Kira Nerys

As I keep thinking about character, I keep coming back to Kira Nerys on Star Trek DS9.

She wasn't my favorite character. I was in love with Bashir and wanted to BE Dax, obviously! But Kira is one of the greatest examples of how to write a character of all time, so I wanted to talk about her in more depth.

Kira is a guerilla fighter at the end of a horrific war of occupation. As her enemy finally retreats, a new power steps in to keep the peace. She's understandably a little intense and she doesn't trust these new people, the Federation, any more than she trusted the Cardassians who just left. 

That is A LOT to have preloaded in a character. And we learn it instantly in the first episode, the first minute we meet Kira. We can tell from how she behaves that she's on a hair trigger at all times and has no patience with any softness or nonsense. She gets along with Odo because he was fair and neutral during the occupation. She doesn't like or trust Quark because he's a carpetbagger and war profiteer. 

Every character we write should always come preloaded with things like this. It doesn't have to be negative or painful, but it should be things that do not just define the person but determine how they behave on the day to day.

Sisko is set up beautifully the same way. The pilot to DS9 is an absolute master class in how to introduce characters and how to build them so that their past and present are fully part of everything they do. That work pays off every second of the show that follows. 

Look, I'm building a character who was completely neglected by absentee parents--not unusual for the time period--and raised by the various staff of the property where she grew up. That's going to inform everything she does. She knows a lot of uncommon things for a ten year old Edwardian girl. But she also DOESN'T know a lot of things that others take for granted. How does she feel when she sees parents with small children, cuddling them and cooing? I feel like she might act out in various ways. There are huge holes in her heart, for all the love and care she got from the cook and the groom and all. 

Her background informs everything she does in these stories. She will notice things I wouldn't. She won't notice things I would. Character HAS to include this kind of specificity or the people are blank slates.

I'll try to stay calm about Discovery, but the way those characters had NO backstory and NO traits makes me wild. I'd love to see the show bible. 

For example, writing Tilly as someone who's smart but acts ditsy. I want to know what would make someone that way. She lets things drop about how her mom wanted her to become an officer, but she never wanted that herself. Okay, that's interesting, but how does that make you talk too much and say inappropriate things and be ditsy and childish? 

The thing is, ditsy and childish aren't character traits. They're behaviors. All they gave her was behaviors. The same with Stametts being irritable and rude. Just behaviors. Everything I see in those characters with the exception of Burnham is just behaviors. 

A character should be a full and interesting and complex person with experience that formed them, because there is not one single human on earth or off it who isn't like that. The guy being crabby at the Walmart checkout isn't just being crabby. He got fired earlier that day because he was late to work because the medication he takes for the fused disks in his back made him oversleep, but if he doesn't take it, he won't sleep at all. He injured his back in a car accident avoiding a moose and its baby on the highway and went over an embankment. He's still glad he did it. But it has messed up his life. Every time he sees a mother and a baby, he's glad all over again. He sacrificed himself to save them. But he's also in a lot of pain. And now he's out of work.

Someone who's in pain and crabby about it is INFINITELY more interesting than someone who is just arbitrarily crabby, like Stametts.

Behaviors with no reason for them come across as nonsense. And it's not actually how people work. Someone who is acting like Tilly probably has profound insecurity and feels like she doesn't deserve to be there. Wouldn't that have been a great story to give her? She's brilliant but insecure? She was always the shy one and so people thought she was dumb, so she doubted herself. Fill out that character in interesting ways. But no, when we meet her, she says she's going to be a captain one day. She sounds ambitious. We have no reason not to believe she IS ambitious since we just met her. So her ditsy thing is just jarring--and profoundly unprofessional. Does she really not know how to act on the bridge? Does she actually not have the ability to control what comes out of her mouth??? Those things don't fit with someone ambitious. Honestly I can't imagine anyone graduating from the Academy without the ability to control herself to that degree.

Later (three whole seasons later) we find out that she never wanted to be a captain for herself. It was her mother's ambition for her. But instead of being a satisfying cap to make sense of this character, it means at best that she was self-sabotaging all that time. But we had no way to know that. She just came across as an actual idiot who could not shut up. See how none of the pieces fit together? It was just garbled nonsense, in terms of character. Character has to fit together in a sensible way.

Let alone the incredibly stupid arc where she, an engineering ensign, literally an unqualified person, was made captain for literally no reason at all. I can't even talk about how moronic that was.

A sensible and coherent backstory that immediately informs their every action is so important that it needs to be a rule for every character written. When a character is faced with a choice, what do they do? We only know because we've build in their past and their conflicts and their goals. If we can't tell, or they could do literally anything, then that's a huge problem. 

You don't even need to box yourself in. You can say, "X person has PTSD from their time in Y," without specifying what happened or where or how long or even how long ago it was. Even that helps tell me which way they will react in a crisis.

A former Boston police officer and a mid-career history professor are going to have different attitudes to that drunk and distraught but incoherent 20 year old boy asking them for help. So is a mom with two kids waiting for her at home. So is someone whose teen ran away from home years ago and they've never heard from them since. So is Kira Nerys. I have no idea what Tilly would do because she's not a character. There was an actor with some behaviors. She was an appealing actor so we liked the character. But there's no earthly way to know which way she would jump. 

I really love how there's so much complexity and energy tied up in Kira Nerys and her character. She's angry, she's energetic, she'll tell you to your face if she thinks you're an idiot. She's short-tempered, she's kind, she's religious and devoted to her beliefs. She's utterly capable and fierce. Such a great character. And you know all this in the pilot episode!

