It has been some while since I did a character review, but then, it has been some while since I read something quite this engaging. I have to say, I picked up Bloody Jack rather on a whim. I enjoy pirate stories, and have one in the works to write myself, so I’m always interested in seeing how other authors portray that era and life on the high seas. (I also have to say that I would never have picked it up at all except for the awesome swashbuckling cover art shown here which, sad to say, seems to have been chucked in the version currently available on Amazon for a cover which is practically cliched in its bland triteness.)

But, it being a Young Adult title, I have to say I went in with fairly low expectations. I don’t mean that as any kind of dig against YA—I love YA, and most of what I write has been YA. I only mean that I wasn’t expecting much more than a hum-drum tale of pirates and Spanish gold. Boy was I wrong, in the best possible way. It is, as the Publisher’s Weekly starred review says, “a rattling good read” that kept me up late several nights in a row, largely on the strength of its amazing protagonist.

The protagonist is Mary Faber, a young orphaned waif making a hard living on the streets of London. How she becomes “Jack” Faber and ends up on a ship in His Majesty’s service is a tale in itself, which I won’t spoil here except to say that it is touching and poignant and heartbreaking in all the right ways. And while striving not to spoil anything else in the book, I do want to talk about the some of the many things Meyer does very much right with his protagonist.

Voice

Meyer has an incredible ear for the language of the period. He portrays 18th century English vernacular with incredible facility. Further, he made the perfect choice in writing the book in first-person POV. Thus, not only does the language of the book convey the setting, but it’s also integral to Mary’s characterization. Everything we see is Mary’s take on events. If you go to writers conferences or attend talks by agents and publishers, you’ll always hear them say they’re looking for books with a strong voice. Bloody Jack is a great example.

Personality

Meyer gave his protagonist quite a personality, and one that is perfectly fitted to her backstory. It is never difficult to believe that she would feel and act in the ways she does. Her ship-board life demands acts of bravery, which she supplies, not because she’s brave (and at several points Mary herself remarks on how she was never very brave) but because she’s a survivor and because she’ll do just about anything to protect the people she cares about. Meyer has done an amazing job of portraying someone who really does wish she could just have a quiet, peaceful, safe life, but can’t, and yet rises to the occasion in order to get by.

Those are Mary’s major themes. But Meyer didn’t stop there. He gave her some additional colorful personality traits—a love of music, a playfully evil mischievious streak, and a right saucy sailor mouth—all of which he works into the fabric of the storyline. None of those traits are there just for fun. Every one of them has a meaningful impact on the ship-board events, and affects Mary’s standing significantly.

He also portrays her as an intelligent, thoughtful girl. This largely comes through in the way she thinks about life, and the occasional deeply insightful observations she makes about it. And if I may go off on a tangent for a moment, I think novels give writers a unique opportunity to make readers think about things they might not otherwise think about. But, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that. The wrong way is to be heavy-handed, preachy, and moralistic in your narrative, to make sure the reader cannot possibly miss how you feel about an issue. The right way is simply to shine a little light on an issue, show your readers how your characters feel about it, and let readers make up their own minds. If you do read Bloody Jack (which I highly recommend), pay attention to Mary’s observations about the differences between men’s and women’s clothing for a great example of how to do that right.

Goals

There’s a saying that in every scene, you have to know what the goals of each character are. Further, characters are supposed to have an over-riding goal for the story, one that is captured in the story’s central conflict. Mary definitely has goals in every scene, but she doesn’t so much have a goal for the whole story as she has a series of escalating goals. One of the parts of Bloody Jack I enjoyed most was watching the evolution of Mary’s goals as the book progresses. In the beginning, her threats are starvation, freezing to death in the winter, and the gruesomely portrayed antagonist Mr. Muck. Her goal is simple survival. But as the book progresses, her goals shift, little by little, until by the end she has gained meaningful long-term goals for her whole life.

Her character arc is wrapped up in her ever-expanding event horizon. In the beginning of the book, she doesn’t expect to live long at all. Street urchins usually don’t. But by the end, everything has changed. Watching her go from hopelessness to hopeful about the future, and watching her have dreams and make plans about the future, was really beautiful to read. Like watching someone come back to life. Masterfully done, Mr. Meyer. Masterfully done indeed.

Treatment

Finally, the way Meyer treats Mary in the book is perfect. She has a hard life, and Meyer doesn’t pull any punches. He doesn’t do the worst thing possible to her, which would be to baby her. If you want to read a great example of the adage “when in doubt, make it worse,” read Bloody Jack. Because Meyer relentlessly makes her situation worse, while at the same time making it much, much better. It’s a great piece of writerly jujitsu, watching how he alleviates one problem in her life only to reveal more subtle, darker, sinister problems lurking in wait.

All in all, I loved Bloody Jack. Even better, it’s the first book in series chronicling the Curious Adventures of Mary “Jacky” Faber, Ship’s Boy. I’m excited to read the rest! Give Bloody Jack a try. You won’t be sorry.

One of my followers on Twitter, Samantha Johnson, asked me “Do you have a post about basing characters loosely on historical figures? And how not to get trapped in the facts?” Well, I didn’t, but now I do! Thanks Samantha! (And by the way, you all should check out the highly amusing bio on her Twitter profile. How can you not like someone like that?)

Samantha goes on to clarify her question: “When I start researching historical figures to get a better sense of their personality, I get so caught up in the facts that I find it very difficult to add my own flair to my characters. It could be a fear of adding/subtracting a trait that ends up making another seem inconsistent or false. It could be a result of my love of history not wanting me to tamper with anything. The more sources and interpretations of historical figures I read, the harder it is for me to figure out how to fictionalize the traits in a way that fits.”

Those are good concerns to have. However, Samantha, I’m heartened to see that you are already doing the first thing right: Research.

Know what you’re talking about

Samantha already knows this, but seriously, make sure you know what you’re talking about. Do some research. How can you expect to use, say, Leonardo Loredan in your epic tale of love and politics in 16th century Venice, if you don’t actually know anything about the guy? I’ve heard writers say that research on their historical figures doesn’t matter all that much because the people they’re borrowing for their novels are too obscure, and nobody’s going to know the difference. Wrong.

Somebody will know the difference. This is a double problem for you. One, if that person does know something about Leonardo Loredan, and you didn’t do any research, chances are that person knows more than you and they will catch you screwing something up. This usually drops the reader’s view of the author by several notches, and messes up their enjoyment of the book. Two, someone who actually knows who Leonardo Loredan was is your ideal target reader. This is the person you want reading your book, loving it, and getting totally stoked because not only did you use a historical figure they knew about, but you got the details right. That’s a person who is going to go give you a five-star rating on Amazon, who is going to generate word-of-mouth sales for you, and so forth. Be smart. Be like Samantha and respect your readers (and your story, honestly) enough to do some research.

Let the research guide you

I’ve written two historicals. In both cases, I learned some utterly wild, crazy stuff I could never have dreamed up on my own. Sometimes, I honestly don’t know why everyone doesn’t just write historical novels, because actual history is so much weirder than anything I can invent, it saves you from coming up with all the fun, quirky little twists and details that make a historical novel come to life. In a certain sense—except for all the research—historicals are easier to write. Case in point: One of my novels is set on the Pony Express trail. In the research, I learned that the famous British explorer Sir Richard Burton travelled the length of the Pony Express trail, and inferred from excerpts of the journals he kept along the way that he was kind of a pompous ass. Not only that, he was on the trail during the specific few months in which my novel takes place. Perfect! He became the inspiration for a much-needed lighthearted chapter in what is otherwise a fairly gritty book. Would I ever have thought to toss a famous British explorer into my Wild West novel? Not a chance. But I found him in the research. Let the research guide you, because history really is stranger than fiction.

In doing the research, you will inevitably stumble upon quirky, fun people who existed on the sidelines of whatever your true research subject is. I wholeheartedly encourage writers to take advantage of those people when you find them. Steal them outright. They can often make wonderful minor character additions to a novel.

When it comes to adding your own flair to a historical figure, I think it’s always a balancing act. Samantha, I admire your dedication to historical accuracy, but as you point out, the interpretations we have of historical figures are often contradictory. What then? Well:

Consider how much we really know about the figure

Here’s a simple rule of thumb. The less we know about a historical figure—and the further back in time your novel is set—the more leeway you have. If I wanted to write a novel set in the 1970s hipster art scene and wanted Andy Warhol to play a part, I’d have to learn a heck of a lot about Warhol in order to make sure I got it right. I’d have to make sure he could have been in a certain art gallery on a certain date in 1973, that I capture his voice with some degree of fidelity, et cetera. Conversely, I once wrote a middle-grade adventure novel set in ancient Egypt, where one of the pharaohs plays a role. Now, that was a long time ago, and in terms of the question “what kind of a guy was Pharaoh Khafre?” the answer is “who the heck knows.” I needed him to be a sympathetic figure to the reader, so I made him be a nice guy. A thoughtful ruler who cared about his people. Accurate? Beats me. But since nobody knows one way or the other, you the writer are free to do whatever works for the story.

That last bit, Samantha, is where I think you should focus your concerns. What’s going to work for your story? I mean, if you read two biographies of Henry Ford and one says he loved horses, while the other one says he hated horses and that’s why he went big into automobiles (note: I’m totally making that up), you kind of have to pick one. When historians can’t agree on what somebody was like, why not pick the one that’s going to give you better opportunities for working with that person in your story?

