Happy 11/11/11 and Veterans Day, dear ones, and welcome to the Open Mic! Let’s chat today about characters… since I’ve been (as I mentioned yesterday) rereading LM Montgomery’s Emily series.
You’re all readers, so I know I can ask you this: Who are your fictional friends, foes, and heroes? What books do you read again and again, because the characters are your friends and the protagonist is you? Who do you aspire to be? And which are the characters you just couldn’t get into, because they were so foreign to any of your selves real or imagined?
If you have diehard literary alter-egos, tell us about them. Or if you’ve never found that fictional soulmate but have been searching all your life… tell us that, too.
See you in the comments!
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak. A character who is strong and self-reliant and lives in the wilderness. All things I aspire to be.
I’ll have to look for those books, Lisa!
Mmm…I’m going to have to look those up, too–sounds like my kind of character!
I have more feelings like these about characters I’ve seen in film than I do with ones in books I’ve read. I love a lot of the books I’ve read, but maybe it’s the deeper exploration of character (because of a story’s ability to show more specifics of their interior feelings and thoughts) that keeps them from feeling like alter egos. I may love them and or admire them, but people in books always feel more individual and separate to me.
For example: I love the Harry Potter books but, at so many points, I want to slap someone — Harry, Hermione, Dumbledore etc. I laugh, I cry, but for me it’s all about the ride. It’s more about how the writer takes me through it all that makes me love a book and read it again.
Oh, how interesting. I can feel like a book character is “me” even if she isn’t that much like me. Laura Ingalls Wilder, for instance — she’s brave and fiery in ways that I’m not, and yet she’s one of my longest-standing fictional alter egos.
I get really into film characters too, but I think inevitably I get tripped up with the fact that they don’t look anything like me. Then I feel silly, because obviously I’m no Keira Knightley. Maybe I need the handicap of not knowing what someone really looks like? I always have a hard time doing visual character sketches — never really know what my characters look like — and maybe that’s part of that too; maybe the specificity of appearance does(n’t) for me what specificity of mind does(n’t) for you!
Wow, I never thought of it that way, but that’s exactly why I have trouble identifying with some film characters, even if they embody so much of who I am, simply because they don’t look like me! How funny. I wonder if the fact that you and I are both super visual has something to do with that?
I wonder that too! And I can tell you this, if I’d ever watched a movie with the kind of heroine I like, and the actress looked like me, I would never never never be able to get her out of my system.
OMG, totally! Weird coincidence, I just watched the film Happy Go Lucky last night, and there was a really interesting bonus feature with the director and cast, detailing the process of co-creating the characters from birth to the present so that the actors were responding in scenes almost as themselves, because they were so closely identified with their character.
The main character, Poppy, reminded me so much of myself in a lot of ways (not all of them terribly flattering, in my opinion), and it gave me so much to think about, particularly after reading your post!
This is an interesting exchange! I hadn’t thought about it this way before, but I guess I’m so intensely into language that a written description trips me up more than a visual one. If a character in a film is beautiful and behaves the way I wish I did, then I can ‘become’ beautiful like the character.
I guess I became stronger whenever I saw “Gladiator” (long story) because I envied the strength and fearlessness in Russell Crowe’s character and was able to ‘become’ him despite the fact that he’s male and muscular.
I’m amazed that you don’t easily visualize your characters. This whole conversation/subject is fascinating to me.
I feel like a real weirdo sometimes for not being able to visualize my characters! It seems like if anyone should be able to “see” who they’re writing, it should be someone who can draw… but now, I can never imagine what anyone looks like (although I know what they don’t look like).