Creating Characters Part 2: Stereotypes

Standard thinking is that good characters avoid being stereotypes. I think that’s a bit oversimplified. Consider a character named “Joe.” We first meet Joe at a gun show in Alabama. He’s around fifty, long hair, beard, wearing blue jeans, motorcycle boots, and a t-shirt that reads: “Always outnumbered, Never outgunned.” He has a southern accent. We see him talking with one gun dealer about the best weapons for home defense, then see him buying reloaded ammunition for this .357 magnum. He finally buys a machete before leaving.

What kind of vehicle does Joe drive away in?
a. sports car
b. SUV
c. pickup truck
d. a hybrid

What level of education do you think Joe has?
a. high school only
b. college degree
c. advanced degree, (MA, PhD, JD)
d. high school dropout

If you selected “c” for the first question and either “a” or “d” for the second one, then you’re doing what most readers do, you’re buying into stereotypes. Readers will say they don’t like stereotypes but they use them all the time to guide them into a story. And if you suddenly break stereotypes as a writer you run the risk of losing the reader.

Characters should avoid being complete stereotypes, of course, but the writer usually needs to bend stereotypes gradually rather than snapping them all at once. You have to lead the reader into your character, and remember that almost all readers will make certain assumptions about your characters based on stereotypes.

By the way, Joe is essentially me. The gun show mentioned was in Louisiana instead of Alabama, and was a composite of several gun shows I’ve visited. But other than that it’s me. And I don’t drive a pickup.

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Creating Characters: Part 1: Why Women are Weird

A couple weeks back in my critique group we went over a writer’s chapter in which two women have a confrontation and argument revolving around a man they both like. I and the other two men in the group thought the chapter worked well. Information was revealed. The plot got moved along. And, we thought there was even some nice characterization going on.

Three of the women in the group were having none of it. The scene didn’t work for them because they thought one of the women in the scene was too aggressive and blunt. In general, the women in the group thought that character was acting too much like a man, and that there should be more subtlety and undercurrents expressed in the argument scene. One woman even went so far as to say “real women” were more subtly vicious and cruel under these circumstances. Now, here’s the kicker for me. The author of the chapter was a woman.

Several weeks before this event, I was telling another group about a scene in a story I was writing where a mother acts a certain way after her child runs away from home. The three women in the group immediately tore my idea to shreds. “A mother would never act that way,” they said.

Skip forward to another moment in my critique group. I have a scene where two women, one a female warrior and the other an empress, are interacting. There’s distrust and hostility there and I tried to convey it with undercurrents in the dialogue, which wasn’t easy because the warrior prefers to let her actions speak louder than her words. One of the female group members said: “Well, I have to keep in mind that this is a man’s idea of women.”

OK, I’m confused. And it’s not the first time I have been so confounded by the other half of the human race. My confusion runs something like this: 1) Would not the woman author in the first instance have a legitimate feel for how women might act in a given situation? 2) Are all mothers precisely the same in how they’d react to a child gone missing? 3) Are there not variations in how women act, or do all women react exactly the same way to such experiences as an argument with another woman?

In defense of my own scene with the mother, I must say that I ran the same scenario past a female friend of mine who is a mother and she said: “That’s exactly what I’d do.”

I understand that men often put women into fiction simply for sexual reasons or to act as window dressing. Well, women do that to men sometimes, as well. And neither of those tactics leads to good characterization. Good characters definitely have subtleties, and they have varied responses to the world around them. I’ve known women who have been blunt, snide, vicious, understanding, supportive, emotional, unemotional, and just about every other descriptor you can imagine in specific situations. I don’t think women are always one thing.

So why are women so hard to characterize in writing? How easy is it to get a female character wrong? What kind of things should you never do in creating a female character? Male writers, and some female writers, want to know.

Character Identification

My writing group talked about how readers identify with characters last night, and one member commented that people are most likely to identify with characters who are like themselves. They were referring primarily to characteristics like race and gender. Although there is truth in that statement, I don't have trouble myself identifying with characters who are quite different from me in those aspects. In reading SF/fantasy and horror I've identified with plenty of characters who weren't even human. I mentioned a book here a few days ago by David Gemmell called Winter Warriors. The book has an ensemble cast but my favorite character is the lone black swordsman in the tale. I identify strongly with him.

One the other hand, I recently read a book by the African American writer Donald Goines called Inner City Hoodlum, and I couldn't identify with any of the black characters (or white ones, for that matter) in that book. This got me to thinking, why could I identify with a black character in one case and not another? I think there are two reasons.