Be smart about who you pick

In line with that, when you have a choice as to which historical figure you place into your book, all else being equal, pick the one we know less about. Maybe your novel is about a working-class woman in the late 1800s who has to make hard choices in order to join the suffragist movement, and your initial idea was that your protagonist would come under Susan B. Anthony’s wing. Fine, but does it have to be her? Why not Abby Kelly Foster, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, or any of the other early women’s rights advocates? Structrually, there’s no reason the story wouldn’t work with those women instead. You may want to think about balancing commercial appeal of having a big-name historical character in your book with the additional leeway you get from using lesser-known figures, but don’t box yourself into using the big-name person just because that’s what you thought of first.

Is what you’re doing with the figure plausible?

Plausibility, in every aspect of every novel, is where so many unpublished manuscripts go wrong. For the portrayal of historical figures in our novels, plausibility about what you have them doing is probably the one thing you can control that has the greatest power to make or break your book. In your Revolutionary War novel, if you’ve got George Washington walking among the half-frozen soldiers at Valley Forge and giving his own boots to a particularly pitiable soldier with freezing feet, yeah, ok. Readers will probably go with you on that. On the other hand, if that same soldier later gets shot—perhaps as a consequence of throwing himself in front of his general to take a bullet for the great leader—and then you have Washington whip out his pocket knife and perform emergency field surgery to remove the bullet and re-inflate the soldier’s collapsed lung, chances are you’ve gone out of bounds.

As a reader, I like to use a two-question litmus test for historical figure plausibility. Question one: Has the writer established that this figure could reasonably be present in the story at this time? Question two: Is the historical figure doing things that are in keeping with my understanding of that person?

If the reader can answer “yes” to both, you’re fine. Usually, this means sticking to normal, unremarkable actions, to things the person really did, and to stuff that’s similar to things the figure really did. That is, don’t turn George Washington into a field surgeon. Unless he was. I don’t know; I haven’t researched him. If you do need to have a historical figure do something really amazing or unexpected, the burden is on you to set it up well ahead of time in order to make it plausible to the reader. Example: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith.

Getting back to Samantha’s concern about “what fits,” I think you have to trust yourself. When you have multiple options that are supported by your research, which work for your story, and which aren’t implausible, just trust yourself. In doing all that research, you’ll have formed your own idea about the historical figure. Who’s to say your interpretation of the person is any less valid than someone else’s? What do you think fits better? Your answer will be guided by who you are as a person, and all the rich history of your own life you bring into your writing. This is why, if you trust yourself to make the right call and honor that decision as you write, it’ll come out well on the page. It will fit because it came from the heart.

Other people will make different choices, but that’s ok. Their choices will fit for them too, because they will be writing a different story than you.

Finally, one last suggestion:

Read the masters

There are countless novels which make use of real historical figures, all in various levels of faithfulness to history. Find some that seem to hit about the same level of authenticity you’re going for, and read them. Your local librarians can be a great help to you there. But don’t just read them for the story. Read them like a forensic novelologist. Pick them apart to see what makes them work, and pay particular attention to the way the writer has portrayed the historical figures. In Stephen King’s epic On Writing, he says something along the lines of “good writers steal from everything they’ve ever read.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. None of us works in a vacuum, and it’s totally fair game to borrow tips and techniques from those who have noveled before you. Here are some of my favorites, just to get you started:

Lamb, by Christopher Moore. Moore has written several books with religious themes, but in Lamb he is at his finest. Lamb is a hilarious, irreverent, and yet at the same time deeply thoughtful and reverent imagined biography of Jesus, aptly subtitled “the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.” If you’ve ever wondered what the Son of God did for fun when he was just a kid, this is the book for you. And if you haven’t, well, Moore did and that’s probably why he’s making more money with his writing than you or I are ever likely to. Either way, Lamb is an excellent example of an in-depth portrayal of a famous historical figure about whom everybody knows the same few things, but nobody really knows much about in terms of his day-to-day life.

The Eight, by Katherine Neville. Aside from being a cracking good adventure novel of astonishing breadth, The Eight is an example of touching lightly on a great many famous historical figures, spread across several continents and cultures. Neville certainly did not become stuck in the facts, yet she hews to the images we have of the famous figures of France (and most of Europe, really) to create believability. The Eight is a truly singular book, the magic of which Neville sadly failed to recapture in her sequel The Fire.

Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes. This book will likely never go out of print, no matter how long in the tooth it might now seem. But, if you’re looking for an example of middle-grade historicals with famous characters, look no further. The portrayal of the famous figures (Paul Revere and some other founding fathers) is exactly in keeping with our stereotypical, larger-than-life images of these people. It’s not nuanced, but I don’t mean that as a criticism; for middle-grade readers who are likely more interested in action and adventure than in subtle questions of the interplay between loyalty to the British Crown versus loyalty to higher moral principles, it’s not a bad way to go at all.

For many more examples—although by no means a complete list, check out the Index of Real People in Works of Fiction. Have your own favorite examples of historical figures in fiction? Share ‘em down in the comments. Just remember to keep the knife out of George’s hand.

Take a look at that picture. What do you see in it? A street scene. Tumbled flats of vegetables, corn, green beans, and what look like cucumbers spilled on the pavement. People walking past. What don’t you see? Anybody lifting a finger to help clean it up. The original picture this one was cropped from has over a dozen people in it, and every one of them is probably thinking something along the lines of “Ooh, glad that’s not my problem.”

That’s the bystander effect. It is the tendency for people to offer less help to strangers the more other people are around. The ironic thing is that if there had been only one other person on the street when this little accident took place, that person would have been much more likely to step in and offer assistance.

Why does it happen?

The reasons behind it are pretty straightforward, and psychologists seem to be of the impression that a number of factors contribute to the bystander effect. One is “diffusion of responsibility” (don’t you just love the fancy names psychologists come up with for everything?): not doing anything because you figure surely someone else will. Another is social proof: when confronted with an emergency situation, people’s initial reaction is to look around to see how other people are responding in order to decide how to respond. So everyone looks around, and sees everyone else also just looking around—that is, not doing anything because they’re also busy making the same internal assessment—and decides that the situation must not be all that serious. A third is uncertainty and fear, not being confident of one’s ability to actually help, or to help in a way that the help-ee will actually appreciate. These are all pretty normal feelings, but they all add up to folks not helping other folks as much as we might hope.

So what can you do with it in your novels? Three things, which revolve around the different roles present in these kinds of situations:

Victim

As I’ve counseled many times before, it’s good to do bad things to your main characters, so your poor protagonists may well be the ones in a scene who would like some help.

If you’re writing in an intimate point of view, either first person or third-person limited, then the POV character is the stand-in for the reader. This creates a wonderful opportunity to create reader empathy: Let the POV character need help, but not get any. Let any bystanders in the scene, well, stand by. If you portray the POV character’s need for help as well as his or her growing sense of desperation as nobody steps up to offer that help, you can really put readers on the edge of their seats. Basically, by giving readers enough information to understand that the emergency situation really is an emergency—that help is genuinely needed—they’ll be just as frustrated at the useless bystanders as your POV character.

This can work really well in an opening scene, as a means for quickly bonding the reader to your POV characters in order that the reader cares what happens to them. You need to be careful not to let your POV characters be so utterly helpless and pathetic that readers can’t root for them—which probably means letting your characters solve their own problems after failing to get help from anybody else—but it can be a great way to create a character-based hook for a novel.

Useless bystander

On the flip-side, you might put a POV character into the useless bystander role. Why might you do this? Because it works well in the early chapters of novels that are driven by inner character arcs as a way to drive home the character’s starting point. When you have a character who is going to experience some kind of inner growth as the story progresses, you need a way to show that they are presently in an emotionally blocked or stunted state. Showing that POV character being unable to render aid and assistance can achieve this.

Be careful, though; there is an obvious danger. It’s easy for readers to decide they don’t like a character who sees someone in need but decides not to help. The way around this pitfall is to make sure the reader understands two things: why the POV character cannot help, and that the POV character feels bad about it. You have to let the reader into the character’s head enough to see the character’s internal debate over whether to help, enough to help the reader understand the choice not to, and enough to see that despite that choice the character would have liked to help. Show us the character’s impulses towards helping, and the counter-impulses against helping. If you show us the struggle, we’re more likely to feel positively towards the character even though the character’s better nature loses.

Which is kind of the point. It’s that very self-defeat by one’s own inner demons that sets the stage for the book’s inner character arc.

Hero

Lastly, of course, there’s the hero. The bystander who doesn’t merely stand by, but in fact goes to the aid of the person in need. If you’re writing some kind of action/adventure book, you’re in very good company by using this technique to build up your character as a heroic figure. How many books have we seen that involve some variant on POV characters rescuing kittens from trees, chasing down muggers in order to return an old lady’s purse, et cetera? It’s common, because it works, but I caution you to be careful here, too.

The common-ness of this technique pushes it dangerously close to cliche territory. Further, it’s very easy to overdo it and end up with an implausibly melodramatic result. That’s fine, if you’re writing a tongue-in-cheek superhero novel or something, but most of the time it damages the reader’s belief in the character. I mean, sure, real life does have its selfless heroes who, without hesitation, run into burning buildings or dive into flood-swollen rivers to save other people.

