Category Archives: Character

With this title in mind, I began researching the topic looking for trends as well as doing a little soul-searching since I am a romantic at heart and write romance. I freely admit I am in love with love. In book, movie, poem or song, old or new, happy or tragic, requited or not. I love love. And this topic could not have been more timely on a personal level.

Over the weekend I had a discussion with my sweetheart about the word “love’ and while I don’t want to bore you with my life, I do want to explain the filter through which I am currently perceiving this word. We love our pets, our cars, our friends, and the steak we had for lunch. How can one word cover so many things and hold its meaning? And how does that impact Great Love? The higher love of John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning? The enduring love of Shakespeare’s Sonnets? Great Love covers more than common feelings and an over-used word.

When I am told that what someone feels for me is so much more meaningful than what the common word “love’ can possibly convey, I feel Greatly Loved in the capital G, capital L, Great Love kind of way. That one incredible human being refuses to tell me he loves me because it does disservice to the depth of his emotions regarding me, well… I can tell you I have never been told anything so romantic or heartfelt no matter how contradictory it may sound.

Yet with all the grand ideas of love and the ideal of Great Love, there is a trend I’m seeing in some of the great legends that bothers me. I am practical, intelligent and have a firm belief that stupidity is its own reward. So, as I looked at lists of the “great’ romances (a couple sites I perused – Best, 10 Greatest, Top 20, Top 100) I became a little frustrated with how much rampant stupidity was involved. Perhaps a harsh term, but we’re going to run with it for now. Before you get your big girl or boy panties in a twist, let me say I love most of these stories – rampantly stupid or not. It was just a trend I saw. I will explain. Stay with me.

First, why do these stories endure? I think it’s because they lead us to a belief in something greater than ourselves. Something selfless and more meaningful than our happiness, than physically being together, than even life itself occasionally. Something transcendental and eternal. So, while I love (there’s that word again) these stories, I would like to add a counter-balance thought to some of them.

We’ll alternate between the happy endings and the not-so-happy endings.

â™¥ Odysseus and Penelope – Time and patience pay off. Yay. Great Love has no limits. Storms and travels and suitors abound, but Great Love stays the course.

Romeo and Juliet – Happy for the willingness to overcome all obstacles including family and friends’ disapproval to be together. Sad about poor communication. Warning: Lots of bad communicating ahead and usually in the ones ending tragically. Maybe a lesson to be learned? Communication = Good.

â™¥ Jane Eyre and Rochester – Disparities in social standing, marital status, money and family situations cannot conquer Great Love. Neither can physical impediments. With time and clarity on what’s important, Great Love will triumph and our lovers will live happily ever after. I love that.

Antony and Cleopatra – Stormy relations involving love, power and politics. Something’s got to give and can you really separate them? I don’t know.

â™¥ Marie and Pierre Curie – Smarts and dedication combined with Great Love can lead to scientific break-throughs and a life well-lived in honor of the Great Love you shared. Death of one does not have to mean an end to that Great Love.

Lancelot and Guinevere – Again, we have power and politics involved (always messy), and although they didn’t live together at the end, they both lived. As romantic as death seems in the abstract, in reality, I don’t think it’s much of a solution. And really, relationships founded on cheating on current spouses rarely end well. There’s a lot of this too.

â™¥ Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – Another Great Love that brought forth greatness in both people when together and the survivor when one died. Sure, Victoria grieved all the rest of her very long life for Albert, but she was a great monarch and paid tribute to her Great Love by continuing on in his memory.

Tristan and Isolde – Kings of any type get the short end of the Great Love stick as their wives keep falling for other guys. I’m gonna say that the risk of jeopardizing a solid relationship as Queen is a pretty big sacrifice to make in the name of love, not to mention it usually also runs the chance of being killed or stuck in a nunnery, you know… for cheating on the king. For the guys too – you risk your life when you fall for the King’s woman. Sacrifice + Risk = Great Love. I guess.

