Category: Characters

Sometimes, in our zeal not to inflict too many characters on our readers, we forget that characters-as-scenery still have a role to play.

The image above is one of my real-life non-player characters, as rendered by a simple MidJourney AI image prompt [MidJourney has some challenges rendering animals….]. He's a shrew, and his name is Samson.

Let me explain…

We currently live in an 1812 stone and log cabin at the the top of a hollow embedded in the rise of the Allegheny plateau, part of a large bit of land we bought for hunting & vacation back in the '80s. (More details here and here and elsewhere.) The original settler's cabin had a single main room downstairs built into the hillside with a fireplace for living/cooking, and three rooms above for sleeping. A small plumbing/furnace extension in the 20th c. added a cellar/pantry below and another bedroom above.

Old buildings like this are, shall we say, semi-permeable to the local wildlife. Squirrels roll walnuts between the walls, snakes take advantage of knotholes in the logs, and mice dare our traps to spend the winter. Mostly they don't make their presence obvious, and we indulge in a fair amount of live and let live (undermined by occasionally disapproving cats who take matters into their own paws).

Now, a shrew has got about the fastest metabolism of any mammal. You never see one standing still, just blurring by at high speed, and since they're the size of a mouse or smaller, if you blink you'll miss them. We're sure of our identification, because the first one ran through the main room from the fireplace corner to the dogs' water dish in the adjacent cellar. We once carelessly left the water level too low for her to get out, and she drowned (providing the evidence). We lamented the unintended death (and named her Ophelia), but soon she was replaced by a successor who is providing us with a great deal of amusement.

You see, this one has taken up some form of construction. He zooms from the floorboard hole to the back of our cheap modern electric stove and proceeds to make an astonishing amount of noise involving metal and scrabbling (and jackhammers and god knows what) — this, despite the oven still being in use periodically, to no apparent effect.

And now comes the point of this post… We want to know what this shrew is doing. We've invented a rationale (he's building bookcases under the oven to hold his comic collection – hence the image above) and we've given him a name (Samson) in recognition of his prodigious activities.

We had to do that — this is a critter with agency whom we encounter on a regular basis. We had to create a story for him. It's what people do. It's beside the point whether the story is true or not.

Well, your fictional POV characters would do the same with the people and other critters in their environment, wouldn't they? That's what struck me; unlike some of my fantasy worlds with limited numbers of onstage people, my current WIP is set in a faux-regency urban environment, and that means that my characters would naturally see all sorts of people all the time — the beggar on a corner, the tailor's assistant sweeping his master's steps every morning, the gentleman who tips his hat to you because you have come to recognize each other on your daily walks, the mangy cat who shows up looking for a handout. None of these are named characters, and none will provide a POV, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be there, and that your real POV characters don't notice and speculate about them casually, the way we all do. Add them to your fictional world's environment and make it seem more like real life (and less of a vacuum).

Long-form storytelling is such a big project sometimes that it's helpful to be reminded of some of the mechanics underlying even the most basic of story forms. Comic strips are some of the simplest — consider the physical size limitations, just a few frames, or even only one.

In these short forms the basics really stand out.

The image above encapsulates an entire history of the interaction of two famous characters (permanent war, which the scheming coyote with his technical gadgets always loses to the roadrunner's effortless and almost magical evasions and reversals). Because of that long history, we can read the above image as the ending of a story with a reversal of the usual outcome.

One image, and a long history of character roles/knowledge on the part of the viewer, and we know most of the story already.

Think of all the prior knowledge we had to bring to that image — we did most of the work ourselves. We had to already know they were antagonists, that the coyote almost always lost, that the coyote's means were usually elaborate mechanical devices.

Bertie Wooster and his keeper (um, valet) Jeeves are the best known players in this sunny world of nothing-ever-goes-permanently-wrong. Bertie and his fellow drones while away their time concocting preposterous schemes and shrinking from their occasional responsibilities.

But Wodehouse is just one of a great many witty authors utilizing this trope of companions in feckless idiocy. One of my other favorites is Georgette Heyer (1902-1974). It doesn't matter whether or not you like the romance genre — Jane Austen's “Comedies of Manners” launched a century-later fashion in Regency romance and Heyer is by a very great margin far the best author of these. The characters and the plots are light and amiable, the period research is impeccable, and her language is a delight. Instead of the Drones Club, we have a class of rich, young men referred to as Corinthians, among other things.

Let's see if I can make sense of something I've recently observed.

If you don't know the rules of the game of Parcheesi, don't worry about it. There are variants, but I'll just stick with one version. Here's the part that matters to this discussion:

• You have up to 4 moveable pieces that have to go from a starting point all the way around the board and into the center. If they are “killed” (an enemy piece lands on their space), they are knocked back to the beginning.
• You have up to 3 opponents trying to do the same thing first from their starting point.
• You can send someone else's piece back to the beginning by moving to its space, unless the space is protected.
• Some spaces are protected and pieces on them can't be knocked back to the beginning.
• A space can hold no more than two pieces. Any space with two pieces is a barrier and can't be passed.
• You roll a die (in some versions two dice, but we'll stick with one for this example) to determine how many spaces you can move one of your pieces. You can't refuse to move. If it is not possible to move that many spaces, you lose your turn.

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Whew! So, here's the stuff that guides your thinking every time you take a turn…

• When you roll the die, you have a 1/6 chance of any particular value.
• You have to pick which of your pieces to move (and not all may be moveable that many spaces).
• You have to pay attention to where the other players' pieces are, in case they roll a value that could eliminate one of yours.
• You have to be conscious of which players are closer to a final win in case you can preferentially knock one of their pieces back or block them.
• You have to consider which of your own pieces are closer to the end (and have come the longest distance), making it more expensive to lose them.

Now, like all games that include chance as an element (unlike, say, chess), the emotions of gambling manifest. Before you roll the die, there's an ideal outcome, and before your opponent rolls, there's a worst possibility. So, at every die roll you find yourself cheering for one outcome and dreading others.