Star Trek: Discovery Season Four

The season started out strong, with Michael Burnham making decisions and doing things, which sounds funny to say, but the season suffered greatly from a whole lot of nothing going on. And by that I mean, entire arcs that were about nothing much at all.

Adira, who is a zero as a character anyway, leaves for a while and it doesn't matter and nobody cares. They showed up again and people were like, "Were you gone?" Stametts actually said, "Oh, you're back."

Tilly, someone we loved, suddenly leaves the show, everyone is sad for literally thirty seconds, then nothing.

Dr. Culber gradually realizes he is upset over legitimate things like BEING DEAD and decides to be allowed to be upset. This takes many scenes over many episodes. It reveals nothing. It shows no growth. He was lovely to start with and lovely to end with. Nothing changed in his behavior or choices because of it. 

There is no CHARACTER in any of these characters. Imagine trying to explain one of them to someone: Tilly is, uh, she's funny sometimes and talks too much. That is not a character. Stametts is kind of crabby. THAT is not a character. Saru is...I don't know, tall? An alien fish guy? Culber: sweet guy, used to be dead. Detmer: drives the ship. Even Michael Burnham. Try to explain her character. You can't. She doesn't have one. She's good at getting what she wants? She has a hot boyfriend? People like her? THAT'S NOT A CHARACTER. None of them are actual characters with depth and breadth and issues and enthusiasms and whole entire lives. None of them get beyond a stick figure, in terms of character. 

Book had more character than anyone and he was a late addition, and even then it was almost all in terms of trauma: lost his family, lost his planet. Before that he was interesting because he risked a lot to save endangered species. Hey! A personality trait! That's what I like to see. How come Stamets, Detmer, Saru, Culber, Tilly, and Burnham don't have any of those???

There were vast endless flashbacks to fill in backstory over the guy with the U on his forehead, an absolutely uninteresting character who was not even part of the regular cast. I cannot express how little anyone cares WHY this boring person did what they did. We sure didn't need to spend literally half of an episode on their reasons for doing the things they do. It DOESN'T MATTER. We had this villain for many episodes before that and accepted them just fine without this backstory. Who cares? It adds nothing to anything.

Nobody should need this explained to them, but: trauma is not a personality trait. It's terrible and you have to deal with it, but at most HOW YOU DEAL WITH IT could be a personality trait. Those are things you do. Trauma is just what happens to you, which is never interesting. "I won the lottery," whoop de do. "I had my inheritance stolen by my aunts so I made a million dollars by cheating at cards at their casino." That's interesting. Add "And their syndicate is after me because of it, so I'm becoming a nun in this remote location in Uruguay." Now you have a character and a story. Take that person and put them on your spaceship and things are going to happen, because we know what that person is like, we know what they do when they're in trouble, and we know there is something coming to catch up with them. 

I kind of liked the season a little, not that you can tell from all that, because it was better than the absolute catastrophe at the end of the previous one, but it was so full of endlessly annoying and pointless BAD DRAMA that a lot of it was something to endure rather than enjoy. Like having a friend you love who tells long boring stories. Sometimes you just have to put up with that. 

But it's a tv show, so it really should understand drama better than this. 

Stakes! There should be stakes. EVER. Yes, the giant space bubble had stakes because it might destroy more planets. But it's a giant space bubble that moves around erratically, so how are we supposed to get a handle on it? One thing it utterly lacks is personality, but another thing it lacks is any kind of story direction. 

Say for example the giant space bubble is plowing a path directly toward Earth from the beginning and we keep trying to stop it or redirect it or whatever but nothing works. Stakes, am I right? 

Say Dr. Culber is becoming unable to do his job because of his post-death PTSD. Stakes!

Say Adina is the only one who can manage XYZ whatever so when they go off to settle the literally impossible fake robot with the literally impossible Trill personality, everything falls apart. Stakes!

And Michael Burnham repeatedly--I lost count because it happened so often--does that thing, which I think was supposed to be Kirk-like, maybe, where instead of following all of the advice of everyone with a working brain, she goes off and does this wildly improbable and incredibly dangerous thing while the clock is ticking. And it ALWAYS WORKS OUT. Hi, you just killed all of your stakes, because even I, the queen of suspension of disbelief, get bored with it now. Even I say, "It's going to be fine. It's always fine." NO STAKES.

I can get stressed out reading books I've read many times before, so this is who you've lost. That takes some doing. 

Let's not even get started on throwing away actual astronomical reality with this incredibly stupid "galactic barrier" thing. It doesn't exist. It can't exist. But they had some kind of stupid bubbles and had to ride them through the blah blah blah. Trying to manufacture stakes doesn't work when the thing you made up is so completely not part of reality. Do you think we're all incredibly stupid and uneducated? That's what it feels like.

It's like you just said there's a wall of energy at the edge of the ocean that keeps us from walking into it. It's not there. We all know it's not there. Hi, at the edge of the galaxy, there are fewer stars, and then there are no stars, and that's the end of the galaxy. 

I don't know how people sleep at night who can throw away not only all of the established rules of this fictional universe (I will never get over stupid Gray, who wasn't even a STORY and was so completely impossible every kind of way) but all of the actual huge obvious realities of the real universe. Like, making up technological things is fine, do whatever, it's the future, but the galactic barrier thing really was profoundly insulting to anyone with even the slightest working knowledge of the ACTUAL GALAXY, a thing which you can see from MY DRIVEWAY. 

