Characterization has long been my Achilles heel. I grew up reading, big idea science fiction and fantasy, and that’s what I always wanted to write. I had the big ideas, but when I first started my writing career, I didn’t know how to craft compelling characters.
I’ve spent the last ten years working on it, using some helpful books filled with character exercises, making story Bibles to track my character info and helping me get inside their heads, and studying how compelling characters are created in books and other mediums. I’ve come a long way, but it’s still a challenge for me.
I like that it’s a challenge, because it means I’m still learning my craft. I’ve always believed that when you think that you have nothing left to learn, your writing dies.
So I am starting off on a new writing adventure, a story that involves a huge experiment. I’m writing three different character POV’s in first person. Each one gets their own chapter, to help minimize confusion, but it means that the characters must have distinctive voices so much so that the reader will know whose head they are in, even if they don’t read the chapter head.
And they are three very distinctive characters.
One is a twenty-five-year-old gay white guy who grew up in poverty, and now lives in Las Vegas working as a rideshare driver. The second is a forty-five-year-old straight Korean-American woman who is a lawyer working on climate change issues. And the third is a 7 foot tall black bi drag queen from Australia, who was in special forces before he dawned his first wig and dress.
Part of the work of crafting distinctive characters is setting them up in the first place as very different people. Of course, it’s fine to write two characters that are very similar, but to my mind that makes the work even harder. LOL
My drag queen character is fairly easy to distinguish from the others. I’ve watched a lot of drag shows, and I’m very familiar with the art form and the lingo that goes with it. I’ll also sprinkle a few Australianisms in there occasionally – not too many because he has been in the United States for a long time – but just enough for flavor. he’s also not afraid to throw around words like shit and fuck with merry abandon.
The Korean character is also fairly easy. She’s very intelligent, speaks in a high form of English, and I have already written a Korean character in Down the River.
I do want to be careful about cultural appropriation. Someone gave me some great advice about writing transgender characters that I’ve always applied when writing characters who are very different from me. They advised me to go ahead write the character, but not make the story about them being transgender.
Strangely enough, the character who is most like me – white, gay, and living in America – is probably the hardest to differentiate because he’s closest to my own voice. He is younger than I am, and has grown up in the slang of his time, so I can work with that. The story takes place about fifteen years from now so I can invent some future slang that he would use that will help set him apart.
But ultimately, crafting diverse, compelling characters is about more than just speech. There’s also the core of who the characters are, and I find that I often discover that with time. I have to internalize each one of them as a writer and understand what makes him tick, and that flows their actions that help establish the rest of their character. One tip I’ve found helpful is to give each a verb that describes their overall character disposition. Advance. Retreat. Hide. Confront. These can help me understand how each character will react in a given situation.
I’m looking forward to this new experiment. I’ve never done first person in a novel length story before, let alone three different first person characters. I considered, briefly, pulling a Kim Stanley Robinson and writing each the characters in a different tense. But I’m not sure I’m up to that level of writing expertise just yet.
I do like grounding them all in first person, because it allows each of their character voices to come through strongly.
Will it work? Who knows – only time will tell.
But I am still learning, and that’s a good thing.