A Cast Of Caricatures: A writerly observation

[Weird Harold]

Watching football and halftime approached. I switched fro the Fox channel game to the CBS channel game, with the thought I'm not in the mood for Fox's caricatures of sportcasters today

That thought in turn led to, When did that 'cast of characters' devolve into a 'cast of caricatures'

In turn, that thought led to the question, do I populate my stories with characters or caricatures?

I came to the conclusion that my stories start with a cast of caricatures or at least a cast stereotypes and then I try to rub the serial numbers off them to turn them into actual characters.

So, how do your story's characters evolve or devolve in relation to common stereotypes and or caricatures.

Alternatively, we can get rude and list all of the TV programs that have devolved into caricatures of themselves or their genre.

 

[rgraham666]

In my serious work I try very hard to make them individual characters. I have a very clear picture in my mind of who they are, how they think and what they want.

In my short pieces of smut, who cares?

 

[Weird Harold]

In my serious work I try very hard to make them individual characters. I have a very clear picture in my mind of who they are, how they think and what they want.

In my short pieces of smut, who cares?

All of your characters, even the "bit players" the encounter in the course of the story?

I find I spend less time rubbing serial numbers off of "Bodyguard #1" and "Random Nameless Jerk On the Street #6,060" than I do on primary and secondary characters.

 

[sr71plt]

All of your characters, even the "bit players" the encounter in the course of the story?

I find I spend less time rubbing serial numbers off of "Bodyguard #1" and "Random Nameless Jerk On the Street #6,060" than I do on primary and secondary characters.

Good point on the minor secondary characters, I think. Just a few characteristics to get the reader to latch into a shared image of that "type" is often quite good enough. The current trend (for some time now) is "less is more" for the tertiary threads. Too much of this, of course, and the story gets overtaken by a feeling of "cartoonish." It's a balancing act.

(And I'm only writing this because I can't stomach half time with the Fox football commentators. )

 

[Salvor-Hardon]

For me ( and I am the least of all writers here) my main characters need to be real. In my head at least they are based on people I know or they walk through my life. I keep a small notebook with me for things like "the way she eats salad" or "his habit of tapping the end of his pen on his lip when he's thinking". All too often I write over the details and don't let the characters come out as such. I'm too impatient to be done.

the walk ons, the extras, are little more than walking talking props and are only as developed as fits the plot.

 

[rgraham666]

All of your characters, even the "bit players" the encounter in the course of the story?

I find I spend less time rubbing serial numbers off of "Bodyguard #1" and "Random Nameless Jerk On the Street #6,060" than I do on primary and secondary characters.

Bit players, no. Desk clerks, cab drivers and that are pretty blank.

I do work on the secondaries at least a little.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I am, as 3113 said, character-based. Right now, I'm trying hard to be plot-based, and I would much rather work on characters-- I think my best bet is to reduce them to caricatures till I flesh out this plot, and then let them fill themselves back in (? ? )

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Main characters - no. Secondary characters - sometimes. Background characters - usually.

Sometimes a characture works better than a fleshy real character. It just works that way.

 

[Oblimo]

I make sure everyone with dialogue at least an external motivation, and all 'tagonists have internal and external motivations as well, but I don't go deeper than I need for verisimilitude of their actions.

edit: wow, that doesn't even make sense to me.

 

[Weird Harold]

The current trend (for some time now) is "less is more" for the tertiary threads. Too much of this, of course, and the story gets overtaken by a feeling of "cartoonish." It's a balancing act.

I think "balancing act" is a pretty fair description most of these "writerly" questions. Sometimes you want a "DickTracy Movie" done in nothing but primary colors, sharp focus and high contrast. Other times you want want a "Moonighting" effect with sharp focus and bright lighting on some characters and soft focus and pasel shadings on other characters.

(And I'm only writing this because I can't stomach half time with the Fox football commentators. )

I did stop to wonder just when they became caricatures of themselves. I used to prefer the Fox halftime show, but it's just irrating now.

I think my best bet is to reduce them to caricatures till I flesh out this plot, and then let them fill themselves back in (? ? )

I tried naming my characters Hero, Damsel, Snidely, Sidekick and Henchman for one story as I tried to build a workable plot for a Perils of Pauline style cliff-hanger serial. It failed because I discovered I'm no good at writing cliff-hangers and as a straightforward adventure novel it just sucked -- but the simple designations for the main characters did let me concentrate on the outlining the Plot without getting hung up on the characters.

