WHAT THEY ADD
What do supporting characters do that’s so important?
Comic Relief
A novel that is earnest and dark in every word of every sentence of every paragraph can be as hard to read as it is to write. In even the most grim fantasy there are moments of humor. Still, you should avoid having your hero or villain slip on a banana peel, drop his pants, or get hit in the face with a pie. Instead, create the court jester, the surly dwarf, or the pun-slinging starship engineer to do all of those things and more, providing a breather between life and death struggles of good versus evil.
A few words of caution: Avoid characters who serve no function other than to clown around. Just as the villain’s plan requires solid motivation, the comic relief character’s jokes have to come from the setting and serve the story. Too many random gags could be construed as you not taking your own story very seriously. We’ll talk more about humor later, but for all characters, whatever their reason for existence, the three most important elements remain: motivation, motivation, and motivation.
Offer Sage Advice and Vital Information
Supporting characters can tell you all about the world.
“The emperor’s son once killed a man in the streets of Giro City,” the wizard recalled, “because the man sneezed as the prince’s carriage passed.”
Galen crumpled the sheet of parchment, breaking the prince’s wax seal, and replied, “That man was my father.”
This is better than:
Galen’s father was killed by the impetuous prince, whose wax seal adorned the parchment he crumpled and tossed across the empty room.
Why? Because people talk to each other. It’s easier and more compelling to read than paragraph after paragraph of exposition. Dialog is one of the things that makes a novel; the absence of dialog makes a textbook. Characters can tell each other an awful lot about the world in which they live, but again, motivation is the key.
If you’re using dialog to cover setting details and/or move the story forward (and you should always be doing that), keep a sharp eye on the motivations of the characters in the scene. Why would the wizard tell Galen that story about the prince and the man who sneezed? Did he know all along he was talking about Galen’s father? Was he trying to egg Galen on, hoping Galen will attack the prince, whom the wizard hates, to avenge his father’s death? Is the wizard shocked to hear that Galen’s father was a victim of the prince’s ill temper? Does the wizard intend to warn the prince that Galen is coming after him?
What people say is secondary to why they say it.
Show How Monsters, Traps, and Magic Kill People
On the TV series Star Trek (the original one, with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock), almost every week one or more crewmen wearing red shirts were horribly killed.
Why did Star Trek work its way through so many guys in red shirts? Because someone had to beam down with Captain Kirk and have all the salt sucked out of his body so that Captain Kirk (and we, the viewers) would have some idea what the crew was up against. Supporting characters are ready-made victims, but that doesn’t mean you should spend their imaginary lives too cheaply. Even the guy who gets salt-sucked should be on the planet with the captain for a logical reason, have a name, and begin with some kind of connection to the hero, the villain, or both. The more we care about that guy in the red shirt, the worse we’ll feel about his untimely demise, and the more worried we’ll be when Captain Kirk is in danger of meeting the same fate.
KEEP THE COMPANY A REASONABLE SIZE
Supporting characters can bring more to a story than adding a little humor, providing some explanation of the world, and serving as convenient victims, of course, but keep an eye on the size of your cast. I’ve said before that if you’re writing a novel, you don’t have to worry about budgets for special effects, costumes, makeup, and set designs, so you can make the world as big as you like. Similarly, you have no budget for actors, so you could have a million extras in your giant throne room, and any number of characters with names and lines, oblivious to Screen Actors Guild contract stipulations. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should have a million named characters. Include more than a dozen and most of the time you’re stretching readers’ ability to keep track of who’s who. Piling on the characters doesn’t prove you’re smarter. It’s more likely to give readers the feeling that you’re disorganized.
Do you need more than one comic relief character, or even one at all? Think carefully. If you have a wizened old Merlin/Gandalf-style wizard to dispense advice and information, do you need an alchemist, an innkeeper, and a beggar to do the same? Maybe. Perhaps Merlin knows all about magic, the alchemist can tell the hero what herbs to look for to cure the scalp-pox, the innkeeper knows who stole the Hammer of Kallian from the temple, and the beggar saw the princess sneaking out the back door of the brothel at dawn yesterday morning. But then again, maybe Merlin knows the right herbs, too, so no need for the alchemist. Keep asking those important questions: What does he know? How does he know it? Who else knows? Why would he—or why wouldn’t he—tell the hero who stole the Hammer of Kallian? And so on.
CHAPTER 13
GIVE THEM VOICE
Though the way a character talks will be informed by your own authorial voice, you need to do some serious thinking about what each character sounds like. But don’t be overzealous in creating colloquialisms and idioms for each character who expresses himself in dialog. The commonalities of expression can do more to make your setting come to life than anything else. It isn’t always about how different they sound from each other, but how similar.