There's also a major pacing problem. You can't start an episode with these OMG ticking clock emergency oh no things and then pause and spend ten literal human minutes on a slow emotion-based scene which again has no stakes at all. This show does that CONSTANTLY. Who cares if Saru and Vulcan Lady are sharing long looks when Earth is about to explode? It's so tone-deaf, I don't know what to say about it. They simply don't understand pacing in a way I've never seen in a tv show before. You can't drop the energy down to nothing and expect us still to be wired up for the end of the world.

It happens all the time that Michael will be en route to some enormous crisis and stop for a quiet emotional conversation with someone that goes on and on and on. That kills all the energy. Yes, it's a lovely scene, and emotional beats matter, but it's the way they're layered in together that makes for a bewildering and nonsensical sequence of events. 

It's like your meal is a bite of delicious hot lasagna, ten after dinner mints spaced out one per minute, another bite of now warm lasagna, a huge cupcake, two bites of cool lasagna and also a gun is held to your grandmother's head, ten more after dinner mints spaced out one per minute, more stone cold lasagna, some salad, a weird concoction of hot peppers and jello, more cold lasagna, and oh no there's still a gun to your grandmother's head, what will happen??? It's exactly that confusing and chaotic in terms of energy level and stakes and plotting and mixing of things that should not be mixed that way.

So anyway. I was relieved when I finished the season. And I was so excited to see that Stacey Abrams was the president of Earth and possibly also Titan, not quite sure. Maybe the short crabby traitor woman is still the leader of Titan? Who committed terrible crimes but somehow it's okay? Also they kept doing this weird thing with her lipstick where sometimes they'd cover the pink part of her lower lip and sometimes they wouldn't. So slapdash, this show. 

Ultimately, there were some things I liked, but the characters had no direction or inner conflict and the stories had that fatal lack of stakes problem.

Just think for a moment about Kira Nerys. From the first minute of DS9, she was a former guerrilla working to reclaim a space station from a hateful and atrocity-filled occupation that was just ousted. That is SO MUCH BACKSTORY. She has a direction and an attitude and love and anger and so much going on. 

There is not one single character on Discovery that has a hundredth of that energy. Nobody has a direction. Nobody even has a backstory, except formerly dead Dr. Culber, and even that is minimized--people literally tell him he's fine now, so be fine. 

The other show that built great backstory into people was Battlestar Galactica. On top of a massive plot conflict between human and Cylon that drove the entire series, it came preloaded with powerful direction and energy for people. That meant that character drove the stories. 

Without character energy like that, you have nothing. Character has to drive story or you have cardboard cutouts. And when you can't even set up reasonable stakes each episode, you have this.

The point of characters

SPOILERS FOR STAR TREK DISCOVERY

 

 

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

 

 

SO BE AWARE

 

 

 

I'm nearly to the end of the extant Discovery episodes, oh no! I have four left. I probably have to catch up on Nanowrimo today but I'll finish it this week some time. Then on to Strange New Worlds, I guess, though I just sighed and looked up and to the left in exasperation IN ADVANCE because I've been seeing gifs and stills of a very stupid episode on Tumblr in which the ship gets transformed into a children's book.

I can't even express how much I hate that kind of premise. It's not cute. It's not charming. It's stupid and annoying. It's just to get the cast into fun outfits and out of their comfort zone, from what I can tell. It feels so utterly condescending and hateful. Like you think viewers will eat any old garbage, so give them garbage. Or worse, you think the viewers are such idiots that they will like this. 

It takes me out of suspension of disbelief entirely. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

So anyway, I guess that's up next, since this is Star Trek and Star Wars summer, if I ever get done with the existing Star Trek and go on to Star Wars. 

I loved the episode I saw of Discovery last night so much, even though it was a super trite premise: away team has to acquire X object, must go into some sketchy underworld and fight and play cards to win it. I'm yawning just thinking about it. There's an episode of every sci-fi show where they do this. There's a bad one or two in Agents of SHIELD. There's a bad one in EVERYTHING. So I was scowling and looking around for other things to do while it rolled on by.

But then! The writing on it! It was absolutely hilarious, came at everything from funny and unexpected angles, turned every expectation upside down, played very fun games with us and the characters. I was so delighted! I went and found the writer and followed him on Twitter. I was CHARMED. I was DELIGHTED. That's especially hard to do when I'm braced for dread that way. 

I laughed out loud. Do you know how hard it is to make me laugh out loud? I'm a stoic hermit type person these days. I talk only to the dog, as a rule. And to Duolingo, in Norwegian. I speak much more Norwegian out loud than English these days. 

And! It's so great to see actors like Sonequa Martin-Green and David Ajala given amazing twisty turny emotional angles to act, mostly during that card game, which could have been deadly otherwise. There were layers upon layers. Martin-Green in particular is an absolutely world-class actor given almost nothing to work with most of the time, so this was hilarious and awesome. Ajala is also astonishingly good and usually given like three colors to use instead of a whole palette. 

There was an odd Tig scene where she was not given anything funny to do, which is so bizarre. Why waste her on a dumb flat scene? She seemed annoyed too, honestly. I like how Tig can't hide her emotions. Just like me.

They're writing out that super boring (and completely implausible) boyfriend guy. Seriously, they extracted the memories of a former Trill host from the symbiont and put them into a synthetic body??? Idiotic. I hope they write out the super boring and pointless character of Adina, who seriously has no purpose whatsoever on the show and is an equally idiotic premise, a human host for a Trill symbiote. Maybe if they get rid of her, we can have Tig back much more. Stay on Trill! Never come back! 

