There is no “I” in “character”…or is there?

I am an incorrigible people-watcher.

Those of you who know me probably know this. And those of you who don’t know me…well, now you know that too.

I’m not sure how this started. I suspect the groundwork for it has always been there, but doing theatre probably had a lot to do with bringing it to the surface. (Acting teachers seem fond of encouraging their students to notice specific behaviors in other people so that said behaviors can be used as acting tools.)

Whatever the cause, the point is that I spend a lot of time staring at people. Funnily enough, this has made me a rather observant person.

He's cool and all, but we're into different things.

I don’t mean that I’m some kind of Sherlock Holmes. I don’t pick up on tiny details and use those to try to deduce facts about a person. I just mean that I read other people well. I’m far from perfect, but I can usually tell by someone’s facial expressions and body language how s/he feels about a given situation–better than average, I think. And thanks to a lot of autodidactic interest in things like microexpressions, I’m even learning to become aware of more subtle expressions too–things that previously would have only registered on a subconscious level.

This is all part of who I am. It’s how I function in everyday life. And guess what kinds of characters I tend to write? I’ll give you a hint: they spend a lot of time watching people.

I first became aware of this fact when I happened upon a thread in the NaNoWriMo forums that was asking about personal tropes (i.e. recurring themes/character types in your writing). I didn’t post on the thread, but reading through it got me thinking about the kinds of things that show up in my writing a lot. (That’s a whole other story, and I’ll save it for later.) What I realized was that there are some intriguing trends in the sorts of characters I tend to write, and that they can be divided into two basic chunks–before high school, and after high school. So, in very broad terms:

Before HS: 100% female protagonists who were strong, intelligent, tomboyish girls who hated being underestimated by guys.

After HS: mostly male protagonists, many of whom are quiet, thoughtful, unassuming, and very, very observant. They tend to be counterbalanced by another character (nearly always female) who is smart, snarky, and energetic.

So what happened in high school to cause this shift? Honestly, I don’t know, because I did almost no creative writing in high school (hence why there’s this distinct before-after scenario). Maybe I developed a better insight into the male psyche due to having a long-term boyfriend. Maybe I got bored writing about girls and found that boys were interesting because they were different.

Or maybe *I* changed.

I don’t want to analyze it too much because that just gets weird, but that’s the strange bit to think about. While I might occasionally grant a character a bit of myself (e.g. a like or dislike), I never write characters with the intention of making them be like me. Still, when I look at those before/after sketches, I can see facets of myself in them, like looking into a fractured mirror.

Of course, I’m definitely not my protagonists, and it would be most unwise to try to psychoanalyze me based on my stories. I also very much agree with John Green’s thoughts on the matter as expressed in the first 30 seconds of this video. I would hate to have someone read my work and try to figure out what parts of the characters are me, because that’s really not the point. However, as a writer, it’s interesting to contemplate why certain traits might show up repeatedly in your babies. Is it a sort of psychological DNA that they share? Or a common psychological body language that they all “speak”? I’m not sure those are the types of questions that need an answer–maybe it’s better not to have one.

But it’s still interesting to think about. And just because you think/talk about it does not mean any of it is set in stone. Actually, my 2011 NaNovel will be an interesting experience because it’s a return to the sort of strong, no-nonsense girls I wrote before high school. We’ll see how that goes…

So, dear readers and raptors:

Do you see traits that show up in many of your characters?
Do you ever intentionally put bits of yourself into characters, or is it mostly unconscious?
Or do your characters not resemble you much at all?

The Hunting of the Snark (or, A Meditation on Why We Like Sarcastic Characters)

Sarcastic, sardonic, snippy.

Sharp-tongued, acid-tongued, razor-tongued.

Snarker, snarky, snarkalicious.

A person prone to making cutting (and often humorous) remarks at the expense of those around them: unlike the mysterious snark in Lewis Carroll’s poem, such people do exist in life. They are, however, comparatively rare. I think most of us will probably meet only a few people in real life who might be classified as “constantly producing witty comments on a day-to-day basis”.

And yet, they are freaking EVERYWHERE in fiction. From Sherlock Holmes to the entire cast of Firefly and from Fred and George Weasley to Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet, snark pervades every type of fiction.

And you say:  Well duh.

This is obviously not a unique revelation or anything. The (in)famous TVTropes.org (Wikipedia for all things fictional) even has a page devoted to the World of Snark phenomenon, not to mention an index of all its snark-related tropes. (Please note that I take no responsibility for excessive time spent on TVTropes–it’s addictive, and you’ve been warned.) Snarky characters are the lifeblood of so much of modern popular fiction that the dialogue of some films and TV shows is really nothing but a sequence of witty comments lobbed back and forth between characters whose mental reflexes rival the physical reflexes of ping-pong masters. Recently, I was sitting in my living room while my sister and mother watched an episode of the TV show Bones, and because I was not sitting with them at the computer and had no visual input, my entire experience of the episode was listening to the characters snarking back and forth at incredible speeds. They hardly seemed to process or register what was said to them before immediately replying with something equally clever. It was very impressive–and also very unrealistic.

Of course, there’s no law that fiction is supposed to represent reality truthfully. For many writers, I think there’s a great (if unconscious) freedom in being able to “improve” upon real life; as some famous person once said, fiction is reality with all the boring stuff cut out. Characters in fiction don’t have to mumble or trip over their words; they don’t have to experience awkward things like getting zits or diarrhea; they don’t have to live quiet, mundane lives. Fictional characters don’t have to do or be these things. It’s not that they can’t. It’s just that most don’t. Thus, the attraction to snark becomes evident if you give it a bit of thought. I think most human beings know the experience of only coming up with a good comeback after the moment for delivering it is long gone. Moreover, we admire people who are snarky because a) we enjoy laughing, and b) on some level, we all wish that we could do what they do. Wouldn’t most of us like to be the verbal best-in-shows in every conversation?

Considering snarky characters in these terms has helped me to understand my own attraction to them. Perhaps it seems a bit obvious–it does to me in retrospect–but it actually puzzled me for a long time. I mean, I’m not a naturally snarky person, yet somehow my own writing is peppered with characters who appear to inhale oxygen and exhale sardonic comments.

If I may admit to something a little embarrassing: recognizing this has led me to worry that, while future readers might enjoy one book or story of mine, reading subsequent works might convince them that I’m incapable of writing a story without snark. And honestly, I’m worried they might be right. On one hand, it’s a funny thing to worry about: so you write about people who are wittier than you are–so what? On the other hand, I myself am bothered by fiction where the snark overrides reality to the point where I’m conscious of the writers at work behind the scenes, madly scribbling to keep the ball in the air. Reading or watching fiction where I’m too aware of the writer isn’t fun, and if a line of dialogue is too obviously “written”, it can pull me out of the story in an unpleasant way. I don’t want to do that to my readers.

But for the moment, I’m going to keep reading and writing about snarky characters. Because regardless of whether it’s due to wish-fulfillment or to humor or to my (possible) inability to do otherwise, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.