Jan 15 2009
Harry Turtledove and the Importance of Characters
Recently I finished reading one of Harry Turtledove’s latest books, ‘The Man with the Iron Heart’. It was OK. But when I set out to re-read it, I got distracted and instead re-read Turtledove’s whole Worldwar series instead (4 books) and then read the sequel, the Colonization series (3 books). What was the difference between the two? Characters!
In ‘Man with the Iron Heart’, there were no characters who caught my interest in any way. There was Lou Weissberg, your standard-issue Jewish guy in the US military, there was Diana McGraw, who is based on a real-life person, that Cindy something who was stalking Pres. Bush, and there is the Man with the Iron Heart himself, Reinhard Heydrich, who instead of being killed earlier in the war survived to become an Osama bin Laden figure.
They say their lines and go through their motions, but there is nothing about any of them that makes me want to spend any extra time with them.
By contrast, the Worldwar/Colonization series is chock full of wonderful characters. There is Moishe Russie, starving in the Warsaw ghetto, who prays to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for a sign that God has not abandoned his people. He is answered with a great light in the sky— the sign of an alien invasion that will in fact liberate Russie and his family from the Nazis.
There is Sam Yeager, a minor-league baseball player and science fiction fan, who becomes the US expert on the invading alien Lizards when he is involved in the capture of Lizard prisoners.
There is Liu Han, a Chinese peasant woman captured by the Lizards and used by them in experiments on human mating habits, who goes on to become a terrorist leader.
There is the alien Straha, who leads an almost-successful rebellion against the Fleetlord Atvar, and who must go into exile in the United States.
And there are many more characters in the series that I came to care deeply about during the reading of these books. Characters are what makes me keep coming back to re-read these books, and what makes me keep buying books by Harry Turtledove, even if the latest one disappoints.
The lesson for writers and would-be writers is that characters are important. There needs to be more to them than an name and a series of lines they have to speak before the story is done. They have to be as real as we can make them.
Creating a good character is a difficult art. We need to know more about them than will appear on the page, in order that our characters have a depth to them. But then again, too detailed character sketches can be a form of procrastination. One has to strike a balance. There is a good Character Workshop at Holly Lisle’s web site, which is a good place to start to improve on character building.
One thing I do in my work is to make sure that my characters don’t have an easy life. Marek, one of my characters in Kolbe’s World, is marooned on a planet with no inhabitants and nearly no life of any kind. Another, Greta, is denied the right to accompany her extended family to a new colony world, but is offered a free assisted suicide.
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From the Lina Lamont Fan Club: Will Sally Sparrow be next Doctor Who companion?
