Character

[Darcy88]

Personally, I am like a character out of Dostoevsky. Even when I'm healthy and not suffering from neuroses I am unpredictable, boisterous, experiencing and expressing passion in exorbitance. Its just who I am. The last time I wrote a piece of any length the character was a reflection of this mercurial side of me. Now that I'm writing a novel I am trying to make the character believable and its hard because I have the tendency to make the character like me, and I myself am hardly believable. I'm sure this sounds odd but its the case.

I have trouble writing sane predictable characters. I am worried that if I make the character too like me, in passion and attitude, that my audience will not believe it. Dostoevsky could pull it off because he was, well.....Dostoevsky. I am vain enough to say that my novel, after I've put a couple years of hard work, of blood and soul into it, will be near the quality of Dostoevsky, but still, I am struggling with this idea of writing a NORMAL character. Should I even bother trying to write a NORMAL character? Should I run with the wildness and madness and unpredictability that I feel welling up in me, wanting to force itself out through my pen like its no pen but rather a flame-thrower?

I think if I have a crazy main character that it might limit my audience. Part of me wants a wide audience, I won't lie.

The only solution I have come up with, other than blowing the consistency of my main character, is to introduce minor characters who embody the wild passion and unorthodoxy I want to express. But then they might steal the stage from my main character.

If anyone can make sense of what I just wrote please feel free to offer some suggestions.

[Jack of Hearts]

This subsection gets the weirdest posts.

It's going to be ironic to get this response from a guy who takes this stuff so seriously, but here it is: stop taking it so seriously.

This reader can't make sense of most of what you wrote. Not in any way you'd like, at least. But, to extrapolate from that, if you can't coherently string together 1,000 words, why should anyone believe 60,000 is a realistic goal? Because, in that context, when we talk about characterization, it seems like we're trying to decide on the colors of the doorknobs for a skyscraper that hasn't been built yet.

And now a suggestion, from personal experience. Do other things for a while. Social things. Outside things. Go be a bipedal ape. Ever hear the expression 'to put the pussy on the pedestal'? You're putting the literature on a pedestal. Not everybody thinks Dostoyevsky is all that great, and not everybody who says he's great has actually read him.

And then you'll feel human, and maybe be ready to talk/write about it, and other humans will listen/read.






J

[namenlose]

Dickens is famous for peopling his novels with minor characters that very often are much more colorful in their grotesque and picturesque qualities than his heroes. In the words of Chesterton, “Dickens not only conquered the world, he conquered it with minor characters”. His main characters, in books like David Copperfield and Great Expectations, played primarily the role of presenting their lives as something of literary scope, being much more reasonable than the other creatures that inhabited their worlds.

Dostoevsky, whom Dickens influenced, was interested in presenting extravagant personalities which could represent the personas he wanted to portray and parody in the multiplicity of voices of his works. They were not ever believable, but were more often than not useful in building the foundations of his art. However, even he had minor characters that could steal the attention of the main cast, but handled it well both in creating an imaginative bond between the personages and the reader and in including different views in his dialect approach.

Moreover, normal people can be characterized in appealing ways too, as Tolstoy and Chekhov well knew. Irony is an element you could employ while making common characters attractive, but there are many others which could be of use.

I personally judge characterization to be one of the most difficult components of prose writing. It’s frequently hard to determine what makes one character who he is, as it is also hard to define what are the essential characteristics of a real person. I become many times stuck with such obstacles while writing in my mother language, being unable to compose anything of quality for days or even weeks.

Jack’s advice seems helpful for me too, as one’s personal experiences are of great importance in defining a style of writing, and to overly burden oneself with its difficulties may only turn the situation even more confusing. Other consideration I would like to make is that I find creating my characters much easier when my designs are already defined in my head. Knowing what I really want to write, a great part of the effort I would have to experience in doing so disappears.

