So Where Did My Characters Come From?

[This post was inspired by the following post on The Story Reading Ape’s blog.  Thanks, Chris!] 

https://thestoryreadingapeblog.com/2020/06/13/the-teenage-protagonist-guest-post-by-jaq-d-hawkins-2/?fbclid=IwAR03c2_kDckW1yrpFM3Ld0Nh4VoVSJIYjPxOt62YAMPO8qLpskPz_ZdxmAc

TSRA’s article ends with a question: “What books do you love that have teenage protagonists? Have you ever written a story from a teenager’s point of view?”

Unfortunately, my response strayed from answering that question, so I’ll just say, not really.  I don’t recall ever loving a book with a teenage protagonist.  In fact, current young adult books as a rule leave me cold – the few that I’ve read always seem contrived and shallow.  Now, my series The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars is a fictional biography, so part of the first volume does deal with Robbin Nikalishin’s childhood and adolescence but only because what happens to him then is foundational to the rest of his life.  Otherwise, most of my characters are adults, with a few exceptions.  In The Blessing of Krozem (not published yet) Halrab is 28 at the beginning of the story, which is just past adolescence in that culture; and in Children of the Music, two important characters are children (seven and five years old), but that book was written for adults.

I should say I didn't read fantasy as a child, except for the Oz books – I read a lot of those because we had a close friend who was crazy about them and made sure I had a big supply.  Oh, and I also read Dr. Doolittle.  There were only two of those books that stuck in my mind – Mudface the Turtle (where a giant sea turtle carries two youngsters to the new world during Noah's flood and that's how that region got populated) and The Canary Opera (Note a burgeoning interest in language and in talking animals, essentially aliens).  I credit Mudface with the beginning of my interest in anthropology.  But there were two books (or types of books) that really molded my development.

https://www.amazon.com/Secret-HarperClassics-Frances-Hodgson-Burnett/dp/006440188X/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3S8ELPR632L7G&dchild=1&keywords=the+secret+garden+book&qid=1592079485&sprefix=The+Secret+Garden%2Caps%2C211&sr=8-3

The first was The Secret Garden. It probably would be considered MG today, but I read it 14 times the year I was 8 and had the whole first chapter memorized.  It has children (not adolescents) as the chief characters, but they develop and grow in the manner of much adult literary fiction, and the psychology of Colin in particular is quite comprehensible.  I think my interest in how the minds and characters of my MCs develop probably stems from being so immersed in that book.

And then the second influence was historical fiction.  I believe the first thing I ever read that had a historical (and medieval) setting was Adam of the Road, by Elizabeth Janet Gray.  But it wasn’t long before I discovered Alexandre Dumas!  Swashbuckling stories became my thing!  At the same age I was reading The Secret Garden, I found in the school library a bowdlerized version of The Three Musketeers, and that was it – I was hooked!  At the age of 10 I read the (unbowdlerized) Count of Monte Cristo.  I read that one many times, also.  It probably wasn’t suitable for my age (do you want your 10-year-old learning what “infanticide” is?) but I was fascinated by the character of the Count and how his experiences stimulated his later actions.  When I was 12, I read every book by Dumas – all the Three Musketeers books and some things I don’t even remember now.  At fourteen I read The Black Tulip, which is not like Dumas’s other books at all.  It’s about the tulip craze in the 16th century, which I had never heard of, but there was a certain charm about that book that none of his other books had.

https://www.amazon.com/Count-Monte-Cristo-Bantam-Classics/dp/0553213504/ref=sr_1_4?crid=15MR9N6133L5B&dchild=1&keywords=count+of+monte+cristo+book&qid=1592079821&sprefix=count+of+monte+cristo%2Caps%2C217&sr=8-4

 And then there was The Prisoner of Zenda when I was twelve.  It was my first introduction to an imaginary land (or as my conlanger friends prefer, a constructed world), although Ruritania is really an imaginary country.  (Well, I guess Oz is a constructed world, but I had no concept of that at the time.)  After Zenda I made my own imaginary countries and drew castles and maps – lots of fun.  And the imaginary country idea is why I really liked Ursula K. LeGuin’s Malafrena setting, many years later.

I mustn’t omit my Roman period.  When I was ten years old, the movie Quo Vadis came out, and I became fascinated by all things Roman.  A new period of history to opened up before me.  I read the book of Quo Vadis – another tale most parents wouldn’t approve for their ten-year-old, but I was captivated by it, and I learned a lot.

https://www.amazon.com/Quo-Vadis-Henryk-K-Sienkiewicz/dp/1934169064/ref=sr_1_4?crid=1JAXAU4JGI5H6&dchild=1&keywords=quo+vadis+book&qid=1592079971&sprefix=quo+vadis%2Caps%2C210&sr=8-4

I read some of what today would be called YA.  I liked the nursing series – Cherry Ames and Sue Barton – but I hated Nancy Drew.  I only read a couple, I think.  I remember it felt completely unrealistic.  No girl of the age of 16 that I knew had her own car and ran around solving crimes on her own.  But I soon discovered adult mysteries, particularly Ellery Queen.  And Sherlock Holmes – I read every one of his stories when I was twelve!

