He's Only a... Character?

By Tony Lee

And it's getting close to Christmas, isn't it kiddies! Have you bought your presents yet? I sure as hell haven't. I'm mired in deadline hell and I barely remember what outside looks like, let alone what doing something other than writing is. Actually, that's a lie. And I'll admit that right now. I have gone out, to the gym, the shops, to see friends here and there – but the problem is that you're never truly 'there'. I find myself mulling over plot issues while on the treadmill, I find myself planning out and blocking page scenes in my head while I'm buying groceries. I regularly visit some friends on most Tuesdays where we catch up and watch TNA Wrestling, and even there I've started to take my Eee PC along so that I can work. And this week? I had to give my housemate Craig my copy of Fallout 3 to look after. I'd only bought it on Sunday, but by Tuesday I already knew that I was spending too much time, only a couple or so hours a day on the game when I should have been working.

Such is the life of the freelancer, little Billy. Are you sure that you want to do this for a living?

But anyway. It is a sunny if not cold Saturday morning as I write this and for a change I'm fresh with the joys of spring, even though it's the middle of winter. For I have shiny new pages of Journal to letter, I'm almost finished on two 22 pager stories I'm writing work for hire and on Thursday I hammered out thirteen pages of Harker and found that actually, I quite like it. And it's Harker that leads me into the two questions I have to answer today.

The first is from my illustrious 'He's Only A Writer' editor, Jason Sacks, he who has to take this mindless drivel and rag-tag collection of random pictures each week and make something coherent from them, his question is

"I'd love to read about how you create characters. How do characters come into focus as you plan a story, what techniques do you use to help develop characters, and how deeply do you plan their lives? Do you know where they went to grade school? What their parents did for a living? How do you know you have enough? "

And the second is from Matthew Badham, who's recently been interviewing me for next month's Judge Dredd: The Megazine who asks

"Could you do a bit about dialoguing? "

Well actually the two things are connected, so yes, I can indeed. Let's start with characters.

I'm terrible at characters. I have this overwhelming urge to put people that I know in as names. I'm a lot better now, but in the early days, when I didn't know how long I'd get away with being a comic writer, I'd shoot my wad, friends wise all over the place. When I wrote my first Starship Troopers story back in 2004, Blaze of Glory: Alamo Bay, pretty much all of Tamari's Tigers were friends of mine. Baldwin was my ex-girlfriend and still best friend (and one day joint best man) Tanya Baldwin, Allen was Rich Allen, Maher was Stu Maher, Haynes a friend called Joolz Haynes, Captain Lilley was Karen Lilley, mad Doctor Andrews was my housemate Craig Andrews (a friend destined for several appearances), Private Marts was Mike Marts, Sergeant Sinclair was Alex Sinclair and so on. I thought it was amusing to bring in chums and kill them off. Only a few really survived the stories and for the main they were quite true to life in character – except for Baldwin who went from a 5 foot 8 Caucasian girl with red/blonde hair to a seven foot Amazonian Afro-American. Oh how we laughed at that one.

Separated At Birth... Baldwin / Baldwin.

(I actually placed a one-time girlfriend (never a good idea) called Charlie in as a character in the Tigers when I did the Starship Troopers #0 story. We then broke up badly a few months later. I had a sniper blow her character's head off in 'Marooned'. Sometimes you can have fun in this business, kiddies.)

But I do this a lot – not deliberately, but here and there I think 'ooh, I could put my make James in this.' It's only a name, after all. Andrews, Chapman and Holland are all friends of mine that I used in "Stalag #666" for 2000 A.D.. Craig (Andrews) was also used as the teenage boy 'Craig Phillips' in my first Doctor Who story "F.A.Q". Helen Gane, the falling angel of Hope Falls? An ex-housemate called? You guessed it, Helen Gane. But although occasionally the characters will be named after friends and sometimes share physical characteristics, most of the time they're nothing like the actual people.

Separated At Birth... Craig Andrews / Craig Phillips.

And the choosing of names is different from person to person. Ben Templesmith used the surnames of several actors who played The Doctor in Doctor Who, as well as the actors who played The Master (amongst others) as character surnames in Welcome to Hoxford. I know other writers who use daytime soap characters, who use names randomly taken from a phone directory – most of the time you find a random name and stick with it. Often however you'll come up with a name that you just have to use. I've been trying for years to write a rip-roaring Victorian steampunk tale starring a male lead called Septimus Woolfe. I've been ruminating the name of Septimus even since the early nineties when I was in a musical called 'Robert and Elizabeth' (written by Doctor Who musical genius Ron Grainer) where one of the other characters was named such. Another name I had way before the story to use them in came to mind was Dudley Nightshade. Dudley and his friend Penny
Dreadful were in several small stories I wrote while at school. And yes, I know that they're hardly original, but that's the whole point. Sometimes the characters work better when they have a name that's easily recognised.

