Characters
Depending on the story I’m writing, my characters can be fictional or dramatizations of actual historical figures. Each character presents its own unique challenges. Let’s start with historical figures. They start easy. The fun comes in animating them.
A lot of folks read biographies for enjoyment. As a reader, when I shopped for a book, biography wasn’t at the top of my list. Then I started writing historical fiction. As I sit here and look around my office, I find I’m accumulating quite a collection- Ulysses S. Grant, George Patton, Billy the Kid, John J. Pershing, John Brown, Pancho Villa, William Clark Quantrill and the list goes on. Biographies get the character ball rolling.
Biographies provide baseline research on the character. You have a story line. You have physical descriptions and photographs to work from. Visualization of the character is there, like a model sitting for a painter. Now comes the real challenge, animating the person. For me animating a character requires getting in-character almost like an actor. If I’m going to put words in a character’s mouth, I need to know the person. Where are they coming from? What might they have thought or felt? Why? As a story unfolds you put characters in situations, interactions and conversations with other characters. How do they act? How do they react? If you are able to get in-character, the character becomes believable. A Booklist review of A Question of Bounty said of my Billy the Kid, “Billy lives in these pages.” If you know anything about Billy, you know he is a complex character. Bringing him to life for a sophisticated reader gave me a real high.
Historical figures present another interesting challenge. Quite often people know them. Readers have an expectation of who that character is. The best example of that is George Patton. We have an iconic expectation about that character as famously portrayed by George C. Scott. Was Patton Scott’s Patton? Who can say? It doesn’t matter. George C. Scott is a great actor. For most of us, Scott’s portrayal is George Patton. Taking that character expectation and rewinding the tape to a younger, ‘coming into his own’ version of that character for Boots and Saddles: A Call to Glory was a challenge. You had to honor the icon at his formative roots.
Next Week: Fictional Characters
Return to Facebook to comment.
Ride easy,
Paul
A lot of folks read biographies for enjoyment. As a reader, when I shopped for a book, biography wasn’t at the top of my list. Then I started writing historical fiction. As I sit here and look around my office, I find I’m accumulating quite a collection- Ulysses S. Grant, George Patton, Billy the Kid, John J. Pershing, John Brown, Pancho Villa, William Clark Quantrill and the list goes on. Biographies get the character ball rolling.
Biographies provide baseline research on the character. You have a story line. You have physical descriptions and photographs to work from. Visualization of the character is there, like a model sitting for a painter. Now comes the real challenge, animating the person. For me animating a character requires getting in-character almost like an actor. If I’m going to put words in a character’s mouth, I need to know the person. Where are they coming from? What might they have thought or felt? Why? As a story unfolds you put characters in situations, interactions and conversations with other characters. How do they act? How do they react? If you are able to get in-character, the character becomes believable. A Booklist review of A Question of Bounty said of my Billy the Kid, “Billy lives in these pages.” If you know anything about Billy, you know he is a complex character. Bringing him to life for a sophisticated reader gave me a real high.
Historical figures present another interesting challenge. Quite often people know them. Readers have an expectation of who that character is. The best example of that is George Patton. We have an iconic expectation about that character as famously portrayed by George C. Scott. Was Patton Scott’s Patton? Who can say? It doesn’t matter. George C. Scott is a great actor. For most of us, Scott’s portrayal is George Patton. Taking that character expectation and rewinding the tape to a younger, ‘coming into his own’ version of that character for Boots and Saddles: A Call to Glory was a challenge. You had to honor the icon at his formative roots.
Next Week: Fictional Characters
Return to Facebook to comment.
Ride easy,
Paul
No comments have been added yet.
