Characters: You have to spend time with them

Firstly, a plug. Amnar: The Inheritance with sparkling new prologue is now available on Podiobooks.com.

I promised a couple of days ago that I would spend time going over one chapter here to give readers an insight into the development of Io, the character at this series’ heart. As she is, she pulls everything down, and I don’t give her an opportunity to shine until The Inheritance.

I decided that I would need to go over and redo sections of Amnar: The Awakening to beef her up a bit. I know that most of the other characters are well done, and I don’t worry about them. For some time, I’ve been trying to work out how to improve on Io, and it occurred to me that I really need to start taking my own advice.

The way I work with characters is to spend time with them. The background characters in Amnar are so finely developed because I happily imagine them all the time – when out running, walking, at the gym. I’ve dedicated a lot of time to seeing them in contexts outside those of the story.

I haven’t done this with Io.

This is probably because I’ve developed her around me, I feel closest to her, so she’s also oddly the most distant. I haven’t ever seen her out of context, or just worked with her for the fun of it. And that’s why it’s caused such a problem.

I’ve resolved to spend time with Io outside of the central story. Anybody who follows The Inheritance over the next few weeks will see that she has improved – she certainly stands up to the Servants pretty well – but after taking time over the earliest chapters of The Awakening, I’ve begun to get a clearer idea of how Io really is when she has a chance to shine.

Instead of a brow-beaten, emotionally retarded Io, she should open The Awakening as thoughtful and quiet. She’s been through the Junior Youth Movement, and she has an understanding of the Tiomke regime but she isn’t that invested in it. She can’t get away from the fact that she works with two young boys from the Taija, who have borne witness to the harm that the State is doing first hand.

Her first interaction with the guards (when she follows Arandes into the High City), doesn’t involve her feeling wounded and broken and only worried about her own pain. Instead, she’s frustrated. Her position at this point is that the Tiomke aren’t brilliant, but everything she knows about the Amnari suggests they are worse.

The guards’ violence towards her is unnerving; that doubtful voice gets louder. But she’s still trapped because she doesn’t know the Amnari are any better. Her interactions with Arandes, toward the second act break and after the arrest of her elder sister, suggest that she is taking everything on evidence and not prepared to listen to anybody’s arguments until she has made up her own mind. She very firmly insists that her sister is her top priority – she’ll worry about giving Arandes the chance to prove himself worthy when she’s handled that situation.

Besides simply spending time with Io and allowing her the chance to shine as intelligent and strong rather than emotional and childish, there are edits to be made. These are easier than I expected. It’s mostly a matter of changing how she says things, what she does when and what she’s thinking. In fact, I’ve removed a lot of the introspection. We now see the world without the fog of her emotional response in the way.

Unfortunately, in the middle of planning all of this additional work on Io, the rest of my life has rather taken over. If you read my Zen In Heels blog, you’ll be aware that after six or so months of depression, I finally caved in and saw a doctor. Ironically, I had to get better to take the time to go and see one. Right now, I’m adjusting to medication after a five year break, so it’s holding up my writing and any other work I’m doing.

Nevertheless, as much as I can I’m carrying on as normal (or as close to normal as is possible). I really appreciate all the kind comments I’ve had at Zen in Heels and privately. I am hoping to do a podcast tomorrow but it will depend on how well I adjust to the medication over the course of tonight.

The strange impact of self-healing on my writing

This is a story with an unexpected twist.

I’ve spent most of my life being – or trying to be – a good person. I’ve also spent most of it running away from darkness. From depression, from hard feelings, from self-hatred, from hurt and rejection. I’d managed to crush it down into a tight mass deep in my chest that was, effectively, a nuclear bomb threatening to go off at any moment.

Over the last few months, I’ve been going through a process of healing. It isn’t the classic, rather saccharine “giving love to it” type of stuff. I recall most powerfully the advice of Adyashanti, who says that we shouldn’t look for the light, but go to our darkest places, our biggest hurt, our greatest contradiction.

You can’t run away from this stuff; it catches up with you eventually.

