Dana sez, A useful post for writers of any age or experience, but I confess I’m sharing it mostly because of Scalzi’s use of “atemporally appealing.” Which Heinlein certainly is.
If I could boil down what I see as Heinlein’s Theory of Characters. It would come to these four lessons:
1. Your Characters Doesn’t Exist in the Story; Your Story Exists For Your Characters. Starship Troopers concerns itself with obligation and duty, but it’s about Johnny Rico’s development as a person who recognizes the importance of these qualities. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress addresses freedom and the cost of achieving it, but in the context of the relationships between its main characters (which include a self-aware computer). Friday mulls over what makes humans human by providing us a warmly human heroine who worries that she’s not human at all. The character is the context; Heinlein books that are more about ideas than people (such as I Will Fear No Evil or Job: A Comedy of Justice) aren’t anywhere as good.
2. Make Room in Your Characters For Your Reader. One of Heinlein’s great talents was creating characters that the readers felt they could be, either because the character was a more or less average person (Troopers’ Johnny Rico is a perfect example of this), or because even if they were special in some way they were still nevertheless subject to uncertainty and doubt (Friday fits here). Heinlein was also smart about immersing his reader into his characters by degrees, rather than frontloading the character development and dumping a complete character into the reader’s lap before the reader knew how to handle it. It’s like boiling a frog: Do it slowly enough and the frog doesn’t realize it’s in hot water. By the same token, if you get your reader comfortable with your character bit by bit, by the end you can do anything you want and the reader will willingly follow.
3. Make Your Characters Talk Like People Talk. This is not to say that you populate your characters’ speech with “ummms” and “uuuuhs” and fractured sentences and grammar. But you do help your readers by not torturing them with strange usage. Nearly all of Heinlein’s books feature recognizably contemporary language usage, and that fact is a great part of their appeal — the reader can focus on the story rather than the language used to tell it. This is probably the lesson that will be the most ignorable, since not every story wants or needs language with an easy-to-read, contemporary feel. But on the other hand, unless you’ve got a reason to make your language difficult, don’t.
4. Make Your Characters Act Like People Act. A corollary to lesson three: Give them doubts, fears, amusements, petty fears, indecisions, conflicting thoughts, space to learn and grow. This note is especially evident in Heinlein’s juveniles, which makes sense because their “heroes” are meant to be teenagers. But Heinlein does it with his adult novels, too — Valentine Michael Smith famously has to learn how to laugh in Stranger in a Strange Land and copes with a continual failure to fundamentally grasp human nature. The plot of Friday depends on its character’s doubts and needs. Characters who are recognizably people are a comfort to reader, since it implicitly suggests that extraordinary things can happen even when one is having ordinary emotions.
Click through here to read the full post, and click through the image below to get yourself a copy of Old Man’s War, where Scalzi puts his money where his mouth is. A fun read. Both of them, really.
