"Roundheads and Ramblings"
Characters
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Posted on Thursday, May 10, 2012 7:16 PM
Here are seven more questions to throw at your characters while you are speed-dating them. Pay close attention to the last three or four, because they will become important as you write. Your reader will forgive you eventually for forgetting that John's eyes are blue, not hazel, but they'll leave you if your character slouches in one scene and struts in another.
I should have taken the Mouse's advice when writing my current WIP. Because I hadn't thought through what her role would be in he story, one of my characters started out as innocuous and bland. Then, 200 pages later, she pulled the rug out from under one of my other characters in a particularly vicious manner, and her actions made no sense at all. I had to go back and re-write some of the beginning in order to make her final behaviors believable.
So ask your characters about these things and then use the mannerisms and verbal tics throughout the story.
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What beliefs do you hold most tightly? Which ones would you be willing
to carve on a rock?
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What is your idea of a perfect day? Where and with whom would you spend
it, and what would you do?
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What are your favorite expressions? Do you use the latest slang, or do
you show off your extensive vocabulary? Do you slip into a more pronounced
accent or dialect when you are excited? Do you have a verbal tic, saying “um”
or “uh” or “like” or ”you know”?
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What does your posture say about you? Do you slouch, or hunch your
shoulders, or keep your arms crossed? Do you keep your eyes on the ground when
you walk? Or are your shoulders thrown back as a sign of confidence?
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What about eye contact? Do you keep looking away, or are you giving me a
belligerent stare? Are you squinting at me or raising a skeptical eyebrow? Are
you avoiding eye contact because you are nervous or because you are bored? Does
your smile reach your eyes?
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Does standing close to someone make you uncomfortable? Or do you
frequently reach out to make physical contact?
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And what do your other gestures say about you? Do you play with your
hair or brush it back impatiently? Do you have a “twitch” or unconscious
mannerism? Do you pick at a hangnail, chew your lip, shuffle your feet, or bite
your fingernails?
We all send out signals with our
body language, and most of us are able to interpret those signals, if only
subconsciously. If your characters behave as real people do, your readers will
judge them accurately.
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Posted on Wednesday, May 09, 2012 7:10 PM
A current commercial features a couple in a speed-dating situation. He pulls out all his favorite pick-up lines and she destroys him by quoting from his own Facebook page. The ad is cute and funny, but it always reminds me of a suggestion I included in "The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese." Before you write your book, get to know the characters in your book by speed dating them. Here are some of the questions I suggest you ask:
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What is your name? Does it have a special significance to your family? Do
you have a nickname?
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How old are you, and where were you born? Have you stayed in one
location or moved around? And if you have moved, at what point in your life?
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What was your family like when you were growing up? Did you have
brothers and sisters, and where do you fall, age-wise, in the list of your
parents’ children? Are you still the responsible one because you were the
oldest? Or are you the forgotten middle child, or the spoiled youngest one?
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Did you have pets as a child? If you could choose just one pet, would
you turn out to be a cat-person (independent) or a dog-person (eager and
friendly)?
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Do you have a large circle of companions, or only a couple of close
friends? Have you moved in the same small circle all your life, or have you
reached out to meet new people? And how do you choose your friends?
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What is your greatest strength? Your greatest weakness?
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What do you dream of doing? If you could be someone else, who would you
choose?
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Posted on Thursday, May 03, 2012 1:50 PM
This week we will celebrate the 187th birthday of Laura Matilda Town, who just happens to be the main character in my next book, The Road to Frogmore. Laura was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on May 3, 1825, the middle child in a large family; she had a brother and two sisters who were older than she was, and a brother and two sisters who were younger. Her mother died when Laura was nine--a tragedy that left its mark on all of her children, and particularly on Laura. As she admits at one point in the book, she always felt responsible for her mother's death. Maybe, if she had just been a better child, she thought, her mother wouldn't have tried to give birth to a new baby.