I would like also to wish you luck. I’m looking forward to what you have to present :D

[Darcy88]

Dickens is famous for peopling his novels with minor characters that very often are much more colorful in their grotesque and picturesque qualities than his heroes. In the words of Chesterton, “Dickens not only conquered the world, he conquered it with minor characters”. His main characters, in books like David Copperfield and Great Expectations, played primarily the role of presenting their lives as something of literary scope, being much more reasonable than the other creatures that inhabited their worlds.

Dostoevsky, whom Dickens influenced, was interested in presenting extravagant personalities which could represent the personas he wanted to portray and parody in the multiplicity of voices of his works. They were not ever believable, but were more often than not useful in building the foundations of his art. However, even he had minor characters that could steal the attention of the main cast, but handled it well both in creating an imaginative bond between the personages and the reader and in including different views in his dialect approach.

Moreover, normal people can be characterized in appealing ways too, as Tolstoy and Chekhov well knew. Irony is an element you could employ while making common characters attractive, but there are many others which could be of use.

I personally judge characterization to be one of the most difficult components of prose writing. It’s frequently hard to determine what makes one character who he is, as it is also hard to define what are the essential characteristics of a real person. I become many times stuck with such obstacles while writing in my mother language, being unable to compose anything of quality for days or even weeks.

Jack’s advice seems helpful for me too, as one’s personal experiences are of great importance in defining a style of writing, and to overly burden oneself with its difficulties may only turn the situation even more confusing. Other consideration I would like to make is that I find creating my characters much easier when my designs are already defined in my head. Knowing what I really want to write, a great part of the effort I would have to experience in doing so disappears.

I would like also to wish you luck. I’m looking forward to what you have to present :D



Thank for having the care and comprehension to write a helpful response. You seem to have a strong grasp on the difficulty of characterization, which is precisely what I was talking about in my original post. One could almost bring up the old dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian to make sense of this. Writing can take place within sharp margins, like Hemingway and his ilk, or it can run all over the place and spin through the wide gamut of human experience, the many subtle shades and shapes of truth and beauty - the dark and the light, the normal, the insane - EVERYTHING.

Dickens is another writer I somewhat strive to emulate. You hit the keyword there - "extravagant." I like extravagant, over the top characters, ones who experience and express profound suffering and profound joy.

The other responder I suppose would have eccentricity eliminated from literature. No Underground Man for him. I like the Underground Man, and Raskolnikov, and characters like them, even if they were diseased and prone to error.

The average is quite simply boring. I believe that the power of art is to distill the truth and beauty from the great ocean of human experience, much of which is banal, hopelessly banal.

There is a great tradition of literature which deals with eccentrics, that takes place on the margins. Henry Miller is another one. This is the tradition I feel my own writing to belong to, though there is another part of me which strives for normality, for orthodoxy and acceptance and understanding. A character like the Underground Man is not accepted. He is considered a freak. For me, freaks can make the best characters, even at the cost of alienating many readers. I think this should make sense to most writers or at least to most eccentrics.

And Jack of Hearts - if you actually knew how out of the norm my life is, due to no fault of my own, and also how many negative things there are surrounding me, you would understand why I retreat into fiction. You would encourage me, not discourage me.

And leaving my mountain-top in order to normalize myself isn't really an option. Because of my looks and the way I speak....interaction with others just reinforces this sense that I am different, exceptional, odd - what have you. I am a deep thinking and theatrical person. Even pills cannot make a dent in the over-active force of my personality. I can fake it, but faking it is a sheer agony.

[Jack of Hearts]

And Jack of Hearts - if you actually knew how out of the norm my life is, due to no fault of my own, and also how many negative things there are surrounding me, you would understand why I retreat into fiction. You would encourage me, not discourage me.

And leaving my mountain-top in order to normalize myself isn't really an option. Because of my looks and the way I speak....interaction with others just reinforces this sense that I am different, exceptional, odd - what have you. I am a deep thinking and theatrical person. Even pills cannot make a dent in the over-active force of my personality. I can fake it, but faking it is a sheer agony.

That's fair enough. This reader doesn't know your personal life and as a courtesy wishes you all the best with it.