First, the main black character in "Hoodlum" has ambitions that I don't share. He wants to get rich, wear fancy clothes, drive a fancy car, and have sex with a new woman every night. In other words, he was not like me at all on the inside. Nogusta, on the other hand, the black swordsman from Winter Warriors, wants a quiet place of his own but has duties that keep him from getting it. He cares about other people (perhaps more than I do), and is hard working, loyal to his friends, and misses his family. Boom, identification.

Second, Nogusta's goals in the context of the book are universal ones. He's not in it to help just himself or those who are replicas of himself. He wants to make the world a better place for everyone. He wants to see "all" children happy. He even cares about animals, and rescues a horse from slaughter because--even though it is old--it has a noble and brave past.

Putting aside any discussion of "realism" in characters, Nogusta is the kind of person I'd like to be. Any character, of any race or gender, or species, that shows these kinds of universal goals will be someone I can identify with.

Rants and Reason

Michelle has a "rant" over on her blog about things that bother her, and I responded in a comment about school related peeves that I have. Some of Michelle's peeves seems pretty unusual to me and that got me thinking about personality and character. In my experience, people's likes and dislikes are so idiosyncratic as to defy understanding. For example, I hate the musical group The Police and every song they, or Sting, have ever written. I dislike their music so much that I turn the radio off or switch stations the instant a Police song comes on. There have been several times when others were in the car with me when I punched the channel change button in the first few seconds of a song and only then found out from my passenger that it was a Police song. I didn't even know it was them and I still hated it. Yet, there are strange people out there who actually like the Police.

Maybe the point of all this is that characters, real or fictional, are as defined by what they dislike as by what they like. And I realize I have never given this as much thought in my fiction as I should have. My characters need peeves. They need something to rant about, and--importantly--it is the more unusual peeves that will tell me the most about them as characters.

Now the question becomes, can I give my characters peeves that I don't share? What if my character doesn't like Z. Z. Top, or *gasp* Black Sabbath? Will I lose all respect for them? How will I ever even speak with them again? How will I be able to resist having them slaughtered quickly by some newly introduced serial killer as punishment for their foolishness?

I guess we'll see.

We Always Hurt the Ones We Love

Kate posted about how it can be difficult to put characters that you love through pain and suffering. We all know we have to, but I agree that sometimes it's tough, particularly if the character is based closely on someone we know and love in real life. I'd have a very hard time, for example, putting a character through hell who was based on my son. In fact, though, I find it difficult to describe any significant pain for a child in my fiction. I was once asked at a panel at a writing conference if there was any theme I wouldn't touch in horror fiction, and I said I wouldn't torture a child. Someone popped up with, "what if they offered you a lot of money?" That hasn't happened yet, but I'd probably still say no. And the fact is that I don't need to. There are plenty of themes in horror fiction besides the suffering of children. I could write a lifetime without exhausting those themes, so if I chose not to work with a particular theme then neither I nor my readers are missing much.

But no matter what type of character you choose for your fiction, you still have to love them, and you still have to make them hurt. My usual solution for this is to make the characters who suffer the most in my fiction resemble me in some crucial way. I don't seem to have much trouble making a surrogate for myself suffer. Perhaps it's my Catholic upbringing, or my German ancestry (Gramlich means Grief and Sorrow, btw), but I can put a doppleganger for myself through the ringer without much thought or pity. So:

Writer! Hurt thyself!

Multidimensionality of Character

Sid has pointed out about my "character paradox" post the importance of multidimensionality in a character. Real people have multiple characteristics, whereas characters that are criticised as unrealistic often seem to have only one dimension. Burrough's John Carter of Mars was unfailingly heroic, for example, while the old pulp style villain was unfailingly evil. But "seem to have only one dimension" is a key phrase here. Many of the more pulpish characters that I like are criticized as one dimensional by more literary oriented readers and writers, but they are mistaken because they haven't read the stories closely enough. Take Conan the Cimmerian, the Robert E. Howard creation, for example.

Conan is often described as dumb, but the actual stories by Howard make it clear that Conan was, in fact, quite cunning. He was "naive" in the stories where he was supposed to be young, but well educated, at least in the school of hard knocks, in the stories where he was king. Conan's philosophy of life was relatively simple, in keeping with his roots as a barbarian, but a simple philosophy does not equal stupidity.

