4 Common Problems With An Everyman

1.  No personality

     One of the top issues with an everyman is that they have no real personality; their entire personality is "I'm an average Joe just like everyone else," but that's not enough.  There has to be something to them, flesh to add to bone.

     Having a character that's average is fine.  In fact, in literature, that's practically an act of rebellion against the status quo.  But you can't allow that character to become boring.  Average doesn't have to be boring--some very interesting people are perfectly average, just in ways you wouldn't expect.

     Maybe they have an eclectic interest, they're just not very good at it, or they know a little bit about a lot of things, or a lot about a very few things; maybe they have skills which were never top notch, but they still love to practice.  Whatever it is, just don't make them a boring bland personalityless nobody.

     Make them into someone we'd want to travel with (or someone we'd hate to travel with), not just someone we tolerate.

2.  Mouthpiece

     An everyman, being that they're our touchstone to reality in this journey through the cosmos or elven lands or what have you, can sometimes serve as an author stand-in, revealing to us all their thoughts about the new places, people, events, and the old people, places, events that we're used to.

     This is all well and good, but be careful you don't go running away with it and turn the character into just another mouthpiece trying to spread an agenda; commentary is great!  We love commentary!  But commentary is sometimes just a hair's breadth away from preaching, and once you get to preaching it's a steep descent down into moralizing bluffs, and no one likes being moralized.

     TL;DR:  Speak, don't preach.  Comment, don't vomit.  We're not here for a sermon, we're here to have fun.

3.  No purpose in the plot

     Other than providing us with information about our new environment and giving us a running commentary on how the nature of whatever's going on relates to the nature of whatever's going on in real life, does your character have a purpose in the plot?

     And I mean a real purpose; look at what's happening in your story.  If you took your everyman out of it, would any of the action change?  If not, you either need to scrap that character, or give them a reason to be on the scene.  Give them something to do, something important, don't just let them laze around observing things; that's how they get flat and boring, and boring is the enemy here!  Boring is the reason people hate everymen!

     Don't subject your everyman to everyman hell; let him have agency.

4.  Stock Personality

     Often, when an everyman does have a personality, it's one of the stock personalities that three hundred other everymen are loaded with.  They're flat cardboard characters with no real backstory that just show up to drive home the author's point or reveal information to us.

     Don't fall into that trap; make your everyman a well-rounded person, with interests, talents, flaws!  If I wanted a stock character, I'd read comedia del'arte.

5 Things I Learned Writing/Editing/Re-Reading My First-Ever "Novel"

1. A notebook of words does not a novel make

My first-ever “novel” was a 42 page book about a Mary Sue superhero getting powers and defeating a dragon.  In between all that, though, lots of bullshit happens that doesn’t have anything to do with the plot, and is mostly just 9-year-old wish fulfillment.  It was, more or less, a notebook full of vaguely connected words and ideas.

But that’s not what a novel is.  First of all, this 42-page story, at around 10,000 words, wouldn’t even qualify as a novella.  It would be more like a novelette at best; a novella is 18,000-40,000 words, and a novel is 40,000 words or more (though most publishing companies prefer that your wordcount be at least 60,000, and often nearer to 80,000, to consider publishing it as a novel).  

Not only is a wordcount required, but a novel has to have a cohesive plot, compelling characters that are more than self-indulgent caricatures of real-life people or cardboard cut-outs, and villains with realistic motives.  You could have a novel that was more anthological, too, as long as all the pieces were woven together to form an overarching narrative, but it still has to say something.  

A bunch of pieces smashed together isn’t a novel just because you want it to be.  Kaleidoscopes are pretty, but there’s a reason we don’t call them paintings.  

2. Tangents Must Go

As I mentioned above, my first “novel” had a TON of tangents.  There was a cringe-worthy sequence where my trio of main characters went off and discovered a new species of weasel that were rainbow colored just … because???  They could???

 

As I said, it was very self-indulgent.  

And it was painfully evident, re-reading it, that it did. not. work.  It didn’t matter, it was a dumb stand-in for conflict, it wasn’t interesting, and it contributed nothing to the plot, such as it was.  