And then of course my mother was an English and Romance Language teacher, and because of her, my interest in languages developed, and I got into Shakespeare.  That kind of goes along with the historical swashbuckling theme.  I read a lot that was not required in school, and for Christmas when I was fourteen, I asked my mother for a Complete Shakespeare.  I still have that book.

Then I went to college, intending to major in history.  But I hated my history teachers in my freshman year and I loved my English teacher, so English literature became the major of choice.  After that I read mostly literary fiction.  Then at the age of 29 I finally discovered Tolkien and to coin a cliché, the rest is history (or fantasy).  It was actually several more years before I read any science fiction, and when I did, I discovered LeGuin.  I’ve always said I got into SF through the back door of fantasy.

And all of these things influenced the kinds of characters I write about.  The concept of a weak or troubled male character who has to overcome a lot of odds probably began with Colin and his father in The Secret Garden, proceeded with the Count of Monte Cristo, and shows up in Griffen Gwidian in The Termite Queen and in Gilzara in The Blessing of Krozem.  My female characters are usually stronger types, particularly Kaitrin Oliva in The Termite Queen.  I think they began with Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden.  I’m not sure where Robbin Nikalishin came from – probably a combination with the swashbuckling D’Artagnan and the troubled man who has to overcome a lot of odds, ultimately realizing he must give up retribution as a motivator, like the Count of Monte Cristo. 

And what about the conundrum of my termites? I presume they came from Mudface and the talking animals, and from Shakespeare and from Greek myths, and from a growing interest in science.  Ki’shto’ba is a quintessential hero, but it commits the sin of Hercules, who killed his children, and so has to atone and find redemption (a favorite theme of mine) through the Twelve Labors and the visit to the Underworld.  Za’dut is the ultimate Trickster character, which turns up a lot in Dumas, and the villains owe a lot to characters like Cassius and Iago and Cardinal Richelieu. 

The best conclusion I can draw is that the influences of our younger days, whether actual or vicarious experiences, come together to make us the writers that we are.

And so I present my heroic termites!
http://amzn.to/LnvhbLy  

Can You Make Your Readers Cry?

Sentimental -- what does the word mean?

I found this picture at  North American Victorian Studies Assoc.
http://navsa.org/2012/07/06/display-victorian-sentimentality-at-the-tate
No artist was given or further credit,
but it certainly sums up Victorian sentimentality

       According to Dictionary.com, sentimental means "expressive of or appealing to sentiment, especially the tender emotions and feelings, as love, pity, or nostalgia [as] a sentimental song."  But the entry goes on to give another meaning: "weakly emotional; mawkishly susceptible or tender [as] the sentimental Victorians." It's that latter meaning that critics commonly employ when they condemn a book as sentimental.  I was always taught as an English major to avoid sentimentality at all costs.

       Yet as a writer I agree with that only up to a point.  I certainly believe that excessive, unjustified emotion should be avoided.  The story that dwells on the "tragedy" of a dead kitten or emotes for pages about how much a mother loves her dying child is not my cup of tea.  And of course I think many stories don't require any sentiment -- for example, murder mysteries or crime stories, especially the kind where the fun part is solving the mystery; or straightforward adventure tales, like the Indiana Jones movies; or a lot of science fiction, particularly the space opera variety.

       But any story that focuses on character needs to bring the reader to tears at some point, because that demonstrates that the author succeeded in making the reader care about the character.  If you read straight through and close the book and say, "That's an OK story, but now I'm done at last and I can forget about it" -- or worse, if the reader abandons reading halfway through, saying, "Ho hum, I just can't get involved emotionally with these characters," then I fear the writer has failed.