Also, Conan is often described as a testosterone driven oaf who treated women as nothing more than objects. It is true that Conan liked women and enjoyed sex, but in the actual Howard stories he did not treat all women alike. He acted differently toward a tavern wench than he did toward a female warrior. He could show respect for a woman or he could treat them indifferently. Whether you approve of his behavior or not, his behavior with women was not one dimensional.

Why do so many people hold the view of Conan that they do? I think because they associate Conan more with the Arnold movies than they do with the Robert E. Howard creation.

I use Conan as example here, but maybe the same could be said of many other pulpish heroes. Maybe the same could be said of the female characters in pulp fiction. Maybe they have more dimensions than most of us believe. Maybe we've judged those characters and the writers who created them too harshly. I wonder.

The Character Paradox

In looking over the favorite character lists that some of my blolleagues and myself have been posting over the past week or so an apparent paradox leaps out at me. This is: 1) For a reader, memorable characters are larger than life. They are extremes in one way or another. 2) For a writer, larger than life characters are not realistic, and therefore appear weak.

Is this an actual paradox or am I reading too much into it? If it is a paradox I wonder how to resolve it. Are readers and writers doomed to war with each other on this issue?

Realistic Female Characters?

C. S. Harris brought up an interesting point. Should we perhaps develop two lists of characters, one for those we find sexually appealing and another for those we like as characters in and of themselves. I’ve already put up my “sex appeal” list, so I started thinking. What female characters do I know who, 1) I would like if I knew them as real people without necessarily wanting to sleep with them, and 2) what female characters seem to me the most “realistic.” None of the ones on my CILFS list seem realistic, but there are one’s I’ve read about in fiction who fit both requirements above. Let’s see:

1. Dolores Claiborne, created by Stephen King. I liked Dolores and rooted for her throughout the book, but I never thought of her in a sexual way. I felt, as a male reader, that Dolores was probably a realistic woman.

2. Eleanor Arroway, created by Carl Sagan for Contact. I liked Ellie, as she was referred to throughout, and I can say she was a pretty realistic scientist. I didn’t think of her in a sexual way, however. I’m not clear that she’s a realistic woman. You women will have to tell me.

3. Deborah, created by James Sallis for the Lew Griffin mysteries, especially Ghost of a Flea. Deborah seems realistic to me. She loves Lew but also has her own interests, and although she is happy to share many things with Lew she clearly keeps her own center and is neither over or underwhelmed by Lew. I could be friends with Deborah but never anything more.

4. Clarice Starling, created by Thomas Harris. Clarice seems pretty realistic to me, although you have to remember that I’m a male. I liked her and rooted for her, and though there is probably some mild sexual attraction there she’s sure no Dejah Thoris.

5. Mary Breydon, created by Louis L’Amour for Cherokee Trail. Mary lost everything in the Civil War and came west to make a new life. But her husband is killed and she ends up managing a stage station with her young daughter. Mary was a practical woman but who still has some dreams. She was a good mother and was even beautiful. But I didn’t think of her in a fantasy way.

6. Ellie Sattler, created by Michael Crichton for Jurassic Park. I’m not sure how realistic Ellie Sattler was but I liked her and rooted for her and felt she had a lot going for her without her being particularly attractive to me. Interesting that there are two “Ellies” on my list.

The above six characters are from books, but I found myself struggling to find more. This probably reflects the fact that I haven’t read nearly as many books featuring strong female leads as male leads. Part of that is my own bias, I’m sure, part is due to the genres I typically read, and part may have to do with the fact that even female adventure writers often feature male protagonists. To complete my list, then, I’m going to movies below.

7. Ellen Ripley, portrayed by Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movies. (And another “Ellen/Ellie.) Ripley seemed most “realistic” to me in Aliens, but I liked her in Alien as well. By the third film she had lost some of her realism, at least to me. This selection bends my rules because I certainly found Ripley attractive in the first movie. However, it was more of a realistic attraction rather than a fantasy attraction.

8. Sarah Conner, from the first Terminator movie, played by Linda Hamilton. This also breaks my rule because I was very attracted to Sarah in the first movie. She seemed both vulnerable and very realistic in her reactions to the situation. In the second movie, Sarah was much more a kick-ass heroine. She seemed much less real but was still attractive to me, more in a fantasy way.

