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Audience interaction with characters

• Character’s actions
• Motive
• Past
• Reputation– what other characters think of him.
  • If reputation hopelessly inaccurate, show how it came to be.
• How habits and behaviors are affected by the character’s environment.
• Don’t overemphasize physical appearance– if you understand a character, you don’t need to know what color his eyes are to imagine him.
• Exaggeration– but not enough so that the person becomes a carciature.
• The twist– play on stereotypes and audience expectations

If you must withhold information from the audience for suspense, make sure that they understand what the question is, even if they don’t know the answer (or you’ll confuse them).

Your protagonists shouldn’t have an easy time of anything.  Show that the best heroes get screwed by circumstances all the time but work through it. Every situation has something that can go wrong.  Find it.

What if something arises and both Lashes respond to the same crisis?  Most impersonations are malicious, so someone will assume that wrongdoing is afoot.

Irony: Rahul wants a dragon to free him from a virtual confinement in the US (play on the princess held in the dragon’s tower)

The narrator should refer to the character by the same thing every time.  Rusty may call Hunter “Daddy”, but the narrator should always use Hunter.

Rusty has two white triangles under his left eye.  They look suspiciously like the rune for “betrayal.”  You wouldn’t betray me, would you?

The reason that Tolkien could get away with so many random digressions into details about his world was that his world was the story.  More importantly, his world was interesting and fresh.  It would put your readers to sleep if you attempted likewise, especially if you draw heavily on boring conventions (ie elves as graceful, cultured, nimble creatures.  We’ve already seen these guys before).

Readers expect a story to end only when the first major source of structural tension is resolved.  This should be the heart of the book.

Controlling audience perception of a character

• Ordinariness vs. strangeness

• The amount of time devoted to the character

• The character’s potential for making meaningful choices

• Other characters’ focus on him

• The character’s frequency of appearance

• The character’s degree of involvement in the action

• Readers’ sympathy for the character

• Narration from the character’s point of view

Emotional investment

• The best uses of emotional and physical pain fall somewhere between inconsequential and unimaginable.
• Grows less effective with repetition.  Is this character a whiner?
• Sacrifice– should be meaningful and a conscious decision.
• Jeopardy–ratchet up the tension and anticipation before the main event.  That way, when the pain comes it is more gripping.
  • The feared event has to be plausible– there’s no way the hero will actually get sliced by the log-cutter.
• Audience should have a personal stake in every conflict because they sympathize with some characters.
• Anguish: when your audience sympathizes with both sides of a conflict.
• Show us character’s needs and desires.  Does he collect new sports cars because he’s greedy and shallow?  Or because his father struggled to make a 20-year-old car run… and the only time his dad bought a new car, it was repossessed days later when the plant shut down.
• Playing fair will draw an audience’s respect.  Cheating is similar to contrived plots– it makes character seem weak.
• Drafted vs. volunteered heroes.  Volunteering for a glorious assignment (like Frodo didn’t) would make character look arrogant and perhaps fool-hardy.
• No sympathetic character should lightly break a promise.
• Villains/Negative reactions
  • Sadism: rooted in thirst for power (not a love of pain).  He forces character to acknowledge he has no control over his life.
  • Self-appointed
  • Oathbreaker
  • Intellect (vanity, arrogance, non-humanness).  We’re afraid and resentful of people that know more than we do.
  • Insanity– show us his perceptions and delusions.
  • An opposite attitude from the hero.  Beholden to absolutely no one but himself, completely impulsive, selfish, ect.

No one is EVER doing “nothing in particular,” unless they’re really preparing for criminal activity.  “What if he was going for a walk?”  That’s not the same as nothing in particular.

Inherit the Wind, by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, used to taunt Bashal

Narration–

Keep a character’s attitude and perspective in mind.  Avoid what he can’t or doesn’t see at all costs or the reader will wonder who’s really talking.

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