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2016
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November
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- The Wall Of Storms by Ken Liu (Reviewed by Achala ...
- GUEST BLOG: Some Thoughts on Overpowering & Balanc...
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November
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Thursday, November 3, 2016
GUEST BLOG: Some Thoughts on Overpowering & Balancing Characters in Fantasy by Blake Charlton
Blake Charlton is a favorite author of mine. His fantasy
novels are detailed, unique and a pure joy to read. In honor of his recently
released novel, Spellbreaker, which came out in August, he has decided to stop
by and talk with Fantasy Book Critic about writing within the fantasy genre.
To learn more about Spellbreaker and even read the first
chapter, visit our blog post from August. Click here to go to the blog post.
Without further ado, I give you Blake Charlton. Enjoy!
***********************************************************
Some Thoughts on Overpowering & Balancing
Characters in Fantasy
Recently, I’ve formed a hypothesis about overpowering
characters in fiction. I doubt it’s an original observation or even a very
profound one, but it’s helped me develop as a writer, and for some reason it
took writing three books for me to form it, so I thought I share it. Here’s the
hypothesis: The caveats regarding overpowering characters extend to morality,
characterization, and voice.
First let me define my terms. Usually “overpowering,” as I
understand it, happens when an author--perhaps too much enjoying the personal
wish-fulfillment aspect of writing--gives one or more character abilities so
powerful that they weaken the story. Epic fantasy and space opera can be
especially vulnerable to overpowering: technology that confers invisibility,
magical powers that confer omnipotence. It’s hard to develop meaningful
conflict and tension when a character is so power that they don’t have to
change to achieve their goal. The quick fix is to power up the antagonist,
while this sometimes works, it often lead to uninteresting polarizing
escalation. While many starting out writing science fiction and fantasy
initially overpower their technology or magic, most quickly learn to limit the
speculative elements or impose a cost on the use of the magic or technology. My
personal favorite, of course, is to create a character with a disability, which
interacts in some meaningful way with the speculative element.
What I hadn’t until recently realized, and perhaps what
others might find useful to contemplate, is that the phenomenon of overpowering
extends to basic aspects of fiction. One easily demonstrated example might be
morality. If you “overpower” morality in your story, you may end up with a
protagonist who is an angel and an antagonist who is a demon. A few
years back, there was much made of the GRRM’s minimal use of magic in A
Song of Ice and Fire. There was a parallel conversation about the “gritty”
or even “grimdark” characterizations in fantasy, where no one character was
wholly good and wholly evil--though most were wholly unsavory. I find it
interesting now to look back at those two discussions and see them as
interconnected. Epic fantasy had had too many “overpowered” magic systems in
the past, and, if you will, it also had too many “overpowered” moral
systems. The movement then was one of balancing both magical and
moral power.
Hopefully this is useful to you in more than just an
exercise in semantics. What I’m driving at is that, maybe, in fiction the
balance of power is important across many different qualities. As I
think of it now, characters can be overpowered not only in terms of magic or
technology or moral standing, but also in terms of voice and characterizations.
If only one character has a unique and lively voice, they will drown out the
other voices. If you have a massive number of characters described in great
depth and given great detail, it may be too much for the reader to
track--perhaps you have “overpowered” the deep characters and you need to make
some of them more “flat” for contrast.
I don’t mean to imply that balance is always better. Balance
or lack thereof is subject to trends. We certainly seem to be going through a
trend of complete moral balance, almost moral equivocation; in almost every
medium there are now successful franchises about sympathetic villains,
anti-heroes, or morally ambiguous protagonists. I found thinking about balance
useful when writing my last novel and find it useful even today as I think
about what it might mean about our current global society and political
atmosphere that we are so fascinated by moral balance in our stories.
If you’re the type of person who is curious, I wrote the
lead character of my latest book Spellbreaker as a way to
explore this interest in moral balance and “overpowering” a character in
morality. My goal was to make her anti-heroic, but rather than being neither
wholly good or bad I wanted her to demonstrate great capacity for both. The
book starts out with her acquiring a prophetic spell that allows her to know
that in one day’s time she will have to choose between murdering someone she
loves or dying herself. She readily accepts that she will soon
become a murderer and sets off on a sort of “inverse murder mystery.” That is
to say, rather than an investigator trying to figure out who killed the victim
and why they did it, we have a murderer trying to figure out who her victim
will be and why she will do it. I also gave her the ability to misspell any
magical text she touched but at the price of exacerbating a chronic
autoimmune-like disease she has had since childhood and, she has always known,
will condemn her to die while still young. I like to think it provided for some
interesting character development. If you should pick up the book, I’d be
curious to hear if you agree.
So, anyway, overpowering and balancing, that’s it. Fairly
simple thoughts. I hope they’re useful or at least interesting. I’m always
curious to hear what others think about such things.
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2 comments:
This was a very thought-provoking piece, and I whole-heartedly agree what when we don't balance things like magic, morality, or character's abilities, the storytelling suffers, causing the genre as a whole to suffer. It's hard to show emotion without characters having anything in their universe that creates a sense of urgency. It's interesting that you've tried to achieve balance with disabilities. In my own fantasy fiction, I've incorporated mental instability--not any specific diagnosis, but rather the triggers we can all have in emotionally unbalanced lives, that can unhinge our behaviors and decision-making. I've explored, for example, and how people with super abilities deal with loss or self-destructive/suicidal impulses.
Thanks for the consideration of the post and the kind words. I'm glade the idea balance and imbalance resonates with your work as well!