 

[gauchecritic]

Usually I begin with character and plot is something that sometimes occurs.

If I'm writing, I need to be writing, not pencilling in, not making flow charts, not outlining but writing. (maybe I need a new year resolution in there)

Characters turn up and I decide at the time if they are accidental or occidental. (just thought of that one: non-descript or have backgrounds) but the main thing that occurs to me is that their visibility is directly related to their effect on the main characters.
Unless the lady serving in MacDonald's is later going to turn out to be a long lost sister that just got out of prison for forging lottery tickets then that lady is going to remain 'that lady' mainly because she has no discernible effect on the main character.

But when it comes to visible characters they are as real as people that I know or parts of people that I know. This is probably where I fall down in my writing. I know the characters so well that I'm unable to determine if the writing actually portrays the person in my head.

This, at last, is where my answer coincides with the question.

Are they caricatures because we leave out the interesting parts or because we write the recognisable parts?

and answering questions with other questions is a reasonable but cliched character trait.

 

[cantdog]

I have, very occasionally, Greek-chorus characters, ones who function as the voice of the community, if you follow. But otherwise, by the time I've done all the endless painful rewrites, two things have happened.

First, I have fleshed them all out, great and small.

Secondly, I have pared away reams of useless writing about them all, great and small, for the sake of making the thing readable and and least semi tight. I don't strip off all that is extraneous, because then everyone is flavorless, but I have chucked a lot of detail in rewrite.

Is the result a caricature? Not in my head, because I know too much about them. It could happen that I have reduced one or more of them to cutout status, I suppose. Sometimes, months later, I can reread and be objective. Generally, I don't find it so, but once in a while someone will have been cut down to nearly nothing. Always a minor player, except perhaps in the story of Andrea, where we see a lot of people very briefly.

By the time I am able to notice this, the story's been posted for many months.

I did, once, do another limited rewrite on one of those, for publication in the Coming Together books. Once, on one of those, I put it out (in Coming Together) without change, because I had not made that sort of blunder.

 

[cantdog]

That's one of the things I appreciate about gauche. His characters are all for real, quirky individuals. He really doesn't often have minor players, of course; one is firmly in the POV of just one or two. But they are never generic.

 

[sr71plt]

I think I almost always start out with the "hook" of the story--the point/theme it serves. And the characters--and only the ones necessary to serve the point of the story--more or less fall into place after that as what's needed to serve the hook. (Of course the character/characters are sometimes the hook of the story themselves.)

I also don't sit down and compose my main characters in some sort of characteristic chart before I start writing--as so many of the writer's books tell you to do. I let the character evolve as I write. This sometimes means going back and rewriting to make a character, as introduced, consistent, but it does two things for me--it prevents the extraneous from intruding and it means that the reader is introduced to the character and discovers the underlying whys of what they do as the story evolves--and at the point where the information adds to the understanding--rather than providing that height/weight/eye and hair color/cup size data dump in the crucial opening paragraphs of a story.

 

[cantdog]

I think I almost always start out with the "hook" of the story--the point/theme it serves. And the characters--and only the ones necessary to serve the point of the story--more or less fall into place after that as what's needed to serve the hook. (Of course the character/characters are sometimes the hook of the story themselves.)

I also don't sit down and compose my main characters in some sort of characteristic chart before I start writing--as so many of the writer's books tell you to do. I let the character evolve as I write. This sometimes means going back and rewriting to make a character, as introduced, consistent, but it does two things for me--it prevents the extraneous from intruding and it means that the reader is introduced to the character and discovers the underlying whys of what they do as the story evolves--and at the point where the information adds to the understanding--rather than providing that height/weight/eye and hair color/cup size data dump in the crucial opening paragraphs of a story.

So far, so good, mate. Don't you get tired of seeing that stuff? I have to have some other cogent reason to give a damn to keep reading once I see cup sizes in para one or two, or, really, anywhere else.

People who make extraordinary effort to compose characters probably need to. Many of us find the characters the easy part, but if it were the sticky part, those author advice books would at least provide one with some idea how to proceed.

Writing screenplays, you do need to generate a character chart. The next writer will want to be consistent if she needs to bring the character back. Series TV, the fans notice very quickly if some sort of slipup gets made. Otherwise, a person would surely not bother without some need. I mean, if one were writing The Winds of War or something like that with like 175 characters in the damn thing, then having some notes might be damn useful.

