TECH: C.J. Cherryh on Characters

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Initial posting: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 11:21:15 EDT

[For those who aren't SF cognoscente (does that really mean people with smelly brains?), C.J. Cherryh writes good, hard SF, with emphasis on the "sense of wonder" caused by NOT explaining the background, just letting the reader deduce it from what is going on...anyway, before I get too far out on a limb without visible support, C.J. Cherryh is a published writer]

And in http://www.cherryh.com/www/charac.htm , C.J. Cherryh discusses heroic and morally weak characters, along with 'well-drawn' and 'one-dimensional' characters.

[HINT: GO READ IT! REALLY!]

Along with other interesting points, this piece includes the following:

"What are the reasonable 'dramatic expectations of a novel'?

1) The central character is supposed to be responsible for things.

2) The central character has to act and cause things to happen, even if the results aren't ideal.

3) Anticipated consequences have to really happen, and have to be dealt with...no 'it was all a dream.' And beware of magical fixes.

4) No backing away or relating things from second-hand or remote vantages.

<snippet>

5) Create anticipation, and remember terror is one form of anticipation. It's why otherwise rational people wrap birthday presents for people they love, and pay to read horror novels.

6) The character should meet opposition or reversal of some kind and should exit with some lasting consequences that aren't positive, some cost---and some gain. <... go read it!>

7) No miracles. The character who fails, the 'morally weak' character, the character who must confront...but refuses, will not cope, will not bear up, will find a weasel way out or a miracle way out rather than face the consequences and who had rather buy moral authority the cheap way or have it granted by a god on a rope, rather than hammering it out the hard way...that's a villain, or a foil for the hero. When it occurs in a hero at the end of the book, it's frustration for the reader, and prompts me to remember an author I won't buy again. The central character in an adult novel must solve the problem, never, never, never have it solved for him by someone else. A central character must never be generally absent or non-participant in the dramatic sort-out. Sounds silly to have to say, but it is true.

"Well, those are 7 rules by which to create a book and 7 rules by which a reader may reasonably judge a book. They can be bent, but only by a master hand...and rarely even then."

<snip-clip>

And the very last sentence of the piece:

"What's character? The whole book...for me...is character."

Something else to ponder, perhaps?

TECH: What's an SF?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting: Sat, 7 May 1994 18:35:02 JST

greg asked, quite correctly, if I would try to explain why I don't consider Star Wars as fundamentally SF.

Let me admit that one of the first times Randy and jc pinned me to the wall and made me think on this list was in connection with the question of what constitutes SF. At that time, I ended up with some extravagant number of words trying to pin down my own thinking about it, and I'm still not sure I'm happy with it.

I still start with the basic notion that there must be at least one assumption not part of "consensus reality" (thanks, jc!) which is necessary to the story. This is a generalization of the more common "the science has to be so integral to the plot that the story would collapse without it." Generalized in that I am not as dogmatic as I once was about what kind of "science" I allow in (e.g., magic, properly handled, can be entertaining) and in that I've been pounded around the head and shoulders enough with the notion that the difference from "consensus reality" might be integral to something besides the plot.

Let me mention an example. Heinlein's story about a time travel agent who is his own father and mother is perhaps one of the clearest examples of a story where removing the "science" -- time travel -- would destroy the story completely. Quite simply, take away that pin and there is nothing left - you can't write the story! The feelings, the characterizations of the single character who makes up the story, these are all very, very human - but the story requires time travel.

Okay - I'll admit that Star Wars has a fantastic setting, robots, and so forth and so on. BUT they are not necessary to the story. In fact, I get the impression in watching it (the first one - I haven't seen the others enough to be impressed with them) that there might have been a concerted effort to avoid making the story turn on any of the differences. Servants would have done just as well as robots. The farm on the edge of the dustbowl is so stereotyped that I had to cheer when it was blown away. Etc. at length.

Thus, while I admit the setting is exotic - since it has nothing to do with the story, the story fails to meet my standards for SF.

(with a touch of hesitancy - how much did the story depend on the setting? would the bar scene have been as much fun without the gratuitious "aliens"? in some ways, the SF setting is played for laughs, as a kind of "camp" backdrop to the tired old story - and I might argue myself into considering that in some way necessary to the story. But it's a pretty weak connection, at best...)

Admittedly, there are a great number of stories and novels marketed under the label SF which I also consider as marginal, at best. Further, there are stories marketed in other parts of the literary world which I would happily consider as fulfilling this basic requirement for SF - no matter how the world weighs them.

And while I'm noting my hedges - in a sense, it could be (and has been) argued that all fiction is merely the subset of SF whose assumptions counter to consensus reality are so minor that we suspend our disbelief easily in regard to them. Non-fiction, of course, is then merely that subset of fiction whose assumptions happen to coincide with consensus reality. By that argument, all writing belongs to SF - it's just that we're kind enough to skip lightly over the minor disagreements between consensus reality and ordinary fiction, while the relatively large and deliberate differences of those writings ordinarily identified as SF require a larger helping of willing suspension...

[BTW - let me just reference Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Gardner Dozois et al, St. Martin's Press, 1991, ISBN 0-312-06003-3. Should at least be read in the library by anyone who wants to write SF. Robert Heinlein sums up his five critical points for SF and tells you to write human stories; Gardner Dozois spends a good 15 pages showing you why simply moving a story into the future or to another planet isn't good enough; and many others... recommended!

Heinlein's List:

1. The conditions must be, in some respect different from here-and-now, although the difference may lie only in an invention made in the course of the story.
2. The new conditions must be an essential part of the story.
3. The problem itself -- the "plot" -- must be a _human_ problem.
4. The human problem must be one that is created by, or indispensably affected by, the new conditions.
5. (at length) don't violate established facts; make it at least partially plausible; keep it consistent...]