This all makes me think of the POINT of characters, their use and role in storytelling, which is something Discovery does very poorly, to be frank. They don't seem to know what they're doing in terms of telling a story using an ensemble. Witness all the useless undeveloped bridge crew. It feels like someone who thinks nobody else but them has a full and vivid life. They do! Nobody is actually background in real life! Everyone is the star of their own show!

That to me seems like an emotionally stunted or unsocialized person. And I say that as someone who only lives with a dog and again, speaks Norwegian much more than anything else, and that's to my phone. 

Okay, what's the purpose of characters? They should each play a role in the storytelling. They should each be on the road somewhere. Everyone should have a story they're working out. But also they should be part of the LARGER story. So with Discovery, that would be something like: how do we deal with loss, how do we accomplish our goals in this new world, how do we make new lives here? Discovery's goal this season should be finding its place in the new world. They're doing that some? But to make it work fully, each character should be making new connections.

Ways they ARE doing that: stupid Adina, who's from the new era but you'd never know it, lovely Book, who's from the new era and connects with Burnham and has a whole developed backstory at least, and this Vulcan woman who is president of the planet or something and likes Saru. That's all relationshippy stuff, except Adina, who as I mentioned is nothing. The ship has new technology. Otherwise? It's the same show as before. I think that's very odd.

I think things will be different in a thousand years in so many ways. New food and new media, just for instance. Hey, have the crew get into those things. Whole new ideas about life! New philosophies, new religions. 

The one woman with the breathing tubes, Dahl? I don't know her name. She's not a regular. She went off and found the descendants of her family, something EVERYONE should have done. I'd have done it immediately, first thing. I want to know what happened to everyone! What did they do for work? Did they have families? What did the families do? Where did they live? How is this not a huge throughline of this season? Everyone should be trading stories. Oh yeah, my sister/brother's descendants moved to X planet and started a freaky new religion entirely based on avocados. Your family and my family were on opposite sides of a war we're just learning about and are mortal enemies. I don't know, something! 

Again, it feels emotionally stunted. How can only one person do that? Did Burnham ever look up what happened to Spock? We know the end of that story, so she should, too, depending on which universe this is in, old Trek or new Trek. (That's a whole thing. And I get why they don't want to get into it. But she could say: Yeah, it's extremely surprising, or something. ACKNOWLEDGE it. We JUST left Spock.)

A thousand years is a whole lot of generations, I know. But wouldn't you want to know? How long did so and so live? What ever happened with that show I was watching? Even if you find out you will never get to see the end of whatever show, that would be a thing. This is LOSS. This is what matters in life. 

Think about moving to Norway. What would you miss? What if communications go down? What would you want to find out? I'd be going nuts trying to find out about my siblings and niece and nephews. Even if I got Rip Van Winkled I'd want to find out the answers. 

I don't think they're dealing with that curiosity and grieving process properly. This is a whole show focused on trauma and they're ignoring that major trauma. Essentially everyone lost everyone but each other. That has to be so utterly distressing and we're seeing none of it.

Give someone a small child living with their partner back on Earth, my goodness. Imagine them combing the archives, trying to find ancient records, coming up with a picture from Ancient Instagram where they were eating pie on the fourth of July. Try to explain to a modern times person what those rituals were about way back then and feel that distance and loss. 

Oh, we all used to listen to these songs at the winter solstice holidays. No, we didn't like them, but we played them anyway. We'd have missed them if we didn't play them. Can I sing one? Sure. And burst into tears singing a Christmas carol. Or a ubiquitous tv ad everyone knows. 

So much wasted opportunity, while we're just chasing the not very interesting Big Bad. It's a bubble thing. It's just a bubble. Not a lot of personality. But then, not boring and stupid like the Orion lady with the poorly fitting pants and the constantly shifting accent, so that's a plus.

Oh, right, the point of characters. Well, they should have a point, is my point. 

As I'm building the world of my current novel, I'm thinking a lot about this. Right now I have three main characters, one of whom is nearly always off-stage, and seven who are in the main character's past, though I want to bring them over and establish them as part of the team. So that might solve the problem. You need more than two, even if it's a mystery solving duo.

Consider the Lord Peter books. Early on you had Lord Peter, Bunter, and Charles Parker, then added Gerald and Mary and the Dowager Duchess, then of course added Harriet Vane. But that's pretty much the only recurring characters. Young Gerald, later. And some of Peter's friends, like the Honorable Freddy. I think the Chief Inspector, right?

But in any given book, there are only a small handful of important recurring characters. 

This is helping me see who I need to add. The aunt should have young but connected friends from university. Her best friend and roommate. The boy she likes or liked. And her mentor. That's plenty right there, but she can have a million friends all over the country she can call on when she's in a pickle.

This is all making me rise up above my story and think about the point of the stories I'm telling. Solving a mystery seems so straightforward, but you're always making SOME point when you do it. Every character has a meaning even if you don't want them to--especially if you don't want them to. How do you think we feel about Rhys and Bryce, two utterly generic characters who don't even talk most of the time, one Asian and one black, getting pushed to the background and not even given any personality traits? That tells us something, even if you don't want it to. 

I want everyone in my stories to have their own agendas and journeys they're on. Nobody is fully formed unless they do. Even if we just get a glimpse of it, it's there and it makes them pop into 3D. 

Here's how terrible I am. I used to drive ride share so I'd meet a LOT of people briefly. They are not always good at showing you the depth and breadth of their rich and complex lives in ten minutes of small talk, but that doesn't mean it's not there. But I have vivid memories of people saying they were madly in love with someone they met online, then showing me a picture of someone. This is why I'm terrible: I was always like, how did you two even pick each other out of all the other people, when there's nothing to make you stand out? 