None of that makes the character any less of a cardboard cutout, though. Much of the population of series TV, especially in comedies, are such cutouts, despite the fact that there might be a chart somewhere listing what they drive for a car and what's in their toolbelt or whatever. Cup size.

 

[sr71plt]

So far, so good, mate. Don't you get tired of seeing that stuff? I have to have some other cogent reason to give a damn to keep reading once I see cup sizes in para one or two, or, really, anywhere else.

People who make extraordinary effort to compose characters probably need to. Many of us find the characters the easy part, but if it were the sticky part, those author advice books would at least provide one with some idea how to proceed.

Writing screenplays, you do need to generate a character chart. The next writer will want to be consistent if she needs to bring the character back. Series TV, the fans notice very quickly if some sort of slipup gets made. Otherwise, a person would surely not bother without some need. I mean, if one were writing The Winds of War or something like that with like 175 characters in the damn thing, then having some notes might be damn useful.

None of that makes the character any less of a cardboard cutout, though. Much of the population of series TV, especially in comedies, are such cutouts, despite the fact that there might be a chart somewhere listing what they drive for a car and what's in their toolbelt or whatever. Cup size.

I have worked as an on-set screen editor for several movies (including a couple of Academy Award-winning ones), and it was at this point--not in the initial screenplay writing--that most of the character charting was being done. Directors were changing whole sweeping issues/character traits in the movie as they went along in the filming. (much the same way I write stories.) We had to do a whole lot of adjusting and fleshing out of the initial charts given to us to keep the characters consistent--or to try too. There have been a lot of flims covering the inconsistencies left in earlier films--often because there's a whole of footage and entire scenes that get cut/swapped in the film editing process. And usually the editors checking the consistency issues in the final cut are thousands of miles away from the on-set editors who tried to control traffic during filming.

 

[cantdog]

And then, there's a clear need for something organized.

I'm with gauche on this one, though. Characters turn up, he said. Too true, o king, they sure do. And the longer you hold 'em in your head, the more they accrue to themselves. So far, I haven't had any trouble keeping them whole in my mind as I go, but even that is no guarantee. They could still be archetypes or caricatures, however consistent.

That's why those mechanical devices, listings and profiles and all, may not be the shit.

 

[oggbashan]

And then, there's a clear need for something organized.

I'm with gauche on this one, though. Characters turn up, he said. Too true, o king, they sure do. And the longer you hold 'em in your head, the more they accrue to themselves. So far, I haven't had any trouble keeping them whole in my mind as I go, but even that is no guarantee. They could still be archetypes or caricatures, however consistent.

That's why those mechanical devices, listings and profiles and all, may not be the shit.

When the characters take on a life of their own, they are almost impossible to kill off. Sherlock Holmes haunted Arthur Conan Doyle; Lord Peter Wimsey irritated Dorothy L Sayers. Conan Doyle even hurled Sherlock Holmes off the Reichenbach Falls but he survived - because the public wanted him to.

I don't think J K Rowling will be allowed to rest Harry Potter for long.

Og

 

[Weird Harold]

Unless the lady serving in MacDonald's is later going to turn out to be a long lost sister that just got out of prison for forging lottery tickets then that lady is going to remain 'that lady' mainly because she has no discernible effect on the main character.

I try to write incidental characters that my POV characters notice or interact with some characterstic worth noticing -- the "Lady in McDonald's" would be "Lady In McDonalds with "Huge Wart on Her Nose" (who with a little green makeup could have a career catching houses in Oz.)

Are they caricatures because we leave out the interesting parts or because we write the recognisable parts?

and answering questions with other questions is a reasonable but cliched character trait.

I definitely write the recognizeable parts for tertiary characters and to some extent, emphasize the recognizeable parts for secondary characters. But I don't think that necessarily means leaving out or de-emphazising the "interesting parts" -- for some stereotypes, the recognizeable part IS the only interesting part.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Usually I begin with character and plot is something that sometimes occurs.

If I'm writing, I need to be writing, not pencilling in, not making flow charts, not outlining but writing. (maybe I need a new year resolution in there)...

