If you take your characters outside their fictional world, do they still function as compelling, relatable characters? Drop them into a different fictional world, is there enough character there to continue the story?
One prompt from Abbie Eammons set me thinking.
Here’s a perennial social studies question; is character is a product of nature or nurture? How much of our personality, wants and desires are formed by our predisposition? And how much by environment, society, family and friends? If you strip those away, are you still you?
Let’s run with Abbie’s opening proposition and take a character out of her fictional world. What’s left? If the world itself is the only thing that makes them special, then the character isn’t complete. If their motivation is solely to pull the Sword of Zaarg from the stone, that’s a fail. What’s their internal struggle, their want, need and misbelief?
Hooked on Classics
Let’s take a couple of favourite characters from literature.
Lizzie Bennett from Pride and Prejudice (yes, collect a sticker). There’s very little period detail of Regency England in P&P. It’s not written as historical romance, it’s contemporary to Austen’s time. There’s a bit of shopping in Meriton, focused on hats and ribbons, the luxury items of their day. Little fashion or economics; no politics at all. Shift the story to now, Lizzie would be a career single doubting she’ll ever find Mr Right. Darcy and the Bingleys? Venture capitalists and Social Media influencers. This is the new class system of aspiration and elites. But Lizzie? Bright, sparky, an independent thinker, a bit of a rebel. Completely unchanged from the Austen original. Overcoming her prejudice is a kind of coming of age story. Shift this to the Asian diaspora, P&P becomes Gurinder Chadha’s fine Bride and Prejudice with a Bollywood twist.
Pip from Great Expectations. A kid from a working class family out in the sticks does a good deed for a gangster on the run. By random chance a local heiress takes an interest. Soon he’s in London wearing designer brands, doing the rounds of junkets, exclusive clubs and red carpets. He’s probably living it up on social media. Give a kid a makeover and unlimited credit and yes, it will turn his head. Pip lives life for show in the misbelief that he’s happy with the status and attention. Until there’s a scandal, the press uncover his roots and the source of his dirty money. It all comes crashing down, made worse by all of Pip’s character flaws. I’m pretty sure someone wrote this version already.
The thing is, the fictional world doesn’t define either character.
Now for something completely different
But I write speculative fiction, where many readers seek out the world-building before the characters.
Can we take Vi out of Fourth Wing and have a credible leading character? She’s barely credible in Fourth Wing. What do you have outside the YA Romantasy military academy, dragon riding setting? Not much. Do many of Sarah J. Maas’ heroines work outside the world of ACOTAR? Feyre? Doubtful? Nesta? Snarky and spikey, maybe she has a chance.
The world of Dune is impressive, but the book could easily have flipped environments. If Caladan was a desert world and Arrakis underwater, Paul Atreides could have mastered free-diving and wrangled an orca instead of the sand walk and riding the sandworm. Dune isn’t really about those; it’s about the corrupting effect of power within a coming of age story (again).
Home front
What about my characters in my fantasy world?
Jovanka – more than prey for the Vipers, more than her Second Sight, she’s defined by family trauma. In another world, her experience of domestic violence and loss is more than enough to drive her. What about her search for a soul mate? Pivot from the fantasy to the romance genre. More than any of that she wants to control her own destiny. Pivot to the coming of age story type. Jovanka confronted the Emperor with a vision of his death. She has politically dangerous secret knowledge. Pivot to the political thriller or conspiracy thriller, or action-adventure. Here’s a revelation; books one and two are pursuit Westerns, but with swords and armor.
Pivot to literary fiction; Jovanka still has all that trauma, race issues, and trust issues. Dealing with her backstory and finding her place in the world provides enough to write Jovanka into literary fiction.
What about Yari in the next part of the series? She’s teenager searching for a parent taken by the Empire, aided by a bizarre mixture of supporting characters, caught up in a religious revolution. This could be Iran, 1978. Or any time in the last fifty years from Argentina’s military junta, to Kosovo in the 90’s, to the ISIS takeover, to Sudan’s ongoing civil war. Hers is a coming of age story.
The Sixth Messenger? Aeryn has layers of complex PTSD and abandonment issues to work through. Also a mission she doesn’t want and a lack of a personal life. For a job, she has to track down and rescue children. She needn’t be a warrior priestess. She could be a private investigator or a social worker – with a bad boss and poor relationships with her co-workers. Aeryn’s childhood tragedy relates directly to her difficult relationship with children, a constant and uncomfortable reminder of her own past. Her issues and resolutions are the same. I could drop Aeryn into any genre from Western to Action, to mystery to domestic. Her story is also a coming of age or World View story.
Repeated Stories
If there really are only seven, or ten, or twelve stories (according to who’s classifying them), and every plot has already been written, then what makes your story unique? It’s not the plot, it’s not the world, it’s the characters. Take your characters outside their fictional world and see if they still stand up in three dimensions.