Character Bios

Last week, I found there was one other thing that I needed to do to complete the story, and that was really figuring out all of the characters. There were some that I had pretty clear views of, especially the main five. However there were some that were more placeholders, which did not feel right, and there were some that had started out as placeholders but were changing. Also, if I was going to be adding in more description on the rewrite, I had to know how much I knew about them.

I ended up starting a separate Word document, and just writing every name down, then going back and filling out details about them. I ended up with 61 names or titles. I never named the “Announcer”, but the “Bouncer” ended up being Doug. That was helpful, because they are in the same scene and the rhyming seemed silly.

Also, even though I found that I understood Jenny’s father really well, and I got him a name and a description, his one scene ended up cut. Also, there is a bio for Christian, and he doesn’t even appear in a flashback—he is just mentioned in a conversation. However, at this time I was starting to realize that drawing it was inevitable, and the panels of a conversation do not merely need to show the characters talking, and they often won’t, so maybe he would still appear at some point even with no lines.

So, it might be just 59 characters, depending on how you count, and then there are people who must be there, but aren’t really characters. I feel worst for the helicopter pilot, because clearly someone other than Tony is flying, but you never see him or hear about him and one would assume he dies too, though it isn’t really addressed. Some roles are more thankless than others.

I did use actors when I could to try and draw a better picture, though I’m not sure it helped. For example, Natalia is kind of a cross between Eva Mendes and Rosario Dawson, Don is similar to Daniel Sunjata and Frank Olive, and Derrick is a cross between Billy Zabka (Karate Kid) and Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter). Shoot, I could have just written blond bullying weasel, I guess. Not everyone looked like actors though, and with Dante I mentioned Gary Busey, but it’s not really that they look alike physically—you just get kind of the same sense about them.

Anyway, there were two things that went differently than expected with writing the bios, which is probably why I feel a need to write this piece at all.

One is that my intention was to be clear on age and physical appearance, and then I kept on writing more about their personality and how they ended up where they are. This has been an issue for all of my writing really. It’s not that I don’t have an idea of how things look, or even that I don’t think it’s important, but I do consistently get distracted by the non-visual. So, I would write a really good bio, and realize I did not have age or appearance down yet, and had therefore not met my purpose, even on ones where I had the clear mental picture and it should have been easy. I’m not fighting it too much right now, but it is something for me to keep in mind.

It was not terribly surprising that some characters became so real, though it did become a little complicated when I realized that the three injured that arrive via helicopter needed to totally change around who had what injuries and who did what later. I think I got all of those corrected appropriately.

The other surprise happened when I was writing Angela Simpson’s bio. I have stated before that I am not Jane, and her mother is not my mother, but when I got to Angela, she ended up being a big worrier. Have you met my mother?

It was interesting because Neal Skorpen (http://www.nealskorpen.com/) had posted something recently about how every time he writes parents they end up being his, and I remember thinking, no, not me, and that was good because I was killing off a lot of parents in this, and so it would feel more awkward if they were definitely mine. Had I just killed my mother?

The thing that helped was the other character bios. The other mothers are all worriers too, and that very much came out while I was writing about them. Even when it didn’t come out in writing about Mrs. White, I look at some of the conversations she has, and yeah, she worries. So, had I killed my mother multiple times, or do I just have a stereotype about mothers?

I still wondered if that was because my own mother imprinted so strongly on me that it led to the assumption—hey, that’s just what they do—but I was thinking about my friends who are mothers, and yeah, it’s not just Mom, they all do that. It’s not a generational thing, or an ethnic thing. Maybe some worry more than others, and certainly different ones focus on different things, but yes, it appears to be a constant. So I still killed several mothers, but none of them were mine. Guilt crisis averted!

Seriously, though, I suppose a devil-may-care mother should be added to the list of characters I have never really written, like a blonde heroine or a dumb protagonist. I could put them all together, but does it negate the impact of the lack of worry if the reason seems to be that she is too dumb to know she should? And even without a strong initial tendency to worry, wouldn’t that be overthrown when you were in a situation where you were constantly threatened by zombies?

It just raises questions.