 Drama: March 01, 2023 Issue [#11823] |
This week: How about Those Odd, Unusual Characters? Edited by: Joy  
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"The Joker is my favorite villain of all time: You don't know his past; you just know what his plans are."
From The Weeknd
“Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.”
Dean Fogg
“I’m a blank canvas that I can paint however I desire. For the first time ever, I get to be the character in my own fantasy land.”
E.K. Blair
"People keep asking me, 'What evil lurks in you to play such bad characters?' There is no evil in me, I just wear tight underwear."
Dennis Hopper
"Some people are cowards... I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now, a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they've got to make that choice."
Tom Hanks
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Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about unusual characters as protagonists and other characters that light up stories.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Remember Hannibal Lecter and his hankering for that sip of Chianty? Or Mary Poppins flying with the open umbrella? Or Cruella de Vil kidnapping puppies? Or Willy Wonka and his Fizzy Lifting Drinks? Aren’t they all successful main characters? Some of those characters lead an unusual life while others are integrated into the society quite successfully -well, to tell the truth-, mostly in fiction.
Also in fiction, from the pens of a capable authors come extraordinary characters that take a hold of many readers and other media even more than the book publishing business. One such character is the psychic misfit Odd Thomas:
“I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion….I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless…” says Odd Thomas, through Dean Koontz’s pen, and he is quite a character, unusual to say the least, but full of wisdom, too. Odd Thomas series were quite a favorite with readers at the time they first came out.
Here is another such main character from The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
“I don’t like to look out of the windows even–there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”
In this story, the main character is obsessed with another woman hidden in the wallpaper. At the story’s ending, she tears down the wallpaper and frees that “imagined” woman, thus becoming integrated herself, as the woman she freed was also herself, giving the story an acceptable and a slightly unusual conclusion.
Several good reasons exist for giving your characters that gift of peculiarity. First, it makes them memorable and it makes your readers take notice of them almost immediately and even relate to them at least in some ways. Then, it makes your readers wonder about them with a jolt of interest, about what caused them to become the way they are and what they could be, given the chance. Better yet, it saves your story from having conventional plotlines and characters and it injects flair, intensity, and charisma into them.
Since creating memorable and strong characters is a process, let’s first take a look at making them three-dimensional and maybe even something more. Following are a few suggestions, in addition to the character sheets you may be using.
 The main thing to remember is that, usually, the oddball personality up front will have a more quirky or, on the opposite hand, quite a serious background personality, too, to make the main character or a secondary character stand out for the readers.
What is unusual, sudden, scary, funny, creepy about them? Can their vocabulary and the ways they speak or their outward appearances make readers notice them? Do they have erratic and suddenly unsettling emotions, silences, outbursts, and obsessions?
What can suddenly annoy them, confuse them or make them feel or act awkwardly? Do they have an inability to pick up on social cues or are they overly polished and glib?
Their loves, hates, weaknesses, strengths, biggest fears, secrets, and dreams. What evil or good lies in their submerged sub-conscience?
Their background: What could have caused them the way they turned up?
The most important factor in the personalities of such characters is their unpredictability for they can act as if their actions and words are totally impulsive and accidental. Yet, you’ll need to tame down this quirk in them and keep it hidden except for only a few special occasions, by offering hints of it here and there, and then at the end scenes, letting it show in a big way. This will, hopefully, give it an unforgettable ending and make your story truly memorable.
May all your characters come to life fully in three dimensions and may they all be unique, entertaining, and difficult to forget.
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This Issue's Tip: When an unusual character is the star, in addition to describing and showing her or him through events and scenes, you can also show his idiosyncracies through the eyes and reactions of the other characters.
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Feedback for "From Short Fiction to the Novel"
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tj-turkey-jobble-jobble-hard-J 
When I write a story, whether long or short, there When we write a short story, usually we have these steps in mind:
1. The Main Idea - I have a general idea of what I am going to write about. The rest develops as I write.
2. Editing, which I tend to put off until; I let you know until when after I get to editing.
Thanks for the input, and I can so relate to your editing behavior. Editing, I feel, is a downer because it takes all the fun out of finishing that first draft. On the other hand, it is a necessary evil we all have to deal with.
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