Some great advice here from Randy so without further ado.

Creating: The Novelist’s Dilemma

Let’s imagine you’re writing a novel and you’ve got a
great idea for a character. This character happens to
be quite similar to you, but not identical. (That is,
you haven’t fallen into the trap of writing an
autobiographical novel.)

Your character is a strong, deep character,
well-motivated, with solid values. Most importantly,
he’s unique. There’s nobody quite like him in
literature.

Congratulations! That’s great. Now you need two or
three more of those and you’ve got yourself the
ingredients for a really terrific novel.

The problem is that those two or three others need to
be different from that first character. Which means
they need to be quite a bit different from you.

In all likelihood, one or more of those characters are
going to have made different “choices” than you have
for such things as gender, ethnicity, hometown,
worldview, religion, occupation, political philosophy,
education, and many other aspects of your character.

Now you have a problem child. This character of yours
is likely to be very different from you in some
Xtremely important ways.

Let’s keep this simple and make the character different
from you in only one of these critical ways. If you’re
a woman, then we’ll assume your character is a man who
has the same ethnicity as you do, same hometown,
worldview, religion, occupation, politics, education,
etc.

Should be simple, right? This character is almost you,
except he’s a man and you’re a woman. So you decide to
follow that good old advice about “writing what you
know” and you make him quite similar to you, except of
course that he’s a man. Very simple.

Well, no. It’s not simple. Just because your character
uses the men’s room doesn’t make him authentically a
guy. If he acts, talks, and thinks like a woman, then
your readers are going to complain that “real men don’t
act like that.” And they’ll be right. MOST men don’t
act like that. There are real differences between men
and women.

Ouch! You’ve just been gored by the first horn of the
Novelist’s Dilemma. Because it’s not always possible to
“write what you know.”

You may think it’s easy to fix this problem. All you
have to do is research a list of all the ways that men
and women are different. Then just make your male
character “act like a real man.”

As an example, you discover that the average height of
an adult man in America is 5′9″. (For you metric folks,
that’s 175 cm.) So you make your character that height
or close to it.

Your research tells you that men don’t ask for
directions, so your character never asks for directions
either.

You learn that men have something called a “male ego,”
so you give your character a good strong ego.

You find that men are “visual,” so you give your man a
roving eye for the ladies.

Tick, tick, tick, right down the list, you make your
character “typical” in every way. How he thinks, how he
acts, the words he uses, the beer he drinks, the chips
he likes to eat, the sports he likes.

When you get done, you’ve got a perfectly “typical” guy
in every respect. But now you get gored by the other
horn of the Novelist’s Dilemma: Your readers are going
to scream that you’ve created a stereotype. And they’ll
be right.

Where did you go wrong? You did your homework. You
really nailed your character. He’s exactly a “manly
guy” in every way. Why are you getting hammered for
writing a stereotype?

The answer is because you wrote a stereotype. You
deserve to get hammered for that.

What, exactly, is a stereotype? The term gets thrown
around a lot, but it rarely gets defined. For our
purposes, we’ll define a stereotyped character as one
who is “in every single way typical of the class he
belongs to.”

And what’s wrong with that?

There are plenty of wrongs, but we’ll focus on two.

The first wrong is that a stereotype is boring.

The second wrong is that, mathematically, it’s
extremely rare to find any individual who is typical in
every single way. (It’s even more rare to find one who
is atypical in every single way, which is why your
readers complain if your character doesn’t act like a
“real man” — or whatever class he comes from.)

I won’t do the math here, but it involves probability
distributions of independent variables in a parameter
space of high dimension. If you know the meaning of
that sentence, then you are one sick geek, but you will
also instantly see that I’m right.

The fact is that NOBODY is “typical in every way.” If
you are a man, then you are likely to behave like a
typical man in many ways, but there are bound to be a
few ways in which you behave more like the typical
woman. If you’re a woman, you’ll likely behave like a
woman in most ways, but there will be a few points on
which you’re more like the average guy.

The same goes for all those other ways we classify
people. Race, religion, political party, geography,
education, occupation — each of these defines a group
of people who are similar in certain ways.

But the key point is that none of these groups has any
members who always fit the stereotype for that group.
If you look hard enough, every member of any group is
different in some significant way from the average.

You can use this to help you create your characters.
For each character, do the following:

* Define the major classifications for the character –
gender, race, religion, etc., right on down the list.

* Do your research and know the stereotypical behavior
of each classification for that character.

* Make your character “typical” in most ways.

* Make your character violate the stereotype in several
significant ways.

* When writing your character, make sure he shows some
awareness of any stereotypes he is violating. The more
severe the violation, the more awareness (and conflict)
the character should show.

The nice thing is that there are almost an infinite
number of ways to choose how each character will
violate his stereotypes.

Again, there is a whole mathematical theory behind this
which I am too darned lazy to explain here. If you know
anything about combinatorics, (you geeks know who you
are), then you won’t need any explanation anyway.

If you execute this strategy well, you’ll dodge both
horns of the Novelist’s Dilemma. Your men will be men
and your women will be women. But they’ll be real
people, not stereotypes.

When you accept your Nobel Prize, you will of course
acknowledge me for teaching you about those pesky
probability distributions of independent variables in
parameter spaces of high dimension.

I’ll be there to watch you accept your award. Look for
the angry guy sitting in the back muttering, “That
Nobel is rightfully MINE!” to anyone who’ll listen.

 If you want to contact Randy (highly recommended) here are his contact details.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, “the
Snowflake Guy,” publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing
E-zine, with more than 11,000 readers, every month. If
you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction,
AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND
have FUN doing it, visit
http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

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