According to R. A. Salvatore, a character “might have a favorite saying or a few tell-tale quirks, but those things should be a logical outgrowth of who he is and how he thinks.”
A character’s identity—his place in the world, where he comes from, and his educational, racial, and religious background—all inform the way he speaks. But still not every white American who went to college sounds like every other white American who went to college. For instance, some people like to talk, and they will spend a hundred words where a more laconic character might answer with a shrug.
Legendary fantasy author Terry Brooks cautions, “Don’t work too hard at trying to be different. Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Make the characters speak in voices that seem natural to you. Remember that much of what connects a reader to a character has nothing to do with voice. Much of it has to do with things like facial expressions and movement and character traits.”
You’ve probably already had someone advise you to read your writing aloud, and this advice is particularly valuable when it comes to dialog. Does it roll off the tongue? Does it sound too formal or not formal enough? If it’s funny, is this a character who wants to be funny, or are we laughing at his expense? If he’s intentionally funny, he should be consistent. Remember, if he’s a goofy dork now, he can’t be scary later.
Speech patterns should also flow from the nature of the world. If you haven’t yet determined if the emperor’s court is highly formal, you won’t know if people should speak in thous and thees and shalts. If you haven’t selected the flora and fauna of the world, you won’t know if people call each other jackass. What if there’s no such thing as a jackass, but there is a gundrey, which is kind of like a monkey the size of an ox that people use as a pack animal. Maybe calling someone gundrey is like saying he’s a big, dumb monkey?
This is a good example of skipping back and forth between the six steps, so take this advice to heart and come back to it when you’re ready to bring your characters to life. Don’t saddle yourself with a list of slang words and modify the world to accommodate them. It should happen the other way around.
TO SUM UP
All of this can be best summed up by the words of Paul Park, author of A Princess of Roumania and its sequels: The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, and The Hidden World. I asked Paul, “What is the most important element to a richly realized character (his back-story, goals,
politics/morality/ethics, family/relationships)? Where should an author start?”
Paul replied, “I often start by imagining the character as a physical and psychological object, and then imagining how that object appears to other people in the drama, including me. Then I start adding detail to justify or confound those assumptions. Then I go deeper, to see if I can discover an interior landscape that challenges the exterior one—in other words, how the character appears to him or herself. Then I invent a personal or family or romantic history that explains, or at least resonates with, those differences. Character motivation derives out of that process; it’s not what I start with. But if everyone in the story knows the same things about a character, or imagines him or her in the same way as the author does, and there’s no gap between what the character perceives and what the reader perceives, there’s usually a problem.”
Well said.
* * *
STEP THREE | THE WORLD
“Most fantasy landscapes are nostalgic in nature, dependent on a shared sense of history or myth. The interesting landscapes are familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.”
—PAUL PARK, author of A Princess of Romania
World building is the one aspect of writing science fiction and fantasy that makes them more challenging to write than most other genres of fiction. A richly realized world is not more important than compelling characters, good writing, or creative, well-balanced action, but its creation can be more complex. We’ll fall back on methods we’ve covered earlier, especially the idea of asking yourself an open-ended series of questions, giving yourself permission to work outside of a special effects budget and “think big,” and so on. But we’ll also talk a little bit about restraint, so you don’t end up with an unrecognizable, overly complex setting no one can grasp.
Bestselling author Paul S. Kemp has some good advice on the subject of world building. “Don’t get bogged down in it,” he says. “It’s an endless exercise. At some point, you have to tell a story, not get caught up in an encyclopedic exploration of the setting. Don’t misunderstand, setting is incredibly important, but it’s (with rare exceptions) just where things happen. It’s the things that are happening and the characters caught up in those things that are more likely to enthrall readers.”
CHAPTER 14
DECIDE ON A SETTING
“Characters are the most important piece of the fiction world,” says J. M. McDermott, author of Last Dragon. “The world exists as your characters move through it. Focus on that interaction between the character and the place, and there you will find the sense of place you are desperate to convey.”
Unless you’re writing in someone else’s shared world, the world you create is there to serve your story and characters, not the other way around. Keep in mind, too, that the word world can also mean an entire science fiction universe set in the far-flung future.
Before you start to build a world, decide on a setting. What’s the difference between a setting and a world? Most of the time, those two words are used interchangeably, but it’s fair to say that setting describes your basic approach, and the world you end up with is the result of layers of detail being added, like the layers of an onion, onto that setting.
TYPES OF WORLDS
Here are some varieties of worlds for you to consider.
