant the seeds at the very beginning of your story. You establish a character by getting the reader inside their head or viewing them from the head of another character. You get across a personality and at least a sketch of a backstory. For every action the character takes, some aspect of their personality and/or backstory combines with an element of the plot and drives them to make a decision that rings true for this fake person you’ve created.

In order to redeem a character or make them fall, you simply turn the stakes up to 11 in such a way that either amplifies their strength of or pries into their flaw. Saruman the White was leader of the White Council until the temptation of the One Ring proved too much for him. The pride that went along with his leadership position convinced him that he could master the ring’s power. Severus Snape, from the viewpoint of the reader at least, went from “he’s definitely bad news” to “he’s a big jerk, but he’s on the right side” gradually over the course of seven books. His redeeming quality, his unrequited love for Lily, burns through all his nastiness and his sympathy with Voldemort’s views and steers him on a path toward redemption.

Other choices can help lend credibility to your character’s journey into extremity. For a character to fall, it helps if they are stubborn and unbending to a fault. They can’t take all moral compromise they see around them, and eventually it becomes too much to bear. They snap, like the tree that doesn’t bend with the wind. In contrast, for a character to be redeemed, the opposite is helpful. If there is a part of them that is uncomfortable with their evil status quo, it provides a seed that can grow into a desire to repent for their crimes.

Handled deftly, this technique can open a reader’s mind in ways that lesser character growth can’t. A villain readers once despised can transform into someone they root for. Or a hero they loved can fall gradually into darkness, bringing readers along in complicity until they realize, with perfectly elicited horror, just how far the character has fallen. If you pull it off, it packs a very special kind of punch.

One last bit of advice. If you turn your main hero bad or your main villain good, make sure you have an understudy character you’ve developed over the course of the story available to fill the now-vacant spot. It helps if they wind up being an even better hero or villain than the character they are replacing. As a bonus, the fresh conflict introduced as former allies turn on one another can add a kick to your story’s climax.