â™¥ The Dashwood Sisters – Sense and Sensability… Let’s start with Marianne and Willoughby – stupid. They may have been in love, but it was a wimpy love with no backbone. All surface and no substance. Col. Brandon on the other hand, his love is substantial. It waits and is understanding of youth and immaturity. Once Marianne pulls her head out of her ***, this is a Great Love. Elinor and Edward’s relationship certainly tests friendship and honor and generosity in the face of utter heartache. These two have a Great Love and a happy ending they’ve earned the hard way.

Scarlett and Rhett – They were a hot mess. But they kept trying and maybe that’s the enduring quality here. Or maybe it’s that despite being a calculating, manipulative, shallow, difficult person, there is someone still willing to love you. No matter what. And if he leaves… well, he’s come back before and tomorrow is always another day. I’m not going to go into the whole Ashley/Melanie aspects. Triangles and trapezoids and daisy-chains of unreciprocated non-sense are not Great Love. I do think Ashley and Melanie had a Great Love that is more honest and worth noting than Scarlett and Rhett’s, but conflict is at the heart of story-telling, so…

â™¥ Rick and Ilsa – Casablanca. No, they didn’t end up together, but their sacrifice of Great Love was for the greater good and I can respect that. Their acts of selflessness mean they can sleep at night knowing they did what was right and not convenient. Rarely is Great Love easy.

Pyramus and Thisbe – Wow for misperception and jumping to wrong conclusions a smidge too soon. This is one of those “stupidity is its own reward’ stories for me. I don’t see the romance in this one unless you want to say that life is meaningless without your Great Love. Whatever.

â™¥ Nickie and Terry – An Affair to Remember. When all hope is gone, you discover you were wrong and love may not be waiting for you atop a building, but it is pretending nothing is wrong when it wants to run to you and can’t. If you don’t get it… watch the movie. I cry every time.

Cathy and Heathcliff – So, Scarlett and Rhett had nothing on Cathy and Heathcliff as hot messes went. They are both completely flawed and selfish. Neither gives two hoots about anyone but themselves and their Great Love. That could be the enduring trait – Great Love at all costs. Including other partners, siblings, parents, children and let’s throw in some animals and servants for good measure. Why not? They completely destroyed themselves and everyone around them. And not that the other people are blameless, they didn’t have to stick around for it. Everybody involved seemed to think love was a weapon of mass destruction. For the record, I still love this one… just pointing out some alternate thoughts.

â™¥ Charlie and Rose – The African Queen. Great Love is not always handsome or beautiful. It is not always romantic in the traditional sense. Sometimes, it’s a lonely alcoholic running a crappy boat up and down a river building something with a high-handed sanctimonious spinster. Building something out of strength and respect and courage. Hell yeah, sometimes Great Love endures because it fought to survive.

There are many reasons these stories endure, many reasons we want to cling to the idea of Great Love. Maybe I touched on some, maybe not. I’m open to discussion. Anyone got some other Great Love couples they want to mention and why? I’d love to hear about them.

Shapeshifting: Mythical and Modern

June 14, 2013

fictorians

Character Craft & Skills Guest Posts 3 Comments

Guest Post by Tristan Brand

As someone who spent seven years studying math, I’m interested in patterns. My favorite type of patterns are the unexpected ones. Seeing similarities emerge when previously you saw only differences is really neat.

Now, as much as I know you’re all hoping I’m going to spend the next thousand words discussing some very exciting developments in algebraic number theory, I’m going to apply this concept instead to myths.

One of the cool things about mythologies is how diverse they are, culture to culture. Though the Greeks, Norse, Egyptians, and Celtics all had their own pantheons of gods, each were different in their personalities, powers, and how they interacted with mortals.

From this diverse set of myths, we see patterns, similarities. Cultures whom never interacted with one another – who never even knew of the other’s existence! – came up with some of the exact same ideas. There’s a term for this; cultural universal. An idea that occurs in essentially every known human culture.

