Understanding my characters

Excellent! And your improved state of well-being - the self confidence etc - will certainly help as well.

Right now I'm almost too far in the other direction. I can visualize them plain as day, and it saddens me that I can't actually have them with me in the flesh sometimes...

Am I just coming to terms with finally having a handle on how fiction works? Incredibly lonely? Both?

edited 4th Jun '15 10:27:20 PM by Twentington

Since this thread was last posted in, I find that I'm feeling more depressed again.

I have the characters quite well developed by now, I think. The thing is, I still don't know for the most part what I want them to do.

Some of the points I have:

1. Characters 1 and 2 are roommates/coworkers, and both 2 (who is lesbian female) and 3 (straight male) are in love with 1 (who is bi female).
2. Character 4 is the boss at the store that 1 and 2 work at.
3. Eventually, characters 1, 2, 3, and 4 end up forming a band which also involves characters 5 and 6, the latter of whom is 1's brother.
4. ???
5. 1 and 2 are still alive 200+ years later, in the futuristic utopian time in which characters 7 and 8 (the husband and wife mentioned upthread) exist.
6. ???
7. PROFIT!

A friend tried doing an exercise on "how would certain jobs be handled 200+ years later?" exercise with me, asking how, say, a miner, a firefighter, a police officer, an EMT, or whatever would use cybernetics to make their job drastically easier 200 years later. And I was pretty much silent because I don't know how any of those jobs work now, and even those that I could get anything out of, I was. Hell, how would even a simple dollar store change in just 10 years, since characters 1-6's story arc begins around 2025?

That's precisely the reason I don't write things set more than a few years in the future - it's pretty much impossible to comprehend - given the changes in the last 200 years - what life would look like in 200 years. Or even 100 years.

Is it vitally important to you/the story that your characters are still alive 200 years in the future?

It's vitally important to me because these two are the most prominent characters.

I think what part of the problem is, is that I'm treating it as if I have a story. When in reality, I have a framework within which I can tell lots of stories. They don't have to be world changing — just little bits of these characters' lives. How did the band get started? What did 1 and 2 have to go through to still be alive after all this time?

The characters themselves being important doesn't actually justify why they must live for 200 years. With that logic, you could apply anything to a character that isn't contiguous with the rest of them and adds nothing of value to their story, like making the protagonists of a summer action film part-time circus clowns, and justify it by saying it's because the characters are important. Actions and events do not automatically become important to a story by way of association with characters that some outside force has decided are important. The story as a whole- the way characters interact with the element, the way the element alters the plot, the place the element has in the setting -must work to justify the element's existence.

What about the story would change if you just cut out the '1 and 2 are still alive 200+ years later' part and replaced it with a more reasonable amount of time?

In addition... why don't you try writing these characters for a bit? You say that you essentially have a setup that lends itself well to a bunch of small, loosely connected stories rather than a big epic. Why don't you try writing about one of those points you gave in the form of a single story, and seeing where it takes you? I'm speaking from personal experience- there is no better way to get to know your characters than just writing about them and thinking about how they'd respond to stuff. It may also help to break this big, interconnected story about those particular characters into shorter stories. Write about their band and get their personalities hammered out, and leave the living for 200 years thing for a different story. If you know your characters inside and out, that will make it easier to come up with ways they might end up living for 200 years.

Another thing that I also recommend, if you don't have the time, patience, or self-restraint to read a proper novel, is to lurk critique forums. Read what people submit for critique, and what others say about them. Compare their ideas for the story and the things they pointed out with what you saw.

edited 25th Sep '16 12:48:12 PM by CrystalGlacia

Is this a story that you're doing in serial form or is it going to be one work that stands complete and spans over 200 years?

In either case, you could try answering the immediate questions of what happens in the not-too-distant settings and that may help you come up with answers for the questions of what happens in the later years as the setting and characters progress.

As to how jobs will be in the future, I'm willing to bet that there will be very few jobs done by humans rather than by some form of automation.

As things are going, a lot of the basic jobs are being replaced by cheaper machine-based options - supermarket check-out operators being replaced by self-service check-outs, MacDonalds is making more use of kiosks to replace the staff that take your orders - and this sort of thing is only going to be more common-place as technology advances and companies get rid of expensive humans in favour of automation to remain competitive in their respective markets.

The low-end jobs are going fast and will go even faster as technology improves and becomes cheaper and more cost-effective, then the higher-end jobs will go.

Already, internet shopping is diminishing the amount of "bricks and mortar" shops required to meet demand, which decreases the need for employees. Police already use robots to handle dangerous situations, so it's not hard to imagine that human police will be mostly replaced by more advanced robots within the next hundred years.

The only humans working will be those who can do things that can't be automated - creative things most likely. However, who's to say that in 200 years, they won't have developed some form of AI that is capable of creating musical/artistic compositions - I personally can't guess the answer to that, which is why I stick to eras that I can make educated guesses about.

But don't feel bad that you can't imagine what employment would look like in 200 years - it's impossible to predict what innovations will be made in that time. Back in 1816, they couldn't have guessed about internet commerce, computer programming, electronic music, YouTube etc