Asimov's Robot Rules for Characters

Speaking as you were about characters in terms of helpful ways to see their relative importance within a narrative, it becomes incumbent on you as well to ponder their significance as individuals on the reader.

Your sad awareness here becomes the weighty knowledge of knowing more about your characters than you know about readers.  In time, you may discover things about readers, including their hostility to your story, their complete lack of interest in your story and its characters or, worse yet, their conviction that you have not put forth plausible beings.

Although you do write to be read, your intent to produce in the smithy of your process a story that transports, investigates, reflects, you do find the reader aspect a potential for the temptation to bully your way forth with a combination of bravado and gesturing, sometimes even resorting to theatrics such as irony, farce, slapstick, and stonewalling.  

There is, however, a way to regain some measure of control; it comes from making eye contact with the characters, respecting them all, particularly the ones who are carrying forth the behavior and philosophy you find antithetical to your own behavior and philosophy during the times you are not immersed in your writing. (These may also be times when you are reading, which includes the works of clients, students, and writers you read in order to be transported somewhere.)  

In other words, you must make eye contact, offer respect, and listen.  You are not merely inflicting opposing forces on your characters to see what they will do and how they will do it, you are sharing them with persons you may never see, never know.
Accordingly, you must pledge to offer only authentic characters, not cheap knock-off characters assembled in sweatshop venues with poor labor laws.  

Your characters must go forth in the world knowing as much as you know and perhaps even more than you know; they must be wrong not as you are wrong because you have too short a temper fuse and are more likely to say fuck it than they are.  While it is true that you admire some of your characters, even get crushes on yet others to the point of sexual jealousy when they seem interested in someone you have your doubts about, you do tend to say fuck it and I'll show you to some of your characters when you should be taking more care to find out why they did as they did or did not do as they didn't do.

Thus this laundry list of behavior toward your characters:

1. They don't get in without a background check in which you find at least one thing about them you can admire.

2. If their blindness or insensitivity mirrors yours, you need to own up to it and give them some sensitivity you do not yet have.

3. They may want to tell you something and you may not want to listen because you have modeled them after someone in real life whom you detest, overshadowing your need to listen.

4.  No patronizing them will be tolerated.

5.  If they want to take over, you have to let them, at least for one draft.

6.  Dustin Hoffman is said by a number of your film friends to be difficult to work with because he is so determined to find the center for his role.  Would you in your impatience refuse to work with a character of such compulsive energy?

7.  Everyone gets a chance to be heard.

8.  Suppose a character comes along, wanting to introduce a schtick of some sort, a gesture, a dance, an accent, even, heaven help you, a joke into the story.  Like, say, Jerry Lewis.  Or is preternaturally meanspirited such as Jonathan Winters.  Are you going to be an asshole or a writer where such individuals are concerned?

9.  It is their story.  Are you down with that?

dramatic

dramatic--having the inherent suggestion and quality of story; implicit content of elements that produce conflict, interaction, goal search, revelation and reversal; a narrative that contains one or more characters in pursuit of an agenda or embarking on an internal or geographical journey; a quest which will involve reversal, frustration, and competitive exterior forces.

A successful dramatic narrative reflects the goals and intent of characters set against the counterpoint of the writer's personal goals at the time of writing. Thus stories may reflect an attitude of cynicism, pragmatism, sadness, bitterness, expansive optimism, and transcendental anticipation. Differing readerships will be particularly drawn to one of these qualities or perhaps even a combination of them. You might liken the physics concept of water, seeking to find its original level, to the literary concept of story: readers seek to find their target level. One thing all stories have in common is a voice or governing personality. It properly should be the goal of the writer to seek its own level, which becomes the pressures informing the voice, timbre, and intensity of its persona.

On a basic level, to say of a work that it is dramatic is to say of it that it is act-able, performable, readable. On a more nuanced level, to say of a work that it is dramatic implies that the work has skillfully designed ventures of men and women engaged in dealings with the enormous varieties present in life. If these dealings appear piled on or contrived, the landscape in which they appear may be spoken of as melodramatic, exaggerated, even operatic. Thus does balance come into the equation of which dramatic is an integral part.

