James and Ashley Stay at Home

Listen to the episode, in which James and Ashley discuss these techniques in depth, here. 

Karen Traviss’ characters are beautifully complicated and never feel like tropes. They don’t fit neat boxes, and they defy our expectations. To achieve this, she does four things exceptionally well.

1. Through the eyes of her characters, she shows us a singular and convincing world. This is a basic skill - it's what all fiction writers are trying to do. However, Traviss' excells in convincing us that the world actually is the way her characters see it. This generates immense empathy for them, even when they're deeply flawed or unlikeable. 
2. She paints characters who appear on the surface to be simplistic templates but who are actually complicated, nuanced people.  She exploits tropes and cliches to subvert our expectations about what a character might say or do by then making them imperfect, vulnerable and complicated. Authentic, in other words. 
3.  She leans into her character’s flaws. She’s honest about them. She doesn’t try to make them heroes because of their flaws, but despite them. We feel for them because they’re broken.
4. She comes to her character's flaws in sideways, roundabout ways as she describes them. Her characters have a degree of awareness of their flaws – they can partially see them, but not enough to fix them. They’ve found ways to focus day to day, but they’re still deeply damaged. As a result, we feel a slight, tingling sense of shame in seeing their true selves (partly because they’re trying to hide that from us), and we connect with that. It feels real.

So ask yourself:

1. In what convincing and singular way does this character see the world?
2. What is this character’s flaw? How can I be the most honest about this?
3. What’s the vulnerability that gives us a tingling sense of shame when we look at, but which eventually makes us love them?  
4. In what ways do they partially see their flaws, and why isn’t this enough to fix them?