Much like a puppy picture in the middle of a writing article, children characters add little except for intolerable cuteness and are rarely, if ever, worth the time it takes to introduce them. Why bother introducing an 100% cliche character? Unfortunately, I’ve concluded that the vast majority of children characters are glorified props that fall into two categories: the adorable angel and/or the spunky brat. Both of these serve two purposes: to inject nauseating cuteness into the story and to develop the main characters (the parents), usually by getting captured by Bad, Bad Men.
Like puppies, children are interesting only when they have a bit of killer instinct or at least some ambition other than being as cute as possible. Perhaps the kid wants to make his difficult parents proud, or has some crazy-eyed dream like becoming Santa Claus, or whatever. Maybe he wants to be taken seriously by someone older. Alternatively, you can make a child character a bully like Dudley from Harry Potter, but he works better as a minor antagonist.
In light of this, I’ve created a set of questions to help you develop a child character if you plan to use one.
What does this child character contribute to the story? Is he put in merely because you think his parents “need” a child or because the story “needs” more cuteness?
If the child is primarily put in to develop his parents (like most child characters in adult fiction, I think), in which ways does he do so?
What sort of character traits drive the child’s personality or mindset? If you used “cute,” “spunky” or “sassy,” please redesign the character and answer again. Is the child curious, adventurous, independent, perceptive, etc? What sort of things does he do for fun?
Describe the child’s relationship with his parents or other relevant older characters. (Please give yourself something more interesting to work with than “his parents are totally loving” or “nurturing”– unless you’re writing a book about parenting, readers probably don’t care much about your vision of the utopian family). I think that everyone who’s ever had kids would agree that there are stresses involved and some parents, although definitely not all, have lousy/adversarial relations with their children. What are the stresses in the family? If there’s a dispute in the house, what’s the point of contention? Etc.
Is your child character extraordinarily gifted? If so, please do not make him extraordinarily savvy with mechanics or electronics. For reasons not clear to me, techno-kids are usually insufferably aggravating (like Micah from Heroes) in a way that generically gifted children (like Ender or Encyclopedia Brown) are not. [Cadet Davis: I think it’s because a generically smart child has to demonstrate his intelligence through something the audience can appreciate, rather than the author just saying “oh, he put together something really impressive. He’s a genius!” A technologically gifted child really can’t show that he is intelligent, unlike (say) Encyclopedia Brown.
Do you think children characters are as problematic as I have suggested? How would you suggest improving them?
Reviewer: I like your work, but I think that [some aspect of your writing] is flawed.
Author: Oh, that? I meant to do that.
Reviewer: Ahh… do you think you could fix it?
Author: But that would ruin the style of the piece!
Deliberately inflicting substandard writing on your story for “stylistic” or “literary” purposes is usually a prelude to rejection. If your reviewers were able to discern that it was either stylish or literary, they wouldn’t be complaining about it.
Here are a few areas that are especially prone to intentionally bad writing…
The Hellboy Quote Generator is out, although it has been technically unreliable. On a comedy scale of 1 to 10, I’d give this a 5: amusing but uneven. It’s a well-done piece of viral advertising, though. (”Let me put this to you as delicately as I can.” *BANG*)
Hellboy interests me, mainly because its writing is merely OK but reviewers sometimes think that it’s been ripped off by other series. For example, “AtomicRoboisaroboticHellboy!” I don’t regularly read either, but that comparison seems counterintuitive to me mainly because Hellboy’s hook is that the genre isn’t light sci-fi and involves a lot of planar travel (hell, etc), as far as I can tell. However, I think it’s valid to criticize both series for the ultimate cliche setting: WWII. I really want to see a comic book tackle the ultimate question: how do you solve a problem like Korea?
I’ll leave you with this parting thought.
C’mon. You’d have to be crazy to give up horns like those.
I submitted a potential rewrite of our introduction to the Critters Writing Workshop. It’s very short (2 pages) and I expect that we’ll eventually expand it to about 5. Currently, it’s rated PG-13 for adult language, but we’re considering modifying it to PG.
Like The Fantasy Novelist’s Exam, we’ve gathered up a list of questions that will help you identify potential problems in your writing. We’ve separated our questions into categories: for all novels, for sword-and-spell fantasies and for superhero stories.
I did a Google search for “bad superhero writing” and Superhero Nation was the top result. Screw you, Google!
[B. Mac] Speaking of Google, it decided to celebrate the 4th of July on its front-page today, which is slightly unexpected because instead of national holidays, they usually focus on holidays like Earth Day that are equally unimportant everywhere.
Picture of Earth courtesy of the HSCD School Board, atomic bomb courtesy of the Department of Energy, and Bill Nye courtesy of TVgasm. All blame for the low quality Photoshopping is ours.
When authors or fans challenge negative reviews, they sometimes say something like “what have you written, because I bet it’s awful.” I think that reflects a fundamentally wrong conception of reviewing. Every day, people evaluate and suggest things without any experience of having made them. For example, over the past few years I’ve suggested that friends stay away from (ugly) Pontiac Azteks, (shoddy) Craftsman tools, and (inedible) McDonald’s food. But I’ve never designed a car, built a tool and hardly ever cook. Does my lack of experience disqualify me as a relevant reviewer?
Few genres of fiction suffer from as much total drivel and utter hackery as the sword-and-spell fantasy. That isn’t to say that mystery, romance and books for tweens are junk-free (believe me, they’re not) but it’s hard to escape the impression that they are not quite up to their neck in awfulness.
Fortunately, there is a list of questions that will help prospective fantasy authors identify some of the most common problems of their field. Here are some of the problems that I find particularly poisonous…
The New York Times has an interesting run-down of cartoon updates, from apparently successful endeavors like Strawberry Shortcake and the ugly-but-popular TMNT series to horrible flops like Magic Earring Ken and Warner Brother’s Loonatics…
The creator of Heroes, Tim Kring, has promised that season 3 will have more villains. Yes, more characters… that’s exactly what Heroes needed.
“You’re going to see a lot of bad guys,” he said to Sci Fi Wire. “We’re playing off the idea of our characters as heroes or villains. So it’s really the duality of good and evil.” T.K., I will see your duality of good and evil and raise you character development, interesting traits and a well-rounded cast. For one, I’d start by killing off about half the cast…
Donation begging time! I’d really appreciate if you could help defray our art expenses. $5 will allow us to buy a character pose and $30 will allow us to buy a set of poses for a new character.
