I was thinking around a recent comment on my character arc post. Kev wrote:

Planning a story arc for a character can be difficult until you know the character fully, this not always the case when you start a writing about/with them.

My response was that I did not feel the character(s) need to be completely mapped out prior to writing – in fact, I would now extend that to purposefully leaving gaps in the character’s personality and back-story that will be revealed by their actions as he lives and breathes the story.

The journey reveals the character

I have had my nose buried in a small book by Bernard Cornwell, the creator of the Sharpe series entitled Sharpe’s Story. If you are not aware, the Sharpe books are a model for how I will initially develop my TableRappers series, and so it was not difficult to find the time to read a book all about their history.

One early passage reminded me of Kev’s comment:

… I knew I needed a hero, but I never once sat down and tried to delineate him in my mind; instead I let him develop as I wrote the book … Sharpe was pretty much a mystery to me when I started writing [the first book].

Even at that stage, Cornwell aimed to write a series of books about his roguish rifleman in the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s, having himself been inspired by C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels. Yet, the central character of Sharpe was little more than a sketch, with simple back-story and a handful of influencing circumstances. Sharpe revealed himself as much to the author as he does to the reader.

I like that way of writing. Reading a book should be a journey of discovery, so why not writing it, also? Of course, there’s the ever present risk of having to re-work already written passages as a result of some late revelation, but writing is re-writing anyway.

The characters write the story

You may think it is the author who directs the passage of the story. But it is, in fact, the characters. Sometimes they surprise you with their actions. You may have one direction in mind but on writing, they can take off an run in a completely different direction. It is exciting (and sometimes troubling to get them out of whatever complications arise out of their actions)!

This may become an additional challenge for me from the second TableRappers book onwards. By book two, there will be few surprises buried in my characters’ personalities and lives. Though I do have a few clues to currently firmly secured skeletons here and there, I may find the adventure of discovering more of the people I am writing about to be more predictable – for me, that means less interesting.

I will only know for sure when I am deeply embroiled in book two. Hopefully, if the situations into which I throw my hapless characters are interesting enough in themselves, everything will work out just fine.

Book two, A Shot in Time,  will be a very intriguing exercise and I anticipate quite a contrasting writing experience that I am very much looking forward to.

Arcs are, of course, essential. The reader must follow a character’s journey through each story and that journey must somehow create change around, and more importantly within the character. He may even end up coming full circle, but there must always be a curve of some description – linear characters invariably lose the reader’s interest.

The problem arises in writing multiple books in a series. One must develop plausible arcs for the main characters within each book while maintaining a much broader arc across the entire series.

Letting it all out too early

The first book seems to be the toughest in this respect. The inclination is to develop a thoroughly gripping character arc for the tortured primary protagonist just as with any standalone novel. But it is vital not to play all the cards too early, leaving so few options across the remaining stories that our protagonist might need a dramatic personality change in order to remain interesting! This seems to happen frequently in long running soaps.

Holding too much back

On the flipside, there’s the danger of keeping too much back. Playing out the character arc across so many books in the series that it becomes flattened with each individual story dulled and uninteresting.

What about a book series with no absolute final number of stories? Without understanding the end, how can you develop a character arc that will find completion and not leave your readers dangling in the dark?

Dimensions are everything

To offer the broadest opportunities to develop smaller character arcs within the overall arc, fully formed characters, it seems to me, are the key. Characters do not need to be complex, but they do need to have realistic, multiple dimensions – sometimes conflicting dimensions are the most interesting to write.

Such characters merely need a situation thrown at them and they take on a life of their own. Writing their actions and reactions to a situation is much more straightforward with a well defined character.

I’m no expert, of course, I’m merely on my first novel, but it seems clear that to sustain my characters across an undefined number of books, they must have a great deal of substance.

Early thoughts in early days. Ask me in ten years if these ideas worked!

For the first few years as an aspiring stand-up comic, one must tread the rocky paths of the open spots. These are the 5 minute – or if you are lucky 10 – slots that most smaller comedy clubs make available to new comics honing their techniques.

The open spot routine goes as follows:

• Travel for 2-3 hours to the venue
• Hang around for 1-2 hours waiting for your spot
• Spend 5 minutes in front of a disinterested audience who paid to see ‘real’ comics
• Hope the club promoter saw enough promise in you to give you another spot in a few months
• Go home and re-consider any gags that did not generate a laugh

That may seem rather cynical view, but that is the process when reduced down to its core. It is genuinely much more fun that it sounds, however. These open spots are best handled by packing them with quick-fire gags and quips; fire stuff into the mic, then get the heck off. I found the minimal audience interaction very uninspiring.

So I moved into running a couple of (very) small clubs and acting as compere. The compere spends several time slots working with that night’s audience, warming them up, cooling them down, and generally creating each appropriate segue from the previous to the next act. Most importantly, there is an evolving relationship over the period of the show.

I’m getting to the point, thank you for hanging in there…

I experience a similar problem in the difference between writing a short story compared to writing a novel. But this is not centred around the act of concise writing.

I want to get to know them

Stories are about people – at least I believe mine are, regardless of their respective settings. There’s little more satisfying than learning about the characters one places into a story, understanding their nuances, discovering their quirks, ’seeing’ them play out their lives.

The short story simply does not have the space or the time for such luxuries and that is where my challenge lies. These are interesting, nay fascinating people (they must be as I am including them in my story!).

The dead end of death

This problem is particularly acute in a series of short stories I am writing and planning which will form a collection entitled “Six Deaths” – the title is something of a giveaway – and as you might guess, each character has but a brief sojourn within the pages. And there lies my personal challenge when writing shorts: I want to know these individuals, get under their skins, understand who they really are before… well, let’s just say before they up and leave.

I find writing short stories about the characters that inhabit Edwardian London in the TableRappers book(s), so very much easier and satisfying because I know them such that I do not feel I am missing out on learning about them as individuals.

It feels so utterly disrespectful to create a character for the sake of merely a few thousand words. Perhaps I just need to grow some thicker skin and be a little more ruthless with my characters. Hmm… Six Deaths, how more ruthless can one be..?