One of those cultural universals is shapeshifting.

Now, if I were to guess where these cultural universals come from, I’d conjecture they emerge from common human experiences. We’re all bipedal, two-armed, two-eyed omnivores. Surely that would have to lead to some similar developments. We all talk; we all walk; we all eat. What we don’t do is turn into wolves and run around in the night making trouble.

Yet, apparently, we all tell stories about exactly that.

Maybe this is less surprising than it seems. Humans’ connection with animals in the real world is as ancient as our myth. We’ve depended on animals to survive; dogs protected our homes, horses carried us through terrain we’d never survive on our own while oxen hauled our belongings; cows gave us milk and chickens gave us eggs. Even when animals aren’t doing our work for us, we’ve always kept them around for companionship. They had pet cats in ancient Egypt, who no doubt knocked over their fair share of cups of water and urns containing your ancestors organs.

This connection to animals seems to lead to a couple things. First, we begin to anthropomorphize the animals close to us. The trusty oxen you’ve used to haul your equipment for the past two years suddenly becomes Eddie. You start to ascribe moods to him as you would a human – happiness, sadness, boredom, anger. Maybe you even start talking to him, something I may or may not do with my own pets.

Second, we look at the traits animals have and wonder: what would it be like to run like a wolf? Smell the scent of your prey in the night? To swim like a fish. People have looked up at birds and wondered what it was like to fly for centuries before we ever developed the technology to do so.

But as the universe did not grant us such traits, so we did the next best thing: we imagined. We thought of men and woman transformed to these animal shapes. What would they experience? What would they see? What would they do?

We imagined, and we told stories. The Greeks told of Circe turning Odysseus’s men into pigs. The Celtics told of Llwyd ap Cil Coed, who transformed his wife and attendants to mice to eat the crops of rival Dyfed. The Norse told of the god Loki, who took the form of a mare to sabotage a man building a wall.

Shapeshifting is still prevalent in modern stories. Though shapeshifting itself is a shared idea among every culture, the way each individual storyteller handles it is different. It can impact a story in a thousand different ways.

One common approach is when then main character is unwillingly transformed into an animal. A classic example is in Roald Dahl’s novel The Witches, where the main character, a young boy, is turned into a mouse early on. Another, perhaps less known example, is The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson, where a man is transported to a fantasy world and transplanted into the body of a dragon.

Often in these stories, the main plot question becomes “How do they become human again?’ Additionally, we get to see the characters struggle with their new forms, learning new senses, new body parts. Other conflicts appear that would never matter to a human – like a mouse having to evade mouse traps, or a dragon having to deal with a new propensity toward freshly killed meat.

In other stories, the character controls when, and sometimes even what, they can change into. The wargs in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series can project their mind into that of animals at will. The were-wolves in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series control when and how they turn into wolves.

Usually when shapeshifting is a choice, it becomes less of a plot question and more of a tool that the characters use in chase of the rest of the plot.

Another way shapeshifting changes in a story is how other characters within the story view shapeshifting. Is it considered a gift or a curse? Is it something that can be done openly or must it be hidden? The answers to these questions will help shape the world around your story, and make shapeshifting a natural part of that world. A great example of this is in Robin Hobb’s Tawny Man trilogy, where people with a power called the Wit can bond with animals – and even inhabit their bodies. The disgust others in story-world have toward this practice motivates a number of important plot points.

These examples only shallowly explore how shapeshifting affects stories. Every author has a different take on it. Some of them will resonate more than others, and will be read by our children and our children’s children and so on. Today’s stories slowly become tomorrow’s myths. I bet a thousand years from now, when humanity has travelled to the stars, they’ll still be telling stories about shapeshifting.

Maybe by then we’ll have even figured out how to shapeshift for real.

***

Tristan Brand is an aspiring fantasy author and technical writer. When he’s not obsessively checking the mail for his long-overdue invitation to wizarding school, he can be found playing StarCraft II, practicing classical piano, or reading a good book. He keeps a blog at www.TristanDBrand.com, does a web-show with his friend called Why We Like It (http://day9.tv/d/b/why-we-like-it/), and can be found on twitter as @TristanDBrand.

