Just a few questions I have for my fellow writers. Why don't you share your method of tackling these problems with the rest of us?
1: How do you write a character smarter than yourself?
2: How many characters is too many to keep track of?
3: Which is more important: creativity, or coherence?
4: How important is it to establish a central character's appearance?
5: When are real-world references appropriate, and when should they be avoided?
This is just a small smattering of the questions that could be asked, and the answers could help your fellow authors, so share your thoughts! I'll do the same after a few others have had a chance to chime in.
Alternatively, do you have any writing questions of your own? Are you curious how your fellow authors would answer? Feel free to post your own questions as well!
Melanie E.
I'll bite
1. Most of my characters are smarter than me. I just use my imagination.
2. I dunno. The combined cast of SEE, AoJ and JoB must run into the thousands by now. Fortunately, I have staff to manage that kind of thing for me (just kidding, Julia!). I don't use any kind of storyboarding but I do now have a timeline to follow and there are character lists and timelines to help the reader (and the authors!) keep track.
3. That one is tricky. For a story to work at all you need both. In my case I seem to have plenty of creativity but struggle with the coherence - I'm taking that to mean consistency, although I know the word has a broader meaning.
4. Any story needs to establish what the central character(s) look like and what their basic character is. The reader might find it difficult to identify with them if that isn't the case. The only exception would be a tale where that is part of the mystery - say someone who appears normal but turns out to be a superbeing or an alien, etc in disguise.
5. That depends on the setting. You can weave your story into real-world events fairly easy and some mainstream authors make lots of money doing just that. Using places and events is acceptable, as is mention of people who are dead, but using still-living people can be problematic if only because of the potential lawsuits.
There are probably questions I could add to your list but I can't think of any right now. I'll come back if I do.
Penny
Thank you for your response!
I'm really interested to see how people answer this. I'll post my own answers after I've got four or five responses.
I'm hoping this will help to inspire people to think about how they write and how they can improve it. Not that I'm accusing anyone here of being a bad writer, but there's ALWAYS room for improvement; otherwise, why would there be writers any more at all?
Melanie E.
As a reader...
#1 - Philosophers talk about 9 discrete types of intelligence. - logical/Mathematical - linguistic - kinaesthetic - musical - naturalist - interpersonal - intra-personal - spacial - existential
I don't understand all of them, but I think I might add - technological/mechanical to the list. (Mostly because I have so little of that type of intelligence. Well, people would likely argue that I don't have much of any of the nine, or ten as it were.)
#2 - What I find most confusing about characters is when they are called by many different names, ESPECIALLY if they have been absent from the story for a while and then are called by one of their more obscure names.
#3 - Which is more important, air or water? Well, the answer is, of course, air, BUT, it is said humans can only go about three days without water. Creativity, in a story, is like air, without it the reader will go else-where, but, if a story is inconsistent the same thing will happen. In fiction, we readers suspend our disbelief when we 'get into' a story. In order to maintain that suspended disbelief, a story has to 'make sense'. (i.e. be internally consistent.)
#4 - It all depends on the focus of the story.
#5 - Is there a ground-work laid for interjection of a change in setting? Will the reader be able to maintain the suspension of disbelief?
with love,
HER
Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.
Answers
1. I do research. I enjoy learning.
2. It is not the quantity of characters; it is are they relevant too the story.
3. Coherence.
4. A character's appearance is immaterial, unless there is something about their appearance that is important to the reader to know.
5. Since I do research, I like to be accurate whenever I use a real-world reference. If the reader does not know the reference, you make, and the reference is crucial, then you have a whole in your story. A reader should never have to do research, so they can understand what an author is writing about.
Robin
I'm not very polific, but...
Part of the reason I don't write a lot is because I get hung up on some of these very questions.
1: "a character smarter than yourself." I could be arrogant, and say that there are none, but the truth is smart (IQ) isn't really relevant, what I think you are referring to would better be stated knowledgeable. As others have said, research, research, research. It's been said, write what you know. If you have a story idea that has an integral part which is something you don't know, then you need to become knowledgeable about it. If that takes too long, then the other choice is to recruit a collaborator/adviser with the knowledge base to beef up that portion of the story.
2: "How many characters is too many to keep track of?" Depends; are you good at multitasking? If so, then 15 or 20 should be easy. Me, about a dozen in my head. If I'm going to write something more involved than that, then I need to break it down into individual story lines and work out the interaction. I've not been successful at creating that complex a story, maybe someday.
