Characterization

I read a lot of books. When I read fiction, I want believable characters. I can think of several ways in which an author could ruin a good story, but one of the most prominent ways is to write unrealistic characters.

I recently read Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David. It was a fairly standard fantasy-style adventure story with several well-crafted satirical passages. The main character was a unique person. He was a kind of anti-hero who did not want fame and glory, who did not want to save the princess or the world, and who really didn’t want much more than to take care of his own personal needs. Through a highly amusing series of events, he finds himself doing much more than he had planned and getting much more than he wanted. I can’t say that he always reacted the way I expected him to react because some of his actions were unorthodox, even in a fantasy realm. However, everything he did was believable because it fit with the personality and history the author had established for him, such as repeatedly attempting to just take the money and run when financial compensation or reward was offered to him.

I followed that book with a science fiction novel called Back to the Moon by Homer H. Hickam, Jr. The science in the book was reasonably sound, involving retrofitting a single large engine onto a NASA shuttle while in orbit and taking the shuttle to the moon to find a rare substance that could provide fuel for clean and safe energy production on earth. Toward the end of the book, I did start to get a little tired of the continuous miraculous escapes from certain-death situations, but overall, I enjoyed the narrative of the adventure. Or, rather, I would have enjoyed it if I didn’t have to put up with such flat characters. They had clear personalities, but their actions did not match their motivations. One main character, Jack, had lost his wife in a tragic accident, and the author repeatedly described how much Jack missed his wife terribly, couldn’t think of being with any other woman, and even scoffed at death because of how little he felt he had left to lose. Another main character, Penny, openly admitted to a strong dislike of men, and her actions toward all the other male characters she met seemed to solidify that. Then, suddenly, while on the shuttle somewhere between Earth and the Moon, Jack and Penny decided to hook up and were portrayed as lovers for the remainder of the story, even with more mentions of Jack’s deceased wife and Penny’s bad encounters with men. The relationships were forced (at best), and I frequently found myself wanting to argue with the author about what a real person would do in these fictional situations.

A story is only as good as the people in it.