But that's because I didn't get the full picture, see what I mean? (I still think it's a terrible thing to think even in passing and I'm really not proud of myself.) But THAT is exactly what you're doing with fiction if you don't give them full lives and backstories and character traits. You're making people generic, when NOBODY is generic. 

Give someone a passion for growing yellow tulips, jeez. Give them homebrewing such that they're always trying to get you to try their terrible or interesting or delicious beer or wine. How do they feel about puzzles and word games? Think of Riker and his trombone. That's such a funny character trait to give someone! Or someone had a leg replaced after a shark attack when they were a boneheaded youth and it aches when the weather changes. (Not really relevant on a spaceship.) But don't you want to know how they got into that situation? Were they being reckless? Were they saving a child or dog? Were they not listening to the warnings? Were they entranced by angel fish? Were they arguing with their brother while the warnings were given out? Every one of those options is character and gives us insight into which way they'll jump when things get rough. 

I just watched a video of someone making fancy lampshades by hand. I love that! Give someone that trait. I think I'm going to, actually. Or making complicated birdcages by twisting and curling copper wire. Amazing. Also tricky to give away, or else in great demand and bringing in a lot of money. Maybe they want to collect a spoon from every planet they visit. It's becoming a problem, so they have to store crates of them in other people's quarters. (Nobody on spaceships has enough stuff, if you ask me. Humans have pack rat tendencies. Surely other species as well.) We're also by nature fiddlers, so we knit or tinker or carve or build ships in bottles. 

I met a guy who was finishing a cross-country bike trip who was also editor of a poetry journal. 

Ugh, people are so complicated. I like sci-fi tv but have to knit while I watch it. I study Norwegian and have a weird collection of cobalt blue glass. (And cobalt blue everything.) Why are their three statues of the Virgin Mary on my desk, when I'm not religious? Wait, one is St. Clare of Assisi, patron saint of television. What's with all the bunnies? What's with the obsession with metamorphic migmatites? Give your character a fascination with certain geological formations. Everything enriches a character. They hate spiders! They love bees! They love spiders and hate ants! They memorize poetry and put it to music!

Even Spock played that Vulcan harp thing and 3D chess. Bashir played tennis growing up. Sisko loves baseball and cooking. I wish I knew even one thing Michael Burnham liked to do in her down time. We caught a glimpse of Owosekun doing pullups in the gym and suddenly knew infinitely more about her than in nearly four seasons of sitting there on the bridge. 

Owosekun's purpose thus far was to fill a spot on a standard Starfleet bridge. What I'm saying is that is NOT ENOUGH. A character isn't there just to do a literal job. They should be doing a job IN THE STORY. Supposing this is Michael Burnham's story, sure, okay, but then Owosekun is her best friend, or her workout partner, or they each try to solve Redactle before the other one.

Being the person who says "No, do it the other way" is not enough, either. Ugh, I hate that Dahl has more of a backstory than Owosekun. I'm mad on Owosekun's behalf. And we do know little bits of things about her, that she grew up in a Luddite community, that she was a pearl diver, but she needs a PURPOSE in the narrative and a GOAL of her own, as well as being part of the ongoing story, which she isn't--she's just there for it. 

By the way, they replaced Bryce (I think--the black guy) with a different but very similar looking man. It made your face-blind correspondent quite agitated because I wasn't sure if I was just not recognizing him. But no, it was a whole different guy. WHY MAKE HIM LOOK SO SIMILAR? That's not just cruel to the face-blind, it makes it seem like he's interchangeable. The way he's written, he totally is, but that's not how we treat people, not in fiction or in reality. Come on!

It's a type of storytelling that really bothers me. And it bothers me on the level of thinking that people you meet for ten minutes are boring. (Still mad at myself, yep.) It's reductive and simplistic and cheap and even cruel. Because if you think people you don't know aren't interesting, you're guilty of thinking you're the only main character in this narrative, which is selfish and egotistical and even narcissistic. That's not a good way to tell stories--or run a society. It's the root of a lot of what's wrong with our culture today. It's a bigger problem than how Owosekun and Bryce and Rhys are written.

Maybe the purpose of characters is not just to fill in space, but to be facets of a full and well-developed life. To bring other elements to the table. To remind all of us that we don't exist in a vacuum, that other points of view exist and are valid and important, that everyone is equally important.

Character

What makes a character interesting and memorable to begin with? It's worthwhile to take time to think about our own favorite characters and what worked so well with them. What makes Elizabeth Bennet so memorable?

Someone (Jacob?) said that the best characters are fundamentally good people in impossible situations, which might be what makes her character work so well. She's intelligent and interesting and sarcastic, but in an impossible position in which she HAS to find a husband from among these extremely unpromising options, with the added handicap of her embarrassing mother and annoying younger sisters. Look at her choices. Mr. Collins is atrocious! Yet we see Charlotte accept his proposal, simply because she has to. Elizabeth also has to, but doesn't. Everything that happens in the novel makes her situation worse and worse, adding pressure to her already precarious life. Yet she still rejects Darcy's first proposal. She has the strength of her convictions even in the face of probable destitution if her father dies. That's an amazing character!

Take a person with convictions and put them into an impossible situation where those convictions are challenged. 

Not to fixate on Star Trek: Discovery, but it started in the pilot with exactly this type of situation. Michael Burnham was faced with two options and had to make an impossible choice. Commit mutiny and maybe save the Federation from a war with the Klingons, or follow her captain's orders and allow the war to happen. As it turned out, she committed the mutiny but the captain woke up and overruled her and so both bad results took place. Amazing!

