Hello Garamet Ask Garamet.

Garamet, what do you consider most important about characters.

For me, the characters are where the story starts, so I try to learn as much about them as possible. That goes for reading as well as writing.

People IRL don't do something "just because." There are reasons, even if they don't know those reasons themselves. Getting inside a character's head and saying "Okay, why is this big brave guy afraid of snakes?" and finding out "Well, he had this really bad experience with snakes when he was a kid, and that's how he got that scar on his chin, so every time he looks in a mirror, he remembers the snakes" can have an impact on every action this character takes throughout the story.

That's just one example. Writing is also more fun that way. If you let the characters tell the story, instead of making them just talking heads or little action figures acting out the story you want to tell, it's usually (not always) easier, and more intriguing, because sometimes the story will take a twist you weren't expecting.

I may have more to say on this, but I'd like to hear from a few other folks as well.

Good question, Baba!

My problem is, my characters tend to run off with the story, with me running after them and yelling...

I'm probably guilty of using characters as little action figures to tell my story to a degree.

Tho sometimes they still go ahead and do what the hell they want to. Generally, the more fully developed the character is in your own mind, the more likely they are to dictate the course of the story rather than allow the story to dictate their actions.

garamet, does your scar guy happen to be Indiana Jones?

^Yes. Figured he was an example everyone would recognize.

I can't use action figures as a metaphor for talking plot robots, because when I played action figures, the characters would take off, and develop kinks and quirks, and fetishes, and bodily function problems, and aversions to foods that'd send them into hulking rages, and all kinds of crazy shit that took way off from whatever cartoon/movie I had started off reenacting.

My Iron Man did horrible raps and got his ass kicked by Yoda and WWI Snoopy, and my Captain America had this corny heroic theme song that would get his ass kicked by everybody, but he'd have to keep starting over again and again until he finished the song before he could fight.
And my Peter Venkman was a raging sex fiend, and my Egon spengler did coke to stay up for an important equipment upgrading.

So....

What is wrong with those characters? They seem perfectly legitimate to me. Venkman and Spengler seem realistic to me as you describe them.

Well yeah, it was natural, I didn't pull it too much out of my ass.

It's just everyone else was playing Tonka or had a B.B. gun, so I was the Rudolph/Herbie of the whole town.

^But don't you see, D, that's why you're a writer. Because you never did what you were supposed to do, and because you were always outside the pack looking in, able to observe behaviors and write them down.

How characters shape the story IRL: I've been watching that series on Rome on the History Channel and, okay, I read Graves' I, Claudius in undergrad and have watched the series numerous times, but always assumed there were some liberties taken. And, by and large, with the character of Claudius there were. Graves needed a sympathetic hero, not the bloodthirsty drunk that Claudius actually was.

But forget about Claudius for a moment, and let's focus on Caligula. Easily the most crazed of the Claudian emperors, and created as much havoc in his four-year reign as any other dictator. But.

What do we know about his childhood? Turns out, quite a great deal. His father was murdered by his Uncle Tiberias, who was emperor at the time. His mother and brothers were exiled by that same Uncle Tiberias and at least one of the brothers was murdered.

Kind of your basic Richard III plot there. Tiberias was killing off anyone who might try to steal the throne from him. So why did he spare Caligula?

For that we have to look to Tiberias' reputation as a pedophile - not an unusual proclivity in Rome at the time, where slaves were bought as children and did whatever their masters bade them. But, even in Rome, there were rules against buggering your own nephew.

No one had the nerve to tell Tiberias this, so Caligula became one of his "minnows" at around age 8 or even younger.

Oh, and whenever Tiberias got bored with one of his minnows, or the boy had the affrontery to start growing out of boyhood, Tiberias had him thrown off a thousand-foot cliff into the sea.

Couldn't exactly do that with the nephew, now, could he? So Tiberias dies, and Caligula comes to power - knowing his entire family was murdered by another family member. The lesson there is: Trust no one. Carrying the burden of having been his uncle's bum-boy, and yet allowed to live. (Did he ever stand at the top of that cliff and wonder?) And now given unbridled power to rule an empire.

