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I will probably regret this ... but, feeling crotchety, I wrote an essay on characterization today. Blame malaz reddit, and reading yet again those comments saying, in effect, that 'Erikson can't do characterization.' Normally, and for more years than I care to count, I've let those comments pass. But my present mood is sour, so I thought: fuck it. I mean, if you were wearing my skin, wouldn't you do the same? Eventually? When you're just tired of it all? Okay, maybe it's just me then. Whatever.
Here's the essay:
Pass the Pablum
Character-Building in Fiction
Steven Erikson
Remember when you were a baby? Me neither. But at some stage we all went through a period when we were sat down in some kind of highchair, and this spoon full of mush would magically appear in front of our eyes, and then still magically zoom in to meet our mouths, and we’d yum-yum our way through another meal, at least until we were full or had spat it all back up (which, we discovered, was always good for a laugh or two). Yeah, it was easy. We didn’t have to do a damned thing to get fed. No effort at all.
Eventually, of course, some new parts of our brain kicked in and we became determined to feed ourselves, our first expression of true freedom, often demonstrated by smearing food all over our faces. Because this thing, this act of feeding oneself, had to be learned. But then, once it was learned, we reaped the rewards. Specifically: deciding that since we really hated broccoli, we just weren’t going to eat it anymore. Freedom meant the ability to decide things, to discriminate, to assert the sanctity of oneself.
Since the publication of Gardens of the Moon, I’ve been the target of readers and fans of the fantasy genre delivering the judgement, usually in ‘it’s-so-obvious-there’s-no-point-in-even-arguing’ tones, that I’m weak on characterization. World-building? Check? Plotting? Check. Ability-to-Write? Check. But characters? Nah, he’s weak. They’re thin, shallow, barely there.
And if I were to dare counter such statements, saying what I really, really want to say, I will be accused of being arrogant, dismissive, diffident and possibly even defensive. What do I really, really want to say? Well it’s this: if you can’t see characterization in my writing, the fault isn’t mine, it’s yours. If I couldn’t do characterization, tens of thousands of readers wouldn’t ball their eyes out when one of those characters dies, would they? So, which side’s right? You, or those tens of thousands? What are they getting that you aren’t? And why, oh why, do you automatically assume the problem’s with me, not you?
Naturally, you’re superior to those tens of thousands when it comes to being a discriminating reader of fantasy fiction. That goes without saying, right? But might I humbly suggest that, in fact, those tens of thousands are superior in their ability to read literature compared to you. How well does that sit?
There are myriad ways of comprehending character in fiction as a reader, but a lot depends on where the reader is at in terms of what they’ve learned (and to cut them some slack, most education systems do rather poorly in this area). At its most basic level of distinction: you are either spoon-fed or expected to feed yourself. The former might well be what you’re used to; the latter takes effort, work, thinking and learning. I would argue that the rewards are worth it. You, of course, are welcome to argue the opposite. It’s down to individual choice.
Just don’t sit in that highchair pronouncing that I don’t know how to do characterization.
And now, as predicted, out come the accusations: Erikson is so arrogant! Well, try stepping into my shoes, since I’ve devoted my life to the business of storytelling. What you call arrogance is in fact my frustration. Has it not occurred to you, even once, that your pronouncement on my ability to do characterization is in itself supremely arrogant? Or that your judgement is also dismissive, all the more irritating because you use it so casually, and rarely if ever defend it?
More to the point, the bulk of what follows in this essay will be about characterization, and while it is mostly intended for beginning writers, readers are welcome to read on. I know, I know, the anti-Erikson ‘bad characterization’ crowd have already left their seats, all their prejudices about Erikson happily confirmed. But I remain an optimist. Who knows, maybe one or two is actually intrigued, enough to stick around.
Okay, rant over. I have held off on making it for over twenty years, but I’m getting old, wearing thin just about everywhere. There’s a fucking pandemic out there and we are collectively failing to do the right thing to mitigate its spread. The world sucks right now, and some snarling version of myself just decided to let loose on those ‘bad-characterization’ Erikson-haters.
My good friend, the SF author, Robert Sawyer, once told me a story where someone came up to him and said: ‘Science fiction – I just don’t get it.’ To which, in classic Sawyer fashion, he replied ‘I’m sorry it goes over your head.’ I admire balls like that, and at times I think, we authors don’t do that enough. Hold our ground in that in-your-face way. (Rob, if you’re reading this, I’m sure I mangled that exchange, though I think the message came across, nevertheless. Feel free, however, to correct me.)