9. Annie, the character played by Kathy Bates in the movie, Misery. Crazy as she was, I really sort of liked the character. Of course, Kathy Bates makes any character come alive. Was she realistic as a woman? I’m not sure, but she was certainly convincing as a crazed fan.

10. Your Name Here!

CILFS

OK, this might sound sexist and immature, but it's meant in good fun. When I was a teenager I enjoyed books that had beautiful female characters because I wanted to imagine such women falling in love with me. I might even have dreamed of making love to such gorgeous ladies. Some of them were perhaps a little scary, too, tough and dangerous enough to make such an activity truly exciting. I don't think I was alone in having such thoughts, and I suspect that most young female readers felt the same way about some of the male characters in the books they read. Now, as a take off on a common term that we hear these days, in poor taste as it is, perhaps I will dare call such female characters “CILFS,” with the “C” pronounced softly like an “S.” That being said, my, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, top ten list of CILFS would be the following:

1. Dejah Thoris, created by Edgar Rice Burroughs: John Carter was too dull for the glorious Dejah. I always thought she’d prefer a little bit more of a bad boy. I mean, a woman who lays eggs! Whoa!

2. Belit, created by Robert E. Howard: A mixture of sexuality and innocence, willful yet fatalistic. And the dance she does for Conan! Heady stuff.

3. Jirel of Joiry, created by C. L. Moore: Jirel would have scared the hell out of me in real life, but that flame-red hair and the so-often torn leathers. Viva La France!

4. Delia of Vallia, created by Ken Bulmer: The delicate beauty of Dejah Thoris; the whip-ass attitude of Jirel of Joiry. Delia had it all. Sometimes she wore a claw.

5. The Lady, created by Glen Cook in his “Black Company” books: Beautiful and evil. An irresistible combination for a young male. You wanted her; you feared her. But you were certainly interested.

6. Nidyis, created by David C. Smith: Another sorceress, and one who clearly enjoyed sex. You just knew that Nidyis was a slut, and you could only hope that she wouldn’t kill you first.

7. Ischade, created by C. J. Cherryh: A witch and a thief. And all her lovers die from her curse. But as they say, what a way to go.

8. The Eternal, created by David Gemmell: A bit like Glen Cook’s “Lady,” but also...well, eternal. We see her as a young woman, intelligent and beautiful, and later as the evil Eternal, but still beautiful, and still, perhaps, capable of love. The love of a good man might just...

9. Mina Harker, created by Bram Stoker: Hey, Dracula knew what he was about when he moved to seduce this innocent beauty. I wanted to protect her; I didn’t think old Jonathan had what it took.

10. (And One from a More Modern Age). Lizette Louvier, created by O’Neil De Noux: OK, so she doesn’t have a lot to do in the series. But she’s sensual, beautiful, and rich. And I think I saw her late one afternoon in Audubon Park.


Is it any accident that most of these female characters, again, were created by men? I doubt it. They aren’t women as women see themselves. They aren’t even women as men see them. They are women as men would like them to be, at least some of the time, and women that men fantasize about. And because I’m male I’m afraid that some of those same things appeal to me. Are female readers really that different? Don’t many of them fantasize just a bit about the male characters they’ve read about? And yet, ask most males and they’ll say those characters aren’t much like real men. But does that really matter when we’re talking fiction? Besides, isn’t it a bit of fun to...dream?

Favorite Fictional Characters

Over on his site, Christopher Mills has a list of his top ten fictional characters. It seemed like a blogworthy sort of thing to do, so I thought I’d join in. First up below are my top ten, from written fiction only. Below that are ten from TV/Movies. These are as of right now, of course, and subject to change.

From Prose:
1. Karl Edward Wagner’s “Kane”
2. Robert E. Howard’s “Bran Mak Morn”
3. ERB’s “John Carter”
4. Ken Bulmer’s “Dray Prescot”
5. John D. MacDonald’s “Travis McGee”
6. Louis L’Amour’s “Rye Tyler” (From To Tame a Land)
7. Howard’s “Conan”
8. David Gemmell’s “Druss”
9. Poul Anderson’s “Flandry of Terra.”
10. Jim Kjelgaard’s “Desert Dog.” (Gotta get one animal in there.)

From TV/Movies
1. James T. Kirk
2. Spock
3. Kolchack (From the original series)
4. Kelly (From Charlie’s Angels)
5. Sean and Christopher (from Nip/Tuck)
6. Little Joe (From Bonanza)
7. Matt Dillon
8. Ripley
9. Pinhead
10. Cartman