The Time Machine

time sequence--the temporal arc of a story or novel; the chronological order of events in a narrative; the arrangement of narrative events to effect the most dramatic result.

Time plays an important role in a story or novel. How long between events? How long has this--whatever this is--been going on? How long before he gets the idea? How long before she asks him if they have a future together? How much times does a Harlen Coben protagonist have before being discovered rifling the files in an office he has no authority to be in? The pacing or beats per minute is another way to measure the way theme and plot establish themselves within the reader's sensibility, helping the reader to remember bits of information as they come forth, We realize also the contrivance behind such manipulation, resenting it if we do not find it.

The skilled writer knows ways to manipulate time, showing an event in progress, exhuming an event from the past, switching away from a character who actually or metaphorically be hanging from the side of a cliff. Nor is it necessary to remain with a time line, instead juggling the various scenes and confrontations like the dealer in three-card monte.

Example of a relatively brief time line, Romeo and Juliet. In more modern times, James Grady's 1974 novel, The Six Days of the Condor, was successful enough to have evolved into a movie in which the time line was cut in half to The Three Days of the Condor. William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's novel, Logan's Run, had a time-line imposed by population explosion: When a character reached the age of thirty, along came the Sandmen to put the character to sleep, as in the final sleep. Somewhere along the way between the penultimate draft and the draft submitted to the publisher, Nolan and Johnson decided to cut back on the arc of character life from thirty to twenty-one.

The Iliad begins with the story already having been set in action some seven years previously. Tim Gautreaux's 2009 novel, The Missing, takes place largely in the late 1920s but begins in the final days of World War I, then flashes back to an earlier time yet before delivering the reader back to the time the protagonist, Sam Simoneaux, returns from his experiences in World War I France to his job in New Orleans, where the main action sets forth.

Time in story is meant to be manipulated, is asking to be manipulated. Time may be compressed in narrative, frozen within the boundaries of a scene, projected into the future with a cheery "And they all lived happily ever after."

Some stories are about lost or stolen time, others are about travels in time, others yet are about waiting to grow up or trying to forestall the age process, while an entire sub-genre exists in which the focus is on the extent to which characters will go to deny the effects of time. Peter Pan did not wish to grow up, but even more worth further study and consideration is the character Jo Stoyte, from Aldous Huxley's engaging satire, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Stoyte, a Hollywood millionaire, at first wants merely not to grow older, but this desire morphs into his not wanting to die

Distraction: On the other hand...

digression--a movement away from a story line; a detail, introduction of character, time shift, or description that calls the reader away from details vital to the understanding of and immersion in the present narrative.

Digression is either a dramatic strategy or a literary wrong turn, the former a contrived movement that will have the effect of urging the reader to continue reading, the later a case of the author becoming impressed with some detail of surrounding, of meaning, or of implication that will have the effect of causing the reader to say, "Huh? What was that about?" The gap between the two poles is, sadly, rather narrow, hence these questions: Does the digression directly add a sense of tension or suspense to the narrative? Digressions in novels are easily achieved--merely shift the point of view to another character, who is appropriately engaged in intriguing activity. This strategy causes the reader to suspend focus on the previous situation, although keeping it close at hand. A short story proposes a more difficult situation because words must be chosen with mosaic precision. Digressions in short stories may be achieved and accommodated in short stories by having one or more characters respond directly to the digression, questioning its very appropriateness (which is what the reader will be doing).

A key to understanding the related plateau of anticlimax is the awareness that digression produces distraction, which in turn yields anticlimax. Digression and distraction combine forces to undercut the dramatic momentum of story. Writers need to develop a search-and-destroy agenda for digression and distraction. This agenda begins with the close examination of the digression to see if it will effectively assist the payoff of the story or is placed where it is merely as an advertisement for the writer's ability with words. Does it lead to a relevant discovery, or is it in fact merely showing off? If it does contribute to a discovery the reader and one or more characters may achieve, stet it; if it is merely showing off--well, that will not get us very far.

