Author Showcase Guest Post – James Dorr: Characterisation

This is the latest in a series of Author Showcase guest posts by authors around the world, sharing their tips and creativity.
Today’s post is by US Midwest horror author James Dorr, on how to get inside your characters’ heads.

On character, stress, and a love of language

Character is usually the most important part of a story, at least to me, since (as I see it) fiction is about the testing of a character or characters under stress. In the case of horror this may be extreme, but even in romance or lighter fiction the stress is still there – it’s the motivation, to solve a problem, whether to gain something that’s desired or just to survive. So the character is in a situation and it's how the character copes with it (or not) that defines the plot. Characters, in turn, are defined in part by their beliefs and their environments – my life has been relatively peaceful, for instance, which will give me a different perspective than someone who grew up, say, in Iraq. What I must do, then, is to put myself into the head of that character, look out through the character’s eyes, hear with its ears, feel with its skin and emotions, etc, to translate that character into terms readers (most likely having relatively peaceable lives as well) will be able to understand.
This can’t be overstated, to in this way become that character: to see things through that character’s eyes, hear through its ears, taste with its tongue – and with all these things “spiced” with the biases that character may bring through its environment, upbringing, and/or education – and, most of all, to feel with its feelings. When some writers speak of characters “taking over a story,” I think this is actually what they mean, that they’ve come to know their characters that well. This is the “showing” instead of “telling,” to draw a reader to share an experience rather than just describing what happens. In my case, this comes from my imagining what I might do in a circumstance similar to what I’ve put that character in – or maybe what a friend or a lover or ex-lover might do, someone I’ve been close to in the past. This is vital for major characters – minor ones may be sketched in more lightly – and while in some stories I might write with a deliberately more distanced point of view than in others (in which, at an extreme, a character may represent “Everyman” or “Everywoman,” as in some Medieval allegories), I still must know who these characters are.
It is then that a love of words comes in, choosing those words most apt for the task – because words can induce mood too, which cycles back into that character’s feelings. But words must also be chosen which will be true to a character’s voice, educated phrases for the sophisticated, simpler words for those less educated – fun can be had too with characters speaking a language that is unfamiliar to them, or contrasting accents or means of expression for those from different parts of a country – but ultimately it is still the character, the person or other being that the story is about, that is all important.

James Dorr writes short fiction and poetry from the Midwestern part of the United States. Of his latest collection, The Tears of Isis (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, May 2013), he says: “The Tears of Isis has an overall theme on the link between beauty and destruction, of art and death, even beginning with a poem and ending with a story that are both about sculptors. I don’t sculpt myself, but I used to do some illustrating and I still cartoon a little. I also play music. I write poems. I like to perform at readings. In short, I relate to the artistic side of a number of the stories’ characters, whether directly or indirectly – as well as the problem solving side, because that’s a part of the creative process too. But at the same time, I also face the destructive (including self-destructive) side of creation, for example the isolation it forces when one must concentrate on a work in progress.”
Up to date information on Dorr’s writing, including his other collections, can be found on his blog, http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com
while information on The Tears of Isis is available on the publisher's website at http://perpetualpublishing.com/the-te...
He also has an Author Page on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/James%20Dorr/e/...

Natasha Ewendt is the author of This Freshest Hell, a vampire novel released in 2013 by Lacuna Publishing. Also a journalist at the Port Lincoln Times and the director of Port Lincoln Copywriting Services, she is reluctantly addicted to coffee and The Walking Dead.