Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Fictional characters adrift in the uncanny valley
Think about the times you’ve wanted to scream at a character in a book or movie, “No, that’s all wrong!” I’m not talking about characters who, in the interest of the plot, seem to have had their brains replaced with tapioca. I’m referring to those times when a character who felt so real to you a moment ago now . . . doesn’t. The former situation is all too common, because lazy writing is everywhere. Author Staci McLaughlin at The Ladykillers suggested two reasons for The Stupid Move: the author may want to heighten the suspense (as in Alien, when the crew insists on splitting up), or she could be stubbornly wedded to her writing. Laziness either way, really.
It's not like they teach you these things in school, after all.
The latter situation may be a unique problem of good writers. How can you leave a reader or viewer in open-mouthed shock at your* criminal lapse of judgment if you haven’t created a convincing character in the first place? You can’t. You have to have the skills to create a living, breathing, fictional being before you can make the error of turning that being into something not quite human. If you make that slip, if your character says something he’d never say, or does something he’d never do, or fails to say or do something the reader expects him to say or do, then he has just fallen into the uncanny valley.
My most challenging patient
As any pediatrician will tell you, the scary thing about infants and toddlers is how fast they can go down the tubes. Humans are complex systems held in check by a variety of buffers and homeostatic feedback loops (there! four years of med school in 16 words), and the smaller the human, the more delicate those buffers and feedback loops. It doesn’t take much to go from eating-drinking-pooping to starving-dehydrated-feverish when you only weigh eight pounds.
How much worse, then, to weigh a fraction of a pound?
This week, our ferret Buehler (named by DCR in this contest, and pictured below — as a much younger weasel) went from eating-drinking-pooping to starving-dehydrated-feverish overnight. I noticed the problem in the morning, and by the time I got home in the afternoon, he looked moribund. We lost Buehler’s pal Harmonica last year, possibly because I underestimated how fast these little guys can plunge. And Harmonica only had an eye infection, whereas Buehler looked much, much worse.
I dithered on the question of taking him to the vet. He looked hopeless. He lay motionless in my arms, breathing fast, hot as a poker. I was able to get him to drink some water, but not much, and he wouldn’t take any food.
Makes it that much more real
Working with 99designs has been a fun experience. I didn’t get a huge number of designers, possibly because my brief called for several character models. That had to have been a lot of work. But I did attract some great talent, and I am very, very happy with the finished product from designer Soheil Toosi:
Let me know what you think, but remember, I love it and will bite to the bone anyone who disagrees with me. (But do let me know if this does not display well on your browser. I have a wide screen, so I tend to max things out quite a bit.)
For those of you who have an earlier version of the manuscript: if this cover art encourages you to get readin’, let me know, and I’ll email you the most recent version.
Back to editing! Eventually, I’ll have to stop fussing.
D.
The Twitter
Don’t laugh . . . I don’t think I owned a cell phone until 2004.
Since this blog is my auxiliary memory, I’m going to catalog useful Twitter links in this post. Feel free to add useful links in the comments, and if you want to “follow” me (isn’t that what the kids say? I don’t know. Perhaps I shouldn’t have chased them off my lawn), I’m dshoffman. That’s what I’ve decided to use as a by-line, too: D. S. Hoffman. Sex-neutral, so I can pub the romance!
On second thought, maybe I don’t want that romance traceable back to me.
How to find the best Twitter hashtags (includes link to “how to use hashtags“).
Another “best hashtags” link.
And yet another, this one aimed for writers.
Google search on using Twitter to promote your book. Because you know how easy it is to forget to Google.
More to come, I suspect.
D.