erastes

I whined on my blog the other day that I couldn't blog about my WIP because of spoilers, and that's all to do with the character I'm writing.

You see, if I were to explain the kind of person he is, it would ruin the entire book (as far as I'm concerned!)

I did blog about him, at first, and I talked about him more, but as I got to know him, I realised how the plot and the characterisation was linked, and so sank back into my hermitty cave.

Thing is, that I am a pure and utter pantser. Only one plot has ever come to me almost entirely ready made, like a bolt out of the blue, and that was Muffled Drum. Everything else is like water dripping in limestone caves. OK – well perhaps not that slow, but still…

When I start, I may have an name (often not, though) like Ambrose Standish or a profession – such as Gideon Frost's in Frost Fair. But that's it. I start to write about a man who is entirely unknown to me, and I learn about him at exactly the same speed as the reader.

Some writers, I know, do a character sheet for their character before they even add a word to the manuscript – some are hugely detailed, whether he's left or right handed, what he thinks about religion, politics, what scares him, what type he's attracted to, and so on. I have tried to work like that, once or twice, but the character sheet template that I found online was quite daunting. I didn't know half that stuff about ME – let alone someone I'd invented. So I stuck with not knowing anything.

Because no characters do (nor should they) leap fully formed onto the page, you don't learn everything about them straight away. Like real life. You meet someone and you only know a tiny, tiny bit about them and your knowledge is layered on, like lacquer.

Albert Ring ran his right hand – the hand he used for writing – through his thick blond curly hair. He was naturally fidgety and impatient. He focussed his light blue eyes on his book. He moved his wide shoulders to ease them, feeling a little cramped, being six foot two in such a small space.

Too much. And that's quite mild. I've read books as bad as that made up para.

I think that the reader should discover the character slowly, and I've found that as I write,I'm discovering the characters at exactly the same speed as the reader. When I start to write, as I said, I know almost nothing and gradually I chip away at him and I find out this about him. "Goodness, he doesn't like dancing," or "LOL he's got the most hopeless dog." Or "bloody hell, that's going to make him unlikeable." The fun is working with an unlikeable character and trying to make it work. Philip Smallwood in Mere Mortals has actually had a fair swell of empathy, and I hope that's because I've tried to explain why the poor man ended up in the situation he was in, and how. Similarly Fleury—although I admit to a fair amount of bias there. He's really NOT a nice person.

When I was writing fanfic, I got obsessed with Lucius Malfoy. I didn't like him in the books much, he was very two-dimensional but when Jason Isaacs got hold of him he fleshed him out and he went from a rare-pairing character to a main-everyone loves Looshie character in no time at all.

However, I was fascinated by his backstory and HOW he'd got to be like that. No man (just as no horse and no dog) is born bad (subject to your opinion on nature vs nuture, ymmv) and apart from an inborn belief in the fact that wizards were the next step on the evolutionary ladder – which made a lot of sense –I wondered about him. So I wrote about him, his father, his marriage, his life-long love of Severus which goes deeper than anything else: Voldemort, Marriage, Family. I explored his relationship with his father (which I'd got pretty much right, if I remember the canon correctly) and his induction into the Death Eaters. Lucius is a pragmastist when it comes down to it—and actually a much better Slytherin than Tom Riddle ever proved to be, because against all the odds, Lucius survives. He doesn't want wholesale destruction of the Muggles because who would support the parasitic wizards?

Anyway, I digress. What I'm trying to say is that any character—no matter what they do—can be written sympathetically (see Dexter, see Jacob in "As Meat Loves Salt." and there's no reason why the reader should like all the character's traits, either. As far as I'm concerned (and any one who's read my stuff will realise this) characters shouldn't be anywhere near approaching perfect. It's how a character deals with his flaws that make him interesting. And how others deal with them, too. There's too much perfection in gay romance. The only obstacles to lurve are external, most of the time, rather than—as in Pride and Prejudice—personality. Perhaps it because the female writers don't want to offend the gays by having them as unpleasant people, and the gay writers simply want Lovely Nice Men in their books. I don't know. I only know that Lovely Nice Men would bore me rigid.

Many people absolutely hated Rafe in Standish, and that's fine—because that's exactly what he was supposed to be. Arrogant to the nth degree, and he didn't get much better by the end of the book. Yes there was character development, but not in a "OMG YOUR LURVE HAS MADE ME A BETTER PERSON" kind of deal. He's still of the opinion that you could buy anything and everyone has a price, whether that is money, influence or threats. It's not his fault—raised in privilege like he was, and seeing both super-richness and uber-poverty he knows which he prefers and he knows how to wield it. He's never really learned that money doesn't make you happy—even at the end of the book.

So going back to the beginning, I wonder what you'll make of Harry in "I Knew Him" because he's quite the favourite character I've written so far. (But then perhaps all my characters are as I'm writing them. He's so charming, so personable, you'd want him to be your friend. But will you want to by the end of the book? I know I would, but there are reasons why I'd probably make excuses if he called around. More than that I cannot say for spoilery reasons, but I hope he's interesting. He's grown on me, because I've let him develop, organically as he's been written, he's been a delight and a jaw dropping surprise at times, but that's really the best thing about writing, isn't it?

Do share your character building with me, do you start with a fully formed guy, or does he come to life under your fingers? does he change as you write, from what you originally planned?

I was going to do Coaches too, but BAH! already too long. I'll cover that, hopefully, in H is for 'Orses.

any suggestions for D?