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

I guess sometimes doing your homework before watching a movie isn’t such a great idea. If I hadn’t, I think I would have enjoyed this movie more. According to an article I read in Entertainment Weekly back in May, X-Files: I Want To Believe was suppost to be a stand-alone story that didn’t deal whatsoever with the X-Files mythos, but where Mulder and Scully get on a case that makes Mulder question his beliefs. I assumed the idea was that the roles would be reversed and Mulder would find himself suddenly becoming skeptical of something that appeared supernatural, that he “wants to believe” but is finally having a hard time doing that. But that really isn’t what happened at all. 

It’s actually a pretty decent thriller, if it just didn’t have “X-Files” in the title. It’s extremely low-key, gritty drama, and really tries to surprise, frighten, and keep you guessing without glamourous special effects or extravagant sets. Much of the movie takes place in the arctic, and dark, snowy and icy landscapes are really quite eerie, especially when given the film’s subject matter, which is about human organ harvesting. The bad guys are doing some truly horrifying stuff with human body parts, which is effective in creeping me out, but it isn’t satisfying because I’m all too aware that this is more than likely the last time we’ll see Mulder and Scully on a case. 

The show has been off the air for several years now, and though I was never a die-hard fan I have seen the final episode, and I hoped this movie would give the series more closure than that convoluted and disappointing ending. But Chris Carter wanted to do a film you didn’t have to be a fan to see, and while I really do respect that, especially since the series usually had that stand-alone feel, I also wanted something a little bigger. And if not bigger, at least something to make my brain work a little harder.

I Want To Believe feels like a long episode, and not even one of the more interesting ones, at least in basic plot. It doesn’t have the twists and turns of some episodes I can recall that  made me say, “woah, I had no idea that’s where they were going.” Mulder and Scully are a delight to watch as a team, and I’m sure fans will enjoy their banter and some of Mulder’s very witty comments. But for a casual viewer or someone who just wants to watch a good thriller (and Carter definitely made this movie for those people) it never gains much momentum and is only sometimes visually surprising, and only then in gross-out factor. There’s some moral questioning, but that mostly comes from a subplot about a young boy with a rare disease that Scully is trying to save, and it has almost nothing to do with the rest of the story. The kid was never on screen long enough for me to really care about him, and I was much more interested in Mulder, who I thought would get a real character-shift by the end of the film, and he never did.

The movie is about people’s beliefs, not about what really is “out there” and certainly not about aliens. I knew there would be no aliens going into it, and I was fine with that. But the only supernatural thing about it was a creepy ex-priest and convicted pedophile named Father Joe who claims to have visions from God, and these visions are all the FBI have to go on to look for a missing agent. They call Scully who brings in Mulder, and though neither are agents any longer, they both reluctantly get involved. As throughout the entire series, Mulder always believes this man really is psychic and Scully is always skeptical. I was sold that he was a real psychic from the very beginning, when one of his visions helped the FBI find a severed human arm in the ice. It didn’t matter that, at the time, it seemed this was unrelated to the missing agent. I knew it couldn’t be coincidence that he managed to find that, and if I had any doubt at all after that, I was certainly sold when he suddenly started crying blood. While the FBI starts thinking they should stop following this man’s rantings, Mulder keeps believing in him. His faith really doesn’t seem to waver, and I thought it would have been really neat if it did.

What if Father Joe started to lose us? What if we, the audience, are led to believe early on that this guy really isn’t psychic at all and Mulder is grasping at straws because he “wants to believe?” As is, the visions are so obviously real that it’s hard to understand why Scully is skeptical at all, and that makes it feel like an episode from the first season. Sure, this is a stand-alone, but the characters still have a nine-season progression that shouldn’t be ignored; they should move forward, not be stagnant. I really wanted Mulder to be led on what seemed like a wild goose chase, and then perhaps toward the end, it turns out Father Joe was right all along. Or maybe he wasn’t at all, and we could have an X-Files movie about a complete hoax, where nothing at all is supernatural. I don’t know. I don’t want to re-write this movie, but I just don’t think it has anything new to say.

It’s impressive what is done with very little, but I was bored, especially since this was the X-Files’ last hurrah. There’s really nothing theatrical about this; it could have been a TV movie. I don’t want to say that’s bad, because I think it’s what Carter was going for. The first X-Files movie tried to be a big budget version but the story was so convoluted it lost people. So this one tries to capture the essence of the series, and it does that visually, but the script was weak. It did what I was really afraid of; by the end, it looks like just one more episode of a show that we never thought we’d hear from again.