This is exactly how my shorts are written, but I don't see how I can accomplish a novel that way... Plot, for some damn reason does not come easy to me. You'd think that the thousands and thousands of books that I've read would have osmosed it into me!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

My characters usually develop in the course of writing the story. I know something about my hero--I want him to be a scatter-brained artist, maybe, or a driven businessman--but the details of his character reveal themselves to me as I watch him walk up some stairs or buy a paper or open the door to his flat or as soon as he has to say hello to someone. Then I can tell you just how he's driven at business or what kind of paintings he does and whether he's losing his hair and things like that. He comes into focus through his actions and words. I can't just sit and make up a character out of thin air and I don't like using people I know because I generally want my character to mean something specific.

Where I tend to use caricatures is in caricature situations: cabdrivers, plumbers, cops--characters who aren't really characters so much as they're functions. You don't want to spend too much time making them interesting and original because then the reader's going to wonder why. (Why does that plumber have a French accent?) The character will have too much weight.

 

[Stella_Omega]

My characters usually develop in the course of writing the story. I know something about my hero--I want him to be a scatter-brained artist, maybe, or a driven businessman--but the details of his character reveal themselves to me as I watch him walk up some stairs or buy a paper or open the door to his flat or as soon as he has to say hello to someone. Then I can tell you just how he's driven at business or what kind of paintings he does and whether he's losing his hair and things like that. He comes into focus through his actions and words. I can't just sit and make up a character out of thin air and I don't like using people I know because I generally want my character to mean something specific.

Where I tend to use caricatures is in caricature situations: cabdrivers, plumbers, cops--characters who aren't really characters so much as they're functions. You don't want to spend too much time making them interesting and original because then the reader's going to wonder why. (Why does that plumber have a French accent?) The character will have too much weight.

Yes, exactly!

Too much detail on secondary and tertiary characters is very off-putting. Recently, I've seen a lot of it-- "Mistress Of Spices" was one. There were details, especially in the love-interest, that had no reason to be there. To me, it reeks of IM role-play turned into fiction-- with no decent editor.

 

[sr71plt]

My characters usually develop in the course of writing the story. I know something about my hero--I want him to be a scatter-brained artist, maybe, or a driven businessman--but the details of his character reveal themselves to me as I watch him walk up some stairs or buy a paper or open the door to his flat or as soon as he has to say hello to someone. Then I can tell you just how he's driven at business or what kind of paintings he does and whether he's losing his hair and things like that. He comes into focus through his actions and words. I can't just sit and make up a character out of thin air and I don't like using people I know because I generally want my character to mean something specific.

Where I tend to use caricatures is in caricature situations: cabdrivers, plumbers, cops--characters who aren't really characters so much as they're functions. You don't want to spend too much time making them interesting and original because then the reader's going to wonder why. (Why does that plumber have a French accent?) The character will have too much weight.

That was what I was trying to say up the line whether or not I conveyed the points well.

 

[Weird Harold]

Where I tend to use caricatures is in caricature situations: cabdrivers, plumbers, cops--characters who aren't really characters so much as they're functions. You don't want to spend too much time making them interesting and original because then the reader's going to wonder why. (Why does that plumber have a French accent?) The character will have too much weight.

Excellent point!

But I have trouble depicting anyone as simply a "function" -- I suppose I promote too many characters from "Extra" to "Bit player" by giving them a line of dialogue or some memorable characteristic (like a wart.)

I don't think I'd wonder too much about a plumber with French accent -- it would be nice change from plumbers that are lingusitically insdistinguishable from Bronx cabdrivers.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I have worked as an on-set screen editor for several movies (including a couple of Academy Award-winning ones), and it was at this point--not in the initial screenplay writing--that most of the character charting was being done. Directors were changing whole sweeping issues/character traits in the movie as they went along in the filming. (much the same way I write stories.) We had to do a whole lot of adjusting and fleshing out of the initial charts given to us to keep the characters consistent--or to try too. There have been a lot of flims covering the inconsistencies left in earlier films--often because there's a whole of footage and entire scenes that get cut/swapped in the film editing process. And usually the editors checking the consistency issues in the final cut are thousands of miles away from the on-set editors who tried to control traffic during filming.

That was what I was trying to say up the line whether or not I conveyed the points well.

You did

Ricardo Rodriguez's movie "One Upon A Time In Mexico" has a scene where the miserable worm of a CIA agent, played by Johnny Depp, undergoes a transformation into a heroic weapon of vengeance. In the context of the film, it's believable enough, because the film is a cartoon. I even wrote a pome about it! But Rodriguez says that the real reason for the change is that he tacked on a chunk of another script entirely, just to flesh out the runtime. Hah!