3: Creativity, or coherence? Creativity is what puts the words on the page, but coherence it the glue that holds the story together. Without creativity, there would be no story. Without coherence, the story would go nowhere. It would be just a jumbled mass of unrelated happenings. In my mind, a storyline needs a setup and someplace to go and a conclusion that either wraps everything up in a neat package or leave the reader something to imagine the rest of the story, like the cowboy riding off into the sunset.
4: Central character's appearance? In many TG stories, a persons appearance is integral to the story; before/after. Not so much details, but at least generalities. In other stories, not so much. If getting the reader to identify with the protagonist is important, then leaving the details to the readers imagination would be helpful.
5: Real-world references? I find that my most successful stories have been chock full of real world places. When writing, I have a location in mind, even if I don't specify it in the story, but those stories that do make specific references have been most well received. As for when to avoid it... anytime your character is doing something that may be considered questionable and the place (i.e. management, corporate entity) could be seen as condoning or helping the effort it would not be advisable. Likewise any known individual, like say a movie star or politician, leave that out as well. Now you could create a fictitious character based on a real life person, but be sure that there is some detail that makes it plain the character is not the real life person; like say physical description, martial status, family make up, birth location, etc.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin ein femininer Mann
My take
1: How do you write a character smarter than yourself?
Just try and make their actions logical and consistent.
2: How many characters is too many to keep track of?
Pass. My characters are people to me.
3: Which is more important: creativity, or coherence?
Neither can work without the other.
4: How important is it to establish a central character's appearance?
Not that important. I have done so in the main, but as I write almost exclusively in the first person there is an extra dimension to that: the character will quite often see themselves differently to the rest of the world. There are occasions where appearance has to be hidden, a classic example being Heinlein's Johnny Rico. All through the book, the reader is allowed to drift into a default 'all-American WASP hero' imagined image, until it is revealed that Rico is Filipino.
5: When are real-world references appropriate, and when should they be avoided?
a)When they can get you sued.
b)When they are contrived. Not everybody lives at the heart of events, certainly not all the time. I try to tie my stories to reality, in the main, and Angharad regularly ties her 'Bike' to real news current at her time of writing, but they are background events against which our own stories play out. One should always ask oneself as a writer "Does this develop the plot or the characters?"
Answers
I'll take a shot:
1: How do you write a character smarter than yourself?
Just like being on a date with a really smart person . . . fake it. Let your character explain things to you.
2: How many characters is too many to keep track of?
I get frustrated when it gets into double digits. I try to avoid starting characters' names with the same letter. It's also helpful to have Dickenesque names like Bovary, which I always thought was udderly delightful.
3: Which is more important: creativity, or coherence?
Coherance.
4: How important is it to establish a central character's appearance?
Not, unless it is. I think minor characters are fun to embellish with description while an overly described main character might send false signals.
5: When are real-world references appropriate, and when should they be avoided?
Real world references will date your story quickly. If you want your story to have a shelf-life of more than a few months they should be avoided . . . unless timeless.
Eager to see your answers.
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Yeah, but
"Real world references will date your story quickly. If you want your story to have a shelf-life of more than a few months they should be avoided . . . unless timeless."
Yeah, but... if you're setting a story in the 60's, 70's, 80's, whenever... then you need to use real-world events to anchor your story.
The problem comes when the author tries to write a story which is current, because current is a moving object and gets old very quickly. Then I would agree with you.
I note that dating a story doesn't seem to have troubled the current crop of Whately stories, many of which seem to be set in the late 2000's.
Penny
Thanks for all the great responses people!
We've had some answers I'd expect, and some that I've found a bit of a surprise!
Here's my own answers to my questions:
1: How do you write a character smarter than yourself?
This is something I really struggle with. Writing a character who KNOWS a lot isn't so much the issue; it's writing characters who, I guess, are more CLEVER that is. It's why I could never write a really good mystery: my mind just doesn't work the same as the Sherlock Homes' or Agatha Christie's among us. The answer, for me, is to know the limitations of how intelligent I can really make a character without overstretching myself. That's one reason why I like writing stories that take place in high school: I can write intelligent high schoolers fairly well, but I don't have enough education or experience beyond that level to really do so with adults.
2: How many characters is too many to keep track of?