And indeed, it has. My whole life came to a halt because of it and I’m only now building something new from the ashes of what was burned down about three months ago.

The strange thing was that this had an impact on my writing. And it wasn’t that I suddenly allowed myself to be a better writer in terms of voice or style, or that I suddenly found the confidence to put myself out there and get Amnar onto Podiobooks and into the charts.

It was, oddly enough, that all the bad guys in Amnar got better.

Amnar is, like all creations of people, something of a reflection of me. And in that sense, it reflected back my fear of looking at the darkest parts of myself. The Amnari were great, yes, but although people commended me on the nastiness of the bad guys, or the complexity of good-bad-guys like Vasha or bad-good-guys like Arandes, I could feel it was out of balance.

I felt, personally, that it was too obvious that the Amnari would win because they had the power. They have the dragonlords, and the Tiomke have no equivalent, and they have the Ai Ta’Sifradan, which in some ways made the whole thing a bit like America being attacked by, say, the Channel Islands*.

It was what led me to begin to develop the Tiomke, also known as the Duum State, and to decide to introduce Tiom himself as a character. The book The Inheritance, which as usual ignores most of the classic rules of putting together a story and works with couplets more than individuals (Tascha and Arandes, Daar and Io in two separate subplots), then has a mirror between the ascension of Vasha into the higher eschelons of Tiomke leadership at the same time as Io Inherits her role as Guardian Defender.

You need to see the bad guys to appreciate them, their standpoint, and understand better why they do what they do. At last, being prepared to at least start looking at some aspects of the chattering of my own monkey mind that are really dark and really hurt, made me start to develop much better bad guys and present a greater balance in the context of my fiction.

I love this. At last, Amnar is beginning to feel more balanced, and a better piece of work. I myself am still dealing with deeper and deeper levels of dark, as I get stronger and better able to handle it. And as I do so, the Amnari plots develop and new ideas spring forth, making this a far more interesting and powerful world and story.

*That isn’t a comment on the political landscape of the Channel Islands, by the way. They’re just suitably small in comparison with America.

How characters evolve 1: Arandes Nashima

This is all about characters, and working with them. For some time I’ve been wondering how to do this, because for me characters are just people who aren’t quite as physically present as everybody else. However, I did decide it would help if I demonstrated how characters evolve within the context of story.

Letting go of the process

I once had a book that told you to write their details on an index card. This is the theory. It’s like theorising the existence of subatomic particles. You can make guesses and estimates, but until you get to CERN and start banging atoms into each other, you don’t know what you’re going to find.

Characters are the same. Given space and freedom, they grow in their own way. If you let them, they will develop of their own accord and show you things you’d never have dreamed up in a million years while sitting at a desk following the instructions in a book. Who cares what flavour ice cream they like? What you need to know is how they react when calamity hits.

This is all part of the principle of letting go. Characters that have been nailed together like an Ikea desk will just clank around the place and fall apart at the slightest sign of trouble. What you want are people that readers will spend their time talking about, relating to, and even arguing over.

Arandes Nashima

The best place to start is with Arandes Nashima, the man who leaped out of Amnar five years ago and took over the story, initially very much to my chagrin. When people ask “Who’s your favourite character?” to each other in regard to Amnar, they usually add, “apart from Arandes?”

One of my earliest readers described him as the man who can make a woman orgasm with just a look – from the next room. Yet he’s not just a sleazy womaniser and warrior. There is also the sense that this is a man who knows the mind of God; and that he might even be giving God advice along the way.

Starting out

Arandes has been around since before I could write. The name has always belonged to the man left of centre-stage, the one who has influence, a kind of hidden power that allows him to move the pieces around the board whilst giving the impression of being the perfect servant. Initially, he was more of the Brave Warrior, running into the kind of danger everybody else ran from. It was the draft from five years ago that gave him the chance to break the mould.