The Outsider’s Perspective

June 12, 2013

mary

Character Mary Pletsch World-building 2 Comments

When I’m waiting at the bus stop, I see all kinds of people. People with skin colours from cocoa to olive, from toffee to porcelain. People in turbans, in hijabs, in saffron robes. People wearing crosses, pentacles, Stars of David. People of all ages, of all income levels, speaking a variety of languages.

When I’m writing, I want to reflect that kind of diversity in my stories. Unless there’s a specific story-based reason for everyone to look the same, believe the same, and exhibit the same behaviours, I like my fiction to encompass the wide variety of human experience.

Growing up, I read a lot of stories based on Greek and Roman myth, Biblical personages, fairy tales, Norse legends, King Arthur. The prevalence of these tales made sense in a historical context; these mythologies form the bedrock of modern Western culture. I also found a few precious collections of different mythologies, containing very different personages: Nanebozho, the Ojibwe trickster. Rama, the hero from India. Fox spirits from China. I loved these stories. I’d memorized Cinderella and Snow White. These anthologies provided me with something new, something different. As I grew older, I found that readers, and publishers, are increasingly open to stories featuring a wider diversity of characters, based on legends and mythologies from all over the globe.

Full disclosure time. I’m white, female, of predominantly German ancestry, in a relationship with a man. But I write about all kinds of people. People whose life experiences I cannot base on my own; people whose cultures I was not raised in.

I have to be very careful when I write about these people.

Cultural appropriation is the act of taking something from another culture and using it to suit your needs. To an extent, all cultures in contact mix and borrow from each other. Suburban youth listen to rap songs about life in the hood; Canadian teenagers read Japanese manga; people all over the world go to movies based on American comic book characters. There is, however, a tension in these relationships, particularly when a group with power plunders groups with less power, taking their symbols and distorting them, commodifying them, stripping them of their cultural context and selling them. There is also a tension when people “try to be something they’re not,” particularly when this means they act out of fantasy and idealization rather than a true understanding, or forget their own heritage in the attempt to ape someone else’s. Appropriation can perpetuate stereotypes (think of how Vodun, aka “voodoo,” struggles to be recognized as a religion), water down symbols (it’s hard to take a powerful symbol seriously when you can buy it as a T-shirt or fridge magnet), and confuse with partial understandings and half-truths. Borrowing mythology from cultures not my own is tricky.

And yet, to write only about white, heterosexual people of European ancestry is both dishonest (in that it doesn’t reflect the totality of human experience) and dangerous (in that it insinuates these are the only people worth writing about).

The beauty of fiction is that it demands that I, as a writer, develop the ability to see through my characters’ eyes. I need to know what motivates them, what their dreams are, what their fears are, what their goals are. Their point of view makes sense to them and I need to understand it in order to figure out what they will do next. I need to see them both in the context of their cultures, and as individuals, whose behaviours and beliefs may vary a little-or a lot-from their cultures’ norms.

And so I imagine what it would be like to be a man. Or a lesbian. Or a Hindu. Or an Asian woman. Or someone who lives in the 18th century. I learn about issues these groups face that I do not, in the hopes that my portrayals are based on reality and not on stereotypes. I do my best to portray the myths of other cultures with respect for the context in which those myths were created, and with the reverence I would give to the figures of my own childhood. And I aim to honour, rather than use; to share in, rather than take.

It’s a balancing act, and I can’t please everyone, but when the alternative is to write about a world where everyone is White and European and middle-class and straight, I’ll take some risks, and do some research, to build a world that’s an honest portrayal of the human experience.