Characters are hard to keep track of! When it comes to characters throughout the entire body of a story, I can keep up with a decent cast, but when it comes to any given activity, I find three to four to be about the limit for real interactivity. At that point, keeping things easily trackable for readers becomes an issue, and much beyond that it's equally hard for the author.
3: Which is more important: creativity, or coherence?
For me, creativity is important, sure, but coherence HAS to rule supreme. Creativity spawns a planet of prawn people in victorian dress who ride bears. Coherence is making sure that those creatures existing makes sense, and fits into the context of your story. It's also writing in such a way other people can read what you write, so in a way, if you don't have the intelligence to hold a coherent line of writing, then all the creativity in the world won't help you. On the other hand, just a touch of creativity can make a coherent but otherwise droll tale amazing.
4: How important is it to establish a central character's appearance?
I get in trouble for this, a LOT. There are times I try and establish the most basic of elements for a character because story elements depend on it, but most of the time I prefer to leave character appearances up to my readers. It's not that I'm lazy! Well, okay, I AM, but that's not why I do this. I do this because one of the easiest ways for me to get drawn into a story is to paint my own pictures of who the characters are. When an author puts in too specific of guidelines that I have to remember when visualizing events, it breaks my immersion in the tale. So, I write the kinds of stories I wanna read, with plenty of subjective character appearance.
5: When are real-world references appropriate, and when should they be avoided?
I don't care for a lot of real-world references in a lot of my work, mostly because of the whole "dating your writing" thing. Those stories that avoid such references easily appeal to a much broader audience than a story that depends on them to make sense. There are ways to avoid this, such as using outdated references to begin with, and making that a key point of the story, or even setting your story in a very firmly-set time period ala the Tuck series, but if you're writing a story that is meant to be taken as "present day 19XX or 20XX" then avoiding firm references is absolutely the best way.
Melanie E.
Prawn people?
"Creativity spawns a planet of prawn people in victorian dress who ride bears."
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Penny ~
My thoughts...
1) Borrowing from what Hope said earlier, there are different types of intelligences. Someone can be "book smart", or politically or socially savvy, or great at solving puzzles, or have a knack for languages, or be an artistic prodigy, or remember every stat in their preferred sport. Someone who is smart in one of these may not be in others; not every genius is a polymath. As to how to show it, that depends.
First, how does the character's intelligence affect your story? A character being fluent in twelve languages only matters if they're going to interact with foreign languages. Maybe they're applying for work as a translator? Maybe they fell through a portal and found themselves in a foreign land? Or maybe your character retains facts well. Maybe they recall useful tidbits of information that others have overlooked, or constantly refer to articles that they've been reading. Are your characters well versed in history or know a lot about the villain? Let them be the one that handles "info-dumps" and exposition to the other characters (and thereby the reader). Is your character a good puzzle-solver? When you throw your characters into a pickle, let them be the ones that find the solution.
On a sidenote, I remember a fun bit of advice for Dungeon Masters trying to play super-smart NPCs (notably old dragons) that their players were about to go up against: cheat. Not in terms of fudging the dice rolls, but rather paying attention to what their players are discussing out-of-character while they're making a plan of attack, and then letting the dragon already have a counter in place for their strategy. Why? Because after 2000 years, the genius dragon has thought of that one and figured out a way around it. Force them to a plan B, or C, or D. This sort of trick works better for evil/villainous geniuses, but still...
2) Probably not more than half a dozen in a single scene, and only if they have distinctive names, the writing makes it obvious who's doing or saying what, and so on. As to how many in the total cast, if you have more than a couple dozen, I'd suggest putting together a character guide, both for your own sake and for the sake of your readers.
3) They're both important. I've had three-year-olds tell me some very creative stories that were entirely incoherent. I've also been forced to slog my way through some extremely coherent textbooks and references with zero creativity behind them.
4) This one's hard, since it can vary a lot depending on the type of story. In some stories, a lack of description is best, since it lets the reader immerse themselves in the story, or create their own preferred main character. In others, the author has a very particular image in mind, and it's fine that they want to share it. Sometimes aspects of the character's appearance are plot elements (Harry Potter's scar, for example). With this site in particular, many of the stories involve a change in the character's appearance, whether through clothes/makeup/padding, magic, surgery/hormones, or what-have-you, so "before-and-after" descriptions are more common, if not outright required.