It was a chance comment from my proofreader on the first seven chapters. Arandes just swaggered right out of the page. You couldn’t tell if he was good or bad, planning to seduce you or kill you. My former podcast producer considered him not unlike the human form of Greebo, Nanny Ogg’s cat in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. He was rather shocked to discover that Arandes is actually fairly pale haired and taller, although the sleek power fits very nicely.

Allowing him the chance to speak

Letting go of the story would inevitably bring Arandes into the foreground. Although he is the antagonist in The Awakening, as the series unfolds his role deepens and we see something more interesting emerge.

I decided early on in the writing of the first books that it should be impossible for the reader to see anything from Arandes’ perspective. It meant I lost scenes I would really have loved to put in, because I always work from the viewpoint of a character, but it did produce other characters like Vasha, who I’ll discuss in the next part of this series.

Arandes began as just Arandes. It was in Chapter 11 that he suddenly gave himself the epithet Nashima. This caused a moment of pause, and I spent several long walks and then even longer runs working out exactly what the Nashima is, what it means, and why he is the only one. It will lead to some fascinating subplots as the series progresses.

Seen through the eyes of others

As the story progresses, Arandes becomes more and more fascinating because he’s only ever seen through the eyes of others. Much of the deeper relationships are about how different characters react and relate to him. He has become much more of a catalyst for the development of others, while he himself remains a mystery.

I spent and still spend a lot of time watching characters interact in scenes and situations that never make it into the books. Just letting go and daydreaming is one of the most wonderful techniques for character play, whether you do it on the bus, the tram, or while out walking. When they exist outside the boundaries of the story, they are more alive within them.

All of this happened because I generally allowed him to develop in whatever way he wanted to. He took a standard destiny story and twisted it around; the clues to the deeper truths behind Amnar’s state during The Awakening lie in the off-hand remarks he makes and the decisions he takes. It’s one of the major benefits of giving characters the freedom to grow on their own. I make certain decisions, but much of it flows without much conscious input.

In the next post in this series I’m going to look at Vasha, a character who emerged by accident. Once again, it’s an example of what happens when you go with the flow in writing, rather than trying to control everything every minute of the time you’re writing.

Working With Characters

A while ago I was asked how I ‘built’ characters, and whether I based them on people I knew or had known. The latter part of that question is one that every author should probably keep secret, if only to avoid lawsuits, but the former puzzled me slightly. I’ve never gone about building characters, as though they could be designed on a board. I recall when I was quite young (around eleven or so), I took a book out of the library on the subject of writing books and being a writer. It included the suggestion that one should keep index cards of all characters with details of their appearance, interests, behaviour and mannerisms. For a long time my personal possessions included a set of index cards in a box, all of which were empty and incomplete because I spent too much time writing.

I don’t build characters; the only reliable verb I can use is that I ‘meet’ them. My mind treats characters in the same manner that it treats people I know in real life, using a strange combination of colour and shape forms borne out of my having synaesthesia. It’s only rarely that I go back to older manuscripts and find myself wondering “Who the hell are you?” when I encounter a name with which I’m not familiar. I do find myself going back to those manuscripts and feeling as though I’m being re-acquainted with an old friend when somebody walks in that I haven’t worked with for a while.

Characters grow with the story. I’ve always maintained a very loose hold on my writing of Amnar. I know the basic history, and what must happen, but there’s a certain freedom around the detail of certain plot elements. That might sound like it would create a chaotic and unworkable story, but the effect has been astounding. Without really trying I found myself allowing the story to develop of its own accord around the set plot points and building it up into something really special. A number of characters who appeared in 4785: I were meant to be incidental, and only appeared because I needed a specific viewpoint. Yet as I worked with them, they gradually became more and more important until by the later books they were essential and played a crucial role in the story. I keep looking back at the way it worked out and think “I could never have planned that.”

A lot of Amnar has depended on being able to jump forward and back in time, and one of the best parts of that is seeing characters as different stages of their lives. I do need to keep a very accurate check on who did what and when, and how old everybody is, but beyond that, there is something exciting about seeing a character grow up from a child into an adult, or seeing them at an earlier stage of their lives. It’s not so much writing my characters as being involved in their lives.