Characterisations

I'm a few pages from finishing The Second Ship, first of a three-book Rho Agenda series by Richard Phillips, and thought it be a good time to talk about characters. People often ask me what I write about, to which I have two available answers. The first is that I answer that I write primarily science fiction, and that my current project is a mixture of military science fiction and a techno-thriller that follows on from Iron Falls. Then, if their eyes don't glaze over, I say that I'd like to think that I write about people and their experiences.

That's write, people. A good story isn't about the setting and the writer's ability to plot a good story, though they definitely help. It's about the people that live within the settings and are part of the plot (and, in a pretty good story, such as my friend's Black Donald, actually drive the plot forward). After all, some of the most popular shows on television and in the movies are the ones where the characters are individuals that we - as the reader or audience - can relate to. Another writing friend of mine, Shawn Kupfer, was blogging about becoming an instant fan of the short-lived Firefly series because of that - the main characters.

Having said that, I'm a tad guilty of glossing over the whole character thing in Iron Falls. Ok, ok, so it's a tad ironic that here I'm writing how important it is to have good characters that we as readers can relate to, and go about admitting that I just glossed over them in my story. Admittedly, I was experimenting with a style more or less used by the likes as David J. Williams and Matthew Reilly - where characters take second to action. With my next story, which will follow on from Iron Falls, I'm moving away from that and it'll deal more with such characters as Gene Bukowski, Kevin Yamakawa and Emilio Heerdan.

But what about you guys, do you have any favourite characters (whether it be from a book, movie or series) and why do you relate to them?