5) It depends on what you mean by "real-world references". Are you writing a "ripped from the headlines" sort of story? Is your story set in a particular location or time period? One would be hard-pressed to set a story in 1915 in Europe without mentioning the Great War. Basically, if it fits with the time and location of the story, make the reference. On the flip-side, making real-world references in a fantasy setting, when done well, can tie that world to the real one in interesting ways.
Using real people in stories is trickier. For private individuals (not public figures or celebrities), if you don't have permission, you're probably better off avoiding their mention, unless you're writing a biographical, true-to-life sort of piece, and are being respectful and faithful to the person in question. With public figures, you can generally take a few more liberties (see "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter" or similar parodying works). In the US, at least, we're protected by very liberal freedom-of-speech laws, especially in terms of parodies and fiction, but if your work could be considered slander or libel, well, you had best tread lightly.
Anyway, this is getting long and it's getting late, so I'll cut off here. Good questions, Melanie!
Conundrums
1. I find that a character smarter than the writer but written without asking for additional opinions are most often shallow and fail to portray the 'smartness' of the character. Which is why I generally avoid stories (even published novels) where the main character is portrayed as 'genius' or having an IQ of say 400. These kind of characters tend to become 'Mary Sue' or use some obscure scientific theory/artifact to make every other character look stupid in comparison.
If you need opinions from people who actually know what they're talking about, I suggest going to the stackexchange.com community. You can use them, they would help you with their knowledge or help you research for free. I personally use the scifi and worldbuilding communities on the stackexchange network. This was one of my thread on worldbuilding. Here I realized that I made a huge error in writing Escape!
2) I think more than 6 is too many. At most you should only have 3-4 main characters. The others can be supporting characters. For Escape! I have 32 students escaping the academy, but there's no point in making them all main characters. It's a headache even for me, so I had only 4 main characters, with supporting characters coming and go. It seems to work.
3) I think coherence is more important if you wish to publish. Creativity is great to pull in readers, but if you start trashing already established facts, you'll get plenty of annoyed readers. However, if your story only appears to be contradicting (creativity always contradicts) but actually fits in the wider sense, then there's no problem.
4) I think this is very important. After all, readers want to know, how does the main character look like? Is he black, white, asian? Does he has blonde hair, black hair or blue hair? Is he limp or can he fly? Unless, if you're writing from the 2nd person POV.
5) It's your fiction, do as you wish. The Japanese did great storylines because they don't have the hangups that writers in the western hemisphere suffer. Sure people would complain, such as "But there's no big island in the Tokyo Bay!" but then again, what do the writers care? The manga still sold millions of copies. As long as you give a proper background story in relation to the difference between the real world and your fantasy world, you're justified in whatever you want to do.
Now here's my question to fellow writers: How the heck does one write erotica?
Off the top of my head...
1: How do you write a character smarter than yourself?
It's about time. When I've been with real-life people who are smarter than me, they always get there first, you know? They see the important point and say the significant thing while I'm still absorbing facts or trying to wake up. Imagine if (in real life) you could freeze time, so that everyone else stopped but you kept going. You're a homicide detective, say, and it's like a TV show, where there's a clue in some dead language. No one knows what it means, so you stop the world and go look it up. Once you've found the answer, you start things up again and say, "Oh, that's a variant of ancient Mayan. It was used in the pre-Columbian Qwery peninsula. There are only three people who could read or write that... well, aside from me, of course."
You do that when you write. You stop and walk away and work out the puzzle, and your character gives the nonchalant solution.
I'm not concerned about what you asked... I work harder at trying to make my characters miss things without making them stupid. I want the clever reader to say, Ohhh, I see what's happening! before my character does.
2: How many characters is too many to keep track of?
A handful is already a handful.
3: Which is more important: creativity, or coherence?
What's important to me is trapping the reader. I want to write so that if someone picks up something I've written that they will have to read to the end, even if they don't want to.
4: How important is it to establish a central character's appearance?
It's not important to me. Age is important. But think about this: is the appearance of the house they live in important?
I do think it's important that they not be incredibly, unbelievably beautiful. Unless it's a fairy tale.
5: When are real-world references appropriate, and when should they be avoided?
I think they can be enormously effective. Suppose a story is set in Louisiana just before Hurricane Katrina. You and your readers know what's coming, but your characters don't know.