But most novels need something a little more tame in order for readers to believe in the character as a real person, and that something is exactly what those real-life heroes don’t have: hesitation. Again, it’s all about letting the reader into the character’s head. For my money, you get a much more believable and sympathetic hero if you show the character’s internal debate about helping. The only difference between the hero, then, and the useless bystander is which side of the character’s personality wins the debate. So let us see the character asking himself, “Does that person really need help? Should I jump in? The character is a proxy for the reader here, too, so it’s very helpful to show the character asking himself the same kinds of questions readers would be asking themselves in that situation.

Then, all you need is something to break that internal logjam in favor of acting. It could be anything. Empathy for the victim because the hero suffered a similar problem in the past isn’t bad, if a little cliched still. For male POV character’s, there’s always the allure of playing the hero in order to impress a girl. That always works. But my favorite reason to jump in is frustration at not seeing anybody else jump in. You take the POV character from seeing the situation and thinking “gosh, somebody should really help that person,” to wondering “why is nobody helping?” and finally to “Dammit! I guess I’ll help, then!”

Conclusion

So, there you go. The bystander effect, and three ways to make it work for you in your novels. I’m curious to know, is this something you’ve used in your novels before? Is it something that could help your current work-in-progress? Tell us about it down in the comments!

In real life, we make judgments about people, often within mere seconds of meeting them. Those judgments, whether right or wrong, are incredibly difficult to change later on. You don’t, as the saying goes, get a second chance to make a first impression.

The same is true in our books. Scenes were we introduce readers to new characters are tough to do well, because we don’t get much space to play with before readers make up their mind. Not many paragraphs pass before readers decide whether they like, loathe, admire, or pity a new character. So we have to act fast.

Star Wars is a great example of how to do this well, and exhibits most of the core techniques I want to talk about. Star Wars (and I’m talking about Episode IV, here) manages to convey to us, in very short amounts of screen-time, the essential nature of all of its main characters and shows them to be unique, distinctive individuals. We can take some lessons there as to how to effectively introduce our own books’ characters.

Show them in action

When introducing a protagonist or other POV character, consider showing them in action. By this I mean putting the character in a scene where he or she has to actually do something. Make it a situation where the character has to make some kind of choice and take some kind of action (preferably, a difficult choice and an unpleasant action) in order to affect the outcome of the situation.

Early on in Princess Leia’s introduction—it’s not her first scene, but it’s close—she is faced with a no-win choice: give up the location of the rebel base, or see her home planet of Alderaan destroyed. We can see how difficult a choice it is for her, through her visceral, bodily reactions. She’s heartbroken to betray the rebellion, but she can’t let an entire planet’s population be eradicated either. It’s an impossible choice, but she makes a choice anyway, and we see the pain of it in the down-turn of her face, the slump of her shoulders.

What does it tell us about her? It tells us that she’s an important person within the world of the movie. It tells us that she is fundamentally a protective, nurturing person, in as much as she tries to protect the people of Alderaan even though she must make a huge sacrifice in the attempt. The scene portrays her as a deeply sympathetic character. But note—and this is important—the sympathy comes not from the choice itself but from how she feels about it, which we viewers read through her body language. Had she treated the choice differently, in a casual or cavalier manner ("Well, Tarkin, I can’t have you blowing up a whole planet, so hey, the rebels are on Dantooine. Go get ‘em, big guy!") we’d have had an entirely different feeling about her.

Show them in conflict

One of Luke Skywalker’s first scenes is a minor conflict between him and his Uncle Owen. We meet Luke in the scene where the Jawas sell R2-D2 and C-3PO to Luke’s family. Having made their purchases, Uncle Owen tells Luke to get the new droids cleaned up. Luke replies with:

But I was going into Toshi Station to pick up some power converters...

Epic whine. A whine that will go down in history. But, he obeys his Uncle. What’s going on here from a character perspective? We’re being shown that Luke is a relatively powerless figure. He has no authority, and little control over his life. Physically, we can see that he’s a very young man, so this makes sense and is something most viewers can empathize with. We’ve all felt that way from time to time. That’s the sympathetic hook of Luke’s character. But it also shows us that he’s not satisfied with the life he lives. He rankles at the limitations of both the life he lives and the place he lives it. As he remarks to C-3PO:

Well, if there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.

Conflict is a wonderful way to bring a character’s deeper motivations up to the surface where we can see them. Whether those motivations come out through dialogue (as they do here), through choices made as the conflict progresses, conflict is a great way to let us know what really drives your characters.

Show them using key skills, attitudes, hobbies, et cetera

We first meet “Old Ben” Kenobi, the “crazy old wizard” after Luke gets his butt kicked by the Tusken Raiders. (Side note: Luke clearly loses that conflict, which greatly re-enforces his powerlessness.) Kenobi comes breezing into the canyon, his brown robes flowing in the breeze, and the raiders all take off. Young, strong, able-bodied Luke was child’s play for the raiders, but creaky old Ben Kenobi scares them off without so much as breaking a sweat.

It’s not difficult to understand that this Kenobi guy must have something going for him. He’s got some kind of mystic juju going on in that scene which is nothing to sneeze at. At that point in the movie, we have no idea what his deal is, not yet, but we get it: he’s a powerful figure. His subsequent dialogue with Luke further reveals him to be both kindly and wise.

In hero’s journey terms (and Star Wars is definitely a hero’s journey story), even in this short introductory scene Kenobi is an obvious fit to be the story’s mentor character.

Use vivid imagery

Don’t discount a vivid set of visuals to introduce a character, either. Like Darth Vader. Even without John William’s unforgettable musical theme for Vader, we know he’s a total badass from the moment he steps into the smoke-filled corridor of Princess Leia’s spacecraft. His imposing physical stature, jet black outfit, and billowing cape all speak of power. The symbology is not subtle at all, but it is pulled off with such panache that the overall impression is powerfully striking.

Show other characters’ reactions

Speaking of Vader, he’s also a great example of how other characters’ reactions can show the viewer (or reader) a more complete picture. He shows his face—well, his mask anyway—and storm-troopers snap to attention along the corridor’s walls. They make room for him to pass. Rebel soldiers avert their eyes and clasp their hands behind their heads. Those reactions, even though they come from nameless (and for the stormtroopers, literally faceless) extras, tell us everything we need to know about Vader. When Vader steps into that corridor, he’s the man. He’s in complete control of the situation, and no one is about to defy him.

Except, getting back to her for a moment, Princess Leia. And what does that tell us about her? That she’s strong, oh so strong, and indomitable.

Make use of setting

Where we meet characters says a lot about them too. We meet Luke out in the ass-end of nowhere on his Uncle’s moisture farm. He could scarcely be in a less influential setting. It’s a great setup for Luke, because for him Star Wars: A New Hope is a fish-out-of-water story. He’s the backwater nobody who finds himself suddenly thrust into the middle of hugely important, high stakes events. That we meet him in such an inauspicious location, and particularly since the previous scenes involved spaceships and Very Important People, shows us exactly the degree to which Luke is going to be an unlikely hero, bumbling through very much out of his depth.

Han Solo’s introduction is also rich with setting. We meet him in the practically the sleaziest dive bar in the galaxy. That alone sets him up as an unsavory rogue character. We then see him shoot his way out of an encounter with a bounty hunter, and with more than his share of casual bravado, establish that he is as much in control within this environment as Vader was back on Leia’s spaceship. We’re also left with no uncertainty that this Han Solo guy is likely the worst of possible choices Luke and Ben have at their disposal for getting off Tattooine, except that he’s their only choice. His roguishness, established as much by the setting as his actions, works to sell the desperate circumstances Luke and Ben are in.

Note, too, that this is a perfect introduction for Han Solo in terms of setting up his overall character arc. He flips from being an indifferent mercenary figure to being an active ally to the rebellion. And in later movies, he shows his softer side, his willingness to take risks for those he cares about, and so forth. His arc is all about that shift from being a self-centered opportunist, to a more idealistic supporter of a cause that is larger than himself. For that to work, we have to meet him while he’s still a pompous jackass, and the Mos Eisly cantina scene is a great setting to establish that as a starting point for him.

Drop some hints about backstory

The opportunity of meeting a new character is not an excuse to tell us their life’s story. It is not an occasion to indulge in a massive backstory infodump. Don’t go there. Just don’t.

It is, however, an opportunity to create some mystery by hinting at interesting elements of backstory. The opportunity of meeting a new character is to raise some compelling questions in the reader’s mind which you can then explore more fully as the story moves on.

Darth Vader’s physical form hints at significant backstory. From the first second we see him, he is obviously a physically powerful character. And yet, there’s that mechanical, raspy breathing that hints at an underlying frailty. He’s got machines and blinking lights all over his chest. You cannot help but look at him and wonder What’s under the mask? And how did he get to be that way?

When we meet Luke Skywalker, it’s in the context of his aunt and uncle. The dialogue takes particular care to give us their names, Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen. Shortly thereafter, we see that he doesn’t simply work on their farm, he lives with them. The subtext of the conversation where his Uncle refuses to let Luke send in his application to the Academy tells us that they are his caregivers and surrogate parents. So we wonder Why is he living with them? What happened to his real parents? We’re not given some kind of heavy-handed flashback montage showing us what happened to Luke’s parents (we had to wait 20+ years and five more movies to really understand that), but we are given hints that there is a compelling backstory there.

