ON WRITING: Keeping your characters in character

Interesting fiction involves interactions with multiple characters, all of whom need to be individualized, to feel true, to be distinct from one another.  Crafting compelling characters (what is going on with all this alliteration?) is a big challenge, maybe the big challenge, of any writing endeavor.  They are the engine that propels your narrative, the choices made and the conflicts that arise are what create the ebb and flow of the drama, ratcheting up the tension with an unexpected decision that cascades through a dramatic turn of events, pulling along the reader to see what happens next.  Characters are the lifeblood of your story. 

But, keeping your characters consistent (more alliteration?!?) can be difficult, especially if you're in the opening pages of your first draft.  At that point, you're still trying to figure out who these people are, trying different things, pushing them into situations, feeling them out, learning about them.  Eventually, they do become more solidified, more real, and, at times, as you're writing you'll find the choices made by your characters come almost naturally, as if they are writing themselves.  It's a pretty cool feeling when you get to that point where the people on the page act as naturally as your neighbor or your family.  But you need to write a bit to get to that point. 

Which brings me to a recent example.  My buddy, Dan (his name's up there, to the right), and I are currently writing the first draft of a YA horror novel.  I'm currently in the middle of chapter 6, and though we have pretty good descriptions for our main characters, they're still evolving and I am still not at a point where the characterizations are lodged in my brain.  I'm still learning they are while trying to remember, fully, who they've been up to now. 

A bit of context:  The setting is a small string of three islands, off the coast of Maine.  The island population barely boasts a couple hundred people, between the three.  Our main characters are two 12-year-olds, one from away, one a local.  The one from away has gone to the library to try and find some information.  He gets there, and the librarian is busy with a family, so his friend takes him to the second floor to look around, while they wait.  This second floor is surround, all the way around without a break, with windows, allowing for a 360 degree view around the building, including a straight shot to the harbor, which is about a half-mile away. 
End contextual infodump

So, our protagonist walks over to the window looking out to the harbor.  It's a pretty amazing view, and I wanted to get this across in the scene, so I had our main character thinking about what a cool view it was from there. 
And all was good, I thought.  I'd described the interior of the library fairly well, and I'd gotten some cool aspects included, with the view of the harbor from the second floor as the big piece. 

Except, our protagonist, Jim, wouldn't react this way.  (something I figured out later, while lying in bed)  He was brought to this island by his father, even though he didn't want to move.  His father has been gone for a couple of weeks, at this point, in order to work on a big fishing vessel so that they can make ends meet.  Add to this all the anxiety and frustration that comes from moving to a new place and starting at a new school, and you can imagine how much pent-up anger Jim has inside.  He's mad.  He doesn't care about some great view from the library.  He wants to go back home, where he grew up.  He wants his father back.  He wants to be anywhere but here. 

So, why would he react in such a positive, almost awestruck fashion?  Answer:  he wouldn't. 

The next day, I rewrote the end of that scene.  I had Carrie, our other main character, remark on how cool a view it was to Jim, and then he turned away, saying, "Yeah, sure," and commented on how it only made him think of how small this island was and how far away home was.  It was a good rewrite that evoked what epitomizes each of these characters.  And it felt good to catch that and keep these two people consistent. 

chris

BALTIMORE COMIC-CON 2015 IN THE REARVIEW pt.1

 

  

A week ago, Dan and I, along with Matt, were in Baltimore for the Baltimore Comic-Con.  It’s been ten years since we tabled at our first convention in Chicago, and in that time we have learned a lot and grown as writers.  That doesn’t always translate to sales, which were less than “soft.”  But we did have a lot of great interactions with fans, and creators, so I can’t complain. 

Caveats, vis-à-vis sales: 

Despite always entering these conventions with high hopes, I don’t believe Dan and I have ever deluded ourselves.  We are certainly working against the tide—offering anthologies that include prose stories as well as comics, most often in black and white, lacking superheroes or Dr. Who or zombies (for the most part) or manga-influenced art, all of which are big draws at these cons.  And we aren’t into the hard sell.  Add to that the fact we are only able to attend a single convention a year, and the chips are stacked against us really gaining any type of foothold.  But that’s okay.  

