A Fantastic Little Corner

The following entry contains several questions phrased as strangely as the title: you have been warned!

Most of my attention lately has been devoted to icons and Halloween decorations, but writing-wise, I’ve been working on original fiction. As I’ve pondered plots and hesitantly outlined, I’ve wondered whether my characters are likeable enough. More specifically, I’ve wondered how much I like my characters as opposed to the characters of books, movies, and tv shows. – A fine enough thing to wonder, but of course, it made me a little curious, too. So, I have a few questions for you, buddies o’ mine.

Particularly if you write original fiction, how much do you love your original characters? Compared to your favorite characters -those of other authors- would you say you hold at least an equal place in your heart for your own fictional personas? Taking the concept further, if you weren't yourself and you read your work, do you think you would be a part of the fandom for it?

The ultimate question is this: whether you write or not, do you think the truthful ability to answer yes to all of these above questions is important for a writer to be successful with their original work? To be more concise, if one cannot answer yes to them all, does it underscore a writer's lacking enthusiasm and passion for their story?

I ask because honestly, I don't think I can answer yes to all of those questions for any one of my original works, and I wonder what that really means, if anything at all. Maybe it only means they’re not finished products yet.

( Still, if your affinity for a character is limited, how can you expect to portray him/her in such a light as to inspire or touch your readership? )

Maybe I’m over thinking this, but it just worries me. To me, characters are what stories are about; I know some people prefer plots over characters, and I can see the value in that, but I prefer awesome people above all. I want my stories to be about how people deal with my plots rather than the inverse. So when I stop to think of how much I love Sirius Black or Daniel Jackson or JARVIS or Minion by comparison, I fear I may be building upon a buckling foundation before I even lift my pen. Each of them are side characters who aren’t favorites of mine, but I love them nonetheless. Granted, I’m leaving out plot and setting in these musings, but for those are for a different post someday. Characters are extremely important, and they are not so easy to adjust.

What do y’all think? Am I right to be concerned?

(POVs said Points of View </grammar nazi mode>)

I'd really appreciate some opinions on this because I keep running into it.

You have your main characters, and from them is where the POV is set. It changes in segments and chapters. But how acceptable is it to do POVs from minor characters when they're not going to have a POV very often, if more than once or twice?

Eric Nylund did the random minor character povs in The Fall of Reach and First Strike, and for characters like the random Grunt he followed for a segment... until his death... it was funny. There were also the random officers back on Earth he followed, and though they relayed important bits of information, I wasn't so thrilled with the POV. I also felt a bit of randomness in it; it was sort of unorganized and unanticipated. The Grunt segment didn't even end when the Grunt died; the POV floated around and landed back with the main characters who were creating the carnage.

But then Halo is a highly visual story, and by that, I mean that it's based off a video game; it is a video game, so the action sequences within the books are written like the CG movies in the game. Shifting POVs within a segment is dangerous, yes? You would have to have some sort of plot-related reason for doing it. Which the death of your character would probably work... And written the way Nylund did it, seeing as how the POV almost immediately swung back to the main characters, it was sort of like he knew he was... Well, I hate to say breaking the rules in anything related to writing, but you know what I mean.

I run into this all the time. Writing Tactical Espionage, there are quite a few temptations. In my still untitled action/adventure R/T story that I didn't make the deadline for, I was tempted to switch the view to Kingsley for a moment when he gets stunned, but he's not a main chara, and that story is only a one-shot. Currently, I'm working on a scene in Chapter 6 between Dr. Shino (aka An ^^) and Phantom. I want to do it from Phantom's POV, but he's not a main character; Dr. Shino is.

So what do y'all think? The minor characters in my stories are at least never completely random; they do have major minor roles that they fulfill. And I hate it that I have these scenes in my mind that follow them; I've always just adjusted them to follow a main character instead even though it usually completely changes the scene and eliminates something important that I wanted to reveal.