Anyway, back to the question. I'll be honest; I've stated on these pages in the past that in most cases, the character isn't the first thing I think of. Most of the time I picture a scene. A character is involved in something that happens in this scene snapshot, and I see maybe three, four pages of the story in my head. It might only be one page, a cliff-hanger perhaps. Or, I might watch or read something that really kicks off my creative juices – I've recently been watching the BBC drama Apparatitions and due to this I've been kicking back into the whole demons / hell archetypes more than usual when considering new characters and settings. And, when you do something like this you'll usually have a 'I loved [whatever show/film/book] – but wouldn't it be cool if instead of the lead being a [man/woman/hermaphrodite/animated talking muskrat] they were instead a [man/woman/hermaphrodite/animated talking muskrat]? I did this after watching Wanted. I came out of the movie itching to do something like that, but in a book. Shotgun Samurai was born. And so the scene appears. And by the simple fact of this happening, I see the characters.

And often? The characters are in the middle of their story in this scene – and as yet I have no idea of what their story is. And then we start the questions. Who are they? Why are they here, in this scene? How did they get here? – It's like those movies that start with the hero in a cell, about to be hanged, and the movie goes 'if only I'd bought the pony...' and the next thing we see, it's three weeks earlier and we're meeting the characters for the first time.

So you start to plan the story out. And for this I'll use an example from The Prince of Baghdad. The first image I ever had was Nasir on a Magic Carpet. But why was he on it? Where was he going to? Where was he coming from? I remember that he was controlling it by an Xbox controller-type thing. Did that mean he was from this world? If so, where did this carpet come from? And so you start on the backwards journey that creates the character.

Nasir is on this carpet because he's escaping from someone. They're after him to kill him. They want to kill him because he's destined to save the world. Not his world, but their world. And so they've come through to kill him. And someone else has come through, with this carpet to save him.

Okay so far, but why is he destined to save a world he's not part of? Because he is. As a baby he was brought to this world. Why? For his own safety. He's the son of the King, and he was placed here in case something bad happened to his father. And something bad did, and the prophecy is that he'll return and save the day. And so they want to kill him.

And so we have the character of Nasir – a reluctant hero. Dragged from Harrow in West London to the mythical world of Baghdad where he must rescue his true parents from an evil Caliph.

But wait. That's plot. That's not characterisation.

But to me, the two things are reliant on each other. You can't have characterisation without plot, as the character is defined by the plot. Bruce Wayne would not have been a batshit-crazy masked vigilante who wears tights and a mask if his parent's hadn't been murdered. The Adventures of Kal-El, the non-powered Kryptonian who never left home would be nothing more than a Kryptonian West Wing, with Kal and his father Jor-El each week trying to outwit the devious plans of the Republican – ahem, I mean General Zod's party. He would never have become the Superman that we know.

And so the plot of Nasir saving the world actively affects his character. He's a normal kid who plays games in Harrow. Is he going to be a hero or not? Will he be a coward? Is he a fighter or a thinker? And as you work these issues out, the character takes place. Do I know what school Nasir went to? No. Why? BecauseI don't care. He doesn't see it in the story; the teachers aren't evil, if anything we might mention he was on the cricket team, so that later when he throws a rock with amazing accuracy, the reader knows it's skill, not luck. But you do start to enter their head a lot more when you start dialoguing. Because currently? Nasir is a rootin' tootin' Boy's Own action hero, saving the day. It's only when you hear his voice that you see that actually, he's just a kid. And it's the words that he states that build his character. And as the character learns, so does the reader. I remember Marv Wolfman saying somewhere that Jericho was the hardest character to write for in the Teen Titans because he was mute. He never said anything. And yet you still needed to build his character. What happened in the end? He died. And then came back able to speak...

But dialogue is incredibly important. To me, it's probably the most important as I came into comics through radio, where I wrote many radio sketches and scripts, etc. And of course in radio, the voice is paramount. You can't see what's going on. Occasional sound effects fill in some blanks, but you end up focusing on the words. And of course you only have a limited time to get those in. And so you start to look at what people say, how they say it. You speak the words aloud, to see if they actually work. Sometimes you punch the air going 'yeah!' and sometimes you shudder going 'who the hell speaks like that? ' Often the words fit the story – I wrote "Stalag #666" in the style of an escape movie with the clichιs and the familiar mainstays – and the dialogue I wrote was done in the same style. And of course that came back to bite me on the arse. So it's a rocky road to ruin, writing dialogue. You can write too little, or you can have panels flowing with it, like Brian Bendis does. Some people hate his 'back and forth', some love it. Being a West Wing fan, I like it – although I would never use it in my own comics. I don't hate my letterers that much.

