'Too much' diversity?

It's like I need to call Dionne Warwick and revive the whole Psychic Friends Network.

I said this was going to go this way, and it most certainly did.

I have taken this thread back to its last point of being remotely rational. If I find a shit-storm tomorrow (because believe it or not, as a real live flesh and blood human, I have to sleep) my actions won't be of the cheerful, rosy sort. If someone decides that's what they want to do, my suggestion to the rest is DO NOT ENGAGE - STAY WELL CLEAR OF THE BLAST RADIUS.

 

There's no reason to mention orientation or gender identity if it isn't going to be used. No more so than mentioning any irrelevant detail. The mere accumulation of trivia is not characterization. The idea that it's necessary to create a rounded human being is false and misguided. Characters are not people. They are necessarily more streamlined than the real and are functional plot building instruments. Thus detail that works toward that function is superior to detail that does not.

 

reductio ad absurdum

Story elements do not always need to answer to the paradigm of need.

Example:

S04E01 of Defiance

There is a scene in which a young man approaches Irisa to get an autograph from her in the graphic novel that was created about her after some crazy shit that went down at the end of the season prior. He tells her "it's for my boyfriend".

If we stick to the most severe paradigm of what is needful to move this story forward - and only what is needful to move this story forward - then we stall at this scene because this scene isn't about him or his boyfriend. The guy in question is a very ancillary character, makes only one other appearance that I can remember, earlier in the show, in uniform when he's an Earth Republic soldier being interviewed by the media-savvy Jessica "Berlin" Rainier.

This scene is actually about Irisa dealing with her guilt over what she did was made to do in the season prior and now, worse, the bizarre mythologizing of her actions and her person. So, does the machinery of this show become broken because we learn an ancillary fact about an ancillary character? Does it suddenly stall out like a motor in which the timing chain has broken? Is it possible for us to instead engage this mention as a small bit of humanization for Soldier Boy Wearing Glasses, as his segue to timidly approach the now-mythical Irisa for an autograph?

The treachery of absolutes...

 

This is so counter-intuitive to how I create characters it's hard to wrap my mind around it. Not to say that it's wrong necessarily, but it's just the total opposite of my approach and many other writers I know.

 

I read murder mysteries, which are pretty plot-heavy, and I absolutely demand well-rounded characters. So don't narrow it down to romance.

Apparently Peter Robinson's books are regarded as police procedurals, and they still have plenty of character. Now, in the one that I just read I was rolling my eyes and saying, "Please, just move on," about the paragraphs and paragraphs about arson investigation. You probably would have been doing a similar eye-rolling when Banks was angsting about the fact that he had to investigate his ex-girlfriend-and-still-friend's current boyfriend. So that book apparently skates the line between those who demand a character focus and those who demand a plot focus.

 

I love police procedurals that put as much emphasis on the Police as on the Procedurals Karin Slaughter, Tess Gerritsen, Patricia Cornwell... If all I wanted to read about was the case itself, I'd read True Crimes / biographies.

Which I do. That's just not what I want from fiction.

 

I'll definitely conceded that point. As both a writer and I prefer characters that are so fully developed they feel just like real people, but not everyone is looking for that, I'm sure.

 

But he's a popular writer. So I think that it's worth remembering that there are a lot of readers that DO care a lot about character details. Advice to minimize those details and focus entirely on what serves the plot and only the plot, isn't going to be generally applicable.

 

Let's try another way; let's not talk about the plot. Let's talk about what details serve the book. There are some details that will make the book a better book and some that don't, right? Because it's a book with a story of it's own, not just a biography of a fictional person. Clearly some, indeed a great many, details are simply irrelevant and including them does not make the book better. That a character used to play saxophone as a child but gave it up as a teenager in a book that makes no references to saxophones or music or the teenage experience is not making this character more sympathetic or interesting or more rounded. It's dangling there doing nothing. So, in a book where sex and sexuality is not important why would knowing which instrument the protagonist prefers blowing help the book be a better book?

What matters with details is the purpose of including them. No, not all details must play into the plot. But you must have purpose in including them; this childhood memory that informs the kind of person they grew into, this line of dialogue that tells us they have a dry sense of humor, this unopened card from their mother that tells us family isn't important to them. These are informing the character in a million different ways. They are not serving the plot, but they are making your book better because they build connections to the reader. They shows us things that matter, even in small ways.

You should feel every single thing you describe about your character is important and matters and without it you feel that the characters actions stop making so much sense. If any description of anything does not meet this standard it should go. No, that doesn't mean streamlining past the point of absurdity. But there is literally no purpose to including anything more, and anything that doesn't inform something of tangible value is a writing crime.

Why would you tell the reader things that they don't need to know?

 

Well, presumably the adult is still "playing the saxophone", right? May even be in a duet, or looking for a duet? Maybe likes more of an orchestra - I'm not here to judge.