I was so pleased with that beginning. Season Four seems to be back on track with that kind of thing.

Character is about the choices the person makes. That's it. It's not about what your past or your potential or your future or what you might have done or would do. It's about choices in the here and now. 

Character is the choice a person makes when they face a conflict. I suspect we all have our own patterns because that's what character means, the ways a person tends to jump when there's a crisis.

In a crisis, do they tend to:

• run away
• panic
• hide
• back the stronger side
• switch sides
• delay a decision
• make a decision then change it
• overthink
• act rashly
• blame others
• blame their past
• blame their current circumstances
• distract themselves
• focus on irrelevancies
• dismiss the concerns of others
• save themselves over all others
• plan ten steps ahead before making a move
  
• distract others
  
• try to change the conversation
• make it about the accuser instead
• fight
• worry about others who are weaker or can't defend themselves
• follow the rules
• find a loophole
• jump from one option to another
• sit still and think
• ask for advice
• tell others what to do
• resort to violence
• argue points
  

It's uncomfortable to look at these about ourselves, but it's fascinating to look at them with a fictional character, especially if you're just building one. These patterns determine what kind of person this is, which determines which choice they will make when things get tough. And what do they do after they make that choice?

I know my move is always to flee a crisis. Flight! Breaking character traits broadly down to fight or flight is a useful place to start, it's true. If there's a bad situation, I want to get out of it. I don't want to talk it out or resolve things or negotiate. I want to run. It's so bad that I pack when I'm extremely stressed. It's like there's a list of options and only one of them is in hundred point font, so I can't even see the others.

I'm not sure that's a sympathetic trait. Well, I assume I'm a fundamentally good person--who doesn't?--but when I'm in an impossible situation, running away is pretty unsympathetic, as well as being psychologically iffy. 

I've never seen Runaway Bride, as I will avoid anything to do with weddings, but I can't imagine it's a very sympathetic character if she's constantly setting people up for emotional devastation that also embarrasses them in front of everyone they care about and wastes thousands of dollars. Not to mention the catering. Well, I suppose the guests can still eat that. Does she invite her family and friends every time? Who would keep on showing up? Are there bridesmaids? Maybe I should watch this thing, just to answer some questions I have. But I will hate it.

I might not be a sympathetic character in general, now that I think about it. Independent to the point of it being pathological, self-contained, focused on my own work to the exclusion of all else, impatient with other people's nonsense, full of panic and terror all the time, and of course ready to move three thousand miles away for no apparent reason. I mean, I will joyously come help you move furniture or paint things or do whatever needs doing, especially if it involves power tools or machinery of some kind. Or my cute little 4'x8' trailer. But I almost never ask for help and I assume the answer is no so I don't ask anyone to do anything fun. (In my defense, the answer is always no.) Is that a sympathetic character?

One way we know how to feel about characters is by how others treat them, which obviously is a self-fulfilling and circular situation. It's ugly, but we assume people are being treated the way they deserve. If nobody hangs out with someone, we assume there's a good reason. In fiction, we take our cues about someone by how others treat them.

I'm still moved by how characters on Discovery would join someone who was being ostracized and sitting alone in the cafeteria. That is a perfect example of others treating someone the way others are treating them, then someone breaking that pattern. (It's Tilly. Tilly is SUCH a good and kind person.) And then others join them and the person is part of the group again.

Characters are what they do. That's the tricky part about thinking we're good people, right? Are you a good person if you don't actually do anything good? That's a kite that's not up in the sky. How can we tell? We can't. Imagine it as something more tangible, like DOING good. Have you done anything good lately?

So characters have to DO in order to BE. 

I get why Elizabeth Bennet is sarcastic and snarky about people. I get why she makes fun of this snooty jerk who said rude things about her at the dance. I find it highly relatable. She's punching up! She has nothing and is mocked by this rich asshole. Who wouldn't want to make fun of him in private? It's not the most sympathetic action, though. Being mean never is. It's understandable but not sympathetic. It almost makes me retroactively think she deserves the mean comments he made. They're both mean! Why would I like them?

But we do, because we can relate to being unkind out of paralyzing social anxiety, or injured pride, or any of a million reasons that we think are absolutely great reasons for doing the thing we did. 

Character is the choice a person makes when they face a conflict.

Character, conflict, choice, consequences. That's everything that makes up every story ever. 

Do you pick up the gold ring you find on the floor in the store? And what do you do with it after that? That choice presents a conflict. Which way the character jumps tells us everything about them. And that choice leads to consequences. Do you keep the ring? Do you wear it out and about? Do you give it to someone who was despondent and turn their life around? Do you try to sell the ring? If so, what if it's recognized and now you're wanted for robbery? Or does the money save your house? Do you give it to someone else, who then wears it around, where it gets recognized, so they get accused of stealing it? Do you give it to the store manager, who denies having it when the person who lost it asks, then gets all sorts of trouble from that? Or they get a promotion and move to the big city?

I had to go back and insert all those positive outcomes. I tend to imagine only terrifying scenarios. It's something I'm working on. See, unsympathetic! Oh no!

I can't stress enough how much ACTIONS are who a character is and determine how we feel about them. Definitely not what they say they are. In fact, someone who insists on who they are is nearly always wrong. "I'm a good person!" is something someone says when the evidence is stacking up against them to demonstrate that they aren't. Maybe they are, but if it were obvious, they wouldn't need to argue for it. 

