You have your story idea and you’ve done some world building.  The stage is set, but who are your players?

The beautiful part about writing in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres is that you are really only limited by your imagination and your ability to make your story believable.  The same ideas that come into play for world building (see World Building 101) also come into play for your characters.  Unlike television and the movies, you are not limited by what make-up people and special effects artists can pull off.  The page is your canvas, and you can paint whomever, or whatever, you want on it. 

What is your creation? 

Human characters are one thing, and a whole other blog posting in its own right, but sludge monsters and aliens are characters too, and ones that come with special considerations.  Though your creatures can be anything your imagination can inspire, you have to make sure that they are appropriate to the environment you have developed for the rest of your story, and again, you need to make them believable.  Think of everything.  What form does their body take?  How do they breathe?  What orifice do they eat through?  How do they move around?  What does their skin (or fur, or scales) feel like?  That is the physical side of your creation, but there is more to it.  How do they think?  What are their cultural values, if any?  What is the hierarchy of their society, if they have one?  What is the depth of their emotional capabilities?  Inside and out, this is where you match your creature to its environment, and carve out its physical and psychological attributes.

The Communication Factor

Your creature is a character.  A character must communicate to be effective, so how does it do that?  Your goal for using different creatures in your stories will be different.  Think about the aliens in the movie Alien versus the alien in E.T.  Pretty different portrayals of extraterrestrial life forms, eh?  One threatening and frightening, the other loveable and curious.  So what attributes does your creature need?  I say creature, because you could be talking about anything that doesn’t exist in our world, alien or mythological or “other,” and that comes from your imagination.  So how is your creature threatening?  How does it show curiousity?  And the issue of language is a whole other factor.  Most made up creatures will not come into being knowing English, yet for your story to move forward, dialogue will definately come into play.  So is there a way for your human characters to understand them?  Is there a device that will translate for them or something else that can make the point for your creature?  Is there some kind of telepathy that will allow for inter-species communication?  Has their been so much inter-species interaction by the time your story takes place that communication is no longer a problem?  Only you will know how this will work in your story.  Just remember that you have many senses at your disposal that you can use to convey information and emotions to your readers: smells, sounds, sights, etc.  Use them, and your character will simply come to life on the page.

Practice, Practice, Practice

As you are writing about characters not from nature as we know it, it may not come naturally to you.  So play with it.  Give yourself a scenario that you can write in a couple of pages involving one of your creatures, and just try it out.  Does your character feel forced?  Is there something about him/her that just rings untrue when you reread it?  Then change things up and try again.  Given time and a little practice,  you will know when your writing feels right, and you will know when you are just kidding yourself.  If you aren’t quite there yet, let someone else read it and give you feedback.  Writing.com has free memberships that allow you to get feedback on your pieces, so long as you are willing to reciprocate the good deed, and can be a great sounding board when you are feeling unsure or are trying out something unusual.  Just remember that you are putting your writing out there on the internet for anyone to see, and though you maintain copyright of your work, according to their site, you are still exposing yourself to some degree and you will want to be careful.

Until next time, write on!

GhOsTwRiTeR KiM

Tags: Aliens, characters, E.T., fantasy, Sci-Fi, science fiction, Writing

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under Ghostwriter Kim, Sci-Fi, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.