Fantastic World

Creating characters happens in many ways. Some authors choose a friend or acquaintance at random and then embellish or exaggerate their attributes. Other writers imagine someone they’ve always wanted to know—or be in love with–and away they go with the character of their dreams.

In a book I recently read, a literary mystery by Randall Silvis named  Two Days Gone, the writer offers up a successful novelist and teacher, I can’t quote the entire section, but there are some fascinating bits in the professor’s words to his students about creating characters. First he tells them to watch people, listen to them, and watch fo rthe gestures that may hint at underlying character traits.

“Next”,’ he writes, “you must learn to translate this observational skill from real people to your characters. You have to come to know you character inside and out, know their history, her childhood, all the traumas and triumphs that made her who she is at the moment the story begins. Only the can you become that character as she takes those choices that will propel the story forward. You, the author, sitting there in your comfortable chair, typing away, must simultaneously be the character…Because only by becoming that character can you know with an authenticity how she will react to those situations. And only then will she be a credible, believable character. Only then will she be real.”

This character writing as a person telling us how to write a character is a weird thing to read, but it does have a lot of wisdom in it . Watching and internalizing quirks you see in people all around you is vital to get away from the same old suburbanite tooling along a nicely manicured suburban highway. Mimickng the way teenagers talk is the best way to put a character on the page who sounds like a true sixteen-year old. But getting inside the character’s head to the point that the character is you, or you are the character seems like bad advice to me. Because then you have a new problem; characters are all the same because they share your thoughts and traumas. Who wants that?

There also is the problem of multiple characters, especially if you have a manuscript where two (or more) characters share the spotlight. With the advice given by the “novelist and writing teacher,’ there would be not much difference between your characters. No conflict.That would lead to a dull read.

I know what Silva is trying to get at. Too many writers are far too lazy in their creations. They will often take a cardboard character, an Indian chief or a bejeweled socialite, toss them into the first draft, and then never try to deepen, or re-mold the character.  You simply have to avoid that. Each pass the writer takes with a draft should make the characters more like real people. But like you? No.

I have to admit that this is the first time I ever saw writing advice in the midst of a murder mystery, and Silva does a fine job with creating his novelist character—who might have murdered his entire family, or maybe is the sweet guy he seems to be who’s being framed.

I know there are lists they hand out to beginning writers that ask, what is the character’s favorite ice cream flavor, who is their idol, where could they live if they could chose anywhere. I never took these lists seriously, because all of my characters ended up liking carmel ice cream, loved Jesus, and wanted to live on a tropical island. It’s just boring trivia.

The best way to create  character is to create someone you meet by chance in your imagination, learn about them, and by the final draft they will have become your best friend. (And that somewhat includes the antagonist, who should be interesting enough to have reasons for his or her bizarre goals.)

But what could be more boring than reading a book about you?

A few years ago, a writer I know once gave me advice that I never pondered before.

“From the bad guy’s point of view, he’s doing the right and logical thing,” she said. “He doesn’t think of himself as a villain.”

She was quite right. I thought back to all the good books I had read, and in every case, no matter how reprehensible the antagonist was, he or she always had the opinion that she was right. Take the Harry Potter books for example. Snape, the teacher the kids all hate at Hogwart’s Academy seems as if he’s just there to make the kids feel total agony. But, as we find out through the long series, he just feels that he is a superior teacher and is trying to impart his extraordinary knowledge to students who don’t appreciate him. When you look at it this way, Snape no longer looks like a cartoon character, but a real person with problems and worries of his own.

When I wrote my first novel, Excited Light (self-published), I kept that advice in mind as I constructed a plot with an antagonist who is a womanizer and cheat. I put myself in his shoes as I wrote the book, remembering that this man saw himself as a handsome, talented newspaper editor whose career had taken a wrong turn. He looked at women as people who would salve his wounded ego, even though he never followed through on the promises he made to them.

For my novels at the Story Plant, each time I created a villain, I’d take some time to look at things from their perspective. I got some great positive reviews, some focusing on how good the “evil” character was. The mother character in The God’s Wife seems like a shrill, unpleasant harridan. However, she is merely trying to smooth the rites of succession for the all-important God’s Wife of Amun position in Ancient Egypt.

For “Dateline: Atlantis” I even sent the ms. to someone who had lived in England to make sure I got the language correct.

I based this bad guy on a real person (who was not remotely English) and tried to make the narcissism ring true. After all, he thought he was a talented and famous museum director who could do no wrong. He even justified murder as being something he had to do in the name of science.

I’ve read some books in which the antagonist is just a plain jerk and I never felt the sense that I was seeing what was under his skin. Then there are books that have no villain at all. It’s just the main character battling against a prevailing and unpopular idea. I wouldn’t suggest doing a book this way. You need conflict to really make a book come alive, and without a villain, there’s really not much tension to propel the reader forward.

