Character Conversations: Kiefan

On the heels of Tuesday's post about Myers-Briggs personality types and researching how those personality types behave in the real world: a brief character interview with one of my major characters. Kiefan is the only prince of Wodenberg, a small kingdom facing invasion by a vast empire. I'm speaking to him later in the story, during Part IV since that's the part I am currently revising. Kiefan tests as an ESTJ, though he's only a mild extrovert.

It's been a while since I've posted a character conversation -- you can find more of them here. Particularly Kiefan's previous conversation. My side of the conversation is in italics.

Character portrait coming soon!
I've seen the artist's preliminary
sketches and they look great. 
Keep an eye on the book blog for
Disciple art reveals.

One of the interesting things I learned in researching ESTJs is that you're staunch supporters of the rules of the game -- until you decide the rules are wrong. 

And then they must be mended. Which I mean to do.

And if you see a weakness in those who oppose you... 

All the better.

Your mother taught you that, in using you against your father? 

The war that Mother and Father waged against each other -- left its marks on me, true. In particular, the day I realized it was a war, and I might be a soldier caught in it or I might take control of my part.

There's a bit of difference between manipulating your parents' personal vendettas and defying the (powerful, god-like) saints you're bound to...

Powerful as the saints are, they are still men. Each has strengths, weaknesses, limitations.

You're not exactly in a position to demand an exemption from your saint's rules in exchange for your talents.

I'm no helpless child. Clever of my saint to treat me as an apprentice this long, to keep my attention on what I still needed to learn. Father did the same thing, and I believed it until I realized he no longer sparred with me because I could put him on his ass.

Your saint expects obedience. 

My saint expects victory. And knows full well that if he were negotiating in my place, we'd soon be friendless and facing the empire's armies alone. Even he doesn't doubt we need these allies, after the disasters of the siege. So long as I seal this alliance, he has little space for complaint at how.

I have some reservations about the assumptions Kiefan's making about his saint -- and the other implicit assumptions that he's making. But this should make for some good drama.

Disciple, Part I: For Want of a Piglet will be published in November, 2012. Watch the book blog for information, flash fic, cover reveals, maps, and other goodies... 

Public Service Announcement

Now that we're into the query feedback portion of School's In (over at Unicorn Bell), I dutifully went to post feedback on the submitted queries... and Blogger ate my post.

I grumbled, retyped it, made sure to specify I was using my Google profile, hit the button and... it ate it again.

A few dozen more tries on different entries, using my WordPress ID, and then trying to comment on my own blog... nothing. Blogger won't post any of my comments.

The help FAQ was no help, so I Googled the problem and eventually found this blog post. I switched my blog's settings, under "Comment Location," to "Pop-up window" -- and lo! I can comment on my own blog again!

Here's a screen grab of changing that setting (click to embiggen):

All bloggers wish they got more comments -- how many have you missed out on because someone wrote a comment, clicked, and it disappeared? 

It just happened to me over on another blog. I didn't go through the trouble of finding the blogger's email to tell them there's a problem. Commenting is a knee-jerk thing, usually, so who's going to take the time to do that?

Go fix it!

Characters as Myers-Briggs types

So, I've put my characters in a complicated, emotionally challenging situation. I know exactly what I would do, if all of this happened to me. I'd find a cave and hide in it. Probably write a book while I'm in there.

Fortunately, my characters are not me and their responses are far more interesting than that. 

It's always a challenge to
bring characters into focus.
Photo by Holger Dieterich,
available at sxc.hu

I try to treat my characters as independent entities, even though they're inside my head and all contain elements of my personality. (I am legion, for I contain multitudes.) I try to predict how they will react in a situation, rather than tell them how they'll react. People are hard to understand, though, so naturally I go looking for real-people reactions to situations and use them to improve my predicting ability.

The Myers-Briggs personality types came up in two earlier blogs I wrote (first one, second one) and lately I've been using them some more to gauge my characters' responses.

Briefly, the sixteen Myers-Briggs personality types group people by their internal workings -- the interplay of intuition, thinking, feeling and sensing, and how they interact with the outside world -- and describe them in four letters. It's not a perfect system. Nothing is. But it can be useful.

You can find free MBTI quizzes online, and you can find descriptions of each of the types in Wikipedia and elsewhere. Figuring out which type fits your character best is a challenging process in itself, and it's a good excuse to sit down and get to know him/her better.

Some descriptions geared toward workplace abilities, some toward romantic compatibilities. They all tend to use neutral language, though. They focus more on the positives than the negatives. And they're very much generalizations.

So I've been hanging out at the Personality Cafe, (they have free MB quizzes & descriptions there) where each MBTI has its own forum and chat about both MBTI issues and real-world situations. In reading through threads of particular types giving each other advice -- and trying to explain themselves to other types -- I picked up a lot of useful insight into what's important to my characters. Then I tried to translate those things into the context of the world they live in.

Because they're not like me. Which is good.

Bonus: A while back, The Character Therapist polled writers about their MB types and posted the intriguing results here.

Three annoying things in my WIP

What is it about lists? People love blog posts of lists. I am writing this at the last minute, to be honest, since I've been distracted this week by starting big revisions on Part IV and squeeing over artwork for Part I. Unlike the big revisions I did for Part III, blogging about these revisions will take some careful consideration. I'll get to them eventually.

In the meantime, three things about Disciple that are annoying me right now:
 
1. The Caer voice is infectious
Did build a fantasy world of many tongues, despite that I've little skill for such myself. 'Twas a question on how to display them, early on. In time, did settle on that each group of foreigners has their voice, their accent, and do use it whichever tongue 'tis they're speaking. Thus, need not do more than mention a shift in language and leave off anything my narrator can't ken.

Well enough, save the Caer voice... 'tis infections. Sticky in my mind.

'Tis especially troublesome in Part V, as I've broken from my first-person narrator and did bring in a Caer for POV. Full half the tale did go to her and 'tis well settled in my mind, now, that 'tis a proper way to speak. Needs must shake it ere it creeps into Part IV's revisions -- did fight it all last night, in writing Alice's dialogue.

Treacherous thing. Do catch myself thinking in Caer, while musing on revisions...

2. The other voice I developed keeps falling out of the story
At the other end, I needed a separate voice for my other major group of foreigners. Whereas the Caer voice came easy, the Arceal one put up a fight. I've had to go back and revise it a couple times now. Part of the problem is that it keeps dropping out of the story. I tried to introduce it in Part III, but the scene has gotten butchered down to less and less dialogue. There was going to be a fair chunk in Part IV, but now I'm going to cut most of that, too. We won't be hearing from them until well into Part VI, at this rate.

3. Keeping it close to the bone
I recently read Name of the Wind. I enjoyed it, and I was intrigued by how Rothfuss used the jumps back to the "present-day" to remind me that he's promised me an awesome story. Because I could tell pretty quickly that this book was going to only be set-up for later volumes. There wasn't going to be any significant progress toward the character's main goal.

95% of that fat book was noodling around. Fun and well written noodling.

I doubt anyone's going to accuse me of noodling around or wandering away from the main goal in Disciple. I could probably get away with some. While I was writing the first chunk of Part V, I was starting to feel just how close to the bone I was writing -- there was nothing extra in that chunk, no secondary storylines to pad it out a all. I kept thinking we could talk about Gregor's crush a bit more, but my gut kept shooting it down.

It kept saying that the whole chunk was a noodle, I shouldn't have broken away from my narrator -- but the reader needs to know what happened in this part.

Lean and mean, my stories. Perhaps skeletal, though. How much meandering do you like in a story?