Bottom line; tangents--by which I mean, tangents that contribute no value or actively detract from the audience’s understanding or enjoyment of a piece--have no place in your novel.  In your first draft, sure, stick in as many tangents as you want, they may turn out to have little pockets of information or entertainment you could later rework into something saleable, but when you go back to edit, cut that shit down.  Hack the jungle down to a garden and breathe deep the fruits of your labors.

Then choke, because you can’t breathe fruit.  Why were you trying to breathe fruit?  Who do you think you are, Fruit-Breathing Man?

3. Daydreaming isn’t the best way to write a book

Again; I was basically day-dreaming when nine-year-old-me wrote this.  And I should probably state, if it wasn’t clear already, that while I’m posting this for the education of all, this post is primarily a letter to kid me about what she could have done better.  

Namely, written a fucking BOOK instead of an IMAGINATIVE DIARY.

Little me had a lot of passion, but she was thin on the execution.  (Don’t worry, she’ll learn ;) )

4. Demonizing childhood bullies isn’t a recipe for a compelling villain

Honey, this is a lesson we all have to learn someday, and you’re learning it *checks watch* ten years ago.  You may have some unresolved issues with the kids that are bullying you right now, and demonizing them in writing can be cathartic, but if you want this book to be great, you need a better villain than a strawman.

Your villains have to be every bit as three dimensional as your protagonists; they need to have realistic reasons for having the goals they do; they need motivation, and even if their goal is to use a dragon to kill someone because they just don’t like her, they need to have a reason not to like her in the first place.  It doesn’t have to be the character’s fault (though it’s often more interesting a story if it is), but the villain needs to be able to see it that way.  

Every character is the protagonist of their own story; find the ways that your villains are the protagonists of theirs.

5. Paragraph usage

This is one thing that school never taught me, which I thank my eldest brother for.  One day, as I was typing away, he stopped behind me, reading over my shoulder, and gave me a piece of advice that forever changed the way I write.

“Include a new paragraph every time a new character speaks.”

And then he disappeared in a puff of dragon smoke and blood-orange incense, never to be seen again until dinner.  

It’s a very simple thing, so obvious a rule that schools don’t even bother telling you to do it (because they teach technical writing, so they don’t bother thinking about what the conventions of creative writing are until you’re already expected to know them all), so I see a lot of young writers making the same mistake.

So.  Every time a new character speaks; new paragraph.  It makes it so much easier to keep track of who’s saying what.  Trust me, you’ll love it.  And so will your readers. :)

Your Protagonist Should Be Popping Pills

     I like pills.
     No, not those kinds of pills; I like ibuprofen and my gabapentin and, when I need it, some good old 'cillin for those pesky hard-to-kill bacteria!
     I don't abuse anything prescription, or OTC (okay, maybe I take a little too much ibuprofen, but I do what I can to get by), but when I need them I need them. Some people think they make you weak (they don't), and I totally understand choosing not to medicate--if you've read my series on Tourette's, you know I chose not to medicate for that--but popping amoxacillin, tossing back some ondansetron, or chugging some cough syrup makes me feel like I'm doing something.  I can't get down on a germ's level to get my pathogenicide on, so I do the next best thing and drop some poison down my gullet (It's bacteria poison, not people poison, don't worry).
     Taking pills is an active measure--reactive, in a sense, but certainly not passive.
     So your protagonist should be popping pills, too--sometimes it's reactive pills, like a revenge plot, or a murder mystery, or a typical *shudder* Chosen One prophecy.  Sometimes your protagonist will be popping vitamins (or "vitamins") instead, a proactive measure, like when little kids go exploring in the attic, or a troubled youth starts plotting his first Get Rich Quick scheme, or a suspicious dude decides to stake out a sketchy guy's house just to see what the hell his deal is.
     Sometimes they'll have to procure the pills themselves (the pills are metaphors for options at this point) like when any character ever goes after meds for their grandmother (not-so-metaphorical), and sometimes they'll be handed them, like Neo in The Matrix (also not really a metaphor... Well, it was a metaphor in the movie, so I guess it's like a meta metaphor?).
     Neo ostensibly has two options--take the red pill, find out what all his shit's about, take the blue pill, pretend it never happened.  I think we can all agree that watching a blue-pill Neo would have been a really boring movie, which brings me to my next point--your character has to take the right pills--which are often actually the wrong pills.
     This is getting confusing and way too meta metaphorical, so I'm going to take a step back and stop talking about pills for a minute.
     The point is:  An active protagonist will, ninety nine percent of the time, make a much more interesting protagonist.  The actions they take may be the ones that destroy them, or the ones that eventually lift them up, but the active pursuit of something is far more interesting than passive acceptance.  If a character makes no decisions, or makes decisions only because they have literally no other choice ("I am the only person in the entire world that can stop the bad guy from killing literally everyone"), it's going to be much harder to make them sympathetic.
     Remember the friend you had in high school that always complained about their life, but never took steps to make things better, never took your advice, and did only what they had to to just barely skirt by?  You may have loved the hell out of them, but I bet they weren't a ton of fun to be around for any length of time; a passive protagonist is a lot like that friend, and unfortunately, a novel necessitates that a LOT of time be spent with them.
     We, as an audience, care more about the character that self-medicates with drugs or shrinks themselves down to microscopic size to murder their own parasites or goes on a murder spree when they find out their pharmaceutical company is screwing over people with cancer than we do about the one that finds out they're dying and just accepts it, rolls over, and waits for death or a savior.
     We like protagonists that, for good or ill, for better or worse, in intellect and stupidity and both sickness and health, have a goal in mind, even if it's a vague or reactive one, and take risks to try to accomplish that goal.
     Your audience, whether they know it or not, wants pill-poppers, and gosh darn it, they want those pills to be as red as a baboon's ass.