     
       Can you believe that a number of people who have read my series The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head, and also its precursor, my novel The Termite Queen, have told me they have teared up or even wept at certain points of the stories?  I take that as a great compliment.  My characters are mostly giant extraterrestrial termites (called the Shshi) -- bristly, rather stinky bugs with no facial expressions beyond what their antennae can convey and strange habits like eating their primary dung in order to extract all the nutrients and also recycling their dead by eating them and thus conserving the protein.  How can you cry over such repulsive creatures?
       The fact that you can proves that I made them "human" -- I made them relatable to the human  psyche.  I read a SF book once (and frankly I can't remember the name of the book or its author now) that had an extraterrestrial race that was amphibious -- big frog-like creatures that spawned in water.  It was narrated from the point of view of the humans who had made first contact with that race, and I never could feel any relationship to them -- they remained remote and just too "alien."
       I think mine is successful partly because I tell the story from the point of view of the Shshi.  In The Termite Queen the point of view switches between the human anthropological team and the Shshi with whom first contact is being made, but the Ki'shto'ba series is narrated entirely from the Shshi perspective, allowing the reader to delve into their essence.  The reader can identify with creatures who have moral principles (or lack them, or are misguided), who care deeply about each other and the foundations of their way of life, who work together, rejoice when something good happens and grieve over loss.  They live full, realistic lives, which means not everything can always work out the way the reader might like.  That can make the reader say, "Not this character!  How could the author do that to this innocent character?" and that can bring on tears.
       I consider tears of that sort to be genuine emotion, and genuine emotion cannot be characterized as sentimentality.  Just killing off a character does not make me weep -- you've got to care about the character that was killed.  That's why we have "red shirts" -- because we need a surrogate for the main characters in whom we have a lot invested.  I can't give anybody instructions on how to make the reader care -- I'm not much of a teacher of writing skills -- but I seem to have succeeded with everybody who has read the entire Ki'shto'ba series.  Heck, I even succeeded with myself -- if I read some of the painful parts after being away from them for a while, I end up weeping over them every time!

       Why don't you give my books a try and see for yourselves if I succeeded?

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Metamorphs and Indiana Jones: My Two Main Characters in The Termite Queen

I've never published this before.
Strangely, I never did a picture
of Kaitrin Oliva.
Lots of times a textured
background doesn't come out right.

       While I was taking my afternoon nap (or rest) just now, I began to think about my protagonist Griffen Gwidian in The Termite Queen.  When I was writing this character, I absolutely fell in love with him.  Perhaps that isn't so surprising since I structured him to be fascinating to all women.  Unfortunately, the women who have read my novel haven't seemed to feel that way about him.  I made him enigmatic, mysterious, founded in a dark, twisted psychology -- everything women ought to find fascinating in a romantic hero.  So I began to think -- why haven't women been attracted to him? (Men haven't been attracted to him either, but that I expected.)

       In the story, Griffen has become skilled in altering himself to appeal to any woman he meets, and he is compelled (for reasons we learn late in the book) to do so.  So where did I get this character?  And I thought, Griffen is an empathic metamorph.  Do you remember the episode in StarTrek: The Next Generation called "The Perfect Mate"?  It's one of my favorite episodes.  A woman is being transported in stasis to be a gift to the ruler of a neighboring planet.  Kamala, wonderfully portrayed by the beautiful Famke Janssen, is an empathic metamorph -- she has the gift of making herself into whatever the man whom she is with at the moment wants her to be.  She is awakened too soon and ends up bonding with Picard, but duty forces her to give herself to this unpleasant Prince from the other planet.  (Poor Picard, he never gets the girl -- I always felt bad about that!)

       I think subconsciously I got the idea for Griffen's character from this metamorph concept.

      The love story between Griffen and Kaitrin Oliva takes up a large quantity of the book -- if you don't like the characters or the love story and all you want is termite adventures, I could see how you might find the book tedious.  One woman who read the book sort of pooh-poohed Griffen as not worth bothering with as a hero.  She said something like this (and she'll know who she is because we discussed it), "I like my adventure heroes to be like Indiana Jones -- he has his shortcomings and his fears, notably snakes, but they don't keep him from being heroic."

       Well, I never intended Griffen to be a stereotypical macho hero.  Certainly, he is not that!  I think if you go into the book expecting some cliched rendition of an adventure hero (or an adventure heroine for that matter), I can see why you might be disappointed.  In fact, the roles are reversed -- Griffen is a psychologically anguished man searching for a way to give meaning to his life and he becomes a metamorph in his quest.  It's Kaitrin Oliva who is Indiana Jones -- a strong-willed, adventurous heroine who may not particularly like going down the rabbit hole (i.e. into the termite mound), but who wouldn't consider not doing it. However, the roles become reversed again in Parts 3 and 4; Griffen does end by becoming the hero he always wanted to be, and Kaitrin becomes the anguished seeker, who has to find a new, more meaningful structure for her life.

Now I hope this elaboration on the characters will make
some of you want to go out and buy The Termite Queen
and get started on your quest to learn everything
you can about my termite people and my future world!

Remember it's a two-volume novel,
and you haven't finished it
and won't have the full impact unless you read v.2!
 

Find the book on

Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

Amazon UK

and all the other Amazon nations.

Also at Smashwords (all varieties of ebooks)
Barnes & Noble
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Termites Can Be Real Characters, Too!

