Weekly Rants: February 6, 2013

Greetings Fellow Readers! Welcome to another round of random ranting. This week I have another 'Thought on Writing' and would like to share with you.

[Character Retrospective

     The beings that pretty much are the central focus of a story. They're the ones we writers ask readers to invest their time into. To root for and look forward to win, or look forward to getting a comeuppance if we deliberately made them bad people. What makes a character good or bad is always up to the reader. As a writer I can only make the characters as best as possible, and as logical as possible, especially within Speculative Fiction. It's not easy making a character due to the fact that these characters will come with complexities that is hard for the reader to understand. After all the reader is not living the characters life. Unless that character is human, writers will tend to project human qualities onto the non-human character in order to help the reader grasp the situation. For instance, a reader does not understand how a robot lives unless we project human qualities into it which then the reader can try to understand where it comes from. Which is what makes Issac Asimov's Robot Series amazing.
      Characters come in all sorts of manifestations, from humans, to aliens, to toasters, to animals, it's pretty limitless. Characters can genuinely captivate our imagination as we watch them live a life at time may not be able to. Like what is the world of Thomas the Tank Engine like when talking trains co-exist with humans. In Osmosis Jones we get to see life of a white blood cell. Or even the Matrix where we learn how programs themselves, not so much the machines, think of us humans. It really creates interesting perspective of the human condition that we might see from our own human characters.
      As for human characters, well I've been trying to figure out how to discuss this part. As of now I have written and erased this particular paragraphed 5 times because I don't what to say. There is so much that can be discussed because history of fiction is riffed with awesome characters that we love, and characters that dehumanized people. So the best I can say is this, I write my characters with the intent and purpose of just being who they are as human beings and nothing else, be they good little angels or full on racists.
       I am not a female, but I like using female protagonists because I find them interesting. I like the idea of placing females in situations where they can come out looking awesome in their actions and are fun to read about. I write about other nationalities and their cultures, particularly Japan, because they are awesome people and their culture is just as awesome as America's. But there is also one other reason why I like to use them in my stories, if the world is invaded by aliens, or facing an exploding sun, or even a hurricane, are we really going to concern ourselves whether Jane Smith is female AND black? No. No we're not. We will only concern ourselves with surviving and helping others to survive the ordeal as well. That is being human.
      Now you see why I had a hard time writting this paragraph 5 times over.]

So that's all I have on my mind this week. You all have yourselves a good weekend and look forward to seeing you all on Twitter this Friday. Remember that 'Shell' will be free this Friday if you haven't picked up a copy yet.

Until Next Time...
See ya.