Subject: Re: [FanFic] Breathing life into characters...
From: jhedge@waterw.com (Jeanne Hedge)
Date: 4/12/1996, 2:49 PM
To: fanfic@tendo-dojo.ranma.net

Shannon wrote:
Panda wrote:

[snip] We talked last night
about how to make your characters come alive; read these two short chapters
straight through, and then analyze and pick them apart, looking for the
elements that make the characters "come alive". [snip]


<snip>

Make sure to give your characters flaws. Perfect people are boring.
General rule of thumb: The more powerful the character is, the more 
flawed it should be. (regular people with little problems are not going 
to be the 'movers' and 'shakers')

I'm a fan of Mercedes Lackey (she's mainly a fantasy writer).  In one of her
series, the main character, Diana Tregarde, makes her living as a romance
writer.  In Lackey's book "Jinx High", Di, in the course of solving the
mystery, ends up as a guest teacher for an Honor's English class at a high
school.  As part of the class, she's teaching them how a professional writer
writes.  There are all sorts of handy tips for good writing during the
classroom scenes of this book.

Anyway, in one section, a student has asked Di to read one of her stories to
tell her if she's got a chance to write for a living.  After complimenting
her, Di tells her (pg 159):

        "Your plots are weak," Diana said, with a touch of reluctance.  "You
make things entirely too easy for your characters.  Think about it; a story
where everything goes right and your character is perfect from the beginning
is boring!  Even in fairy tales things start out rotten for the heroine, get
worse, and only at the very end does she 'live happily ever after.'  You've
got to make your character _work_ for her happy ending.  And making her
wonderful, sweet, understanding, no faults at all -- what is she, Mother
Teresa?  If she's that fabulous, she should be a saint.  You've got to make
her interesting' give her warts, make her human?"
        "Like how?" Monica asked weakly.  "I mean, what should I do?"
        "Give her faults; make her impulsive, oversensitive, something.
Give her PMS, for heaven's sake.  And every time your heroine thinks she's
got a clear path, throw something in her way and make her trip over it."

(oh, yeah - Di thinks the girl is absolutely good enough, and she could have
a submittable story -- after five or six complete drafts <g>)

<snip>

Dialogue: Ever wondered how to write proper dialogues? Simple. Look in any
of your favourite novels (or fanfics<g>) and go through the dialogues
looking at the way they appear, who speaks when, how and when the
quotation marks appear and how dialogue fits inside a paragraph. That's how
I figured it out :)

Dialouge is one of the hardest things to carry off and have it sound 
natural.

I read somewhere (sorry, I don't remember where, but it *wasn't* in a
writer's guide) that you should read your dialogue out loud.  If it sounds
stupid, it probably is.  Written dialogue should sound like people talk.
After all, that's what it is. ;)


Jeanne Hedge

     jhedge@waterw.com ==================== 75512.1214@compuserve.com

                    "Hell is full of musical amateurs."
                          --  George Bernard Shaw  (1856 - 1950)

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