Characters

Do you see Samuel Delany's About Writing hanging out on the left side of my blog under Now Reading - Non-Fiction? Well, you're probably going to see it there for quite some time. When I'm finished, I plan to read it again, maybe even immediately.

There's a wealth of information here on serious writing: essays, letters and interviews covering Delany's entire teaching (and writing) career. I went back this afternoon and re-read his essay on Characters.

Says Delany: "Ideally, all the plot information should contribute to the realization of the characters. All the character information should move the plot..."

I think I gave lip service to that early on, at least on some level, but never really understood it until I looked at some of my stories to try to figure out what wasn't working. My character information didn't move the plot; the characters got plugged into the plot, creating...well, crap.

Delany goes on: "A character in a novel of mine...observed that there were three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. If the writer can show a character involved in a number of all three types of actions, the character will probably seem more real."

I realized that in the stories I've written that don't work for some reason or another, I haven't exposed my characters to such situations. And - no surprise - when a story has worked, those elements are present. Delany also says (and this runs contrary to what a lot of books on writing will tell you) that it's more important for the writer to really see the characters than to understand them. "The reader, however, does need to understand them; if the reader figures them out for herself, the writer has 'created' all that more vivid a character than if the writer explained them away. The writer must see and put down those things that allow (not make: you can't make the reader do anything - not even open the book) the reader to understand."

Like I said, this book will be within easy reach for quite awhile.