Or maybe events are piling up against them, through no fault of their own. I tend to find that extremely sympathetic, but it's not good drama, when things *happen to* someone, versus when they are making choices of their own. Victimhood is not interesting. Choices are interesting. So if bad things happen, how the person tackles that is what makes them a sympathetic character. Complaining and feeling put upon are never, ever sympathetic, even when they're absolutely justified. (Oh no, do I complain too much? This discussion is making me self-conscious, yet another unsympathetic trait.) (It would be hilarious to change my life because I'm afraid I'm an unsympathetic character.)

Elizabeth Bennet has such a profoundly excellent character situation. She's in a bad situation not of her own making (the family, the desperate need to marry for financial stability, the poverty) and has to accomplish a goal in order to solve it. She has character traits that actively hinder her accomplishment of that goal. She has to overcome both inner traits and external obstacles to get where she needs to be. 

Just being in a bad situation alone is never enough to make someone sympathetic. In fact, as discussed above, we tend to think people deserve what happens to them, so it has to be extremely clear that they didn't get into that situation by themselves or it makes them even less sympathetic. 

To take a totally unfair example, imagine someone with an abusive husband. All we think is: get out of there! People say every time, "Why doesn't she just leave him?" Obviously it's not that easy. Emotional abuse is profoundly damaging and there are often crucial financial reasons and dependents and other factors. That person *could* leave, but they *can't* leave. We tend not to see that as a sympathetic character necessarily because we focus on what we would do to solve it, instead of what that person in that situation can and can't do to get out of the situation. It's not easy (for anyone but me, apparently) to leave their entire life behind. And I take a 26 foot Penske truck when I go. 

There are great stories about abused partners who claim there are bedbugs or say they're having a yard sale and bag up all their stuff and put it in the garage, then flee in the night. Imagine if even looking like you're packing will get you beaten up. How do you leave? Often these people end up with literally just the clothes they're wearing. No money, nothing, and the knowledge that a terrifying monster is out there willing and able to hurt or kill them if they are found. That leaves out going to family or anywhere familiar, too. 

I find that incredibly sympathetic, personally, but I know that situation brings out a lot of "why don't they just" or "they never should have" reactions. Those are tricky when we're writing a character who we want to be sympathetic. It's much better when our reactions are more like, "Yes, go go go!" or "Look out, he's coming home!" 

Incidentally, I just realized how to improve the beginning of my favorite of my novels. Right in the beginning, add a strong choice the character makes that sets her up to be much more sympathetic. 

I always picture someone on the high dive. Have you ever backed away and climbed back down the ladder? I sure have. I couldn't make myself do it. Everyone was cheering me on but I was much too scared. I did eventually get myself to go back up there and jump off. Big steps are scary! We all want you to do the thing! What does it take, though? What's the crucial thing that makes you able to take that step?

In this novel, in the first sentence, the character *considers* dropping out of college. If I change it to *decides,* it's infinitely stronger. It's a choice, not just a thought. It's something she's doing to do. She just has to figure it out. It's not a coincidence that I keep talking about how people leave controlling situations. This character is in one, rigidly controlled and constantly monitored by phone calls, always put in the wrong no matter what she does, not allowed to work or have any money, and so on. 

Again, we tend to think people deserve the situations they're in. It's unfair, but it's true. We have to see her taking steps to change things if we want to find her sympathetic. Just like Elizabeth Bennet, out there at the dance and trying her best, with her mother being loud and embarrassing and her sisters being terribly pious, excessively flirty, or singing like a cat getting its shots at the vet. She's taking action! She's trying to do the thing! And so we're on her side.

This character is facing a conflict, but as it stands, isn't making a choice. She has to make that choice and try to do the thing, otherwise we don't find her sympathetic. 

Character, conflict, choice, consequences.

 

Comma plus and

I really hate comma plus and.

It's not a comma splice. A comma splice is two independent clauses joined by a comma, forming a fused sentence. Grammatically incorrect.

Comma plus and is used in grammatically correct but horribly awkward and awful ways. 

I have strong feelings about this. My feelings are that this is very bad writing. So don't do it. Now I will explain why.

Every time I read my beloved Murderbot books, especially the beginning of the first novel, I get smacked in the face with so many comma plus and constructions. I really want everyone to stop doing this.

There are good reasons. Connections between ideas should be more than just a plus sign, primarily. In fiction, the connections between ideas generally range from something like because to something like although. In other words, there are causal connections, not just a plus b plus c.

Authors Joan Aiken and Ursula K. LeGuin, arguably my fiction parents, both have said versions of this in their works about writing. To paraphrase:

The king died and then the queen died is not a story. 

The king died and then the queen died of grief IS a story. Because there's a causal connection between those two things. 

I had to learn this the hard way in a larger plotting sense in my writing. Several entire novels consisted of events happening, with no drive to them. It was only when I started writing the main character making choices that drive the action that I began to have a narrative drive to the stories. 

Elsewhere I will talk about character, conflict, choice, and consequences. But it's the same sense that I'm talking about here on the sentence level. We can't just have a sequence of events. We have to see things driving other things. 

The first sentence of Martha Wells's All Systems Red is a master class in excellent story set-up:

"I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites."

I get a little squirmy when sentences tell events out of order, to be honest. I want things to be in order. But it's not a requirement. I just always dislike sentences that go out of time order, like, "Before I went to the car, I fell down the front steps." I want that to be something like: "I fell down the front steps on the way to the car."

