Fighting Character being thin

I've been flailing about as to what made Maass call Lucy "a real person" and Nikki "thin." He hinted that he felt as if the character only existed to drive the plot, and not real. How do I make Nikki real as Lucy?

So I failed about for about a week now. Today something kind of jarred me into a new mental state.

Voodoo snipped in chat and asked for help on a small action scene. It was two paragraph snippet but it suffered from having two characters on horses. Something I've discovered in the past that when you have two people operating/controlling something that you're going to reference a lot in an action scene, its best to find nicknames to put on the object than referring to it by a general name. Her scene had James and Elsie on horses. A bird frightens the horses. Elsie's horse does x. Elsie does y. James' horse does a. James does b.

As you can see, you have four items, two of which share the same name as other two plus you're repeating the word "horse" again and again. A similar situation is two people fighting with two pistols, or two people in two cars racing…or something. But using general terms, you end up having to use the character names to refer to the objects and you're stuck with repeating the same word – be it horse, gun, or car – over and over again.

Any time you can, you should get specific as possible with an item within knowledge of the character. A horse person would refer to their horse by name – Betsy, Branco, Bugger – and an unknown horse by some general term – black stallion, white mare, roan gelding. Thus you have James and Elsie on a black stallion Killer, and a white mare Betsy. A bird startles the horses. The mare dances sideways. Elsie watches in horror as Killer rears. James falls and breaks his leg.

Or this could be two people scrambling for guns. Elsie kicks the 45 out of James' hand. As the pistol stakes across the floor, the fight moves to who can get to the shotgun first.

What does this all have to do with character thinness? Nothing – but it was an interesting writing lesson….

So I digress. Thinness of character.

Well, after I gave this whole lesson to help Voodoo, Chatter X says "I think her original is fine." Headdesk

So I sigh, reduce the window, and ignore chat for a little while. Later I rant to my husband about it and that's when the AH HA hits. Basically because I start off the conversation with "introduction of character" so he knows who the hell I'm ranting about.

This is how I start it: Chatter X is a young brit – she's like 20 or something thereabouts. She's quirky usually in a good way. She has an obsession with expensive quill pens and moleskin journals. She has labored long to learn how to write elegantly with the quill pens in the journals so she can justify the cost of both. She handwrites everything and then retypes it later into the computer. And its not just any moleskin journals, they have to be beautiful, a certain thickness and density of paper and an a certain size. She's fascinated for some odd reason with volcano and tracks their activity and has like a doctorate level of geology in them. She has a rabid love of pasta too, and can talk at length about different types, how to cook them and what they taste like. Her chat handle is because of her interest in Japanese manga and anime. She's also compulsively private in regards of her real name – she's one of the few people I chat with where I don't know her real name….

And the little light goes on in my head and I forget all about the writing lesson sabotage. In Chatter X, I suddenly see "REAL" very clearly. Here was a mass of information, all vaguely related because they're generated by the same person, all non-plot important and yet creates a feel of a very specific person. It's like there's this solid bones of "this is the person" and then flesh that's shaped by those bones. It's easy to say but it's hard to do.

I've avoided character sheets in the past because to me the seem like you randomly throw stuff onto the sheet really without knowing the character in the first place. What's their favorite color? What's their favorite song? Who's their favorite actor? It seemed too easy to put down stuff that doesn't matter. What did all this stuff have to do with anything. Clutter! Clutter!

But it does matter, but not in a haphazard picked random way. Chatter X is a logical collection of likes and dislikes. You can guess from her likes and dislikes that she is a very strong-willed, very opinionated, and yet very …hmmm… what's the word I'm looking for… lush in terms of what she likes. You can guess that she would happy working in a library or a bookstore or a stationary store. You can pick up a moleskin journal and go "Chatter X would love this" or "This one is so tiny it drive her nuts." You can guess she has a pantry full of pasta and probably has a pasta pot that she uses often. In a scene, if she pulled out something to write with, she'll probably have a fist full of pens to chose from and would deliberate which one to use unless under pressure, and even then it would be "no, not the expensive pen!"

