I said yesterday that there's a beta event for Guild Wars 2 this weekend. I am immensely excited for this, and hope to spend a large amount of time playing. Maybe that old computer can even get set up for GW2 so I can play with my wife!
Running is my go-to idea for exercise, but I'm really bad about doing it. I should probably do it soon, but the internet! And the things!
And pizza!
Friday and Saturday I talked at length about diction and word choice and how they relate to writing (with a focus on Fantasy because, well, I'm me). I wanted to talk today about characterization and its utmost importance.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to tell a compelling story it requires at least one person at the center of things, experiencing and interpreting the world, and influencing it with agency. If there isn't a person involved, it's not a story in my estimation. That isn't to say it isn't art. There's quite a few poems where there's hardly an author's voice, let alone a narrator (though this is most often a finely crafted illusion because, you know, there's an author or at least an editor where there's words involved), and that doesn't detract from the artistry of the poem. Similarly, visual arts don't need human subjects to be artful or beautiful. They just aren't stories in my eyes.
Now you might mention wilderness documentary stories, like that Chimpanzee movie. But here's the thing: in those works, the creatures depicted are anthropomorphized. They're not people, and I believe they shouldn't be treated like people. That's why movies like that bother me. When things get more metaphorical it bothers me less, but animal movies annoy me because the stories pretend that these creatures are people.
I am making sure to use the word "person" because that is a more significant catch-all than human being. In my worldview, the only "people" are human beings (aside from God and maybe angels). However, there is a rich tradition of giving a non-human the aspects of personhood (self-cognizance and the like) throughout human history. It's a good exercise for the imagination. So I should clarify that the stories that bother me the most are the ones that are direct documentaries, especially of primates, that try to sell them as people when they're not.
So anyway, people are at the center of storytelling, because people are the origin of stories we tell. I also believe that God is a storyteller, and that he has imparted stories to us, and that our penchant for storytelling is part of His image in us, but that does not detract from the centrality of people in our storytelling.
I've said all this to contextualize why doing your characters right is as important to the world you build with your story as diction and word choice. It's also not one of the things you think about when you think "world-building." That phrase conjures to mind the imagining of geography and infrastructure and special laws outside the ones that govern our universe.
But all that mind-blowing stuff has no meaning and no purpose when not considered through the lens of character. It's hard for me to say this. I love world-building for the sake of it. Coming up with places and types of magic and different political systems is really fun. But I realize that if you don't have a character who reacts to the circumstances you've invented for him (or her, or it) you don't have a story. You just have a world. And it's harder to sell or spread the word about a world you built aside from within a story. You need a medium to convey the world you've carved in your mind. That's where the art comes in, and fantasy writing relates to world-building as a medium for that creation you've done.
In the series I worked on for most of my adolescence, called Talas Ke, there are two characters who come from (a slightly alternate version of) Earth, but spend the vast majority of the series on Talas Ke, the world I built. They bring all their prejudices, experiences, memories, mannerisms, and so on from Earth with them, and view the differences of Talas Ke in light of that paradigm. It's a fairly common formula, and because I started writing it when I was about twelve I wrote to discover, building the world as I went. Looking back, I see the world-building and storytelling I did when I first wrote that story as sloppy and sometimes ill-conceived, but I've been told by many of those who've read it that it works. Why?
Because they cared about the characters. I plunged my characters into the world that I had made, as shoddily as I might have made it, and made them live it. Because they lived it, and they reacted as fully as I could make them react, and as fleshed out as I could make them, I had invested readers.
Now, as I reflect to friends and family on my disappointments with that story, and express my need to revise it to a tremendous extent, I likely have some disappointed, invested readers. It's because of them that I haven't given up on Talas Ke and intend to return to the world soon, to finish what I started almost ten years ago. It's also because, in my slightly-insane writerly way, I owe it to those characters to finish their story.
Most of my short stories fail because I can't give the characters the roundness they need. Epic, mainstream, AAA endeavors in writing or in film fall short because the characters aren't written true to themselves and to the world. And do you know why the Avengers was such an awesome movie? Why it's a record-breaker? It's because Whedon wrote the characters well, and gave them their fullness to live in the world that was made. If the characters weren't well written, they couldn't have been well-acted, and then no amount of fancy special effects shots could have saved the movie.
If you agonize over anything when you're writing, let it be the characters. If you believe the characters, you'll believe the story, even if the world-building sucks or is just plain mind-raping. Homestuck, as another example, has characters I am invested in for better or for worse, and it's that investment that has me reading through all the appearifying antics and yellow yards. Characters are why I'm still reading the Wheel of Time series, and why after the first season of Game of Thrones I wiki-walked through what remains of the story, and might even read the remaining books as they are released. They're also why A Song of Ice and Fire hurts me deeply to consume as a story, because it punishes you for caring about characters.
And if it sounds too painful to agonize over your characters, know that it gets better over time. Maybe it's because you get more heartless, or maybe it's coming to terms, but unless you're a children's author you're very likely going to kill off a character you love at some point when you're writing.
I'd give some pithy saying, like "invest in your characters, and..." but I can't come up with the second half. So just that. If you're telling a story, invest in your characters, then build your world for them.
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