I think that one of the (unacknowledged) reasons that I blog is because if I don't, my characters get ranty. They start off on a topic and then go on and on and on, which is kind of good but mainly not. I say "kind of good" because it's important for characters to have opinions. A character that has no opinions has, to me, no character. There need to be beliefs and passions that help to define what the person is about. Case in point: Captain America's line in The Avengers about there only being one God, and He doesn't dress like that. This is a belief that helps define what the character is about.
There's a difference, however, between a character believing in the Christian God, and a character demonstrating this belief by endlessly proselytizing and basically re-enacting the sermon on the mount over the course of 2-3 paragraphs in your manuscript. Oh, sure - you could do that. But why? What does the reader not understand about Cap after, "There's only one God, and I'm pretty sure He doesn't dress like that" that you can capture in some drawn-out soliloquoy in which the character goes on and on about the topic? You don't make people any more familiar with the character with a monologue, and characters are no different from people when it comes to listening to their opinions. Most of the time, we don't want to hear it.
Seriously. Think about the way we interact with one another. When we start talking about strongly-held opinions or beliefs, there are two typical reactions. The first is that whomever's opinion we are listening to is someone that we already agree with, so we nod and interject the appropriate form of "Amen" and engage in some fun mutual admiration stuff until we get bored. The second is that we're being subjected to something we don't agree with, and really don't want to hear it, and start wishing life had a Fast Forward button.
We're interested in opinions. We just like the Cliff Notes version, for the most part. This is particularly true for characters, since they will (a) hold opinions we don't agree with, and are therefore wrong, (b) hold opinions we already agree with, but with which we cannot express agreement or get the positive regard we're used to getting when we agree with someone, or (c) hold opinions we don't give a damn about, in which case they're wasting space on the page.
What I'm finding, as I do an initial read-through and edit on Prophesied (that would be the third Mack book - had I mentioned that before?) is that there are a number of places where a character - often Mack, but not always - has a strong opinion, and this strong opinion becomes disruptive to the flow of the story. A quick sign that an opinion might be disruptive is if I've got a paragraph that takes up more than a full screen's worth of real estate. (100% magnification in Word of Times New Roman 12-point font, with the ribbon at the top of the screen hidden.) That's not a particularly long paragraph, probably 12 or so lines, but if I go on that long, there needs to be a reason. A good reason.
What I'm seeing is that there are two kinds of character rants that pop up from time to time, which in my writing read a lot like mental constipation. "Ooh, I'm not sure what to do, or I feel like things are moving too fast and I want to slow it down. I know - I'll have a character pontificate or reflect on something! Here, character - go crazy!"
I don't get writer's block, like I've said, but that's because when I get blocked up I just let whatever's blocking me ... well, let's stop with that metaphor before it gets disgusting.
Character Rant 1.0: "And I am telling you..."
John stared at Sarah across the black glass of the twenty-foot board room table. "You don't get it, do you? What you're doing. You don't understand it at all."
Sarah shook her head. "You're overreacting."
"Me?" John laughed. At least, the noise should have sounded like a laugh, if its mirth hadn't been stillborn. "I don't think it's possible to overreact. You're the one who had the direction of this company in her hands. You're the one who chose to push the board to move our factories overseas. You're the one who said that the best way to be responsive to our shareholders and our community was to make the products as inexpensively as possible, then re-invest back home." He held up a hand, cutting off any objection she might make before she could so much as open her mouth. "What you've done is what so many other companies have done. You've given work not to the people here who need it, but to children. That's right, Sarah. Children in a third-world country, working for pennies a day, working until their hands bleed in unsanitary environments with no regulation of how long they are there and no hope of actually improving themselves through education. They will work there until they die, if the people you signed contracts with have their way. And for what? A few million more dollars in our ledger. Is it worth it? Is any amount of money worth it?"
Character Rant 2.0: Information Vomit
John couldn't understand why Sarah didn't see what she'd helped create. Didn't she know that, since 1990, over two-million jobs had been sent overseas by American companies? Hadn't she seen the statistics on unemployment, with its record highs for so many disadvantaged groups? And how she remained unaware of the increasing state of what amounted to child slavery in many third-world and second-world countries, where children as young as seven or eight might find themselves working twelve-hour days and never learn to read anything more complicated than what they had to comprehend to do their menial jobs, he couldn't say. He'd read the studies that came out of UCLA and the Wharton School, and had looked at the research on corporate social responsibility. He'd tracked down pictures and videos of what those sweat-shops looked like, and read interviews with people like Yun-Kim Xi, the Chinese dissident whose early years in a sweat-shop turned her into a modern crusader for human rights. Sarah didn't know what kind of industry she was contributing to - but John did. The question was, what did he do about it?
---
Now, I made anything that looks vaguely like a "fact" in either of those examples up. What's important isn't the facts, it's what these two scenarios represent.
In the first, what we've got is the author's sock puppet. A character who holds a particularly strong belief - one that gets him or her on a roll that results in at least one stifling of a second character's attempt to interject - is often serving as a sock puppet through which the author inserts his or her opinions into the work. This kind of thing is just not needed. Characters need depth and complexity, but they don't need to be ranty assholes. Once you start ranting you lose some of your readers and you bore others. You also sound vaguely nuts.
In the second, the author is very proud of his research and wants to share it with everybody. The problem is, people don't read fiction to get a dissertation on whatever topic the author spent twenty minutes googling before starting the scene. (Some people read fiction for detailed research-y topics, and appreciate it when it's done well. There's a place for such detail and presentation of information in historical fiction, but for the most part it doesn't work.) Information can enhance storytelling, but when presented for its own sake, information can become a barrier to storytelling.
Your character cares about something? Good.
Your character is a single-minded devotee of a topic, and incapable of talking or thinking about anything else?
Less good.
That's what I'm finding some of, in Prophesied. Not a lot, but enough that I'm again doing a lot of cutting, which is the main thing that happens in first-round edits. Overall impression so far is positive, and we'll see if that stays the case as I keep moving through. At the very least, it's a fast read through the first third...
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