Utilizing the Unexpected

by Elizabeth Bear

At thirty, everybody dies.

Okay. Not really; this isn't Logan's Run. But sometimes in speculative fiction, it can seem like it. Mystery is the genre of the mature protagonist, while science fiction and fantasy have long been dominated by the exploits of vigorous - and impetuous - youth. And usually heterosexual Anglo-Saxon youth, at that.

But here's something interesting:

Diversity can sell a book. And more than that, it can breathe life and complexity into characters and worldbuilding that might otherwise tread well-plowed turf. It wasn't long ago when novels with older, female, non-white, religious, non-heterosexual, or otherwise "nontraditional" protagonists faced an uphill climb to publication. But something miraculous happened; the publishing industry realized that not only was there an audience for unusual characters, but an avid one, and that books that broke those barriers - books like John Varley's Titan, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint - found devoted, even fanatical, audiences. Readers who hadn't found many characters like themselves to identify with - readers who may have been persons of color, queer, transgendered, older, or otherwise "different" - were eager to read about characters who were more like them and less like the American media image of a homogenized culture.

Writers like Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., C.J. Cherryh, Samuel Delany, Steven Barnes, H. Beam Piper, Ursula K. Le Guin, George Alec Effinger, Suzy McKee Charnas, Diane Duane, and Octavia Butler - among others - found race, sexuality, age, and even the need to declare a gender or a sexual orientation unnecessary limitations, leading to a refreshing current of diversity in fantastic fiction. In more recent years, writers such as Nalo Hopkinson, Minister Faust, Karin Lowachee, Sarah Monette, Matt Ruff, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and Jon Courtenay Grimwood have further broadened the genre melting pot.

So why are characters who aren't young, fresh-faced, heterosexual, and Caucasian still seen as exceptional in genre writing?

Is it simply inertia, or perhaps a little authorial laziness? It's unlikely to be malice, though most science fiction and fantasy writers, statistically speaking, are Caucasian and heterosexual. But historically, most fantasy milieus are default-pseudoEuropean. Developing other worlds, other cultures, and more complex characters requires significantly more research. For believable construction, these worlds, people, and cultures require rigorous attention to internal consistency, cultural completeness, and an entire complimentary palette of gestures, mannerisms and taboos. In addition, younger characters seem easier to write; they don't have the weight of memory to contend with, and they come with built-in goals and problems. After all, they face the issue of growing up. It's something that most writers have experienced, to one degree or another. Writers default to the familiar, the tested and true.

But older characters are more diverse and potentially more interesting. They have more life experience, more quirks, more opinions. They're tempered and complex. They have history and the weight of detail behind them, and when well-developed they can feel considerably less generic, simply because they have careers and old lovers, children and scars. Thomas Covenant is noteworthy for his illness and attitude problem; Gandalf the Grey can't quite be a stereotypical wizard figure because he has a wicked sense of humor and a cache of fireworks; Pyanfar Chanur has her family loyalty and impulsive good nature, but she's also got a scathing wit and a piratical recklessness.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

Practically speaking, the way to make any character live is detail. But it's the layering of details that adds up. Memorable characters in fiction have a kind of super-reality. A proper selection of details creates that super-reality in the same way that a posed portrait may create a more compellingly true image of a subject than a candid snapshot. The writer chooses what to illuminate - which details to demonstrate and bring into relief, and which to gloss over as irrelevant.

Complex and believable characters require this kind of attention. They're more than a packaged bundle of assumptions, a template impressed with a few salient identifiers. This farm boy stammers, and that one has red hair, and this other one is actually a blacksmith. Much as grounding detail makes a chair real in the mind of a reader - not a chair, but this chair, right here, with a crack in the seat and some blue paint stuck around the rungs on the ladder back from being badly stripped - it also makes a character real. One precise detail is worth ten broad gestures. Of course, it's more work - but it's worth it.

But it's important to integrate the details, to make sure the character is well-rounded and has a voice, and that her individuality affects her world view and her motivations. There's a danger in characterizing solely by quirks - the character who tugs her hair, the one with red nails, the one with affected speech, the one in a funny hat. The old one, the young one, the Asian one. That's not so much characterization as branding, and it doesn't matter if the bottles look different if the same stuff comes in every bottle.