Catching and Killing the God-Mod

     Mary Sues, as I have previously discussed, started out as characters that changed the behavior of the universe and characters around them to fit the whim of the author--usually because they're author inserts in the first place.  But since those early days of Star Trek fanfiction, the term Mary Sue has come to represent any character (usually female) who happens to be too perfect, with too few flaws.  Really, the term Mary Sue has evolved to mean a confusing number of things, too numerous to pin down--it now means so much that it means nothing.

     Ignoring for now the original definition of a Mary Sue, I'm going to fixate on "too perfect" characters--Our Aylas, our Supermans, our Eragons, we know the type; over-powered and under-flawed, these are characters who always know what's best, always do what's right, always win, and never have any substantial problems that need more than a few chapters of angst to fix.

     While nothing in writing is inherently bad, these characters are definitely not on the "inherently good" side of the bell curve.  They're not harmful, they don't hurt people--but they're boring.  They bore you absolutely to death.  When your character is overpowered and underflawed, every battle they ever face is going to feel contrived, so nothing is ever going to feel satisfying.

     When I was coming up in the (*shudder* Warriors) role playing ranks, waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy back in 2009, we had a specific name for these characters--we called them "God Mods."  As in, "This character has been modified to assume a God-like status."  Creating or playing a God-Modded character was the act of God-Modding, and made you a God-Modder.

     In role play, this was seen as an unfair advantage, and many site homepages had this among their top three on the list of rules, right up there with no Power Playing.  It could result in penalties as severe as suspension or even banishment.  In writing God-Mods can't get you banned, but they can severely damage the quality of your story.

     While a God-Mod can be an author insert, and can be a Mary Sue as originally described, it may only be an author's favorite character (an "author's baby" gone wrong).  God-Mods tend to be super smart, super attractive, and super important (for no obvious or even tangible reason), and they also tend to have talents and sometimes literal superpowers far surpassing that of other characters within.  Essentially, the God-Mod is the very epitome of in-world perfection.  If they have any flaws at all, they're either informed flaws (flaws which the narrator tells us about, but which we never bear witness to) or "cute"/useful flaws--he's so clumsy it's adorable, teehee, or he has a terrible temper, but only when he's talking to bad guys.

     Just being amazing isn't enough--amazing characters can be plenty overpowered and still manage to register as non-God-Mods, because fully realized characters, super or not, have flaws and limits of both mind and body.  They may be unjustifiably cruel at times, their powers may only work for a small ten-minute window each day, they may not really be able to hear out of their left ear at all, and only have normal (i.e. NOT SUPER) hearing in the right, etc.