        I'm going to post this on both my blogs, because I'm going to discuss not only characters from the "Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head" series but also some who are unique to "The Termite Queen." I've been wondering if, in spite of all past explanations, some of you may view a people evolved from social insects as mindless, colorless units in a mechanized society. My creations are far from that! They have real, individualized personalities, which allows them to play all the roles necessary in an epic adventure, and I would like for anyone who reads either of my blogs to understand that.

        In "The Termite Queen" the cast of Shshi is more limited, and the characters are more black-and-white -- more written to type. It's a story of good vs. evil, in fact. So we have the leader, the Holy Seer Kwi'ga'ga'tei, who personifies all that is good about the termite society, and we have her counterpart, the evil Mo'gri'ta'tu, who carries within him a touch of the Earthly Satan himself. Both are extremely intelligent in their own way, both know how to use words to offset their weak Alate bodies, and both are powerful forces. I personally think Mo'gri'ta'tu is one of the greatest villains of all time (but of course I could be prejudiced! LOL!)

        Then in that same story we have those who are manipulated by Mo'gri'ta'tu. We have the aging Commander Hi'ta'fu, who has been the fortress's mainstay for many years but who is nearing the end of its life and lives in fear of being supplanted and shunned before death comes. Hi'ta'fu is thus ripe for being lured into treason by a more subtle individual. Hi'ta'fu's Second in Command Lo'lo'pai, a Warrior who is not especially well-endowed intellectually, can't sense the forest for the trees -- Mo'gri'ta'tu is able to twist its perceptions in way that produces a true tragedy. Both Hi'ta'fu and Lo'lo'pai can be seen as heroes with tragic flaws. Is Kwi'ga'ga'tei a tragic character? Probably not, because she accepts her role as savior of ... Well, you'll have to read the books if you want to find out what her savior-role might imply.

        Finally, we have the Champion Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head -- an outsider brought in to fight -- what? In the beginning they think it is the Star-Beings, who came to the termite world, abducted and killed two members of the society, and returned in a flying egg that hatches into the most bizarre creatures the Shshi have ever seen. Later, they discover that the Champion -- that same mighty Warrior who threatens the position of the Commander Hi'ta'fu -- has really been called to fight the evil within.

        We get a good look at Ki'shto'ba in "The Termite Queen," but we don't get the full scope of its character. In the "Labors" series, Ki'shto'ba is revealed as the quintessential epic hero -- a Warrior of high moral character, who had a mysterious genesis and is the subject of prophecies. It shares the somewhat stubborn, single-pathed outlook of its Caste, but it rises above that through a native intelligence. Ki'shto'ba understands that there is a time to fight but that there is also a time not to fight -- a time to seek peace. The Shshi Way of Life is after all one of peaceful existence within the bounds that the Highest-Mother-Who-Has-No-Name set for her insectoid creation.

        Ki'shto'ba's Companions each has its own carefully drawn character. Di'fa'kro'mi the Remembrancer, the narrator of the tales, is no fool -- he's astute, analytical, and pragmatic, but he has a streak of adventurous idealism, and he's always willing to consider another's opinions. And he has a strong sense of empathy, as well as a big sense of humor.

        A'zhu'lo, Ki'shto'ba's twin, typifies all the conflicts of a younger brother. Actually, it isn't younger, because it was hatched from the same egg as Ki'shto'ba, but A'zhu'lo is much smaller and less powerful and not very inclined to fight. It idolizes its mightier brother but it's always measuring itself against Ki'sho'ba and always coming up short. Now there's a recipe for some kind of ominous development, that's for sure.

        The Worker Wei'tu, one of the two Helpers from Lo'ro'ra who accompany Ki'shto'ba and Di'fa'kro'mi on the Quest, is another pragmatist and a bit of a cynic. Just the same, it is devoted to the task at hand -- of looking after the more needy members of the troop -- and it's a very good Builder, who becomes more and more educated to that task as the Quest proceeds.

        The other Helper, Twa'sei, is infatuated with Ki'shto'ba (da'roit'um| or twist-headed, in the Shshi language). It is very small, but it is fiercely devoted to the Champion and wouldn't give place to anyone when it comes to taking care of the giant Warrior. However, Twa'sei is also resentful that, because of its small size, everybody is protective of it and nobody will give it credit for being able to do anything significant. It wants an adventure in its own right. Twa'sei will have to wait for v.2 to get its opportunity to shine.

        And then there is Za'dut, who joins the Quest after the To'wak episode. Za'dut is a Worker, but it's also the quintessential con-man (or con-termite!) It's an outcast and a canny, glib liar -- a first-rate actor. It survives by its wits -- it can talk its way into and out of scrapes better than anybody in the universe. It cares for nobody but itself -- at least at first. Whether that changes, you'll have to decide for yourself by reading the books.

        There are other characters, of course, but these that I've discussed will be with the series from the start to the finish. I would be delighted if you would introduce yourself to all of them. See the sidebar for information about how to buy any volume of my works.