Buffy Lessons

I'm devoting my next few posts to the creation and maintenance of exceptional characters. One of the best compliments I've received about my writing came from my amazing crit partner, Lisa Dez, who wrote in response to a draft of NIGHTSHADE, "You're clearly a character writer." And I was thrilled. (Thanks Lisa!)

The characters who populate my written worlds are almost closer than friends. As I write, I feel what they feel, fear what they fear, understand their motivations, and cringe when they make poor choices.

In Twitter's #kidlitchat last night, the topic was "What makes a strong character?" Some chatters took that literally - talking about physical strength over feebleness and fragility, but I considered the prompt a call for characters that are built by the author in such a way that they grab onto the reader and don't let go.

I'll be spending a day on the following character types: MCs, Supporting, and Villains (bwaaah-haa-haa).

But to start us off, I'd like to give a nod to my favorite, Jedi-Master character builder: Joss Whedon. Joss gives us the best kind of characters - sharp, engaging, and multi-faceted. Scott Westerfeld wrote a great essay on Whedon's strength in world building, and I've seen many posts about how amazing Joss is at dialogue. His characters deserve equal attention.

This post was inspired by my shock and horror at a Tweet I saw claiming that Buffy has no brains. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.I don't need everyone on this planet to be a Buffy fan. I'm a believer in personal taste, and Buffy is not for everyone. I don't care for the Beatles (no, really, I don't), but I can appreciate why others do and I understand what their contribution to the music world was. I respect that contribution and their art - I still don't like listening to them.

So if you don't wake up each morning and watch Buffy over breakfast like me, that is A-Okay. But if you insult Buffy broadly and disparage her as a character while demonstrating you know nothing about the show other than a one-glance write off...then I iz angries!!

It's exactly that Buffy does have brains, but that at first glance you wouldn't know it, which demonstrates why Joss is a master character writer. All the outward modes of Buffy (including her name) point to bubble-gum snapping, shoe obsessing, vacuous girlhood. But scratch beneath that surface and you find a complex, always evolving young woman who constantly balances a desire to belong with the isolation of being the Chosen One.
And in answer to the claim that Buffy has no brains, let me just say:

1)Her teachers always note her intellectual aptitude, but other things get in the way. (It's not her fault nice science teacher got eaten by a giant praying mantis and that her favorite college prof turned out to be a crazed bio-demon engineer whose creation made Frankenstein look like My Little Pony.)
2)She kicks ass on the SAT and is admitted to Northwestern (duty alone pushes her to attend the local branch of UC-Sunnydale).
And 3) She changes over time (and is still evolving as a character in the Season 8 comics) - and isn't the ability to grow as an individual the clearest sign of an open mind and intelligence?
But if you don't want to believe me, well "that's your purgative." (Ahem, that's a quote from Buffy's kid sister, Dawn (Season 6, 'Tabula Rasa.' And in case you were wondering - Buffy corrects her language.)

Does This Happen to You?

Still sequestered with H1N1. This is a miserable virus, may none of you be struck down by its evil symptoms.

One thing I've noticed about myself is that in addition to physical symptoms, when I'm sick I become an emotional weakling. Self-esteem plummets, doubts arise, and I tear up at everything.

Case in point, throughout my quarantine I've been comforting myself by watching Buffy. Ah, Buffy how you sustain in times of trial. I don't know if it's being sick, or simply sentimental but watching Buffy triumph over evil and her own personal demons has had me wiping tears away on several occasions. I was going to post a sappy moment to share, but then I found this and its awesomeness knocked my socks off (only tears of laughter here):



Angsty Edward vs. classic Buffy sass, it doesn't get better. But hilarious vid remix notwithstanding, Buffy has been bringing me to total sap tears. Now I love Buffy and have been devoted to Joss Whedon's oeuvre for many years, but even I recognize that such tearful episodes indicate that I'm not exactly myself.

Does this happen to you when illness strikes? Other weird non-physical results of a weakened immune system?

Friday Round-Up

I'm doing a great job of procrastinating today. I need to reread the Twilight series to prep for the article I'm contributing to a forthcoming Blackwell anthology on the role of history in Twilight. My particular article focuses on Jasper, and I think it will be an interesting experiment to read a novel with an eye to a supporting rather than the main character.

Supporting characters often make or break a book for me. My own supporting characters are just as vital, if not more, than the MCs. I get frustrated by stories where friends or family appear only as back story or plot movers. I like severe entanglements, startling twists, and key events tied into the lives, hopes, and fears of supporting characters.

My investment in a novel, and particularly in a series, rests in how much I care about what happens to the other characters in the book and not just the protagonist.

Case in point: Harry Potter. My favorite characters in the Harry Potter series are probably Fred and George Weasley, with Hagrid coming in at a close second.



Supporting characters with that much dynamism fill out a world and draw the reader in.

Do you have favorite supporting characters? How do you treat supporting characters in your own writing?

On a final note, Joss Whedon finally made the comment I've been waiting for.

Happy weekend!

So They Say It's Your Earth Day

Anyone who knows me is aware that I'm a Joss Whedon fan (freak, fiend, fetishizer...well, not quite). My morning ritual involves drinking coffee and catching up on Dollhouse via Hulu. But I caught up and then they ran a silly two-hour Prison Break episode and there was no Dollhouse for me to watch!

To soothe my irritation I decided to watch Firefly again, a brilliant show that led to the film Serenity but sadly Fox cancelled after only one season.

The introduction to Firefly begins with this voice over:

"After the Earth was used up we sought out new planets."

Throughout the series there are sporadic references to "Earth that was."

On Earth Day 2009 I was chilled to the bone by the phrase "after the Earth was used up." The words hit home because I'm working on a YA dystopia that involves ecological catastrophe. To research this novel I turned to two thought-provoking works about the possibilites and problems of human interaction with our home planet. Alan Weisman's World Without Us and Edward O. Wilson's The Future of Life both provocative and enlightening books that I'd highly recommend.

One of the most influential short stories I read as a child involved a couple going to sleep the last day the Earth would survive before being burned up by the sun. They were among the few humans who'd opted to remain on Earth (and knowingly die) rather than board the colonizing ships that departed the planet in search of new homes. (Does anyone know who wrote this story? I swear it was in one of my textbooks for middle school 'Reading' but I can't for the life of me remember the author).

I still get shivers when I think of that story. As much as I love to speculate about other worlds, space, and the future I am deeply tied to this one. I imagined that I would be one of those who stayed behind to die with the Earth (space ships give me terrible claustrophia - in theory. I've never actually been on one, but I totally freaked out on the Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea ride at Disney World when I was eleven).

I hope that we can demonstrate wisdom enough so that our Earth isn't ever "used up" and that "Earth that was" results from natural phenomena and not the errors of our poor species.