     Whatever your character's limits and flaws, abilities and disabilities, they need to be meaningful--your character should be truly, honestly challenged in their endeavors.  The villain should be strong enough to pose a real threat to your hero, and your hero should be flawed enough to make it conceivable that she might fail.  You can't worry about a character if they don't have the capacity to fail, and without worry there's no staying power--no matter how interesting the plot, people won't want to read about how Mister Perfect saved the day as he yawned into his palm just by flicking his perfectly-manicured nails in the villain's general direction.

     Don't let the God Mods win, folks; seek them out and wrangle them in, murder them that they may be reborn into a more imperfect form.  Only then will they truly shine.

Character Development: Idiosyncrasies

     People are weird.
 
     We all do weird things now and then, with or without reason, and when you get to know someone well enough, repetitions of the behavioral pattern can result in head-shaking and laughter, maybe a few, "Oh, Donald"s thrown in (unless of course their name isn't Donald, but whose isn't, amirite?).  Humans have idiosyncrasies, and they add a new layer of depth to the people around us--they can be revealing or puzzling, amusing or disgusting, frustrating or embarrassing....

     We all have them, so why shouldn't our characters?

     As I see it, there are three main types of idiosyncrasies--Reasoned, Reasonable, and Weird.

1. Reasoned:  These are the types of traits that make complete sense once you know someone's history or inner self.  Maybe someone flinches when someone tries to touch them, and once you know that the character was abused, it makes perfect sense!  Or someone is boxed in by people on all sides and runs away to cower by themselves.  Maybe they have claustrophobia, or, if they're comfortable in tight spaces, they could have social anxiety.  Reasoned Idiosyncrasies just make sense--but not until you know the person. 
2. Reasonable:  Reasonable Idiosyncrasies make sense... kinda....  These are the idiosyncrasies that don't seem to have a root cause.  They just kind of exist, yet no one really questions it too much because the behavior is within our sphere of understanding.  Maybe the character collects rocks, not because they like geology, but because they just think rocks are pretty, or they laugh when they're nervous--a pretty common "nervous tic," at least in fiction.  Many nervous tics fall under this category.  You can't explain them, but you really don't have to.  They're just there.
3. Weird:  This is the interesting one.  These are the things people do that just make no sense whatsoever, things they might not be able to explain.  Sometimes it's situational--when the guy who hit Stephen King with his van told King that his leg was probably broken in five or six places, King's response was "I'm sorry."                                                                                                                           It doesn't make sense, but it's so human, something a number of us can imagine ourselves doing.  Show of hands, how many of you apologize to people on a daily basis for things you had no control over?  Things other people did to you?  ((You can't see them, but there are so many hands up right now, I promise, just trust me.))  And have you ever just gotten up in the middle of the night to sort through your bookshelf and rearrange everything by author?  I have.                                                           Other times, it's just a person being themselves.  Maybe they suck on their middle finger as opposed to their thumb, or they always feel like they have to have exactly the right pair of pants to wear, or the day will be horrible.  Maybe they always carry around a water bottle full of mud, and they might not be able to tell you why, just that they think it could come in handy, or they mutter ancient incantations under their breath instead of curse words, or they repeat every thirtieth word two times.                                                                                                                                                        Sometimes these things can overlap with the other two--the character could be recalling that mud helps draw out bee poison, or their parents were wizards, or they might have palilalia, or any number of things.  But weird is weird, and if no one can understand it, this might be the category it fits in best.

     If your character has at least one of each of these, they're on their way toward roundedness.  Multiples of some or all of these can flesh your character out further still.  Just make sure that your character doesn't become one big walking idiosyncrasy themselves.  If your character is too weird, they might not be taken seriously.

     On the other hand, if you're writing a comedy, go for it!  Try to find a balance that works with your story and characters.  Straight-laced heroes may only have one or two of each, where the less held-together heroes (or villains) might be riddled with them.  The more you have, the more potential for silliness, or for drama, depending on what kind of idiosyncrasies you use.

     Are there any idiosyncrasies you'd like to see more in fiction?  Any you'd like to see less?  Send it my way and I'll compile a list!