When we meet Obi Wan and come to understand that he isn’t just a crazy old man like Uncle Owen told Luke, that he does have some kind of power, we’re forced to wonder What the heck he’s doing living out in the middle of a nowhere desert?

We’re forced to wonder. And because of that curiosity, we’re compelled to keep watching. It works in books, too.

The number-one job of a character introduction

If I can sum all this up, my advice would be this: Craft your character introductions to tell us what’s most important about that person. You don’t get much space before the reader’s first impression is set, so make it count. Concentrate on conveying the one thing you most want us to believe about that character.

And make it something good, because above all, we need a reason to be interested. Give us some reason to love, to hate, to admire, or to pity the character. As long as we feel something about the person, we’ll read on. As long as we’re interested in who they are, we’ll be interested in what happens to them. The second we realize there’s nothing about a character that interests us (usually because the writer has left them too opaque), we lose interest in the story itself.

It has been so long since I posted a Character Corner review that most of my new readers have probably never even seen one. If not, it’s a book review wherein I discuss the good, bad, and ugly about a book’s characters. Part of the reason I haven’t done one in a while is because of the question of spoilers. It is quite difficult to provide a meaningful discussion of a book’s characters without spoiling important plot points.

I have no spoiler concerns with The Last Universe because, well, let me put it this way: When I finished the book the other night, I turned to my wife and said “What a disappointingly stupid book.” Honestly, you’ll be better off spending your reading time on something better. May I suggest Newberry winner When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead? It has a similar teen girl protagonist and mystery/adventure plot, but is a totally kick-ass book.

I have to say I was surprised at this book’s many flaws. Sleator is a well known author, with a whole bunch of books to his name. My wife read some of his stuff when she was in library school and said she enjoyed them. The “other books by” list opposite the title page in this one lists twenty-one other titles. So I was expecting better. Maybe after a certain point an author’s agents and editors stop paying attention? I don’t know.

The story, in a nutshell

The rest of this will be easier if I at least give you a capsule summary. First off, you’d have to classify this as a paranormal book. There are three notable characters in this book. Teenager and first-person narrator Susan, her sickly brother Gary, and the family’s gardener Luke. The basic premise is that the kids’ great uncle was a physicist who studied quantum mechanics, and built this freaky hedge maze out in the family’s wooded back property where, if you go in, you come out in a different universe. Parallel world stuff. The they discover this when the maze starts making strange things happen elsewhere in the gardens.

Susan’s job in the book is to push her brother in his wheelchair through the gardens, because he’s so sick and being outside is what he wants to do, and how can you say no to your dying brother? Susan is fairly realistic in this, so far as really she just wants to hang out with her friends and not be coerced by her parents and her brother into being his summertime caretaker.

Gary’s job is to be the cryptic cipher. He, so we are told, just knows there’s something weird going on in the garden—or more specifically, at the spooky old pond where a little girl drowned several decades prior—and so he wants to be there when it happens. This, ostensibly, is why he continually demands that Susan take him out to the pond and why he has gotten a bunch of quantum mechanics books from the library. Gary is the book’s stakes, too. He also claims that whatever is going on in the garden is making him better, helping him recover from the illness that put him in a wheelchair.

Luke’s job is to maintain the family’s gardens, but also to take care of a cat that had once belonged to the great uncle from way back (it’s a cat, in a story about macroscopic quantum effects. Get it? Nyuk-nyuk! ), and to deliver a critical piece of information later on in the plot. Luke is Cambodian, a refugee from the Khmer Rouge. He sends money back to his family in Cambodia whenever he can, and longs for the day he can rejoin them.

Be smart. Fact check your book

Here’s a tiny little thing that would have been no work at all for Sleater to have gotten right, but which he didn’t, and which sabotaged his protagonist and my suspension of disbelief alike: sloppy use of the word “quantum.” As Susan experiences the weird happenings in the garden, she becomes naturally curious as to what’s going on. This provides Gary with an opportunity to explain, a little bit at a time, some of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. This, in theory, is great: with the sorry state of science education in our public schools, I’m all for slipping a little science into YA literature, especially when it serves the story.

Only, Susan consistently misuses the word “quantum” in her dialogue and her narration. She treats it like a noun, rather than an adjective. She asks Gary questions like “Tell me about quantum” which, leaving aside the obvious “Here be exposition!” red-flag, is just wrong. She could ask about “quantum physics,” “quantum mechanics,” or “quantum effects.” Those would all be fine. But bare “quantum"? No. It’s wrong.

I wouldn’t mind if she did it once. That would be a fine way to show that she doesn’t, as she admits, know the first thing about it. Gary could correct her, and thenceforth she could get it right. But that’s not what happened. She made that same mistake many times, and Gary never called her on it. He should know, he’s the one reading all the physics books. He uses it correctly in his dialogue, so I know he knows, and therefore, I also know that William Sleator knows that “quantum” is an adjective.

So why does Susan keep getting it wrong? There’s no excuse other than sloppiness. Because analyzing the relationship between surface-level writing and the portrayal of characters is what I do, I can’t help but step back and conclude the fault lies with Sleator, his agent, and his editor. Sleator should have gotten it right, but somehow didn’t, and nobody upstream in the publication process bothered to pay much attention, probably because he’s got a history of 21 other titles under his belt already.

But that’s me, trying my hardest to look favorably on Susan, and even I couldn’t fully escape the feeling that Susan was kind of a dope. Other readers may be less likely to be so charitable towards her. Still, in the balance I’m left with a protagonist I can’t really respect and a writer I can’t really trust to get the details right. Ask yourself, are those your wishes for how readers will experience your book?

This error falls under the larger category of fact checking. So be smart. Take the time to fact check your book on stuff like this, especially when elements of your premise, plot, et cetera fall outside of your own personal areas of expertise. And don’t try to tell me that it doesn’t matter because YA readers wouldn’t know enough physics to spot the mistake. If I ever catch you disrespecting your readers like that, I’ll personally come over to your house and steal all the vowels off your keyboard.

Keep your characters’ priorities straight

Sleater also did a poor job, in my estimation, of correctly maintaining his characters’ differing priorities. The only one he really gets right here is Gary, whose overriding priority is to overcome his illness. Everything Gary does is in line with that, until that proves to be impossible. After he loses hope for himself, his main priority shifts to Susan’s welfare. That was great. But Sleater didn’t do so well with Susan’s and Luke’s priorities.

Susan’s original motivations to assist Gary on his expeditions into the “quantum garden” are fine. She really does want to see him get better. But later in the book when the figure out that the hedge maze sends you to different universes where things are different (e.g. in some universes, Gary isn’t sick), her priorities don’t track. At that moment, when Susan comes to understand what the maze really does, she ought to be faced with a rather thorny set of questions. Are they still the same people, if they go to a different universe? Can they ever get back? Even if they do find a universe where Gary is just fine, will that even matter since they won’t be in their home universe with their real parents?

If I’m Susan in that situation, my reaction is going to be to want nothing more than to figure out how to get back home. It’s at heart a denial reaction: Gary understood what was going on, but didn’t tell her. So from her perspective, she has just learned not only that she has been duped, but that she has just had her whole life—her friends, her family, her home, literally her entire world—stolen from her. Yes, maybe these parallel worlds are eerily similar to her home world, but now she understands that they are not the same. Remember why stakes work? Remember how the endowment effect shows that characters will work much, much harder to avoid a loss than they will to gain something of ostensibly identical value? For Susan, the endowment effect and her natural denial should work together to create a powerful new priority: get home.

Alas, there’s no inkling towards any of that. There’s no examination of any of those thorny questions that sure popped right int my mind. There’s no heated argument between Susan and Gary where she rails at him for tricking her out of her rightful universe. There is no re-evaluation of priorities. Nothing.

Instead, Susan continues on helping Gary visit yet more new universes looking for the one that will satisfy his priority. Emotionally, it rings false. It would be one thing had Sleater recognized the emotions that this revelation should have had on Susan, and confronted them head on. But he didn’t. He skipped over it entirely and moved on with the plot he wanted to tell. He traded his plot problem for a characterization problem, which in my view is always a losing trade.

Sleater did something similar with Luke. Luke, we are given to understand, knows something about the dangers of the hedge maze. We learn, later on in the story when he delivers that critical clue to Susan, that he probably understands the maze sends you to a different universe. Yet, given that, there’s still a point where he chases Susan and Gary into the maze, supposedly out of fear for their safety. That would be very noble, except for not making any sense. On the one hand, if he understands what the maze does, then he would know that the instant they set foot in it, they were already lost. So what’s the point of chasing them in there? On the other hand, he would also understand that if he sets foot in the maze, he will be forever separated from his real family, the one he sends money to all the time, and that he wants to be reunited with. So again, why would he go in? He wouldn’t. Except, he did. Sleater made him go into the maze anyway, despite what Luke knew and understood, and despite acting against his knowledge and his priorities alike.

Don’t get sloppy.

Don’t forget: little details of language use can be just as problematic for your characters and your overall story as can outright plot holes. And never forget, too, that your characters ought to be real people with their own unique, motivating priorities which govern much of how they feel and act. Always keep your characters behavior consistent with their priorities, lest you break the reader’s faith in your character, lest you break the reader’s suspension of disbelief, and lest you undermine the reader’s trust in you to tell them a believable story.

