So I've come to a realization lately. Bear with me while I ramble?
A lot of the really interesting characters I've been reading lately--the ones that stick with me, as opposed to the ones who are just functions of the story--are big. Not size, necessarily, but rather in the space they occupy in the reader's mind.
My favorite character in anything I've written is Mr. Finch, a more-or-less immortal who is introduced the reader in a bored conversation with his employer; in his first scene Mr. Finch is slowly impaling his hand on a cactus and talking about how nothing is fun anymore. He's just that kinda guy.
Tyrion Lannister, in GRR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire doorstopology, is a huge character, and my favorite of that series. He's a dwarf who not only accepts his dwarfdom but embraces it as a self-protection mechanism; he insists on confronting reality at nearly every turn. Dolorous Edd is my second favorite character in that series, with his endless (and endlessly entertaining) moaning about the way life always poops on him.
Miles Vorkosigan (I swear I don't have a dwarf fetish) is Tyrion in Space, more or less. Ender is . . . well, he's Ender, at least in the first book. Harry Bosch is driven. Hannibal Lecter is a freak. Bartleby the Scrivener prefers not, and Hamlet is a man possessed by demons of a sort. In movies, Pirates of the Carribean doesn't get off the ground without Johnny Depp's characterization. And so on.
But . . .
Your typical Steven King protagonist (Roland, and whathisface from The Talisman, excepted) is "real." He's someone you can meet on the street. And for me, though I love King's stories, most of the characters disappear from my mind when I give the "what's the book about" synopsis to a friend. The characters are subsumed by the tale itself. Thinking about it, though, the bad guys (and/or and the problems those "real" characters face) are enormous.
Tom Clancy's characters are shells, but his plots are huge. Michael Crichton's "I'm scared of technology" bits are the huge things in his works, overshadowing fairly thin characters. John Grisham's big sellers were the ones where the well-motivated-and-characterized-but-"real" MC was up against some monolithic corporation or firm or case. Willy Wonka was a strange man, and Charlie downright normal, but Willy's factory was jaw-dropping.
Am I missing something here? Or is scale a bigger factor than I've been taking into account?
This thought leads to other questions: does too many "big" things overload the story--if you have a mythic character up against a mythic-scale opponent in a mythic-scale universe, does everyone scale to the same size? Does the reader need a familiar-scale frame of reference to make the big stuff seem big?
If any of you has dealt with this idea of scale before, how, and what were the results?
A lot of the really interesting characters I've been reading lately--the ones that stick with me, as opposed to the ones who are just functions of the story--are big. Not size, necessarily, but rather in the space they occupy in the reader's mind.
My favorite character in anything I've written is Mr. Finch, a more-or-less immortal who is introduced the reader in a bored conversation with his employer; in his first scene Mr. Finch is slowly impaling his hand on a cactus and talking about how nothing is fun anymore. He's just that kinda guy.
Tyrion Lannister, in GRR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire doorstopology, is a huge character, and my favorite of that series. He's a dwarf who not only accepts his dwarfdom but embraces it as a self-protection mechanism; he insists on confronting reality at nearly every turn. Dolorous Edd is my second favorite character in that series, with his endless (and endlessly entertaining) moaning about the way life always poops on him.
Miles Vorkosigan (I swear I don't have a dwarf fetish) is Tyrion in Space, more or less. Ender is . . . well, he's Ender, at least in the first book. Harry Bosch is driven. Hannibal Lecter is a freak. Bartleby the Scrivener prefers not, and Hamlet is a man possessed by demons of a sort. In movies, Pirates of the Carribean doesn't get off the ground without Johnny Depp's characterization. And so on.
But . . .
Your typical Steven King protagonist (Roland, and whathisface from The Talisman, excepted) is "real." He's someone you can meet on the street. And for me, though I love King's stories, most of the characters disappear from my mind when I give the "what's the book about" synopsis to a friend. The characters are subsumed by the tale itself. Thinking about it, though, the bad guys (and/or and the problems those "real" characters face) are enormous.
Tom Clancy's characters are shells, but his plots are huge. Michael Crichton's "I'm scared of technology" bits are the huge things in his works, overshadowing fairly thin characters. John Grisham's big sellers were the ones where the well-motivated-and-characterized-but-"real" MC was up against some monolithic corporation or firm or case. Willy Wonka was a strange man, and Charlie downright normal, but Willy's factory was jaw-dropping.
Am I missing something here? Or is scale a bigger factor than I've been taking into account?
This thought leads to other questions: does too many "big" things overload the story--if you have a mythic character up against a mythic-scale opponent in a mythic-scale universe, does everyone scale to the same size? Does the reader need a familiar-scale frame of reference to make the big stuff seem big?
If any of you has dealt with this idea of scale before, how, and what were the results?