The first few months of his reign, we're told, were glorious. He was the opposite of Tiberias in all respects. But then he was taken ill and nearly died. Epilepsy, schizophrenia, other? No one knows. But what emerged on the other side was the Mad Caligula who raped his guests' wives and had prisoners beheaded at the dinner table and tried to have his horse made senator.

None of those ingredients can be ignored in the man he became, and in the effect his rule had on the fate of the empire and the millions it governed. And you can pretty much do that with any historical figure.

Ira Levin did that in The Boys from Brazil, taking what was known of Hitler's childhood and saying: What if a group of boys, cloned from Hitler's DNA, were raised in circumstances identical to his growing up? Would they be just like him?

And so - again, my way of doing things - is to start with the characters. Because if Caligula had grown up safe in a loving family, the history of Rome might have been different. If Character A is involved in a bad auto accident that left him hospitalized for six months and now makes him jump at every loud noise, that's going to affect how he responds to different situations. If, on the other hand, his life has been relatively uneventful until the story starts, his path will be a very different one.

Then it comes down to: How aware are the characters of their situation? Let's say Character B grows up believing that his stepfather is his real father. When he's in his teens, his mother slips and mentions that she was pregnant on her wedding day by a guy who skipped town and vanished. Suddenly he understands why he looks slightly different than his siblings. He understands why, in a drunken rage, his stepfather told him "You're no son of mine!" All this time he's been blaming himself for not being a good son; now he understands that his stepfather meant it literally.

How is that going to affect his relationships with his mother, his stepfather, his siblings? Is he going to search for the guy who knocked his mother up or not? If he does, what will he find?

Again, this is just one technique. But I know the kinds of books I like to read are those that give a lot of depth to the characters, so I try to write that way as well.

Garamet genetics do play a important part in a persona. Maybe some family historical traits that each generation might have.

^That reminds me of a week-long wrangle I got into with Kass and LizK in the old NZ. Kass was insisting that some people are "born bad," and LizK was backing her up. But I digress.

Do I believe that genetics shape personality? Not directly. But let's look at a few other factors.

What if someone's born with a genetic predisposition to heart disease. Both his father and his brother died young of massive coronaries. How does that affect his life? Does he decide to live life to the fullest, or does he fall into despair? Does he put himself under a doctor's care, monitor his weight and blood pressure, take the best possible care of himself? Or does he smoke and drink and overeat, figuring he's going to die young anyway?

There's also prenatal biochemistry. People will say "depression runs in families." Does that mean there's a "depression gene"? Probably not. However, we know that endorphins cross the uterine barrier. If a woman is depressed throughout her pregnancy, for whatever reason, her body is putting out negative chemicals, and the fetus is being bathed in them. We have to look at what effect that would have on fetal development.

Plus, if the woman doesn't get help for her depression, once the baby's born she may fail to bond with it, neglect it, look at it with a sad face, refuse to hold it, giving the baby the impression that there's a cold, rejecting universe out there, so of course this child is going to show signs of depression, which it may pass on to its children, and so on.

These are factors IRL, and they can be integral factors in good fiction writing.

What a bizarre thread title...

^Yeah, but it's a Baba Original[tm].

You shoulda answered it something like this.

Garamet- So, do you want cheese on your apple pie?

Garamet- WTF?!?! *flies into hulking rage*

^Yeah, cryin' out loud. Ice cream, maybe, or Cool Whip, but cheese?

Garamet loves the baba's sense of humor. She ,knows baba is the ultimate teaser of posters.

^Baba is indeed one of a kind.

Garamet warnj my skinny white ass.

Play nice, Baba, or go away.

Funny you bring all that up.
I saw that special too, and thought most of those thoughts.

See, Caligula's my favorite historical psycho, so I've seen all the shows about him.

Haven't seen the movie though.

I know, I know, what kind of fan am I?

^I haven't seen the movie, either. (Even though Peter O'Toole's a favorite of mine.) But every so often PBS reruns the I, Claudius mini (John Hurt plays Caligula), or you can go right to Robert Graves' novel.