If you do ever find yourself in William Sleator’s enviable position of having 21 prior published books to your name, don’t let yourself get sloppy and don’t let your agent and editor stop holding you to the highest standards either. You owe your readers better than that.

Money, the root of all evil, plays a large role in more books than probably anyone can name. It’s so ubiquitous, in fact, that I’m hard pressed to think of any book at all which doesn’t involve money at all. At the very least, practically every book involves someone buying or selling something. Maybe it’s only a pack of gum, but still, money plays a role. Did William Golding’s Lord of the Flies involve money anywhere? Maybe that’s one example, but it has been so long since I read it I wouldn’t swear to that. Somebody refresh my memory.

Why you might take your protagonist’s money away

Anyway, money is everywhere in our stories, which is great for writers because of two things. One, as the saying goes, “when in doubt, make things worse.” That is, when your book feels like it’s starting to sag and you’re not sure how to raise the drama back up, you can do no better than to dump some new problems on your protagonist. Ask yourself, “what’s the worst thing that could plausibly happen to him right now?” and do that. A great option might just be to part your protagonist from his cash. If he needs the money for something later (and who doesn’t?), that becomes a great obstacle.

Two, consider de-funding your protagonist for something I blogged about a long time ago, why you should steal your character’s shoes. The idea there is a bit different than merely creating an obstacle. You can read the whole article, but in brief, the strategy isn’t so much to create actual problems for your protagonist as it is to create what the character thinks are problems but really aren’t. The goal is to strip away everything the character thinks she needs but which are really just conveniences, leaving her with only what she actually needs: a willingness to pursue the goal no matter what. Viewed in that light, stripping your character of all her money might seem like an enormous problem for her at first, but upon later reflection, she can realize that money isn’t actually necessary for getting the job done. Useful, maybe, but not necessary. There’s lots of great drama in that.

How to take your protagonist’s money away

You could be blunt about it: simply rob the character at gunpoint, or burn down the house in which all his money is stashed. That would work, but in my view it’s kind of bland. I think the drama and opportunities for character development are ever so much better if you let it be at least partly the character’s fault that he loses all his money. Here, then, are three common mistakes in thinking, perception, and judgment which relate to people and their money. Perhaps one of these money-loss reasons would fit well with your plot.

The denomination effect. This relates to poor money management skills. The idea here is that people tend to spend more money in total if presented with many opportunities to spend small amounts of money than they will if presented with just a few opportunities to make larger purchases. This makes intuitive sense; most of us would think long and hard before choosing to spend a thousand dollars on a sweet new digital camera with all the bells and whistles. Yet few people think anything at all about spending two or three dollars a day on their morning latte, which over the course of a year, adds up to about the same. And over the course of the lifetime of the camera (which for a thousand bucks had better be more than a year!), the camera comes out way ahead versus the lattes. So one option is simply to let your character be the sort of person who makes a lot of small, impulse purchases that lead to an unfortunate shortage of cash at some point when they really need it.

The gambler’s fallacy. Like the name says, this relates directly to gambling, whether through casino-style games of chance or playing the stock market or even investing in real estate. Any time you have a character putting up money against the hope that a future event will break their way, the gambler’s fallacy can come into play. The fallacy itself is when a person gets the feeling or comes to believe that a fundamentally unlikely event is more likely to happen at a particular time simply because it hasn’t happened for a while. Note, too, there’s usually some selection bias involved as well: we only think this way about unlikely events that would be beneficial to us.

In gambling, what happens is that players will keep putting quarters into that slot machine, losing on every pull, but with every loss becoming more confident that surely the next pull will have to come up triple-cherries because “it’s bound to happen eventually.” Or in craps, making bet after bet in the face of continual losses because double-sixes “are due” to happen any time now. Well, no. They’re not. Unless the dice are loaded, double-sixes aren’t “due” at all. Each throw is independent of the last, and no amount of data about past throws tells you a darned thing about what might happen on the next throw.

You can see the pattern. In your novels, to bring the gambler’s fallacy into play you must first subject the character to a sequence of losses leading them to believe that they’re “due to win one.” Maybe they’ve made a series of bad real estate investments, each of which may have made sense at the time, but which turned out badly for one reason or another. “Just bad luck,” your character might think. But knowing that real estate prices do tend to rise over the long run, the character might fall into the trap of thinking that they’ve been playing the market long enough that “prices have got to start going back up soon,” and so might go all-in with their remaining money on one last deal.

Extraordinarity bias: This one relates to people’s tendency to over-value anything which is perceived to have something special about it, however intangible that special quality may be. How do you get a kid to trade a cow for a handful of beans? Convince him they’re special, extraordinary, magic beans. Of course, being a fairy tale the beans really were magic, but the point remains: Jack would never have made the trade except for his belief in the extraordinarity of the beans.

More prosaically, show a sports memorabilia collector two basically identical baseballs, but tell him “the one on the left once belonged to Joe DiMaggio’s cousin. Who knows, Joe may once have held this very ball! The one on the right I bought at Walmart this morning.” If you ask the person which baseball is more valuable, it’s not hard to guess which one he’ll pick.

Similarly, those home shopping channels on cable TV make relentless use of extraordinarity bias in everything they sell: the reason the announcers fill the air time telling you that the diamond chips in these fabulous 12-karat gold plated earrings came all the way from South Africa is to create the perception that there’s something special—something extraordinary—about these particular earrings versus ones you might find at any mass market jewelry store. Never mind that South Africa is where an enormous fraction of the world’s diamonds come from anyway, and as such aren’t any more or less remarkable than any other diamonds in the world.

For fleecing characters of their money, this one has got to be my favorite error in judgment because it is the basis on which a lot of confidence schemes work. The con artist gets someone to believe that a perfectly ordinary, relatively valueless item is in fact somehow very special, and as such, worth a lot of money. Think about your character’s background and interests, and figure out what kind of cheap garbage a con artist could use to dupe him. What’s the baseball, as it were, to your character’s equivalent of collecting sports memorabilia? I love this one because the character ends up broke, with nothing to show for it but a worthless trinket, because he let himself get duped.

How embarassing! The great thing for the novelist, though, is that not only does the con itself create a great moment in your novel, but you can very easily use it as an excellent turning point for the character. If you’re still early in the book when it’s appropriate for things to be getting worse and worse, maybe the act of getting duped undermines the character’s confidence, and leads to a series of poor choices based on not trusting himself anymore and second-guessing himself at every turn. Or, if it’s late in the book, the act of getting duped might have the opposite effect of steeling the character’s resolve to win through anyway.

Money is everywhere

I suspect most of us have something of a love/hate relationship with money. We love what it can do for us, but we hate how hard we have to work to get it. Your characters may well feel the same way, at least initially, but I guarantee if you cause the character to lose all of his or her money, you’ll make that character’s feelings about money suddenly much more complex and interesting. In any event, money is everywhere, in real life and in our novels. Rather than trying to fight it or gloss over it in your story, I hope these tips give you some ideas for how to work with it to improve the depth and layered complexity of your novel.

You want to know how powerful a well established setting is? It’s so powerful that when badly done, it can break the reader’s belief in the actions of your characters. Ultimately a weakly developed setting can destroy the reader’s suspension of disbelief in the whole novel. But when well done, a setting supports the believability of even the most unusual behaviors of your characters.

This article applies mainly to novels with unusual settings, ones that alter the bedrock truths about life here in the 21st century that we all take for granted. That’s what I mean by an unusual setting. This can happen in any genre, although it is most often a factor in fantasy and science fiction.

And fair warning: this article may seem less about character development than my usual fare. This is only because it’s impossible to untangle characters from the settings that are the foundation on which the character’s whole life rests. Almost nothing has as much influence on how your characters behave as the setting. If that seems like a strong statement, read on.

Settings have rules

Since all of this ultimately relates to suspension of disbelief, let’s take a second to talk about the non-character-related ways to break the reader’s belief in an unusual setting. For purposes of this article, let’s take our setting as something very different from our own day-to-day world: A sci-fi Mars colony, 25 years after the colony has been established, but based on the technology we have today. I’m purposely choosing an extreme setting to show how far authors can—and should—take the business of settings.

Settings have rules, which have to make sense in and of themselves with respect to the reader’s general knowledge, intuition, and common sense. For instance, here’s a rule that is true for Mars: “Mars is an astonishingly dry place.” With today’s technology, colonists certainly won’t have been able to change the Martian climate in only 25 years, so consequently you would be unwise to stick this in your novel:

McCann opened his eyes to a gray, rainy day. “Oh, fabulous,” he muttered as he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

“Quit griping,” said his billet-mate Shariz. “At least it’ll wash the dust off the hab.”

You can’t get away with this because you made it rain on mars. You violated the rules readers will assume a reasonable Mars colony setting ought to have to follow. If you stick this scene in your novel, the reader’s going to think “This joker doesn’t know the first thing about Mars!” and will lose faith in you to tell a believable story. Although if I’m to believe what I wrote back in January (and I suppose I should), even this is kind of character-related too.

Settings affect characters

If I had to sum up this whole article in three words, that would be it. Settings affect characters. Seems obvious, right? Well, it is, but that doesn’t stop writers from forgetting it all the time. Or rather, I suspect what happens is that the author forgets what his setting is from time to time. I know that sounds impossible—how could you forget your setting?—but it does happen.