But now we come back to Harker, as I mentioned earlier. Because in a way, both questions directly affect this tale. For those who haven't heard of this yet, Harker is a graphic novel that I'm writing for Markosia with Neil Van Antwerpen and Peter-David Douglas. It's set six months after the end of Dracula, and it's featuring most, if not all of the characters from Bram Stoker's masterpiece, as they not only come to terms with the events of the last year, but also band together once more against The Countess Von Gratz, the Countess Dracule – Dracula's final surviving bride, sister to the Countess in Dracula's Guest and a Vampire in her own right, returning to London to gain revenge on her husband's killers and take Mina's unborn baby as a host for her lost husband's unholy spirit. And of course we have twists and turns and old friends return.

Concept design – Jonathan Harker.

But the problem with such a story is that it's been done so many times before. And nearly all of them are in no way faithful to the original story. Even Coppola's Dracula with Gary Oldman had purists up in arms about some of the added 'characterisation' they used. And until October, when Dacre Stoker's official sequel comes out, all the 'oh look! Dracula's back! ' tales are nothing but rather effective fan-fic.

And Harker is the same. But, whereas many of the 'Dracula returns' tales are romping horrors with a loose connection to the source material, my story is taking directly from the book. In the same way that I took the characters of Oliver Twist and placed them twelve years down the line in Dodge & Twist, I've done the same here. Mina and Jonathan Harker are content, but both have terrible dreams. Dr Seward has found love with a new woman. Arthur Holmbrook keeps seeing his beloved (and incredibly dead) Lucy in the street, and Van Helsing has lost the will to continue.

But the characters are already well defined, through the fictional notes and diaries that Dracula is created from. My job here however is to enhance the characters. Harker was always a bit ineffective – what happens when he has to 'man up'? Arthur did what he did in the book to avenge his beloved Lucy – what happens when she returns? Mina was linked to the Count through his blood – what happens when she realises that he's still there in her head, in her dreams? All these thoughts and problems build the story, but at the same time add to the characters. What if Seward loses his love? What if Arthur is asked by Lucy to betray people? What if Harker has to kill his child? Our choices, our actions all create who we are. How many times have you heard someone go 'I hated it – but I'd never change it – it made me the man I am today'...

Concept design – Count Dracula.

And then we have the dialogue. For Harker, I'm lucky, as the source material, Dracula is pretty much solidly written from a dialogue perspective, be it internal monologue in the form of a diary, or a spoken work recording. And through these passages you learn the vocal nuances of each character, and when creating new dialogue for Harker, I found that I could quite easily 'fall into character'. But what about the new characters, in particular the Countess Dracule? We've never heard her before. How does she speak? Is she forward, frank, or does she fake a quiet demureness? Luckily my fiancιe Tracy has spent years in her own time researching Victorian society and did her dissertation on Dracula, and when I read her my Countess lines, she'll reply with comments on either words that wouldn't be used, or attitudes that wouldn't be so publicly shown. And through this osmosis a character like the Countess is created. And, with luck she'll fit so seamlessly into the story that, when you read it, when you see these familiar characters, you'll not even realise that she was never seen before this point.

But her dialogue creates her character, just as her character creates her dialogue. I just haven't worked out what High School she went to yet...

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I've spent so much time on that, I've run out of room elsewhere – so I'll be quick. On the subject of friends, my housemate and good chum Craig Andrews runs a rather popular website for the Flintloque / 'Black Powder Fantasy' range of games called Orcs In The Webbe [http://www.orcsinthewebbe.co.uk/], and this week he's continuing his Christmas Advent Calendar of scenarios written by Craig, fans of the site, people involved in the industry and today, Monday the 15th of December a little tale by yours truly called 'The League of Extra-Curricular, Not-So-Gentlebeings' which uses several of their more well known characters in a Londinium setting.

I don't play the game, but I did have some fun with the dialogue and one liners that I was able to get away with here, and I suggest that you should go and have a look. Right now.

So, one more column before Christmas? I'd better go buy some presents then. Well, that or finish another ten pages of Pendragon: The Legend Of King Arthur.
I wonder if I can make any of my mates Knights of the Round Table...?

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© 2008, Tony Lee

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