Right now, I’m working on a book in which the antagonist has just appeared and I am trying mightily to figure out what her motivation is. I’m even considering doing a chapter just on her and her thoughts. I may never use that chapter, but it will help me from letting her become a caricature instead of a character.

Try looking at your own writing and see if the villain, or forces of evil, have a tale of their own to tell. It might be just the thing to liven up a moribund manuscript.

Fantastic Worlds

Astronomers who have been looking for possibly inhabited planets almost always look in the “Goldilocks” zone of a star. That is the area where the conditions are most Earthlike—temperature enough to host liquid water, which is considered essential for any type of life to grow.

However, new research published in Astrophysical Journal  suggest that they ought to be looking in some unexpected places. There is a better chance that life will show up on planets that are near aging, red giant stars. These stars, which are starting to go through the ending cycles of a sun’s life, have expanded greatly and may be warming planets that had been cold for billions of years.

Astronomer usually look at middle-aged stars like our own, trying to find planets that are in just the right spot for life to develop. But there aren’t many planets that we have found that fit the specifications, so it might make more sense to also look at planets circling “senior” stars. Suns that are about twice the age of our own could be radiating heat out to once-frigid planet, defrosting oceans, and finding new life or old eco-systems that come back to life under the changing conditions.

Right now, nearly two dozen aging stars are within 100 light years of our own solar system.

“I hope that this will actually spark an effort by people who look for planets to also look at these old stars now,” Lisa Kaltnegger, astronomy professor and director of the Carl Sagan Institute, told Space.com. “Because if you could find signatures of life on such and evolved planet—a de-frozen planet—it could tell you how (life) got started on the surface, and that would be an amazing part of the story.”

After our own sun expands to become a red giant (in a few billion years, so don’t panic), it will incinerate Mercury and Venus and Earth and Mars will be fried wastelands. But Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune may warm up enough to sustain life.

For fantasy and science fiction writers, finding new inhabited planets could spark whole new series of books: the Un-Frozen Worlds. That’s the fun of fiction, every new little quirk that scientists discover can bring all kinds of inspiration to writers.

Fantastic World

Scientists are discovering that there are far more black holes in space than we ever thought possible. A new study in Nature magazine predicts hundreds of black hole coming into existence each year. These new black holes are visible through the second generation of gravitational wave directors, according to website phys.org.

When the first colliding black holes were discovered this year, they were discovered by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The colliding black holes offered proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Now, we are finding that there are colliding black holes happening all over space.

Richard O’Shaughnessy, assistant professor of RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences, told the website phys.org. “The universe isn’t the same everywhere. Some places produce many more binary black holes than others.”

For the most part black holes are massive stars that collapse into themselves and become negative gravity fields. But pairs of them are extremely rare. However the black holes O’Shaughnessy predicts that we are going to be seeing more and more binary and twinned black holes in the future.

“(We) are not going to see 1,000 black holes like these every year, but many of them will be better and even more exciting because we have a better instrument—better glasses to view them with and better techniques,’ the scientist said.

So, the universe could be filled with black holes. Whether any of these offer any opportunity for time travel is still unanswered. But the more the black holes, the more science fiction will play with the possibilities.

Fantastic World

Intricately carved stone blocks have been found depicting Queen Hatshepsut on Egypt’s Elephantine Island, far to the south of most Egyptian capitals. They provide insights to the early reign of this formerly over-looked ruler, whom some elements of Egyptian society tried to hide. That’s because Queen Hatshepsut, who was a regent for her nephew Thutmoses III, took on the robes of the pharaoh for herself.

It was more than a little unusual for a woman to serve as pharaoh (Nefertiti worked as a co-ruler with her husband Akhenaten), and probably the public rebelled. But there have been many statues (most broken up and used as fill for other structures) that show Hatshepsut depicted as a woman. The Elephantine sculptures show her as female, which was the way she was depicted early in her reign.

The first female pharaoh ruled from from 1473 B.C. to 1458 B.C. as a female. Later in her reign, the queen was depicted as a male. They even placed the pharaoh’s false beard on her feminine chin. She was one of the most prolific builders of the pharaoh. She erected and renovated many shrines and temples to the gods. Her Memorial temple still draws crowds today. But the smaller building on Elephantine Island shows how widely the planned buildings were.

The Elephantine Island structure was a way station for a ceremonial barque dedicated to the god Khnum.

No one knows what happened to Hatshepsut when she disappeared from history. Some think her jealous nephew had her killed. Certainly he is blamed for defacing her image and royal cartouche throughout Egypt. Still, many departures of Hatshepsut as a man exist throughout Egypt thanks to archeologist and restorers throughout the world.

It goes to show that when you create something marvelous, as Hatshepsut did with her buildings, people are going to remember you male or female.