For the purposes of examining characterization, I’m going to offer up a couple examples. The first version will be an introduction of a character in an expositional block, bereft of any in-story point-of-view. I’ll make it up off-the-cuff, so here goes:
Eleese was tall and willowy, fair-skinned with long, wavy blonde hair. Her large blue eyes were set in a heart-shaped face. She was now twenty years old, the middle child but the youngest still living, since her little sister’s death a year ago. That death, so unexpected, so unfair, had come as a shock to her, and she often wished that like her older sister, she had been far away on that day, rather than finding herself all-too-close in the moment of sudden tragedy. Each and every day since, she had seen how the grief battered at her mother and father, and the renewed attention they lavished upon her, at times suffocating, made perfect sense. But it wasn’t helping, not at all, because Eleese had her own emotions to deal with, a dark, swirling inner world where grief blended with guilt and a dozen other things she could not even name. Each day at the estate, as the summer wore on, she would find herself walking the same path, arriving at the very place where her little sister had breathed her last breath. This was no welcome ritual, yet it had trapped her, bound her into making the same steps, the same decisions, the same choices. On this day she wore the same dress she had been wearing back then, on that dark afternoon when storm-clouds gathered, and the air grew febrile and tense. Folds of blue silk flowed like water around her lithe form, slipped like caresses along her forearms. An uneasy wind sifted through the trees to either side of the trail where it led down to the old pond with its ring of crooked pavestones, brushing her face as if bearing the memories of that storm a year past. Two steps behind her walked her maid, Brianth; shorter, wider, her face plain and her expression one of weary patience. How many times would they have to make this journey, she wondered? How many times would they act out repeating the scene of a year ago? And now that blue dress, again, flowing all around her mistress. She herself wore plainer garb, as befitted a servant. A tunic of rough undyed linen bearing lighter patches where she had scrubbed too hard to remove stains, the hems frayed, her feet bare. She had grown up in Eleese’s shadow, often ghostlike in her faint presence, floating like a pair of eyes hovering in a barely seen slip of fog. This was her life’s role, here in the shadows, and she expected to follow it through the years until some natural calamity befell her. They reached the pond’s edge.
If this in your mind constitutes decent, or at least recognizable, characterization as you might find in a standard fantasy novel, you might be right. Problem is, it’s weak characterization. It’s pablum. It’s the magical spoon filling your mouth with mush. Unfortunately, this version shows up a lot in fantasy fiction. In an Iowa Writer’s Workshop class, where ‘literature’ is the goal, it would probably get you eviscerated, and with good reason. It’s over-written, handed to you on a platter of detail, the physical mixed up with the emotional, background info jammed in with setting descriptives, and written in a style that takes everything at face value. Having said all that, I might actually be over-critical. When I wrote it, I had in my mind a heavy expositional block and we sort of arrived at that. But in other aspects, I couldn’t help myself. Even employing an omniscient point of view, I started slipping stuff in. Accordingly, there’s some lines in that example that I might well keep. But in a more general sense, no, it’s gotta go.
Let’s tackle it a second time, with a few changes (though I haven’t decided on them yet, so it’ll be off-the-cuff again. Meaning, I don’t even know where I’m going with it, but since the first version left me bored, I’ll have to challenge myself).
Brianth hurried to keep up with her mistress on the winding trail that led down to the old pond. Under her breath was a silent prayer that Eleese would not turn around, would not see how her maid waddled, bared feet slapping the mulch of leaf litter and twigs, would not offer up the usual sneer. Eleese’s days of frail weakness were over. In the past year she had blossomed into a desirable young woman, the pride of her wondering parents. She walked now in the manner of a queen, flowing like water in her blue silks, lithe as a dancer on this path. Health was a gift, was it not? Grace a blessing, the blush in the high cheeks of the heart-shaped face, fires dancing in those large blue eyes, her long blonde hair like a halo of light. “Hurry up!” snapped her mistress. “Can you not feel the wind? It remembers. It remembers everything.” Ducking her head, Brianth picked up her pace. Waddling. Pavestones lined the pond, un-swept and filthy. Since Shalla’s tragic death a year ago, only Eleese and Brianth ever walked this path, ever came down to the place where Eleese’s younger sister had died. Dusk was closing in, the wind picking up, thrashing the high canopy surrounding them, but the surface of the pond was utterly still, green and impenetrable. Eleese’s long, slim form bent as she sank down to her knees at the pond’s edge. “They adore me now,” she said, her tone thick with pleasure. “No weakling child any longer.” Brianth came up almost alongside her mistress, her feet finding the familiar imprints in the thin mud covering the pavestones, the place where she’d stood day after day as Eleese returned here, to settle down on her knees, staining the silks yet again, and sink her hands into the slime of the shallows. Now lifting them clear, eyes transfixed on the mud covering her long, elegant fingers, clumps clinging to the palms, dripping heavily to slap the pavestones. “Do you see it?” she asked, as she had asked every time. “No, Mistress,” Brianth said quietly, driven by a stubborn need to remain honest. But Eleese had heard the same reply too many times to take umbrage. Instead, she smiled her triumphant smile. “I do. I always do, now. It’s redder, Brianth. The mud may be dead, but the red still lives.” Brianth watched it all playing out again. The same ritual. Dusk at the pond’s edge, the mud in the hands, and now the delicate licking clean of those fingers, the smears on the palms, the sucking of fingertips. Brianth ran her own hands down the rough linen of her tunic, scratching yet again at the white patches where blood had sprayed that night a year ago. Death magic was horrible.