J

[prendrelemick]

Personally, I am like a character out of Dostoevsky. Even when I'm healthy and not suffering from neuroses I am unpredictable, boisterous, experiencing and expressing passion in exorbitance. Its just who I am. The last time I wrote a piece of any length the character was a reflection of this mercurial side of me. Now that I'm writing a novel I am trying to make the character believable and its hard because I have the tendency to make the character like me, and I myself am hardly believable. I'm sure this sounds odd but its the case.

I have trouble writing sane predictable characters. I am worried that if I make the character too like me, in passion and attitude, that my audience will not believe it. Dostoevsky could pull it off because he was, well.....Dostoevsky. I am vain enough to say that my novel, after I've put a couple years of hard work, of blood and soul into it, will be near the quality of Dostoevsky, but still, I am struggling with this idea of writing a NORMAL character. Should I even bother trying to write a NORMAL character? Should I run with the wildness and madness and unpredictability that I feel welling up in me, wanting to force itself out through my pen like its no pen but rather a flame-thrower?

I think if I have a crazy main character that it might limit my audience. Part of me wants a wide audience, I won't lie.

The only solution I have come up with, other than blowing the consistency of my main character, is to introduce minor characters who embody the wild passion and unorthodoxy I want to express. But then they might steal the stage from my main character.

If anyone can make sense of what I just wrote please feel free to offer some suggestions.

John Self in Martin Amis' Money, managed to carry the book as the main character. He was outragous and off the wall, but it worked because the reader was privy to his strange internal philosophy and so could see why he acted as he did. In other words although he did crazy things, there was a logical connection between stimuli and reaction.

[Motherof8]

Does anyone identify with any of the characters in Dicken's novels, such as David Copperfield?

[Alexander III]

Does anyone identify with any of the characters in Dicken's novels, such as David Copperfield?

I identified quite a bit with both David Copperfield and Steerforth...

[Bonsai Ent]

It sounds like you're fighting your own characters Darcy. Let them be what they are.

[cacian]

Why do you need to be a Dostoyevsky when you can be a Darcy?
The more you look into others for resemblances and the less in touch you become with you.
'lose not yoursefl in others but find you in you''
The best way to write is to do it your own ways and your own ventures with words and imagination.
Remember the song and Frank Sinatra ''I did it my way'' great title for a great song.
The less you copy or imitate others the more content you become with your own.
The world needs new different and original it does not need any more of the same.
Literature needs an uplift not a bypass of something that is no longer.
This is just my thoughts.
Enjoy your writing and leave those who came before you enjoy theirs their own way.:)

[zoolane]

Personally, I am like a character out of Dostoevsky. Even when I'm healthy and not suffering from neuroses I am unpredictable, boisterous, experiencing and expressing passion in exorbitance. Its just who I am. The last time I wrote a piece of any length the character was a reflection of this mercurial side of me. Now that I'm writing a novel I am trying to make the character believable and its hard because I have the tendency to make the character like me, and I myself am hardly believable. I'm sure this sounds odd but its the case.

I have trouble writing sane predictable characters. I am worried that if I make the character too like me, in passion and attitude, that my audience will not believe it. Dostoevsky could pull it off because he was, well.....Dostoevsky. I am vain enough to say that my novel, after I've put a couple years of hard work, of blood and soul into it, will be near the quality of Dostoevsky, but still, I am struggling with this idea of writing a NORMAL character. Should I even bother trying to write a NORMAL character? Should I run with the wildness and madness and unpredictability that I feel welling up in me, wanting to force itself out through my pen like its no pen but rather a flame-thrower?

I think if I have a crazy main character that it might limit my audience. Part of me wants a wide audience, I won't lie.

The only solution I have come up with, other than blowing the consistency of my main character, is to introduce minor characters who embody the wild passion and unorthodoxy I want to express. But then they might steal the stage from my main character.

If anyone can make sense of what I just wrote please feel free to offer some suggestions.

I can understand what you said about base main character on yourself which I presume most authors and amateurs writers do. Why don't you base your characters on people you know have met past or present. Personal when I am make up character or develop them it about give human touch or quality so are believe to your audience.

One more thing why not try writing something from time when you were boy.