Laura grew up to be an unconventional woman. She was a Unitarian in an era of evangelical fervor. She studied to be a doctor, when women doctors were still a rarity. She refused to marry, in an age when every woman was expected to become a dutiful wife. Instead, she set up her own household with her lifelong companion, Miss Ellen Murray. But nothing she did was more outrageous than her decision to travel to South Carolina in the middle of the Civil War so that she could bring medical care and education to the slaves who were just learning that they were going to be free.
Her efforts on behalf of the people she came to know on St. Helena Island did not stop when the war was over. She felt responsible for all the evils of slavery, which was not surprising, given her character, and she refused to abandon the people she had come to love. Instead, she and Ellen bought a former plantation right there on the island, and built a school financed entirely from Laura's own inheritance. The two women adopted several black children and raised them as their own. They continued to teach for the rest of their lives. They provided an education that was the equivalent to (or perhaps better than) the state-provided education of white children. Laura died on St. Helena Island in 1901, and Ellen followed her in 1908.
Their school, however, outlived them. Known first as The Penn School, so named in honor of the Freedmen's Aid Society of Pennsylvania, it has evolved today into The Penn Center, whose purpose is the preservation of the Gullah language and heritage of the people of St. Helena Island. This year, you will note, is the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Penn School, and the Penn Center will be honoring Miss Towne and her amazing contributions to the welfare of the people she helped to transform from slaves into citizens. So happy birthday, Laura. We're still trying to live up to your ideals.
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Posted on Monday, March 19, 2012 9:23 AM
“Writers of historical fiction must be careful to keep their
characters authentic.” What does that mean? Well, one method is to make sure
your characters talk as they would have in their own time, not yours. The
surest way to destroy a reader’s faith in your knowledge and writing ability is
to have your Roman emperor say, “Cool, man!”
I recognize that I’m pretty old-fashioned about names, even
in today’s first-name society. While I was teaching, I expected my students to
call me Dr. Schriber or Professor Schriber. Even the personable young man who
made a habit of popping into my office to say, “Hey, Doc!” made me cringe a
bit. No one ever addressed me as Carolyn, at least not more than once.
Several years ago, an amateur reviewer commented that my
first novel used stilted language; he pointed to the prevalent use of last
names among people who knew each other moderately well. My response was that in
the 19th century, people were much more conscious of social and
age-related conventions than we are today. The use of proper names was a matter of respect. Think
about what your French teacher tried to tell you about personal pronouns—vous for proper society; tu only in intimate relationships. The same
principle applies to names.
Here are some of the conventions I try to follow when
writing historical fiction set in the time of the Civil War.
In most English-speaking 19-century families,
first names were used only among those who had grown up together—classmates or
siblings. The requirement for first name
usage had two parts—similarity of age and closeness of relationship.
Children, of course, called their parents and grandparents
by their titles only: Mother, Father,
Grandmother, Grandfather. Parents and grandparents could use a child’s
first name. Other adults might refer to a child as Miss Betsy or Miss Ross,
depending upon how well they knew her.
For lateral relationships—i.e, family relationships outside
the immediate household—everyone used a title plus a first name: Cousin Betsy, Uncle Charles.
More importantly, first names carried such a suggestion of
intimacy that they were never used in mixed company or in front of strangers. A
husband might call his wife Nelly in
the bedroom, but outside of it, he would address her or refer to her as Mrs. Fairfield.
Similarly, women friends in a private visit might use Laura and Ellen but would revert to Miss
Towne and Miss Murray in front of
their colleagues or visitors. Male friends reacted the same way, but sometimes
addressed each other by last names only: Pierce,
Saxton. And certainly, a man would always address a woman as Miss Ware until they were actually engaged
or married.
In the Civil War South, conversations between whites and
blacks had their own conventions. House slaves used white first names but
always with the honorific Massa, or Missus, while whites addressed slaves by their
first names only: “Is dinner ready,
Rina?” “Yes’m, Missus Laura.”