THE DANGERS OF CARICATURE

The opposite extreme is equally problematic. A character who's composed of nothing but colorful personality traits topples into caricature, wobbling unsteadily along the fine line between Elric and oblivion. Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone, a.k.a Elric the albino - a crippled sorcerer-prince burdened with a demon in the shape of a powerful magic sword - could easily slide into self-parody by virtue of his very uniqueness. And, he's hardly gotten off without a few casual swipes: from "Elrod the Albino" to "Johnny Melnibone," he's seen his share of satire. The danger of such unique details is that they are enormously easy to caricature, and if the writer isn't in control they become ridiculous. Moorcock rides the edge of that problem, but it's an uneasy balance at best.

The reason Elric works for many readers (and is over the top for another group) rather than sliding into self-parody is because the unique aspects of his character hang together in a cohesive whole, and the stories are structured to take advantage of those aspects. He's integral to his world and the stories he encounters.

A character's uniqueness does not have to be justified by the stories in which he appears; it is as possible to write a homosexual character and not have the story revolve around that character's gayness as it is to write a straight character without the story pivoting on that point. However, the story needs to be informed by the character's personality in some way - just as it would be affected if the character were a straight, white, twenty-something Protestant. Otherwise, the characters will seem mere addenda after the fact. They won't breathe into three-dimensionality the way they will if their preconceptions and cultural assumptions affect their perceptions, however subtly.

It's important to avoid shuffling from blandness into stereotype, because people are not categories and they are not roles. This approach is exemplified in Samuel Delany's Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, where a diverse and brilliantly developed cast reflects the story through a host of different perceptions. Such characters shift the river when they step into it. There are no perfect reflections. As we see the story through the eyes of the characters, or through those of an omniscient narrator, those perceptions control every detail of the story we are told. It's why point of view is perhaps the most important choice a writer makes. It's the filter that skews everything else about a narrative.

BREAKING THE BOUNDARIES

There's a fine line between archetype and caricature, and most attempts to write archetypal characters fall on the wrong side of it - into stereotype or repetition. Real people are contradictory, often surprising - and so one way to avoid stereotype and bring that aspect of well-roundedness forward is to look for the surprising or contradictory detail. Characters in genre fiction often seem to lack families and connections, for example. Providing those - friends, children, parents, spouses, lovers, siblings - can often illuminate the characters in sharp and surprising ways.

Our cultural biases are not egalitarian: things that are automatically assumed about a woman may be surprising in a man. One of my own favorite characters grew out of my reluctance to portray the person in a particular caretaking role as a stereotypical Good Wife. When I let a middle-aged man fill that place, something wonderful happened - he turned into a personality. He became a minor but delightful character who made the major character also blossom, rejuvenated by the power of this detail - an unexpected relationship. The story, in other words, became more interesting because the characters did.

If characters in your chosen genre are usually young, consider if there are any reasons why your characters can't be older. If they are normally female, recast them as male. Try to make sure that the "good" and "bad" characters are not in easy philosophical agreement with their allies. Politics make strange bedfellows, and internal tensions make for more interesting intrigue, and plot. Minor characters need better motivations than personal loyalty to the hero. They need issues and agendas. They need to want things, and fear things. Characters who are "different" have different cultural and personal assumptions; they will shatter conventions simply in how they act and react, and in the original directions in which they take the story.

Some authors construct elaborate descriptive sheets for everyone in their stories, with favorite colors and candy bars and brand of shoes. Those sort of details are handy, but they can amount to little more than quirks. All I really need to know about a character to write her is what she wants on her tombstone. Everything else grows out of that - because that expresses the character's primal hopes and fears, the things that drive her when no-one's looking. The favorite color is window dressing.

WHY BOTHER?

Famously, Dwight L. Moody said that "Character is what you are in the dark." It's as true of fictional characters as real ones. And it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who proclaimed "Character is plot, plot is character," and William Hallihan who refined that to "Plot is character in predicament." Not only do the details and quirks of a well-realized character drive the story, but they become the story. The rounded narrative is an engine that does not function if either the plot or the characters are eliminated, because they rely upon each other; place a different character in that situation, and one would get a different story, because she would react differently.

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© Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear is cranky, outspoken, uppity, runs with scissors, and doesn't act her age - but she does play well with others. Most of the time. Her second novel, Scardown, was published by Bantam Spectra in July of 2005. (Read RE's review here.) A complete listing of her work is available at elizabethbear.com. She has written two previous articles for Reflection's Edge: "Achieving Freshness in Fantasy," and "The Politics of Dancing." Elizabeth Bear was the recipient of the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.