Settings may be quite outlandish, but the characters in them are still just people. They’re still driven by the same fundamental emotions, impulses, and desires as those of us who live right here on Earth in the 21st century. My suspicion is that authors get caught up in the familiarity of ordinary people, and lose sight of how their particular ordinary people—the ones in their books—are supposed to be affected by the setting. As a result, they end up with characters who think and act in ways that are perfectly normal and believable here on Earth, today, but which violate the expectations one would have for characters in a different setting.

When you hear people talk about books or movies where “the setting is like a character in its own right,” this is what they’re trying to put into words: that the setting has indeed affected the actual characters in accordance with whatever rules go along with that setting. Characters thus have a relationship with the setting as much as they do with other characters.

How to get it right

When you elect to use an unusual setting, you’re taking on some extra up-front work compared with normal-world novelists. You have to borrow a page out of Einstein’s book and do a “thought experiment” about life in your setting. You need to spend some time to figure out what all the explicit and implicit rules of your setting are, and from them, deduce what makes sense for how your characters would live, what they would eat, how they would govern themselves, et cetera.

A good place to start is by making a list of how your setting differs from our real life setting. “It’s like here, but gravity is weaker, there’s barely any air or water, all you have is what you brought from Earth, and instead of six billion people on the planet there are only 54, and they all live together.” If you feel it’s necessary, you might make a list of what’s the same, too. If any of your items relate to people, make them about people generally, not about the specific characters you may have in mind for your story. It’s not time to think about the story yet, not before you’ve got the setting firmly fixed in your mind.

Once you’ve got a handle on what’s the same and what’s different, you’re ready to do the thought experiment. Let’s take those Mars colonists as an example, and let’s offer the further twist that our colonists have been completely cut off from Earth; perhaps a super-virus spread on Earth after the colony was established, wiping out Earth civilization, meaning there will be no future supply ships or new colonists.

Consider the mundane

On some level food, water, and shelter are boring, but you can’t skip them. In fact, you should start your thought experiment with these essentials because if these are missing, it totally re-focuses people’s attention on the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. In the case of Mars, air can’t be taken for granted either. Still, people don’t like spending their days obsessing over how they’re going to meet these basic needs, and as a result, people tend to organize their lives so as to make this as easy as possible.

You need to consider, within the parameters of your setting, how people are going to keep the bottom of the hierarchy satisfied. Our Mars colonists are going to have to grow their own food. They’re going to have to be fanatical about recycling water and, well, let’s just call it “organic matter.” They will have brought some shelter with them, whatever kind of prefab habitats came on the colony ship, but that’s about it.

Even stuff like the reality of clothes and garbage within this setting, entirely mundane to be sure, have enormous impact on your characters. The colonists will have brought clothes with them, and certainly some quantity of replacements, but that’s it. They can’t just make more at the drop of a hat, nor can they pop ‘round to The Gap to pick up some new khakis. So, taking care of one’s clothes becomes much more important than it is here on Earth. Mundane, yes, but it sure raises the stakes when somebody spills coffee on somebody else’s shirt.

Mars colonists probably wouldn’t even have the concept of garbage. If all you have is what you brought with you from Earth, even a ripped up, coffee stained, sweat pitted old shirt is still going to be a resource. Somebody, somewhere, is going to find a use for it. In a Mars colony, nothing gets thrown away.

Consider social norms

These physical realities around the necessities of life, clothes, garbage, and so forth all shape social behaviors. Those realities dictate how the society within which your characters live conceives of what is acceptable, normal, and even right or wrong.

Our Mars colonists, by necessity, will be hard core recyclers. If somebody dies, the funeral will end with putting the person’s body into the compost heap to be spread around in the gardens, or maybe pureed to be put into the colony’s hydroponics system. To you and me this may seem disrespectful of the dead, or even ghoulish, but to them it’s simply a necessity. Besides, it’s not like they have anywhere else to put the body.

The lack of ready access to new clothes, on the one hand, might mean people would be super paranoid about caring for their clothes. Certainly in the initial years after a colony’s establishment, when social norms from Earth are still engrained in people’s minds, that would be true. But on the other hand, the colony’s dome city or whatever is bound to be 100% climate controlled, kept at a balmy late spring temperature with perfect humidity all the time. That being the case, it’s not like the colonists really need to wear clothes. And as the years go by and clothes wear out, well, maybe it would just be easier to go around naked all the time.

But, on the other-other hand, other forces might oppose casual nudity: The fact that the colonists have extremely limited food, water, air, and space means that they can’t just go around having babies willy-nilly (no pun intended). Procreation would, again by necessity, have to be severely governed. China has a “one child per family” policy; Mars colonists might have a “one child per funeral” policy—nobody gets to be pregnant unless someone else dies to make room. Severe restraints on procreation could lead to highly regulated interactions between men and women. They might even start enforcing gender segregation within the colony to limit the interactions between men and women, and thus, the chances for unapproved pregnancies.

Or take it further: if the colonists know there won’t be any more settlers from Earth because of the super-virus, then it becomes critically important for these colonists to preserve their genetic diversity. This means that when the opportunity for somebody to get pregnant does come up, there will probably be an official colony geneticist whose job it is to decide who the parents will be.

Perhaps, in a society where these are the realities of life, the notion of love and marriage, of loving partnership, would become entirely divorced from the notion of parenthood: You wouldn’t get married because you wanted to have a family with someone. You wouldn’t even expect necessarily to have a family with that person. But you would expect that, at some point, you or your spouse might get a visit from the geneticist saying “I need you go to inseminate (or be inseminated by) so-and-so.” And whether you liked so-and-so or hated their guts would have no bearing on the situation.

Setting equals society

It goes on and on. The more different your setting is from real life, the more that setting changes the way society itself operates. For instance, what do you do if somebody commits a crime? If you have a murder within the colony (hardly unexpected, with the same people cooped up in close quarters year after year), what do you do? How do you punish the killer when there’s no prison to send them to, and you can’t execute them since you need everyone working for the colony’s survival.

That’s what setting does. It determines a great, great deal of the way societies are forced to act. Maybe your setting isn’t so extreme, but I guarantee you, whatever it is about your setting that makes it different from the setting in which you live your own life, that difference will shape the society in which your characters live.

I should note, this thought-experiment process for identifying the ramifications of an unusual setting in fantasy and sci-fi is not all that different from what many writers in other genres do. In novels set in historical time periods novels or in contemporary but exotic parts of the world, the realities of those settings shaped their societies just like a sci-fi Mars colony setting shapes its society. The only difference is that writers whose settings really do or did exist on Earth can do research to learn how the setting actually did shape a society, while fantasy and sci-fi writers have to think it through themselves.

That’s the bottom line. Whether you do it by research or by imagination, you must somehow arrive at a clear mental picture of a society grounded in the immutable factors of human psychology and behavior, but which is also perfectly attuned to the realities of its physical setting. It is this society in which your characters live, so you better know how it works.

Where writers fall down

What I’ve seen in client manuscripts (and the occasional published novel) is writers who haven’t done the necessary work to put this clear mental picture into their own heads before they figure out their plot and before they start writing down what their characters are doing and how they’re reacting.

This is why careful character development is so critical. You have to know how all of your characters think and act—this is the controlled multiple-personalities of writers—but never forget that how your characters think and act is equally determined by their personalities as by the society they live in. And as we just saw, society is a function of setting.

Get it right, and your characters’ non-Earthlike behaviors are not only completely believable but also support the reality of the setting itself. Get it wrong, and behaviors that would be totally believable here on Earth become suddenly nonsensical and collapse the reader’s suspension of disbelief in the setting too.

It doesn’t work to let your characters act like you or I would, based on the rules of modern Earth culture, while living in a setting that is dramatically unlike our modern world. It just falls flat. As a reader, it’s impossible to maintain my suspension of disbelief about the story as a whole when the characters don’t act in ways that are congruous with the explicit and implicit rules of their settings.

Pit your characters against the setting’s rules

So if you want to write a sci-fi romance set on Mars, go for it! But make sure everyone’s behavior is in keeping with the behaviors that make sense—that are necessary—given the realities of the setting. It may mean that the plot you had in mind doesn’t actually work. It may be that the plot you intended turns out to be grounded in modern Earth behaviors that wouldn’t make sense on Mars. Chances are, this will initially come as a disappointment to you.

But trust me, it’s actually a good thing, because it means you’re discovering what Donald Maass calls inherent conflict in your premise: maybe your star-crossed lovers can’t hook up because the very non-Earthlike rules around love and romance in that colony don’t allow it. If that’s what you discover, don’t fight it. Work with it! Readers will love watching your characters explore the tension between their emotional drive to be together and the colony’s overall greater good of keeping the population in check.

When they’re well done—when the characterization lives up to the explicit and implicit rules of the setting—stories that pit characters against the settings they live in can be fascinating both for the plots they contain as well as for their ability to explore human behavior in inventive new situations.

There are times in our novels when we need our characters to make mistakes. After all, they’re only human. There are lots of good reasons for letting our characters screw up. Characters who are perfect are boring to read. Mistakes tend to make a character’s situation worse, which heightens the drama and tension in your story. A sudden mistake can make readers gasp in alarm, while a mistake the reader sees coming but the character doesn’t can make readers laugh or cringe.

The question is, how can you get away with your otherwise smart characters doing dumb things? For our protagonists and antagonists, especially, we often work hard to create an impression of intelligence and capability, which clashes with the very idea of making mistakes. Fortunately, there are patterns to the ways in which regular people (even the smart ones) make mistakes. There are dozens of such patterns, but here are three you might draw on when looking for a good reason why your smart protagonist might do something dumb.