Field slaves used their owner’s last name, as in Massa Pope.
Slaves did not have their own last names until the Civil
War, when they started adopting last names of their former owners or people
they admired. There were lots of
Lincolns right after the war. But when
they took a surname, they followed the same speech patterns as the whites used.
One of my favorite stories concerns the butler who, after emancipation was
announced, told one of the housemaids, “I
isn’t Joe no more. My name be Mister Johnson.”
Keep your characters' names straight, and your book will have authenticity.
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Posted on Monday, August 29, 2011 9:38 AM
Several blog posts from teachers and professors about starting a new school year reminded me of my own classroom days. Several years ago, I would have been starting a new class with Western Civ. students, hoping desperately that I could manage to cover 4000 years of history in 14 weeks. That amounts, approximately, to the period from Noah's flood to 1750. I wasn't kidding when I told them that if they missed a day of class they might miss the Roman Empire.
One way I found to make sense of that vast spread of years was to offer the students some general theories of why people act the way they do. Were the theories too broad, too simplistic? Of course. Students used to joke that the answer to any of my test questions was "The climate did it." Still, students learned to ask the right sorts of questions when approaching a new culture or civilization.
Interestingly, I find that I am applying the same sort of approach to the characters in my books. Authors, particularly those writing historical fiction, struggle with making their characters act authentically for their own time period. In Beyond all Price, I had to imagine the lives of many different characters -- a battered wife in the 19th century; a five-year-old slave child, whose family could no remember any other way of life; an alcoholic Union army general; a nun in a teaching order; a homesick soldier. I managed to capture their differences by applying the same historical theories I used in class. So for the next week or so, I thought I'd pass along some of these ideas to you. They may not all apply to your work, but perhaps one or two will click.
Let's start with the difference between a civilization and a culture. Today, I suspect we are all too inclined to equate "civilized" with people like ourselves and "uncivilized" with those we don't understand. Not so at all. The word civilization comes from a Latin word for city, and to a historian, a civilization applies only to a people whose lives center on a city, to those who live in an urban environment, to those who have managed to sit still and make the world come to them. (So New Yorkers are civilized, even though some of them may behave in disturbingly "uncivilized" ways).
If you examine the earliest historical examples of civilizations, you'll find that they all develop in the same general location -- between the 30th and 40th degrees of latitude and on a major navigable river or other body of water. (For a western civ class, think Egyptions, Romans, Greeks, Mesopotamians.) Because they have moderate temperatures, adequate water supplies, and means of transportation, they are able to remain in one location, while importing the things they need to sustain a large population.
People who live in other regions of the earth, whether north or south of that temperate belt, or those who must keep moving to find water or grazing lands will remain uncivilized -- that is, not tied to any one location but migrating to whatever region will allow them to sustain life.
Does that mean that migratory people are barbarians, uncivilized, uneducated, uncultured, unsophisticated? Not at all. Culture is something quite different. It takes in all the other characteristics that make people human -- an appreciation of beauty, artistic talent, music, dance, manners, cuisine, clothing styles, religious beliefs, social skills, ethical standards, family ties. In other words, a culture embodies values. A civilization is no more than a socio-political organization located in a particular spot at a particular time. Thus civilizations can rise and fall; cultures endure because they are transportable.
Failure to understand how that difference affects our perceptions lies behind many of the problems faced by the characters in Beyond All Price. Military officers, charged with capturing and "civilizing" the coast of South Carolina in 1861, see the abandoned slaves on the sea islands as "uncivilized," dirty, dangerous, stupid, undesirables. Nellie Chase sees them in an entirely different light because she looks at their enduring culture. She listens to their folktales, eats their foods, enjoys their music, and appreciates their family lives and their ties to the only home they have ever known.
Concentrating on cultures increases our understanding of people unlike ourselves; looking for civilization can blind us to the values to be found in our differences.
Tomorrow's question: Can the type of grain one grows alter the whole wold view of the grower?
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