(no subject)

[ksmith]

These posts by kaigou, who I don't know, are riveting. If you write, read, or just wish to understand.

Part One.

Part Two.
By way of matociquala and difrancis.

The overarching point, of providing your characters with realistic backgrounds, of making the effort to flesh them out with the right details, is something I've seen discussed since I started writing. I remember an article in which Samuel R. Delany asked his students to think about what their protag did for a living. The "phantom income", the gang of underemployed 20-somethings living in the Manhattan apartment that anyone with some knowledge of the area knows would cost thousands a month. How do they pay the rent? Where do the clothes come from? How do they get around? Do they have friends? Can they keep them, or do they lose them, and why?

Those aren't details that get in the way of the story--they *are* the story, because they shape who your characters are and how they react and how others react to them.

The set-up of Incident on a Small Colony involved Jani-as-fugitive trying to earn enough money to get to the next hiding place. Yes, as I read kaigou's posts, I compared points made to my mental checklist. I did better than I thought. I see a couple of places where I missed the boat. Jani came from a different place, but the similarities I saw between what I've read of intelligence agents and what I read in kaigou's posts...well, it strikes me that there's a lot of overlap. A lot.

The conclusion is that background shapes character. It doesn't have to be a street background, which seems to strike some folks as romantic in a Paris urchin kind of way and isn't if you take the time to draw back the curtain and look at what's there. If you take the time to learn, you may not wind up with the story you originally intended. And the story will likely be better for it.

Comments

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

Haven't followed the links yet, but just from what you said here--agree absolutely. Character makes the story, and background makes the character--both the intrinsic bits that biology provides and the extrinsic bits that the biology interacting with the available social/economic/political/physical environment provides.

Now to go read the links...

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

They're the sort of helpful essays that Speculations used to run in their paper days. Don't know if they still do.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

It also strikes me that there's one hell of a novel in there.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd add one more thing to the weapons discussion — it's sort of a tangent, but not really —

You know the outsider who comes in with the Bruce Lee-like moves? It doesn't matter whether he (or she) is an immigrant, a Masked Avenger, a kid from a rich family who did lots of martial arts before being out of the family home, or whatever: He or she is a walking dead person, for two reasons (either of which is fatal).

* Martial arts prowess is judged under safety rules. There are no safety rules on the street. One of the subtexts in the first part of Kaigou's essay (http://kaigou.livejournal.com/419026.html) — a subtext that I wish had been more explicit — is that striking to hit is an entirely different matter from striking to damage, to maim, or to kill. The difference affects more than just attitude; merely feeling more ruthless, now that it's not in the dojo, doesn't make up for ingrained, muscle-memory-level technique learned in that dojo. Remember the sarcastic point about "there are no rules"?

* Fancy martial arts moves (especially against multiple opponents) depend upon clear, sound footing and balance. They don't work so well in an alley with scattered puddles, oil slicks, garbage, loose stones, cracked pavement, and so on. Neither do they work so well in a field full of stumps, divots, gopher holes, broken bottles, and so on. If you actually watch a Hollywood-like performance, you'll note that the "winner" always has a firm, even (not necessarily level, but always even), predictable-traction surface under him/her when launching one of those deadly martial-arts attacks.

— CEP
Scrivener's Error (http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com)