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

Possible SPOILER ALERT

As a kid growing up my some of my favorite action/sci-fi movies were those of the Predator and Alien series. I still to this day quote memorable lines like Arnold’s “Run, go, get to the Chopper” or Sigourney’s “Get away from her you B@#$%.” So it was to my utter delight to hear that an Alien vs Predator movie was in the makes a few years back. I thought that there was no possible way for the producers of the film to screw up this deadly combination yet like many things in Hollywood they somehow found a way.

The film itself I thought had a pretty cool premise but ultimately failed to please. An ancient pyramid is found in the arctic under the ice and a team is assembled to go excavate and check it out. However, little do they know that they aren’t alone in this futuristic yet ancient pyramid – they’re in the middle of a war between the Predators and the Aliens. The movie itself doesn’t even start off half-bad. Surprisingly there’s some decent acting and the plot seems good enough for an action/sci-fi movie. Rather, the part that really ticked me off the first time I saw the movie was the lack of combat skills that the predators displayed. Here I am in the theater watching two Predators get killed by one alien in the first real fight scene of the movie. What!? No, that’s ridiculous! Predators, the universe’s most technologically advanced life form, born into a life of combat is getting powned by an inferior, in almost every way possible, Alien. I’m sorry but I’m just not going to buy that one. Nonetheless, the rest of the movie follows the sole surviving Predator of the three as he tears his way through hordes of Aliens and eventually to a final fight scene with the Queen Alien. This single Predator hunting down and killing all of these Aliens is what I expected from the film in the first place. However, this doesn’t save the rest of the movie. In order to accommodate for the obvious lack of dialog between the Predators and the Aliens they had to incorporate human interaction. Therefore, in order to attempt solving this problem they essentially created a tag teaming duo between the Predator and the last remaining human survivor of the excavation team – a strong willed and strong minded woman. I almost bought this idea but I think I lost it as soon as I saw the Predator create a shield and a spear for the woman out of an Alien’s skull and tail. Not to mention the amount of cheesiness that occurred when the camera zooms out to show the Predator and the Woman running side-by-side down a hallway of the pyramid while explosions are booming in the distance. Honestly, what were they thinking? Oh, and don’t even get me started about the Predalien – I’ve never been so mad.

Anyways, it’s been nearly four years and now the sequel to this rather pathetic first attempt at an AVP movie is out in theaters. What’s the verdict – better or worse? Well, a little bit of both…if I had to judge it. This time around the movie basis itself as a follow-up sequel, starting off directly after the end of its predecessor. The Predalien (which automatically negated points from the sequel) causes the Predators ship to crash on earth near a small town and in turn causes it to release young Alien Egglayers from the ship. You can see where this is going right? The quote-on-quote suspected King Predator gets a distress call from the ship and rushes to earth to single-handedly hunt down, kill and cover up the existence of the Aliens that are quickly populating throughout this small town.

The sequel, Requiem, tries to incorporate the storylines and character development of essentially four main actors essentially making it easier for the movie to create scenes of dialogue. However, as nice as it was to see the incorporation of dialogue, these different character storylines seem to slow down the pace of the movie and overall seem unnecessarily needed because when it all comes down to it the reason this movie was made was to give the fans what they want – Predators and Aliens killing each other, not the back-story to human characters that are probably going to die anyway.

Also, this time around in AVPR the gore factor is definitely upped a notch over the first film – heads are blown off, bodies are cut in half, little kids are used as hosts for the Aliens and the most disturbing one of all is when nursery babies are used for an Alien feast. Yeah, that’s right. You don’t actually see it, but it is heavily implied.

Yes, that lady is definitely preggers and yes, she and her baby die.

The special effects and the makeup of the Predators and Aliens looked phenomenal as usual and the fight scenes were cool, but they were filmed so close up and in such dark lighting that it was often hard to see exactly what was going on. Probably a big factor of this was because the movie took place mostly at night and in close corridors.

Another big draw back to this sequel is the horrible amount of acting. Almost every character was seemingly selected not for their acting skills but rather for their good looks and cheap payroll. Basically these actors are worse than those in a weekday soap opera, and that could be an understatement. In the first AVP, they actually had a few small-named actors in the cast which made the movie seem less cheesy since there was some decent acting, not good acting, but decent. This time around in Requiem it was as if the budget was totally consumed on the special effects and they used whatever pennies they had left to hire some actors, which is stupid because there is so much more human interaction and dialogue this time around and hiring decent actors should’ve been a necessity.

I did like the premise of Requiem, but I didn’t quite get a lot of the decisions that the directors chose. For starters why would only one Predator come down to Earth in order to hunt down the Aliens? I mean this King Predator (which is what I like to call him) is a complete bad ass in every way possible but why does he go alone. In the first movie there were three Predators sent down to the Pyramid to kill the Aliens, granted two of them died in like five minutes but still it just doesn’t make sense. It would’ve been so much cooler to see an all out war against the Aliens and Predators in the sequel, which is what I, and I’m sure many other fans thought was supposed to happen in Requiem.

(On the left) Behold the ridiculousness that is the Predalien!

I could talk more about how disappointing the movie was, but in the end I did in fact see it twice in theaters. I’m a complete sucker for these kinds of movies. I know when a movie is bad and believe me this one is up there, but I love these kinds of horribly awesome movies. The only thing that I really didn’t like about the movie was the Predalien (a half Alien and half Predator creature which fought on the Alien’s side). I disliked this character so much that I tried in all attempts to barely mention it in this blog for fear that it would anger me too much. Its role in the movie was stupid and completely unnecessary. I think the only reason it was put in the film in the first place was because the Queen Alien died in the first one and the directors needed a new final boss for the Predator to fight at the end of the movie.

Overall, I’m telling you to not see this movie unless you either: A) really like the Predator and Alien movies, B) really like sci-fi/ action movies, C) really like gore or D) have nothing better to go see at the theaters. When AVPR comes out on DVD in a few months I’m sure I’ll pick it up and put it in the case next to the first AVP but as far as being a good movie goes, you’ve got to be kidding me. Let’s just hope that a third installment of AVP, which is left to speculation at the end of Requiem, will finally bring the people what they want – an all out war between the Aliens and the Predators. As always, thanks for reading.

-Dillon (D-Dub)