You've probably seen the "studies" about how many times in a day the average adult thinks about sex. If there was a character in one of my books thinking about a saxophone that often, damn right I'd mention it.

 

I could almost agree with you if this weren't such a bait-N-switch train of thought.

Perfectly logical bait...

Followed by a switcheroo in argument...

And then a question in summation that absolutely no longer answers to the original train of logical thought proffered.

The turnip truck is years down the road for me...

 

For the sake of being silly, because there really is nowhere else for this conversation to go at this point, were I to write:

Bryan - who is bisexual - queued up the GMROI report for the fourth quarter of 2016 and prepared to deliver the bad news concerning the company's expansion into the south-east region.

"As you can see from the sales comparison with our northern stores..."​

That's just shit writing, regardless of what's getting mentioned for no apparent purpose, and I have yet to see anyone in this thread propose this as what they even remotely mean. But if I don't make that silly interjection above and instead take Bryan home after this board meeting where he had to deliver the bad news, and poor Bryan is exhausted and bedraggled and his mind is a dark cloud of worry because he was counting on the success of the south-east regional sales to get him that long sought after promotion, and he's walking up to apartment 211, where he lives, and runs into David, with whom he had a short fling last summer because it was his first summer in New York, away from Wichita, but that's over now and Bryan kinda' has to regularly dodge David because for some reason David doesn't know how to stop suggesting a revisit to last summer, and Bryan is short with him... Now I'm well into the zone of what I certainly think is important for the reader to know as regards Bryan, his day, and his life. Even if Bryan never so much as looks at another boy ever again.

 

No, he lives in the building. Bryan, poor Bryan, just wasn't thinking about the consequences of dating someone who lives in the same building. And, worse, they live on the same floor where the stairwell leads up to just four apartment doors for each floor, clustered closely together. It's a Bronx thing. David's a nice guy and the whole thing happened when David invited Bryan, the new guy, with that charming Wichita accent, to a party, partly because he thought Bryan was cute, and partly to stave off any complaints about the noise. New York in the summer can be a magical place and Bryan was caught up in the whole New Yorkness of New York.

Later, Bryan feels terrible for biting David's head off in the stairwell and sheepishly invites him out to get a bite to eat. He's gotta' tell someone about this shit day at work, right?

 

LOL No. If this were a wish-fulfillment story, I'm Bryan. See, in this story I went to New York with the usual Mid-Western dreams of what I would accomplish, how the world would be mine! And... it's not working out that way. Also, I'm discovering that even if it had worked out that way, the end result just doesn't equate to the happiness I was thinking it would mean. Instead, over dinner, David, who now understands why I've been dodging him (I'm shitty with that kind of confrontation) suggests a different idea that he once mentioned long, long ago. David's family owns a deli. Have you ever been to a genuine, real-deal New York Jewish deli? It will change your life. Anyway, David jokes that if I ever need it, there's a job for me there. Later that same week, I discover that yep, I need some help because my place at Big-Ass Retail Giant is pretty much evaporating. I go work with David and his family. Initially I engage it as "oh, fuck, my dreams are falling apart", but then I discover that New York isn't all that different from Wichita if I just stop acting like such a big-shot asshole. David's family is awesome. I don't date David again, but that doesn't stop me from becoming part of their family.

Tada! Story!

 

Am I the only writer who gets ideas for things to put in the story based on details I've worked out about the character's characteristics or backgrounds?

For example, in UTK I established early on in the first draft that not only did Nate move around a lot as a chef, but that he spent some of that time working at various restaurants in New England. Chapters later, when I had to come up with a pizza for him to create as part of a challenge, I thought, "Ohhh, don't they specialize in white clam pizza in New England? He should make that!" It wasn't like I knew he was going to make a white clam pizza in Chapter 10 and so made sure I mentioned early on that he'd worked in New England.

Although I usually have a general idea of where my book will start and end as well as the path to get there, when it comes to actual scenes I'm way more of a panstser than a plotter. My characters are one of the sources I draw inspiration from to figure out how to get the story from point A to point B.

 

Contrarily, I often get ideas for my characters based on where the plot develops. I was 20k words into a piece about a detective, in his late 20's, athletic, a crack shot. Then I had a scene where he visits an old people's home, and the scene worked better if he knew one of the residents. So I altered the MC into a 78 year old man who uses a zimmerframe and also lived in the old people's home but was a PI when he wasn't taking his medication or napping. It took a lot of work to remove all the chase sequences and shoot-outs, but it was worth it.

Then one of my beta readers suggested the relationship could have been son and father or grandson/ grandfather. I don't know why I didn't think of that.

 

I'm a lot like you. Some major reference points. I know where I want it to end almost alway, but how it gets there can change as things come. In the above bit of silly, though, I wouldn't have come to the idea of Bryan's new life in the Not So Big Apple without the "pointless" (as it would seem some would argue) mention of David, and the relationship last summer.