Says Who?

point of view--the character or characters in a story through whose eyes and other senses the reader learns and intuits the dramatic action; the teller of the tale; the biased, human filter through which the dramatic information is transmitted.

The writer achieves a significant part of willing suspension of belief from the reader when dramatic forces cause the reader to forget that the story is emerging directly from the writer and that, in fact, the story is pure artifice. This WSOB is well achieved by artful introduction of one or more characters who are telling the story, ASAP. As in:

"My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."

The first sentence would actually fit as a Twitter entry. The second sentence pretty well nails the character and his point of view in place, where it remains, a resoundingly successful example of a writer assuming a persona and that individual's traits and experiences in order to relate the details of his encounters variously with his snarky sister, her jewel of a man-for-husband, with an escaped convict, a cantankerous old lady, and a spoiled-if-beguiling young woman named Estella. So gifted a public speaker was Pip's creator that he could have chosen to tell the story of Great Expectations in his own voice. You could profit from asking yourself why he did not, then consider your answer.

There is often some practical reason for a particular character or set of characters having been chosen to narrate a story, sometimes as simplistic as Ahab's case in his selection to be narrator of Moby-Dick; he was the only one who survived the events of the novel. Mr. Stephens was chosen to narrate The Remains of the Day because of his resume as head butler, but also because of his not getting 'it," which is to say because of his naivete. Thus was the writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, constrained to keep Stevens's naivete in mind at all times and to constantly be aware of the need to render it plausibly.

Who is telling your story, and why?

Benjy Compson was chosen to narrate a portion of The Sound and the Fury because the wiring of his intellectual and reasoning processes were some degrees away from the intellectual and emotional outlook of other POV characters. No doubt about it, at some point during his writing of the story, William Faulkner recalled the Shakespearean line from Macbeth"...it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing." But Faulkner new the need to have larger fish to fry than the mere perception of Benjy as an idiot; Faulkner wished the reader to compare Benjy's vision of reality with that of the other characters in the novel. Benjy is then by no means a case of a writer thinking, Aha, I'll tell a story from the point of view of an idiot. The novel is a complex comparison of attitudes, sensitivities, and behavior in which Benjy emerges as an ironic symbol of the most admirable sort.

Once again, why have you selected a particular person or combination of persons to relate your narrative? What effect will your choice have on the other characters? What effect will your choice have on the reader?

Withhold

withhold--a narrative strategy for delaying the presentation of vital dramatic information; a dramatic device for creating tension if not outright suspense in a story by means of causing the reader to wonder about a detail, event, or meaning.

Readers are natural matchmakers; they will speculate on the potential embers of romantic attraction bursting into flames when characters exchange glances or respond edgily to one another, seeing sexual tension everywhere, whether intended by the writer or not. Readers will wonder and make outrageous assumptions. Let them. They will suspect the suspects in a mystery for reasons other than those intended by the writer. Let them.

Writers who read their work in classes or writers' groups will frequently be enjoined to bring the story to a screeching halt by injecting physical descriptions and details of attitudes and beliefs. This is done in the spirit of wanting to be helpful, in pointing out to the writer the need for details that humanize the characters. Trouble is, such details are irrelevant and actual albatrosses until the reader is made curious about them in the first place. The proof of the reading resides in the curiosity itching away at these literal minds who ask for details. Most habitual readers can and will continue reading a story without knowing what color a character's eyes are or what she is wearing. Particularly if the character is involved in some activity such as arguing or asserting her independence or difference of opinion.

Some accomplished writers never describe characters, wanting readers to supply their own vision; their use of description and/or explanation is limited, conveyed by indirection rather than description. Prolific writers often limit their descriptions of characters and of settings to elements that reveal qualities by implication. Denise Mina, for instance, is at greater pains to describe her protagonist Paddy Meehan's attempts at dietary precautions than she is to provide actual references to body configuration, and as a result, when Paddy overindulges, the reader feels a sympathy for her interior climate.

Nor are detailed reasons for a character's behavior likely to impart greater gravity or conviction to a that character's behavior. Often such descriptions are the first things that can be removed in the revision process.

Hint: Make them want it, which they will if it is not presented too soon.