Of course, as long as you kept to that correct level of detail, she feel real. But if you just skim the surface – never drift into a discussion of pens and what makes them good or never have her drooling over a new pen or never having her protect an expensive one – but just say 'she likes quill pens' then its thin.

SO…

What I need to do for Nikki is come with logical likes and dislikes and show them.

Sigh.

Of course, that said, it seems like a very DOH statement.
Because of Chatter X, the first one that springs to mind is pen and paper. There's a good possibility that Nikki has similar love of quill – I rarely meet a writer that doesn't. However, it's more likely that she has an OCD driven level of comfort. The pens she could easily get hold of in hospitals were the cheap ballpoint click pens given out in bulk by drug companies. There's a chance she would have to keep the pen hidden – there might be rules against patients having pens. While she might love moleskin journals, there's probably some kind of stock pad of paper – like yellow letter tablet – that she writes best on. I have to figure out what kind of pad and then work it into the already written scenes. It will divert the flow slight to talk about what kind of pad she uses and why, but it would add depth to her.

Similarly there are her clothes. I start the first scene in Japan with her wearing a Goth Lolita black lace babydoll shirt and I mention slouch boots. Nothing else gets mentioned in the way of clothes until her Hello Kitty rant at the nearly halfway mark of the book. In the rant I mention that she thought she was ugly until she realized it was because her mother was buying ugly clothes for her. Having kind of faced that myself, I know that you end up trying to find stylish affordable clothes even if you're not a clotheshorse kind of a person. I'm not sure at this moment how to indicate the weird "clothes matter but I'm not a clotheshorse" mentality but it should show up earlier than mid-point of book. I state that she was doing laundry the time of the first murder, so certainly there's probably an opportunity to talk about clothes early on.

I have her carrying a yaoi manga book but never indicate why she reads it. Would she actually like yaoi? I stated at one point that she likes the slice of life manga that dwells on the normal day-to-day life that she never got to live. If she does read yaoi, it could because she's not comfortable in romances between male and female because she perceives an imbalance of power between girl and boy that's often not there in boy love stories. Boy's love, since both characters are male, there's often not the physical risk that a girl would face of being over powered, raped, and impregnated. (Yes, boys can be raped and often are in yaoi, but she might not read those kind…) That might be too much aside to handle, though, in the pace that I keep at the start of the book. I could say it’s a romance book, and indicate that she would like to have a boyfriend but guys always find her too creepy, thus setting the stage for her relationship with Leo better…

I have a sister that likes to wear floppy hats because from a very early age she thought it would keep bees from crawling into her ears. (Don't ask, I don't understand it, just after years of hearing this reasoning, I now dream of bugs in my ears…ICK) Japanese have a huge fetish at keeping their skin white, so they wear LOTS of sun protection in terms of long sleeves and umbrellas on sunny days. Does she go with that because she finds their umbrellas charming?

Is she addicted to coke cola and NEEDS to have a soda all the time? I hinted that she occasionally binge eats under stress in an effort not to fall into OCD writing. What does she like to binge on? Ice cream? Candy bars? Salty chips? WHY? Certainly if I say ice cream I could then say its because she could never get it at the hospital, or maybe her grandfather who died when she was young took her out for ice cream, or maybe the best times in her life was sneaking out of the dorms with Miriam to go to the ice cream store waaaay down the road from school (and across from the graveyard.) Does she like graveyards?

Oh, yeah, cool one I thought of and forgot to this moment. Maybe she was taught mediation to deal with the OCD, which deep breathing and "imaging her safe place." I first experience this in childbirth classes. My safe place is front porch of a log cabin by a lake with pine trees and loons at dusk. This reflects an early fasciation with log cabins, lakes, dusk, and loons. I have to admit that if I were learning mediation today, my safe place would be FAR from snow! It might be cool if Nikki's safe place is Hawaii – which Leo holds out later as a refuge. Certainly it could be "beach with palm trees and not much else" in terms of "as far from a hospital as you can get."

Obviously I need to spend some time considering all the possible likes/dislikes that Nikki might have that would give her depth and make sense MENTIONING in the story.