That first sentence goes b then a then c. But I understand wanting to put the quite eye-catching "mass murderer" part up front. Of course, anyone could be a mass murderer any time, so what was holding this person back? What is a governor module? We are instantly engaged and interested and curious. We know a whole lot about Murderbot by the way the sentence ends, with the entertainment feed. 

By the way, if you give me directions out of order that way, I will be completely confused. Before you walk the dog, take the compost to the compost pile and rinse out the bowl, but when you come back make sure you don't spill any lettuce seeds, but first go next door and see if they have the newspaper. These are the ravings of a disordered mind! 

If you keep things in chronological order, then we can drive the narrative forward even on the sentence level, with actions causing consequences, not the other way around. 

The first few pages of All Systems Red are full of comma plus and in a way that drives me wild when I read it. 

First of all, you don't need that comma if you're connecting two things that actually should be connected. Wells leaves it out when the two thoughts go together. On page two, there's a fine example of this: "I was looking at the sky and mentally poking at the feed when the bottom of the crater exploded." Nobody would ever use a comma there because those two things are happening at the same time and belong together. 

Here's where it gets messy: "I dragged Bharadwaj out of its mouth and shoved myself in there instead, and discharged my weapon down its throat and then up toward where I hoped the brain would be." In my ebook, it's on page three. 

The first part, before the comma, is terrific. But then why do we have a comma plus and next? It's because this sentence is a string of pearls.

I dragged

I shoved

I discharged my weapon

I discharged my weapon up

I understand that the point is to create a rapid-fire sequence of events, but it just becomes awkward. That is too many ands in one sentence. To improve it, I'd use other coordinating conjunctions besides just and all the time. Break it into two sentences or connect it with one of those lovely words that drive the motion forward, like then. There are a lot of words called "adverbs of time," a beautiful term. There's a list here, but the main point is, PLUS does not drive the action forward.

It reminds me of how I eat sometimes. My friend has accused me of eating ingredients. I'm sure I gave her a blank look and kept eating plain carrots, then plain bread, then whatever else was in front of me. I can't be hungry and plan simultaneously.

A string of pearls doesn't do the job as well as connections that drive the motion forward.

I like the first part: "I dragged Bharadwaj out of its mouth and shoved myself in there instead," but I would then just break it there and make a new sentence. "I discharged my weapon down its throat then up toward where I hoped the brain would be." It's still utilitarian and not fancy, but it's sequential thoughts. 

Notice that those events in the first part do not happen at the same time or as part of the same movement as those in the second part. If they were all part of the same movement, I might be okay with it. Like this: "I fell down the chute and tried to brace my legs, but scraped them painfully against the rough surface." You're doing those things simultaneously.  

That's the ultimate point of AND when it joins these things. Those things should be happening at the same time. When comma plus and is used over and over to show sequence, it comes across as severely lacking in forward motion. Or misunderstanding that plus does not equal then.

Does one action cause the next? Say so. Does one event require the next? Say that. 

Plenty of times we do multiple things at the same time but it's still super boring. "I sat on the couch and watched tv and ate carrots and drank tea." That might be factually accurate, but it's going NOWHERE. Who cares? You are so boring. You are stuck in an eternal boring present.

Much more interesting: "I sat on the couch watching tv while I ate carrots and thought about whether to bake shepherd's pie later." That person has a future. Sure, they're still eating ingredients, but at least there's a shepherd's pie in the future. And there IS a future. That has motion to it. 

Comma plus and puts everything into an eternal static present. It's a pile of rocks. 

Every event in fiction should drive you on to the next event. It has to have narrative motion or we're just sitting there. The same holds true on the grammatical sentence level. 

There are more instances of and that I would like to kill in these first few pages, even some without commas, like this one:

"Another burst of commands from the governor module came through and I backburnered it without bothering to decode them."

I hate that. Why is that and there? Destroy. Break into two sentences. Or use a semicolon. Or use but which is much more interesting. But tells you there's a conflict between two things, where and just says both exist, which tells us nothing. 

"Another burst of commands from the governor module came through, but I backburnered it without bothering to decode them."

MUCH BETTER.

This one is fine, but would  be better as but:

"I was far less vulnerable in this situation than he was and I wasn't exactly having a great time either."

Kill the following comma plus and with extreme prejudice. (We could discuss the having managed construction another time.) It should be two sentences:

"The feed was quiet now, Mensah having managed to use her leadership priority to mute everything but MedSystem and the hopper, and all I could hear on the hopper feed was the others frantically shushing each other."

 "The feed was quiet now. Mensah had used her leadership priority to mute everything but MedSystem and the hopper. All I could hear on the hopper feed was the others frantically shushing each other."

This one is fine because it furthers the point instead of just being a pointless plus sign:

"They don't give murderbots decent education modules on anything except murdering, and even those are the cheap versions."

Partly you can tell the good ones from the bad ones because NOBODY would ever say the bad ones out loud. We simply don't use comma plus and this way in spoken English. Nobody ever does or ever will. Try saying all the bad examples out loud and you'll see. They don't make sense with how we think or speak. That's the crucial way to tell if you're doing it right or wrong. Say it out loud. Comma plus and will always sound extremely awkward and tacked on. 

In summary, death to comma plus and and any and that is just functioning as a plus sign instead of being a sensible connection between two simultaneous or otherwise essentially connected ideas that drive narrative motion forward. 

Use other words! Use words that mean things. But, then, except, unless, because, although, while, but instead, but unfortunately, so many more. And don't be afraid of breaking things into separate sentences. If you find yourself using comma plus and that's almost always a sign those things don't really belong together anyway.