A Secret History: The Real Stories Behind Literature’s Most Legendary Figures

June 11, 2013

Kristin Luna

Character Kristin Luna The Writing Life No Comments

As you are well aware, excellent reader that you are, every story starts from an idea. Every legend is inspired by something real. Think about some of your own stories and the crazy places from which they originated: a phenomenal supernatural event in space, a news report, or a picture you stumbled upon on the internet when you were [suppose to be] writing. Most of my best story ideas come straight from my dreams.

Let’s take a look at the seeds that eventually grew to be literature’s most legendary heroes and villains.

Protagonists

These popular protagonists underwent a few author-induced identity crises to become some of the most iconic characters in literature.

Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fashioned his character Sherlock Holmes after an infirmary clerk, Dr. Joseph Bell. Doyle also had other sources including Sir Henry Littlejohn, a lecturer on Forensic Medicine and a Medical Officer, but Bell provided the main trait of figuring out the mystery from small, seemingly innocuous clues. After Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were published, Dr. Joseph Bell wrote to Doyle claiming, “You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it.” Perhaps we are reading a bit of Doyle himself in the pages of every Sherlock Holmes story.

Captain Nemo

Captain Nemo (aka Prince Dakkar) was not always of Indian heritage. Jules Verne originally wrote him as a Polish aristocrat whose family was murdered during the January Uprising, in which Poles protested against enlistment in the Imperial Russian Army. Verne’s editor feared that Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea would be banned in Russia – a French ally at the time. Verne kept Nemo’s origins relatively vague for the time period (nemo in Latin means “no one”), although he is now clearly identified as Indian.

Hobbits

Before I jump in here, did you know the decision to publish The Hobbit came down to a 10-year-old boy? Unsure if she should publish the story, Susan Dagnall of George Allen & Unwin Ltd. gave the story to her son to read, and because he enjoyed it, Dagnall decided to move forward with its publication.

Although he had been writing about goblins and developing languages for years before he began writing about Hobbits, Tolkien suspected his idea for hobbits came from The Marvelous Land of Snergs by Edward Wyke Smith. Tolkien wrote that the Snergs were “a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and have the strength of ten men.” He also noted that Sinclair Lewis’ character Babbitt had a homebody-like nature, which was also an influence.

Tolkien originally wrote Aragorn, or Strider, as a hobbit. Imagine Frodo’s first encounter with the mysterious hobbit Strider in the Prancing Pony! Doesn’t quite have the same effect, does it?

Antagonists

Some of literature’s more legendary antagonists were created from the most obvious and peculiar places.

Dracula

The name alone triggers shivers down the spine. It may be no surprise to you that Dracula originated from the Romanian word dracul, which means “the dragon’ or “the devil’.

As Bram Stoker dug into Wallachian history, he happened across Prince Vlad III, or Vlad the Impaler. Known for his brutality by impaling his enemies, it’s estimated that Vlad killed nearly 10,000 people.

Vlad’s patronymic name was Dracula, passed down from his father Vlad II Dracul, a member of The Order of the Dragon. These knights were tasked with protecting Christianity in Eastern Europe.

Grendel

In the Scandinavian epic Beowulf, the monster Grendel terrorizes a mead hall and slaughters those poor souls who happened to be drinking inside of it. The author describes Grendel as a grotesque creature descended from the race of Cain (who was the first murderer according to the Bible). Scholars debate the nature of Grendel – was he monster or humanoid? Some scholars even propose that Grendel represented enemies of the Geats, or even more simply, an outcast.

Moby-Dick

An enormous, albino sperm whale covered in barnacles that attacked whaling ships in the early 1800’s served as the inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Jeremiah Reynolds, an explorer in that time and who was thought to have inspired the character Captain Ahab, wrote of the whale Mocha Dick, describing how its attacks on ships appeared premeditated. It was rumored that Mocha Dick had around 20 harpoons in his back from the 100 or more encounters it had with whaling ships that sailed near the Chilean island Mocha.

The saying goes that legends are born, not made. But, as evidenced above, they certainly can be made – created from an idea half the size of a man, or as terrifying as a bloodthirsty albino whale.