Notes from Whining vs. Angst in Characters at Westercon

Whining versus angst

Corry L. Lee, Alma Alexander, Elizabeth Guizetti, Stephanie Weippert, Anna Sheehan

sometimes they leap out
characters take quite a bit of work.
given the plot of my book, what’s a character that’s going to be interesting if they go through a change that mirrors the plot of the book?

If you have a character that says “here I am”, and then you have to write a story, what do you do?

Elizabeth: I need to start with a plot, their occupation, and their gender. once I have that, the rest jumps out. I’ve very plot driven, not character driven.
Alma: I wrote down character sketches (~5 lines) for nine different characters, then started writing. No idea of what the plot is.
Stephanie: I start with a starting scene. I imagine a woman driving in a stormy night. Then ask, why is she doing that? And it turns out she’s lost her job, and her boyfriend, and her apartment complex is being torn down.

If you have a character where everything is going wrong, how do you keep them from being whiny?

Anna: I have a very passive character, who is that way because of emotional abuse. The trick to get away with it is to make it an unreliable first-person narrator.
Stephanie:

Alma:
Elizabeth: Most of the characters I write about have real problems. If they whine a little bit, the reader understands that’s acceptable. But I also go to action: the character does something.
Corry: If you have somebody who is cycling on something in their past, they can’t just loop on the same thing, and say the same thing: e.g. “i lost my job. it sucks that I lost my job. i can’t believe i lost my job.” it’s time to progress: “oh, maybe i lost my job because i came to work with a mohawk.” or go into action.

What about action characters? If you have a really active characters, how does that balance out? (e.g. how do you write a two-dimensional action here?)

Elizabeth: they have to have real problems. they need to have personalities, likes and dislikes, friends. This rounds them out.
Anna: Has a character who is wildly angry, whose impulse is always to hit first. But need to keep him from being one dimensional. So he fights this anger. It has a background: he was institutionalized as a child. And it causes him problems.
Corry: Their personality needs to build with the world and intensify the story. Otherwise it is just tacked on.

I like to look at the main characters. These are aspects of my main characters. Now how can I flip that aspect, and give it to a secondary character. Now each character and the aspects itself is more interesting.
Too often secondary characters are just milk-toast. They’re not interesting enough, or not weird enough.

Elizabeth: Every secondary character has to fulfill a purpose, and if they aren’t fulfilling enough purposes, then combine secondary characters into one: makes them more interesting, fulfill more purposes, and have less names to remember.
Corry: Your secondary characters should want and need things, just as your primary character does. And if what they want is at odds with the primary character, all the better.

Elizabeth: generally a quiet scene, something that furthers the plot, but something they do uniquely: e.g. the thief character who washes their laundry by hand and hangs it inside so it won’t be stolen.
Stephanie: Let the character make their own choices: big things: what are they going to choose if they can only save one of two things. little things: what music they listen to.
Anna: I do a lot of dialogue, and focus on the off the wall.
Corry: Action. Have your character doing something. The choice of what they do, and how they do it tells us a lot. Washing the blood out of the laundry is very different from someone doesn’t wash the blood out.

William Hertling's Thoughtstream