Because getting a table affords us opportunities we might not have going to these as “just fans.”  We get early entry, don’t have to wait in line, have a place to sit and store our stuff, and, even if sales are not what we hope for, we are proving to those professionals and publishers we do see regularly that we are persistent and committed to our writing. 

That said, despite soft sales, we did have some great interactions with fans attending the show.  One of the items we had available, for free, was a distinct nametag with your sci-fi name on it.  I crafted a Lego coliseum within which anyone could roll two dice—a 6-die and a 20-die—to find out their character type (alien, smuggler, bounty hunter, star pilot, explorer, or universal despot) and their specific name (from a list of 20 each for male, female, or neutral).  Kids and parents alike loved these.  They were rolling dice all weekend.  And it was great.  The kids, regardless of age, were all excited to find out their strange, otherworldly names such as Tiik’Al or Quellon or Axlotl (keen-eyed science fiction buffs will recognize that last one), and the parents were equally intrigued and enthused by the prospect of finding out their sci-fi names.  That was a surefire hit and we got to have some nice conversations with people about the show, when they rolled for their nametags (including meeting someone originally from Lebanon, Maine). 

So, did we sell a lot of books?  No.  But did we get to interact with fans and have a good time behind the table?  Oh, yeah. 

But what about walking the floor and meeting artist and writers and other professionals?  Find out about that, tomorrow, in the second half of my Baltimore wrap-up.

chris

What It Is – week ending 18 January [2015]

With apologies to Dave the Thune (as well as Mike Baron & Steve Rude).

WRITING:

Every day.  1000 words.  That’s the goal.

Shifted back over to the novel.  I ended the first part toward the end of November and knew that December would be busy.  But now that we’re past the holidays, it’s time to dive back in and get this first draft done.  Initially, I planned to start adding to the manuscript on Monday, but that didn’t happen.  Typically, when I’ve completed one story and it’s time to move onto something else, it takes a few days of procrastination (possibly writing something for this site or taking a day or two off from writing) to get past that fear of the blank page – this one only happened to be on manuscript page 197 of this document, but it was still the same.  Anyway.  By Thursday, I had exhausted all other writing avenues and re-entered the world of Ledge Island, Maine.  It was tough, a fact that wasn’t surprising.  I needed jus the right sentence to lead me back inside, which involved rewriting that opening sentence at least a dozen times.  It was frustrating, but I now have three days of writing within this narrative world again, and every day it comes a little more easily.  I hope to have this draft completed by the end of March so that I can think about doing a heavy revision beginning in October.  We’ll see how things go.

That said, I still have my streak intact – 18 days into 2015, with 18 days of writing.  Feeling good about this year.  We’ll see.

As for that ancillary writing that filled the gap, prior to getting back to the novel, I polished up three pieces for the website (each needing varying degrees of polish):  a look at where I’ve had stories published, a reminiscence ten years on from the publication of the first issue of Warrior27 by Dan and me, and a special 400^th post looking at Superman’s 400th issue, from 1984, one of my all-time favorite single comics, if not my favorite.  Check ‘em out. I think you’ll like them.

READING:

Finished reading The Martian by Andy Weir this week.  Big thanks to Dan Fleming for recommending this to me.  It’s a phenomenal piece of work – a near-future look at an astronaut stranded on Mars, after the mission is bolloxed by a huge sandstorm, and how he survives a year and a half on that desolate planet, while awaiting a rescue operation that may not be successful.  The intelligence behind the scenarios and the distinctiveness of the myriad characters’ voices was impressive.  I look forward to Weir’s next offering to see if he can achieve a similar storytelling success. 

WATCHING:

Over at the ITMODcast, the guys recently offered their cinematic resolutions for 2015 – films they want to watch for the first time, in order to broaden their horizons as movie fans.  For me, I want to watch all of  Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre (or re-watch, as the case may be) as well as Wes Anderson’s body of work (I’ve only seen Tenenbaums) and continue working through my Akira Kurosawa box set from Criterion.  To that end, I rewatched Reservoir Dogs this week and was just as impressed this time around as the first.  The way Tarantino used the camera to pull away from the grisliest of scenes to burn it more hotly into the viewers’ brains, as well as his ability to have a heist movie that never showed any of the heist but still allowed one to perfectly visualize it, is a master class not only in filmmaking but in economic filmmaking.  Great stuff.  Can’t wait to check out Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown again, and then move into new territory.  Thanks, Netflix. 

