The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Mechanics

  • Meeting with Mitch

    This interview is with a character from my short story Patchwork. The story is not yet available. It is being submitted to horror markets with the hope of being published soon.

    “ Welcome to a Meeting with Mitch, I’m Mitch Marlins. Our guest today could not join us in the studio. He is currently being housed in the Taylor County Jail facing charges on several murders, but he has agreed to talk to us via satellite. Denny, thanks for joining us.

    “ Goddammit, my name’s not Denny.

    “The deputies said—“

    “Those [beep]heads,” he yells off-camera. “Hey, Joel. It’s not enough that you got me locked up in this [beep]ing [beep]hole, but you gotta keep busting my balls on the Denny thing? Yeah, real [beep]ing funny.”

    “So your name isn’t Denny?” Mitch asks. (more…)

  • Getting to Know You (Week Ending October 13)

    The characters we invent are little extensions of ourselves. Whether we create heroes or villains, friends or foils, writers invest a bit of their own personalities into them. So, we thought it might be fun to meet some of these characters.

    Recently, the “character interview” has been used by authors to help promote books. It’s a great way to talk about the book and give a feel for the writing without actually giving away an excerpt. And sometimes the characters are entertaining enough on their own to entice readers to pick up the book.

    This week, you’ll meet a variety of characters from a variety of works by our Cafe authors. Some of these interviews are straight-forward. Some are … offbeat. But we’re sure you’ll enjoy meeting these characters and the authors who created them.

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management

  • Easy: Keep the Cast Small

    Ha!

    Ahem.

    Okay, so, I’m not the person to ask about managing large casts of characters — I’m shit with large casts of characters. Frankly, I get exhausted reading about a large cast of characters.

    I might give you six or eight named characters who influence the story, but really, the story is only about two or three of them. Or, one or two sets of them; I love writing about relationships and interaction, be it between brothers or enemies.

    (more…)

  • Shaking the Tree

    If you know all the visual cues you’ll understand this. If not, sorry. Image attribution.

    Can you name the original X-Men? Do you know who the first members of the Uncanny X-Men (the second team) were and how many are still in the group? All right, how about the Reavers? Or the New Mutants? What about Generation X?

    My point being that as a reader, anyone who followed the far-ranging cast of characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s taken by Chris Claremont in the late 70s and expanded beyond any scope or definition of Reason into the 90s had to have an inclination toward keeping literally hundreds of mutants straight. Fortunately there were visual cues. Unfortunately, not every artist interpreted those visual cues the same way.

    But there was a lesson there for young Jason as he aspired to his own dreams of writing. (Sorry, the Claremont pretentiousness sometimes slips over the levee. <cringe>) The lesson was that for a reader to enjoy a story with an enormous cast, the author had to have a kind of shorthand that immediately cued the reader. Sometimes it’s the way a character talks, or a catchword or phrase. Or maybe it’s patois that’s stylistically disguised as “accent” ala having an English character say “Eh, wot?” That’s all in the writing.

    (more…)

  • Information Design. For Dummies?

    This week’s Confabulator Cafe topic is how to avoid confusing your reader when using a large cast of characters.

    So it’s about managing complexity.

    In other words, information design.

    Information design is one of those meta-meta [0] terms that can make your brain bleed. It’s like water to a fish— all around you, but you barely notice. It’s similar to the concept of linguistic framing.

    (more…)

  • Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice…

    Justice League
    Even in the Justice League, there are secondary characters who need to tell their stories. Artwork by Ed Benes. © 2007 DC Comics, all rights reserved.

    Writing a story involving multiple characters is never easy. Heck, it’s hard enough writing a story about one main character, knowing there are going to be secondary characters moving in and out of their story. But the bar gets raised when — to the writer’s surprise — several supposed secondary characters begin to cry out for attention.

    This is what I call the “Justice League Effect.”

    In the comic book world, there are two types of superhero comics: solo titles and team books. Some characters (think Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) are big enough to anchor one or more solo titles. But other characters never have enough fan support to manage it.

    (more…)

  • 5 Ways to Avoid Character Confusion

    When I’m writing I can picture all the characters from my story interacting. In my mind they are fully realized individuals with their own strengths and personalities. They entertain me with their uniqueness, their specific way of speaking and their wacky fashion statements. It’s easy to forget that a reader coming to my work fresh might not perceive the characters as I do! Readers will need to be shown all the things that make a character unique before that character comes to life for them.

    Continually putting myself in my reader’s shoes and trying to view the story as someone else helps me keep from getting lost in my own imagination or taking my characters for granted.

    (more…)

  • Crowd Noise

    Don’t let them all talk at once.

    Writing a story with a large cast of characters can be tricky. My books tend to have a large cast, and with each progression in the series, the cast gets bigger.

    Book three, especially, has become a little out of hand, but that’s a major plot point, so whittling down the number of people/creatures would erase the entire point. I’ve had to make peace with the fact that it might get a little overwhelming for the reader in the first few chapters, simply because it must become overwhelming to my main character. The plot sort of revolves around it.

    But that’s not the normal way I go about handling a large cast. In previous books, and even in a few short stories I’ve written, I’ve had to use a few tricks to keep everyone in line.

    (more…)

  • Keep the Cast Small, With an Ax if Necessary

    Nobody ever told me I was supposed to have a large cast of characters! This is actually something I have a bit of trouble with managing. In short works I tend to limit my characters to a central protagonist and a few sidekicks. I mean… side characters. Depending on the length of the piece, my story might not actually have more than two characters. Sometimes more characters are mentioned in passing, but not always.

    Even in my novel, I tried to limit the number of important characters my viewpoint character interacts with. I’ve found that writing in first person really allows me to get inside my protagonist’s head and allow her opinions and views of the other characters to color how they are presented to the audience.  She has very distinctive opinions about different characters, and I hope that those opinions allow them to become more memorable. (more…)

  • What’s in a Name That Starts with J?

    I admire the way writers like Tolkien and George R.R. Martin juggle enormous casts of characters. Martin has an entire appendix dedicated to all of the different houses, for crap’s sake. How in the world do they keep track of them all? Extensive note-taking, I’m sure. They are obviously masters of their craft.

    I have never had as much luck managing that many characters, but I’ve found a few tricks help me keep everyone straight.

    As shallow as it sounds, names are probably one of the most basic ways to avoid character confusion. I learned early on that names that sound the same or to have too many names that start with the same letter make it hard to tell everyone apart. I also tend to use simple names, even in my fantasy writing, to make them easier to remember. (more…)