Created Worlds
These are settings that are, not to put too fine a point on it, entirely created by the author. Robert Silverberg’s Majipoor, for instance, previously existed in no other place and time but in Mr. Silverberg’s imagination. Every city, every mountain range, every island was placed there by him, working, surely, from various sources of inspiration. The result is something that has never existed anywhere else before. Created worlds exist in science fiction as well, in one famous case preceded by these words: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”
Fantasized Worlds
This sort of thing results when an author takes a culture or nation out of the history of the real world and uses it as the sole or primary inspiration for a fantasy world. The Empire of Wa, for instance, in Sean Russell’s The Initiate Brother, is a fantasized version of Imperial China. It isn’t precisely China, but his cultural inspiration is clear in the naming conventions, customs, and so on. Though it may seem a subtle distinction, fantasized worlds are not the same as historical fantasy, though much of the same research will have to be done to create a fantasized China as would be done to set a novel in China itself. But with a fantasized world, the author takes much broader liberties with the source culture and history. Though it may be easy to assume that this is just a lazy version of historical fantasy, if done well, as with The Initiate Brother, it’s no less rewarding a read as either an entirely created world or a richly researched historical world.
Historical Fantasy/Alternate History
These are novels set entirely in a real historical period, but they introduce fantastical or intentionally anachronistic technological elements. Susanna Clarke’s seminal Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is the gold standard by which all historical fantasies will be judged, and Harry Turtledove is the reigning king of serious alternate history. Clarke and Turtledove have set the bar high, so approach historical fantasy with care. Be prepared to spend many months, if not years, meticulously researching, and be prepared for detailed criticism if you get the slightest detail wrong.
Near or Far Future Science Fiction
This is really two categories lumped together. Near future science fiction is the hardest of the two to write because in order to make it plausible you have to be up on the latest trends in science and technology, and you will see your best efforts rendered obsolete in your lifetime. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, made utterly incorrect assumptions on the future of manned spaceflight. Far future science fiction affords the author much wider latitude, with a greater understanding on the part of the majority of readers that the author isn’t actually trying to tell you what the world will be like in, say, the year 2552. The world created for the video game HALO is just fun to play in and read about while it speaks to contemporary issues of security, war, and xenophobia.
Contemporary (Urban) Fantasy and Science Fiction
What makes novels like Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files or Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden series contemporary fantasies rather than thinly disguised horror novels is that the supernatural elements come from a character’s ability to manipulate magic. Harry Dresden is a wizard who lives in today’s Chicago.
The science fiction equivalent of contemporary fantasy assumes it’s the here and now, but some kind of imaginary technology intrudes. Superheroes, UFO stories, and many mad scientist tales fall into this category. Michael Crichton was contemporary SF’s true master, especially with books like Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain.
LET THE WORLD BUILDING BEGIN
Once you’ve chosen a basic approach, your world-building work starts. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these categories, and choosing one or another, or combining them in whatever way your imagination allows, is an entirely personal decision. Historicals are hard, but there are drawbacks to the others as well. Created worlds are great when they work, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Terry Brooks’s Shannara, but the fantasy publishing battlefield is littered with the corpses of equally well realized worlds that failed to resonate with readers. Countless authors have had to come to grips with the fact that they’ve spent in some cases years creating a world they hoped would be the setting for a dozen books or more, only to hear their editors or agents say, “Maybe it’s time for something new.” When this occurs, the editor or agent is probably passing on a message that came from the community of science fiction and fantasy readers, who voted with their wallets.
CHAPTER 15
BUILD THE WORLD
“Know your world before you write,” Terry Brooks cautions. “Have it clear in your mind.”
Okay, then, let’s dig in and really start working. You’ve
settled on a setting—the overall approach. Now it’s time to actually create the world by layering on details. But where to start?
The craft—the hard work—of world building can be boiled down to two elements: research and creativity. Before we get into specific factors like alien religions or how magic works in your world, some advice on research.
Research is a process of figuring out what to read. The Internet has made researching anything a lot easier and faster, but it can also be less authoritative. If you’re creating, say, a fantasized version of pre–Columbian Mexico, you may not need to find the most authoritative sources. After all, you’re creating your own version of that culture, so you’ll want some details to come from your imagination. Still, better information is always better than worse information.
AVOID OVER- OR UNDER-RESEARCHING
Author Paul Park warns that “research can be a trap, a way to delay starting a book. I don’t do a whole lot of general research; it’s mostly on a need-to-know basis. After all, it’s what you invent that will make your book original or derivative, and you can get started on that anytime.”
The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Page 6