My favorite (one of them) historical loonies has always been Nero.

Neroon is a pretty good person to base a character after.

Characters should absolutely have a life of their own -- but whereas you want to let your characters become their own people (to the extent that any character can) you want to remember that they = people < you = God. Otherwise, you end up with all sorts of little people running amok all over the place, getting into things and places they oughtn't and just generally playing merry Hobb with the landscape. Don't chase them -- drive them from one obstacle to the next.

Oh, this is where you and I disagree quite widely. Some people are simply born bad. The problem for society is that in actuality they're really quite rare. Certain traits are hardwired. You can't get away from it.

If you haven't read it already Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is excellent all around book on the conerstones of personality, nature v. nurutre.

Personally I think it's an equal split. Both are at play from day one and neither should be discounted. That doesn't mean that nature should get a free pass or be used as an excuse though.

But it's not all nurture. If it were, how come our sexual preferences are never conscious decisions. If you follow the logical conclusion of your stance then sexuality is a cognitive choice and being gay becomes a choice and therefore can be undone - yet if I've followed your posts correctly over the years you firmly believe being gay is not a choice - but sexuality also defines part of our personality. So you're automatically being contradictory...

Edit: ironically many people who firmly believe that some people are born bad, often have the reverse contradictory notion that being gay is a choice...

G-
What's your favorite tense and POV, and why?

Good question. In the early years I stuck to past tense, because editors tended to freak if I switched to present tense ("Why are you doing that? What does it mean? "). More recently I've worked with editors who are either a little more open to stylistic quirks, or just too lazy to read the entire ms., so I can get away with it.

I never write an entire novel in present tense. Usually I choose certain scenes that need a sense of immediacy and tell them as if they're happening RIGHT NOW, then switch back to past tense in the following scene.

As for POV, believe it or not, I find first-person a bitch. First time I tried it was in The Others, and it damn near drove me mad. Midway through the first book I almost switched back to third person. Actually tinkered with it for a few weeks and then resigned myself to the fact that this book had to be told from the POV of the protagonist.

Why was it so difficult? Because third-person narrative, where you as the writer are the all-knowing god, is a helluva lot easier than a limited, fallible first-person narrator saying "Well, of course, I wasn't there when it happened, but what I heard was..."

As the omniscient third person, you can look down from the clouds and say "The red car was coming from the north at twice the legal speed when it struck the black car, killing the passenger instantly and knocking the driver out cold. The driver of the red car would walk away with a few glass cuts and nothing more."

Whereas the first-person narrator can only say "When I came to, my girlfriend had slipped over and was lying with her head on my right knee. Her eyes were open. There was blood trickling from the corner of her mouth onto my new jeans. I had no idea what had just happened."

Which gives the reader a more visceral sense of the accident right there, but then sticks the author with the job of clean-up afterwards. "Later, in the hospital, the cute blonde police officer told me what happened..." Which can be clunky, depending on how skilled the writer is.

Diff'rent strokes, I guess.

If by "hardwired" you mean encoded at the genetic level, I'd still have to disagree.

Is each of us born with a distinct personality as opposed to tabula rasa? Yes, absolutely. But there's no one factor you can attribute that to.

However, my money's still on biochemistry, whether it's a particular hormone balance that results in one twin's being straight and the other gay, or depressive/traumatized mother produces depressive/schizophrenic infant, or three-pack-a-day smoker produces low birth-weight infant with asthma.

That's based on observation - having birthed a couple of 'em and seeing the innate personality manifest from Minute #1 - and a bit of psych study.

I agree, much of this is biochemistry but what determines the initial biochemistry are the genes. There isn't one without the other. Neurotransmitters don't just fall out of the sky they're transcripted direct from the blueprint in the DNA. And although over a persons lifetime the levels can be altered by simple things such as what we eat, certain traits remain. Thrill seekers for example.

Schizophrenics go off their meds and they revert to the state their DNA has eroniously decided is this persons correct bio chemical balance.