The bandwagon effect

This is more classically known as your mother asking you “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” The fact is, the world is a complicated place, and taking the time to deeply evaluate the wisdom of everything we might consider doing would just take too long. One of the shortcuts we use to make decisions without all the bothersome evaluation is to use other people’s behavior as a proxy for the evaluation. If we see two restaurants side by side, and only one has a line of people at the door waiting to get in, we’re likely to conclude that one is the better of the two restaurants.

But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s an awful grease-pit, about to be shut down by the health department, but the owners decided to go out with a bang by holding a “5-cent beer night” special and putting up flyers all over the local college campus. That’s the bandwagon effect in action. Or, taking up smoking because the people at your job all seem to smoke. Or putting all your money into tulip bulbs, silver, or sub-prime mortgages without regard to the underlying strength of those investments.

The bandwagon effect can be quite powerful, and can readily overwhelm rational decision making with emotional decision making. You see a bunch of other people doing something, and you start to think there must be some sense to it. Or worse, you may start to think that you are missing out on whatever it is all those other people know.

For certain types of “going along with the crowd” mistakes, see if there’s a crowd you can create in your novel that you could use to sucker your protagonist into a bad decision.

Isolation effect

This is when you confuse the ease of remembering an instance of an event of some particular type with the actual likelihood of that kind of event happening. That is, our gut feeling as to whether something is relatively likely or unlikely to happen has more to do with whether we can easily remember experiencing or hearing about that kind of event.

Like the lottery. Even simple mathematical analysis shows the lottery to be, as a friend of mine in college once said, “a tax on people who are bad at math.” But when we think about the lottery, what comes to mind are the news stories about ordinary people winning millions of dollars. Our mind is filled with memories of winning events, highly positive outcomes, but is not filled with a statistically appropriate number of losing events. That is, the millions of people who don’t win the lottery every single week, fail to make it onto the evening news.

It works for bad events, too. Like terrorism. Everyone can easily remember instances of terrorism, like the 9/11 attacks. From a coldly logical, mathematical perspective, such events are incredibly rare. But not one of us who was old enough to understand what was happening on September 11, 2001, is ever going to forget that event. It’s so easy to remember that it can cause people to vastly over-estimate the chances that it’ll happen again, just like it did before. As a result, some people won’t go into a high rise building now because they’re afraid the building will get hit by a plane, despite the fact that they have vastly greater chances of dying from things they do every day. Like crossing the street.

If you need your character to make an irrational decision, consider putting an emotionally significant effect into the character’s backstory (one that will be easy for the character to remember), that would bias the character away from the sensible choice. Maybe your character witnesses a crime, and the smart thing to do is report it to the police. But that would mess up your whole plot; you need the character to avoid going to the police. You could put some kind of bad police experience into the character’s backstory. Maybe when the character was a kid, his dad had a similar experience, and did report the crime to the cops, who then ended up treating him as a suspect too. Maybe the cops showed up at the dad’s place of business, asking a bunch of baseless and embarrassing questions, which caused the dad to lose his job and the family to lose their home. A character with this backstory might well fall sway to the isolation effect and, by over-estimating the risk of being falsely accused, choose not to go to the cops.

Confirmation bias

This is the tendency to interpret new information in support of what you already believe. Rationally, we should look at new information to see whether it more strongly supports or contradicts what we believe. Or whether it supports something we don’t believe. But what people actually do, most of the time, is to try to construct a scenario in which new information bolsters existing beliefs. Sometimes, people can tie themselves all in knots, inventing the most bizarre rationalizations by which to harmonize what they believe with contradictory evidence.

For example, let’s say one evening you get it into your head that now is a good time to refinance your house, because you were flipping channels and caught a bit of some pundit show on cable news where some nicely dressed and serious looking guy said “...and so people might think about refinancing.” Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t; you’ll have to do the math to really know. But let’s say that the next morning you turn on the news and hear that the Fed’s prime interest rate just went down by a quarter of a point. You’re likely to think “Ooh, lower rates, that guy last night was right! I’m going to call the bank right now!” On the other hand, let’s say the morning news instead told you that the Fed’s prime interest rate just went up by a quarter of a point. You’re likely to think “Ooh, rates are going up! I’d better call the bank now, before they go up too much!” That’s confirmation bias.

One of the great things about confirmation bias for novelists is that it works so very well with ambiguous information. Which, let’s face it, is about 99% of what we encounter in our lives. Practically everything is subject to interpretation. Where this really shines as a great tool for novelists is in those situations where you have a character on the brink of making a bad decision, and you need something to push them over the edge. That is, you’ve put the idea into the character’s head already. You’ve built up an emotional drive towards that action, but the character can’t quite commit to it because on some level they may know it’s a bad idea. If that sounds like your situation, drop some kind of ambiguous evidence at the character’s feet, and let them interpret it (or misinterpret it) in support of the emotional decision they already want to make.

I use this all the time in situations where I find myself saying to my characters “I need you to such-and-such, but you’re ordinarily too clever to make that kind of mistake.” Confirmation bias is a great way to dupe your characters without destroying the reader’s sense of the character’s general intelligence and sensibility. The other totally fun thing you can do with confirmation bias (depending on your book’s POV) is to let the reader believe something different than the character, so that the reader interprets the ambiguous evidence in the opposite way as the character, and yet, the reader can still understand why the character makes that wrong choice.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention by way of example, the novel Huge, by James Fuerst. I reviewed this book some months ago here for its wonderful characters and enormously hilarious story and style, but the protagonist’s journey in Huge is the most textbook perfect application of confirmation bias as I can recall ever having read. If you really want to see what a novelist can do with confirmation bias, don’t just read my dinky little blog. Go read that book.

Some while back, I wrote a couple of articles on creating sympathetic characters; one about emotion and another one about stakes. Ever since then, I’ve been meaning to do a third article with some more specific, hands-on strategies for creating sympathetic characters. Today is that day.

But first a bit of context, because like everything in narrative writing, it’s all about “show, don’t tell.” Sympathy arises from the conclusions readers draw about your characters’ personalities based on what you show the characters doing. This includes everything that is observable to the reader: characters’ actions, their dialogue, their inner monologue if you’re into that kind of thing, the way they treat other characters, the choices they make.

All the stuff you show in the narrative does the work of telling the reader what kind of people your characters are, so you don’t have to. That is, you shouldn’t ever have to write “Stanley was a prince among men,” or words to that effect, because Stanley’s observable actions and so forth should make that clear. So keep that in mind: everything else in this article relates to stuff you can show for the specific purpose of helping readers sympathize with your characters.

Use humor

People like funny people, and readers like funny characters. Few things make people more readily comfortable with one another than as good natured humor. To this end, you can show your character being funny, cracking jokes or making witty comments. You can show your character having a humorous outlook on life, finding humor in unusual places, or even resorting to humor as a coping mechanism when situations get particularly grim—sometimes you have to laugh to keep from falling into a complete panic. You can also show your character readily laughing at themselves, rather than taking themselves too seriously.

These are all reactions that, in real people, tend to put us at ease with one another. Jokes, witticisms, and wry commentary give us mirth. Humor in the face of danger is certainly easier to get along with than panic. (Would you want to be stuck in a foxhole with a soldier who was laughing in the face of death, or one who was having a total freak-out meltdown?) A person who easily laughs at himself is someone we aren’t likely to offend easily, which allows us to be more relaxed around him as well. If it works in life, it works in fiction.

Use Admiration

Humor works great for creating sympathy among social peers, but when you need to create sympathy for a character who is inherently more aloof or is intentionally not humorous, admiration may be the ticket. The strategy here is to show that character being masterful at some non-trivial skill. We all tend to admire people who are very, very good at what they do. They may suck at everything else (witness sympathetic jerks like Dr. House), but we can still admire their hard-won skills and root for them on that basis.

This can work in almost any book, because chances are there is some reason relating to skills why that character is your protagonist. You gave the character special skills for some specific purpose relating to the plot. Build on those to create sympathy by showing those skills in action. Even better is when you can show those skills used in unexpected ways but to great effect. MacGyver is probably the most obvious example there.

The Golden Rule

This one is kind of obvious: if you want people to like your character, show the character being a kind to others. I suspect that’s rather self-explanatory, so I won’t belabor it. Rather, I’ll talk about the danger of misusing the Golden Rule.

Human beings (which, never forget, includes your readers) are keenly sensitive in terms of reading the motivations behind people’s actions. If we see a person doing something nice for someone else, we don’t usually have trouble determining whether the action is sincere or disingenuous. Whether the action comes from the heart, or comes via some ulterior motive. For example, when we see politicians kissing babies in a crowd or filling sandbags at the site of a flooding river, we can be pretty sure they are motivated at least in part by the presence of TV cameras in the vicinity. We all know politicians are drawn to photo-ops like bees to honey.

In novels, the Golden Rule fails when you toss in scenes of overt kindness that seem to have nothing to do with the rest of the plot. Readers spot the photo-op scene immediately. I found a scene in a client’s novel once where, for no particular reason I could determine, the protagonist suddenly went to the children’s ward at the hospital to bring balloons and ice cream to the sick kiddies. So by all means use the Golden Rule (I wish more people did so in real life!), but for it to be convincing, acts of kindness need to have some plausible connection to the greater context of the scene they’re in or the plot at large, they have to be in proportion to the situation, and there shouldn’t seem to be anything in it for the character other than perhaps someone else’s thanks and appreciation.