Well then. About the same length. Some details, physical, descriptive, either dropped or woven in here and there. Point of view fixed and held to, dialogue added, actions as well. Question for you: is characterization going on in this second example? I would answer: yes. In fact, a hell of a lot more than in the first example, despite the picking up of the pace, the insistence on immediacy.
I had in mind the death magic, even in the first example. It arrived as soon as I invented the death of the younger sister. But to get to it, in the first example, was pretty much impossible. Too many words, too many useless or irrelevant details, too sedate a pace, too passive the exposition.
For the second example, the scene builds itself and carries characterization with it. Show don’t tell (sigh, to have to repeat that mantra, I feel the way Brianth does). And though so many incidental ‘background’ details were dropped, I would argue that the second version actually delivers more characterization than the first, by a far margin. Not only that, but the reader, reading the second version, can figure out something of what happened a year ago, the nature of the younger sister’s ‘tragic’ death. But the narrative approach of the second version holds an expectation: that the reader gets it, even when ‘getting it’ takes a bit of work (not much in the example, it’s true, but the principle of engagement still obtains).
The second example illustrates my approach to characterization. But I’ll grant you that both versions can be found in fantasy fiction; the former more often than the latter (I think). In many ways, the first version is more traditional for fantasy fiction; the latter owes its allegiance to the ‘literary’ approach (and I use quotes around ‘literary’ to emphasize that any value judgement between the two is suspect; rather, it’s just different ways of approaching characterization, and as such, a lot depends on the reader’s own experience).
Now, in writing the second version, I had to make some choices. Why did I choose Brianth and not Eleese for my point of view? Hmm, let me think on that since the choice was instinctive. One, since she was trailing Eleese, I could fit in some physical description of her mistress, pointedly contrasting it with Brianth’s own ‘waddling,’ which then allowed me to add something of Eleese’s newfound contempt for such physical ‘unpleasantries,’ said contempt being … you guessed it, characterization. Two, I could flatten the tone of the narrative, rather than being bound to Eleese’s own excitement and flush of pleasure; instead, we’re dragged along behind Eleese by that point of view, meaning the reader is invited to feel all right about ‘struggling’ to catch up to the narrative, since Brianth is doing the same on that path leading to the pond. All of which leads us, Brianth and reader both, to the pond’s edge, to then share in witnessing the horror of Eleese’s actions.
If, instead, I had elected to use Eleese as the point of view, I would have had to spend a lot more time inching the reader ever closer to her madness – and really, who wants to spend any time there? No way I could have jumped in with that insane, flushed, smug point of view … well, sure, I could have, but I didn’t want to. A lot depends on the kind of story you want to tell.
Given that both versions are ‘first scenes,’ the first one could actually work for a short story, despite its more turgid pacing, and it would be the kind of short story that carefully works up to the revelation of what really happened with Shalla beside the old pond. Gothic horror style. And in that instance, it’s all about avoiding any give-away to the final punch, inviting a more languid, wandering style. It’d be a pretty good short story, actually.
But I don’t write short stories anymore. I write novels. And that in turn makes the second opening much more interesting for me. Because the ‘punch’ or ‘big reveal’ is not the death magic scene, it’s what follows that scene, and what follows that scene can go just about anywhere. So in effect, where the first version, as short story opening, is wide and open only to gradually narrow in to that ‘reveal,’ the second version starts narrow and finishes by opening wide to possibilities.
Does that make any sense?
Anyway, two examples of characterization, highlighting two different approaches to it. While it is always a question, for the reader, of what ‘works for me’ it does not follow that the one that doesn’t work is therefore a failing of the writer.
Now, having said that, I’m pretty sure I lost my naysayers a long time ago, back when I decided to throw their critiques right back at them. Being arrogant and all.
And hey, if I’m going to get that accusation (and I do), might as well wear it, right?
Cheers for now
SE