SIGN OFF:

And, as always, check out my friends – Brad & Matt and Don McMillan for their own weekly recaps on things comic-y and geeky, and we'll see what's what in seven.  

-chris

Looking Back – A Decade Since Warrior27 #1

By 2005, four years had passed since a handful of friends and I had first discussed self-publishing our comic anthology, with nothing to show for it.  We all harbored ideas of one day being (magically) discovered as the brilliant creators we knew ourselves to be.  That road is more difficult to hoe when you don’t do the work.  We wrote some scripts and got some pages penciled, but we did not create enough content to fill a proper book, and, even more to the point of why we never published anything, we left all the production stuff to a single person rather than taking on that responsibility as well.  So, in January of 2005, Dan and I decided to finally do something about it and published the first issue of Warrior27.  [see here, here, and here for more on that].  2005 also saw my first published work outside of Warrior27.  That was the year I started to take my writing seriously – emphasis on “started.” 

That first issue, and our first time exhibiting at a convention, was a bust.  But Dan and I learned from the experience and moved forward.  With a bit more lead time, we were more successful in finding artists for the next issue (a few who agreed to work on the inaugural book fell off the face of the earth…or just didn’t return our emails).  Having not found our audience at Wizard World Chicago, we wrapped the new book with a thematic spine across all the stories and decided to exhibit at SPX in 2006, a crowd more in tune with what we were doing with Warrior27.  That second time exhibiting was a great experience.  (might’ve helped that our writing had improved, as well)

Two years later, taking Steven Grant’s advice to write within genres or mediums outside those one aspires to, both Dan and I began writing for the Pulse, a pop culture website where Heidi MacDonald had written.  I wrote the weekly column, “For Your Consideration,” at the Pulse, spotlighting online and small press comics and creators.  Dan wrote, “Am I Alone In This?” encompassing his personal reading journey through comics.  As Grant stated in his own column for CBR, if one wishes to be a writer, one needs to write and take the opportunity for publication wherever it may come, because any and all writing can only help you improve your craft and evaluating one’s writing upon publication affords one a different, and often better, perspective on its success, or lack thereof. 

Dan and I published two more issues of Warrior27, in 2008 and 2009, with ITMOD co-founder, Matt Constantine, joining us, along with some more great artists.  Dan and I also started finding some publishing success outside our own venture.  He got a short story published by Arcana, in their second Dark Horrors anthology, and I started writing some short fiction for a couple of burst culture sites – 50 Years From Now and Elephant Words.  In my mind, I was going to take the Harrison Ford route – just keep plugging away at this creative endeavor until, through atrophy, those others who started at the same time I did will have fallen away like leaves, deciding it was too much effort for too little reward. 

After we published a 254-page of Warrior27, which included all the best stories and articles from those four issues, along with extras like the interview I did with Joe Quesada in 2001, Dan embarked on a year-long blog adventure, My Year In Crime.  For the entirety of 2010 and half of 2011, Dan posted every day on his crime blog.  It was a great exercise and it garnered him a bit of attention, as he landed short interviews with authors Duane Swierczynski and Victor Gischler.  Achievement unlocked.

Not being a fool – and hewing closely to the paraphrased adage to steal the best ideas – I started my own year-long blog project in 2012, Reading Watchmen.  For years, I’d been thinking about writing my own page-by-page analysis of this seminal work by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons. With the template Dan provided, I finally went all in.  Each month was dedicated to a single chapter of the comic, opening with a quick thematic overview of the issue at hand, followed by examinations of the cover and then the page-by-page annotations – a page a day, every day, with the issue’s full annotations at the end of the month.  It was a big project, with daily deadlines, but incredibly fulfilling.  In the end, I wrote a bit over 87,000 words on Watchmen and did not miss a deadline. 

At this point, the writing continues, for both Dan and myself.  I’ve met with some success, having short stories published – comics and prose, alike – every year since 2010, with two more scheduled, hopefully, for publication this year.  Right now, Dan is hip-deep in his non-fiction novel, while I have begun the second half of a novel that’s been sitting in the back of my brain ever since I taught on Matinicus Island, twenty-four miles out in the Atlantic.  We’re not done yet – Dan and I are too damn pig-headed – and with the tenth anniversary of that first issue of Warrior27 coming up this August, we’re thinking of publishing something new.  I don’t know what it will be – and I can’t even say, for certain, that it will get done – but it’s exciting to think we’ve come this far. 