Oh, and you have to do it consistently. The ice cream scene in that book was basically the only selfless, nice thing that character did for anybody else in the whole book. A one-time act of kindness does not earn your character a free pass on sympathy for the rest of the book.

"Glad it’s not me!"

You can also trigger readers’ sympathy by being cruel to your characters. Visit upon them misfortunes they don’t deserve. Show bad things happening to your characters, not only so we can see how they rise to the occasion, but also for sympathy. Think about every time you’ve ever driven past another motorist who has been stopped by the police, especially when you notice you’re a few miles-per-hour over the speed limit yourself: some part of you is feeling bad for the other driver’s misfortune while feeling lucky that it wasn’t you.

Make their job harder

Whatever the major story goal is that a character wants to achieve, you can add more sympathy by doing something to the character that makes their job harder. Give them some kind of handicap in that pursuit. It could be a literal, physical handicap: a marathon racer who tears a ligament. It could be an emotional handicap, like fear of needles for someone who has to get some immunizations before traveling overseas on a business trip. It could be a resource handicap, such as trying to get through college while being dirt poor. It could be a skill handicap, like being stranded after having all their stuff stolen in a foreign country where they don’t speak the language.

Whatever situation your character is in, whatever goal they have in a specific scene or for the whole book, see if there’s something you can change about the character (either inwardly or outwardly) that would make the goal harder to achieve. There usually is, and it’s always a great way to add believable sympathy.

Conclusion

The reader’s sympathy doesn’t come for free. You do have to work for it. Fortunately, creating sympathetic characters isn’t as hard as a lot of things in novel-craft. There are lots of ways to create it, and for the most part, readers want to sympathize with your characters anyway. They’re predisposed to do so, and probably will if you give any kind of decent effort at portraying your characters sympathetically.

And one more tip: these tips work for your book’s villains, too...

Sure, the view is great, but why would anybody go to all the bother of building a castle up there? Can you imagine how long it must have taken to haul all those stone blocks up the mountain on donkey carts or whatever? I mean, seriously—put an observation deck up there and build a staircase if you want the view, but why build a whole castle up there? Must have cost a fortune!

No doubt it did. So why do it? Why do build a mountaintop castle there in picturesque San Marino, and why do it on hundreds of other peaks scattered across Europe? Why not build your castle somewhere more convenient?

Because what’s mine is mine

There’s one simple reason. Defense. Mountaintop fortresses are much harder to conquer than fortresses down on the flats, which if you’re considering where to build your castle during medieval Europe, when the wars never ceased and national borders shifted faster than mapmakers could keep up, is a major selling point.

Trust me, we’ll see what this has to do with the stakes in our novels in a minute. The point is, build your stronghold on a mountaintop, collect all your wealth (what’s left after building the castle, anyway) and power there, and you’re much more likely to keep somebody from taking it away from you.

Gain versus loss

What’s mine is mine, so the saying goes, and what’s true for kings is true for commoners: people will generally put a lot more effort into keeping what they have than in obtaining something they don’t have. Behavioral economists call this “divestiture aversion” or alternately “the endowment effect,” although I quite prefer the latter for its obvious double-entendre possibilities. I swear. Only a bunch of behavioral economists could suggest a name like that with a straight face.

Anyway.

The endowment effect can play out in grandiose castles or in more subtle ways. British traffic enforcement assigns you “penalty points” when you get caught speeding and so forth. But the Italians do it the other way around: they start you out with 12 points and take them away for traffic infractions, because subconsciously the urge to preserve your points is a stronger motivator to follow the rules.

Why does it work?

I can’t say for sure why people act this way, but intuitively, we understand that they do. Our language even reflects it through phrases such as “what’s mine is mine,” and its implied counterpart “don’t you dare try to take it.”

Personally, I think it has to do with emotional attachment. We become attached to the things we have. Material things—stuff we have earned by the sweat of our brow, things we have been given by loved ones, or simply things we’ve had for so long they become part of the fabric of our lives. Abstract things—our sense of identity, legal and political freedoms, our physical abilities. And of course, other people through their relationships to us.

Put in slightly different terms, if you break the “World’s Greatest Dad” coffee mug my kids gave me, it isn’t sufficient recompense to buy me an identical mug. You can’t replace the emotional attachment I had to the original mug. Although the two mugs may be identical, the one my kids gave me has a higher value to me, because of the emotional attachment, than a new one fresh from the store.

If someone cares to do some MRI scans or something, I’d almost bet money that this effect stems from the more ancient parts of our brains, the ones that are also responsible for parenting instincts. The instinct to value our children more highly than anything else and protect them even up to our own deaths is deeply rooted in biology and survival of the species. To me, it’s not a great stretch to imagine our shiny new neo-cortexes generalizing this parenting instinct towards everything we consider to be ours.

That’s my theory, anyway.

Using the endowment effect in your novels

Ok, here we go, and you’ll be glad you stuck with this article because there’s plenty you can do with it.

Create a strong emotional motivation for action. You ever get stuck in your novel, knowing that a character needs to do something—say, stand up to her heartless and insensitive boss—but you can’t figure out a plausible reason why she’d do it? Use the endowment effect. Link the action you want her to take to the defense of something she owns or hold dear, and you’ve got it. The thing she holds dear becomes additional stakes pushing her towards doing what you need her to do.

For example, maybe your heroine works at an ad agency that’s doing a pro-bono work for a women’s shelter fundraiser. Her boss doesn’t care, since it’s not for a big account client, and wants to simply recycle a similar ad campaign from ten years ago. You need your character to say “No! That’s not good enough. That ad won’t play today and you know it!” But why would she do it?

Let’s go big-stakes: What if her sister’s staying at that shelter, having only narrowly escaped from drug addiction and a violent husband? And what if the shelter is running on a shoestring, and needs a big take from the fundraiser in order to pay off their creditors and stay in operation? If the fundraising campaign fails, your protagonist might lose her sister: the sister would be turned out on the street, and might well slip back into her old life, complete with drugs and abusive husband. Only this time, she might not survive.

Under those circumstances, wouldn’t she fight hard to do whatever she could to keep her sister off the streets? You bet she would. And if that means standing up to her boss and demanding that they put as much effort into the fundraiser promotions as they would for a national brand ad campaign, then by god that’s what she’ll do!

That’s perhaps a melodramatic example, but you get the picture: if inaction threatens to cause the loss of something a character values, the character will be motivated to act. But remember: keep it proportional; in most cases, the lengths someone is willing to go to in order to avoid a loss should be commensurate with the degree of that loss. Readers will believe a parent throwing themselves in front of a train in order to push their child out of the way, but they’ll have much more trouble believing the same action if, say, it were a stray kitten on the tracks. No matter how cute the kitten.

Create a dramatic bluff. If someone is explicitly threatening to visit a loss upon your character, you can ratchet the tension and drama in a scene right up to the roof by having the character proclaim that he doesn’t, in fact, care about whatever’s being threatened. Viewers of Lost will remember the scene where Benjamin Linus claims not to care about the girl some amoral commandos are holding at gunpoint. They make the standard offer: do what we want, or we’ll shoot her. He bluffs: “Go ahead. She means nothing to me.” The girl, of course, is his daughter and in fact means a great deal to him. Instant drama.

Convey the importance of something else. That same scene from Lost achieves another storytelling goal as well: it quite effectively conveys the degree to which Ben values the secrets he is trying to protect. He values them so much he’s willing to put his daughter up as the ante in a very high-stakes bluff. This can work whether the character wins or loses the bluff, but in my opinion it’s more effective if the character loses. Actually suffering the loss of something the character values—being forced to follow through on the sacrifice—will convey the importance of the other thing much more clearly. After all, the deadliest urge a writer can fall prey to is letting your characters off the hook.

Create a believable victory over a stronger opponent. The flip side of the endowment effect is that, all else being equal, if one person is trying to take something belonging to someone else, the attacker’s motivation to follow through will be inherently less than the defender’s motivation to hold onto what they have. That scene from the end of Stand By Me where young Gordie Lachance stands up to the much stronger town bully Ace Merrill is just such a scene. On the surface, the two are vying for the glory of reporting the location of the missing boy’s body to the authorities. That’s all Ace is fighting for. But Gordie is not only fighting for that glory, but also for his own self esteem and the memory of his brother. For Gordie, the emotional attachments pulling on him in that moment are so much stronger than those pulling on Ace, that not only is it totally believable to see Gordie pull a gun on Ace, but also that Ace backs down.

The basis of stakes

Whatever the reason, whether it’s emotion or biology or both, people will fight hard to hold on to what they have and what they value. It’s such a powerful lever controlling the actions our characters that I would argue the endowment effect is in fact the basis underlying the whole concept of stakes in our novels. More writing books than I care to name (E.g. Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!) talk about the importance of having compelling stakes in your novel. And well they should. But not a one of them I’ve ever read has stopped to talk about why it is we care about stakes at all.

It’s because of the endowment effect. A novel’s stakes, whatever they are, represent something that is had by the characters, by society, or whoever. The central conflict puts this thing at risk. Thus, characters are motivated to defend it, sometimes even at the cost of their lives.