by Tram Hillyard

Regardless of how sensational the events in a story are, there has to interesting characters involved in those events - characters are what keep a reader glued to the page. One way to make interesting characters is to make them more realistic, to create a sense that these could be people the reader might know and can relate to.

A very quick way to make your characters ‘real’ is to give them flaws. Great big flaws, flaws that are dangerous, flaws that are a drag to everyone in the story. Characters who have flaws are realistic because real people have flaws in their personalities. Everyone you know, every stranger you see when you walk down the street, everyone, has a great big tragic flaw. They don’t want you to see it, they will do their best to hide it, and most of the time the only people who will know are their closest loved ones – even then it may never be defined or discussed. But the flaws are there. Likewise, fictional characters that appeal all have some kind of tragic flaw, and how they deal with that flaw and how they hide or reveal it to other characters makes for dramatic situations and dialog.

You can also use character flaws to emphasize the differences between a hero and a villain. The difference in fiction between a good guy and a bad guy is that the bad guys flaws are predatory, they are those traits in the villain that are out to get people. The good guy’s flaws may hurt people, but only by accident. A hero or a villain may be proud, hasty, arrogant, afraid, or even brutal, but they will manifest themselves differently in the story. This is a good way to build to a conclusion of a story, as the flaws of both the protagonist and the villain become apparent first to the reader and then to the characters themselves.

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September 13, 2010 4:40 pm

by Mary Borjes

Everyone’s watched Star Trek – and seen the myriad races of ST aliens, all just like us except for the weird make-up on their foreheads. The point of the show is that, really, they’re just like us – not aliens at all. Nowadays, that’s not really enough for the hardcore SF enthusiast, a little more ‘realism’ is in order. That requires some fancy footwork, dodging a lot of the common errors that writers make when designing aliens and their cultures.

This isn’t exactly unexplored territory we’re trampling on. Creating those alien societies is one of the hot topics of writing science fiction, just as important as ‘world building’ is in fantasy. But while one can pretty safely assume there is some worldly basis for the creation of a milieu in the fantasy genre, a mythological or historical thread that a reader can grasp, it’s not a good idea to make those assumptions in science fiction. In fact, it’s not a good idea to make assumptions at all, as broad a field as science fiction is now.

We can’t make assumptions when creating aliens and alien societies, mainly because we aren’t aliens. It’s difficult to even ask the right questions you need to ask to create those aliens, much less answer them with ready made solutions. Faced with so many possibilities in a huge universe, one pitfall we can fall into is to self-limit our options too much. One approach to making convincing aliens, which admittedly can be pretty effective, is to create aliens based on an arbitrary determination of their environment. What is the technique the species uses to prosper on their world? What is their means of adaptation? Rabbits have big legs, humans have brains and thumbs, cows have big molars, etc., and aliens have… what? Do aliens share the process of categorization and abstraction that we call intelligence? Starting from the top down, we can make a world, and proceed to make species and go on to cultural adaptations.

The problem is that this portrays evolution as a simple cause and effect process. We can’t ignore the sometimes spontaneous nature of mutation, and the fact that not all mutation serves a purpose. It’s important to also bear in mind that many mutations, both physical and cultural, have a negative effect.

Another big assumption people make when creating run of the mill sfnal aliens is that they will somehow be like us – like the star trek aliens – that there would even be a frame of reference, a commonality that could be reached between human and alien. This isn’t necessarily the case. As humans we like to look out at the universe, filter it through the particular senses we’ve evolved and the abstract preconceptions that go along with them, and assume that a ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ like ours is universal. It’s part of how we navigate the universe. But we’re writing science fiction here, asking the harder questions. Why would the universe or the beings in it be anything like us at all?

Should we, as writers, assume that the ‘part’ (humans) reflects the nature of the ‘whole’ (the universe)? Can we discern the beautiful and complex nature of man and his civilization from a nucleotide? Somewhat, but not really. And that’s where we are – trying to make a guess as to the nature of things based on our own limited information, and projecting our own wants, needs and characteristics onto the universe at large. But that projection does nothing to get closer to potential realities, which is what speculative fiction of every kind accomplishes when it’s working right. If we just project our own physiology and philosophy onto our fictional aliens, we get boring, comfortable aliens, not aliens at all, not beings that we can truly learn from.There is no need to settle for that, when there is really almost infinite possibility.

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February 24, 2010 4:34 pm