Here’s to the next ten years.

-chris

Baltimore in the rear view - being the 2nd part

My summation of the recently completed Baltimore Comic-con, where I, along with Dan & Matt, exhibited for the first time.  Sales weren't as brisk as we would have liked, but does that mean it was an unsuccessful convention?  Click the link and find out.  [spoiler: it was a good show, as a fan and aspiring writer]

LINK

-chris

Baltimore in the rear view - being the 1st part

Over at In the Mouth of Dorkness, I offer a personal retrospective on the recent Baltimore Comic-con.  In this first part, I write about how it was, as a fan, for me to return to the Baltimore show after ten years.  Spoiler:  it was a pretty good show.

Look for part 2 soon.

-chris

Baltimore Comic-Con here we come

Dan and I are on the road to Baltimore.  Hope to see you there.

chris

Baltimore Comic-con -- We're bringing some books to the show!

Dan and I, along with "Mouth Dork" hosts Matt & Brad, will be at Baltimore Comic-con this weekend, and we're bringing some books.  Here's a quick rundown:

-  Mainelining is the over-arching title for my series of chapbooks that include one short comic story and one short prose story written by me (with the exception of volumes 2&3, which encompasses my 20,000 word novella, "In Search Of").  Between 24 and 28 pages, these are stories that have been published in Warrior27 as well as through other publishers like Dark Recesses Press, Black Tome Books, Ape Entertainment, and Top Shelf Publications.  

- Warrior27 - the comics/prose anthology that Dan and I started in 2005.  We'll have three issues there, with comic and prose stories as well as interviews with key comic people such as Chris Staros and Gary Groth. With more pages than your typical Marvel/DC book, at 3 bucks each, they're a steal.  [and Indie Comics Horror #1 is 48 pages of horror comic stories set in space, ancient Rome, and all points in between, including my story, "Minister to the Undead," with art by Dan Lauer]

-  Reading Watchmen - my 87,000-word examination of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons's seminal graphic novel, in 3 handy volumes.  If you love Watchmen, or are just curious about what "all the fuss" is about, give these a try. And if you want a taste of what this entails, check out our sister site.

-  New Orleans by Gaslight is the steampunk anthology in which I placed my story "You Gotta Give Good."  You'll find many more great stories and poems set in a steampunk-era New Orleans inside, as well.  

-  Warrior27: the Collection.  256 pages of all the best bits from our original issues, along with new and never-before-seen stuff, including interviews with Bryan Talbot and Joe Quesada (only a year into his tenure as EIC of Marvel) and teases of stories we're working on.  You can get the physical copy or the digital, in both cbz and pdf form.

Hope to see you there.

chris

Baltimore Comic-Con: Here's where we'll be.

In a little over 10 days, Dan, Matt, Brad, and I will be in Artist's Alley at the Baltimore Comic-con.

Table A301.  Click the map for a larger image.

Hope to see you there.

-chris

4 Day to Super Show

I'll have copies of my chapbook series, Mainelining, with short comic and prose stories written by me and drawn by some fantastic artists - including Jason Copland whose Kill All Monsters! book (with Michael May) is in the latest Previews - at the CGS Super Show this weekend, April 6-7, in Reading, PA.

Convention special:  $2.00 a piece or the whole shebang for 8 bucks.  Can't beat that.  And I guarantee that, thanks to the short prose story included in each (except for 2 and 3, which are straight prose, all the way) these books will take longer to read than your typical DC/Marvel book at an equal or higher price.

So, if you're in the Reading, Pennsylvania area, stop by the Greater Reading Convention Expo Center and check out some cool comics and cooler creators.

-chris

W27: more preview art

Here's a preview page of art we felt just shouldn't be tampered with. Some Cthulhu goodness in inky black (with a splash of white to provide some contrast).

Word by Dan Fleming. Art from Geoff Mosse.

Enjoy,

chris

W27: more preview art

Here's another preview image, newly colored for the upcoming collection of Warrior27, from the story "Come Hell"

Words by Dan Fleming, line art by Dan Lauer.

Enjoy.

chris