more important than he looks

[marycatelli]

The complication that arises when you plop in a character to be rescued is that you then have to do something with him afterward.  In the worst case, they can sit there saying that they're too developed to make only a cameo, that the reader will expect more of them, and not tell what else they will do.

Or if  a character is insufferably drab even for a cameo, so you assign a trait.  He's bad-tempered, he's mischievous, he's lazy -- and the next thing you know, he's looking for new locations in the book to be bad-tempered, mischievous, lazy. . . .

Once I realized that a character had taken on too much importance in the first chapter.  So I killed him in the second.  Didn't get rid of him.  Dead as he was -- and stayed -- he came up again and again during the novel.

Comments

[jryson.livejournal.com]

Why, oh why did you do so much development work in the first place? I'd think a head bobbing in the water is all you'd need. Then hand him over too his parents, charge them for the cost to the government for the rescue, and send him on.

Attach a name, royal connections, and plot thickening evildoers and yeah, I guess I see the problem. Unless you're with Her Majesty's Aleatory Happenstance Rescue Service, where you have to rescue everybody, a character takes on some importance before they can be worth the bother of rescuing. But then you've buttered your bread, so you have to sleep in it. Goes with the territory, no?

[marycatelli]

Because it would be dull.

Rescuing a bland and anonymous character -- where's the fun in that? Besides, how are they going to find out he needs rescuing if they don't hear he's out there in the snow? -- and for that they will also need to learn why he's out there.

[jryson.livejournal.com]

My only rescued character is in fact the POV. The fact that she had to be rescued after running away from home lends some interest, I guess. She was really hard to develop. I had to chisel every trait into her. She's in a position of conflict between two moral imperatives, but she herself is altruistic, puritanical, and rather plain. I write in a tight third, so she's basically the narrator.

Well, okay, she does spend much of the book trying to find eight abducted girls. She does her part in finding them. But as soon as they turn up they get hustled into a landing craft and sent home. One of them will come to Bible Grove in the next book.

I don't know, my characters don't object much to being dismissed.

[marycatelli]

interesting. It's one of my biggest sources of subplots.

[jryson.livejournal.com]

Tell me about it. I've generated enough verbiage to do my own post:

http://jryson.livejournal.com/26372.html

[marycatelli]

cool