Among the many and ongoing interesting discussions at our home, we’ve been talking about the concept we’re calling “internal logic” for a character. Internal logic here means that, among other things: an action that to an outside observer appears irrational, wrong, or evil, from the internal viewpoint of the character will be a justified, logical, and right action to make. It’s a useful thing to examine for most characters, but especially helpful in creating believable antagonists in a story.
Tolkien got around the need to deeply explore this by creating a world where evil really did exist, and some creatures did things because they were bad evil things to do. In this sort of scenario, you don’t have to worry too much about internal consistency for a antagonist’s actions as long as you have the formula “evil is good”. Unfortunately, Tolkien’s many imitators have generally not done as well as he did, and these days most people who encounter the Evil Overlord stereotype are likely to assign a label of “campy” “trite” or “overdone” to whichever story has the latest iteration of the trope.
Another loophole to spending a lot of time with discovering a character’s internal logic is the “Rendezvous with Rama” effect. For those of you who haven’t read or don’t remember the original story *spoiler alert skip to the next paragraph* an alien ship passes through our solar system, refuels from our sun, and departs. We send a ship out from Earth to explore the large alien ship, see lots of really interesting things, and learn nothing much about the aliens who created the ship. It’s the ultimate story in creating aliens with very alien motives that have little to nothing to do with humans except in passing.*end of spoilers*
Similarly, in Steve’s book Issola, the Jenoine are massively powerful and very alien, doing things that from the view of both the reader and the characters are hard to understand. Since that’s rather the point, we don’t really need to understand further about the Jenoine’s internal viewpoint.
With both of these examples, the unfathomability is the point of both the alien ship and the Jenoine. With characters that come closer to human-like actions and understandings, internal logic considerations become more of a factor. The world from the outside-looking-in and the inside-looking-out are often far different for people, and even for non-POV characters you might need to know something about their internal motivations. So how do you depict this?
One of my own characters tends to organize their environment in ways that to my first impressions seem counter-intuitive. It’s not a way that I would organize things, and sometimes doesn’t seem to make logical sense from my perspective. However, when I ask myself “why would [said character] arrange their things in that way?” I nearly always have an answer that comes to mind that makes sense from the viewpoint and life experiences of the character. Even if the internal explanation for the room arrangement doesn’t make it directly onto the written page, the fact that I as the writer understand why the character does a certain thing means that it’s more likely to reflect that knowledge in little bits of characterization throughout the story that will bring that understanding to the reader.
-Reesa
What springs to mind is the skeptic’s mantra: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. As it applies to fiction, it seems to me that the more bizarre the thought processes of the character, the more you have to convince the reader that the character really does think that way. The fun part is: how do you do it?
I was remembering Will Shetterly’s first novel, Cats Have No Lord, in which the antagonist’s primary motivation was fear–he did all sorts of horrible things because they seemed to be the best way to keep himself safe–and Will sold it so thoroughly that I never questioned it. Will did it with a hint here, a comment there, which was enough to clue the reader in to what was going on. Generally, I like the “less is more” approach when practicable.
The most fun way to approach it, for me, is to fall completely into the head of that character, and then write it in first person from his POV (I did that in Agyar), but there have to be other ways. I’m wondering what other people have used, or noticed.
-Steve
20 responses so far ↓
1 Yes, It Is All My Fault! » Characterization discussion: Internal Logic > Reesa Brown's homepage // Feb 5, 2010 at 2:30 am
[...] the rest of the entry where Steve shares his thoughts over on our household blog, Words Words Words. You can comment either here or [...]
2 Andrea // Feb 5, 2010 at 3:07 am
This is a topic I find fascinating. The inner workings of “fictional” characters are (or should be) just as complex and multi-layered as real people are. That is to say, just as there are people are really do function from a strictly instinctive place, with little or no higher thought involved in their choices/reflexes, its appropriate that those characters exist as well.
The opposite is also true of course, just as there are incredibly deep and faceted characters there are people like that too. The problem I find, is when writers can’t themselves tell the difference.
The extremes of that spectrum I find equally uncomfortable. People who are so convoluted and confusing as to be impossible to grok make me uncomfortable, much like stepping into a cloudy lake. People who appear to be so simple as to never even bother to ask the question “why?” I find uncomfortable like stepping onto slippery ice. I respond to characters of this type the same way. Which can be an extremely useful tool for the author of course. An author who manages to use that tool well, will keep me coming around in spite of my discomfort.
3 bd // Feb 5, 2010 at 6:39 am
Perhaps it’s not helpful, but I’ve noticed more and more in recent years—perhaps it’s people, perhaps it’s just me getting older and more cynical—that audiences are becoming more and more distant from characters. And I’m not actually complaining about eye-candy explosions and the shallow heroes of the silver screen that seem to accommodate the people’s need for simple entertainment. I encounter a lot of criticism of various characters and situations for being stupid or unrealistic, and more often than not I look at the critic and think, “Maybe for you. But you’re not the character.”
Part of it is a matter of trust. I trust Steven Brust. I trust Clive Barker. I trust Ray Bradbury. I trust Jack Cady and Joyce Carol Oates and Tim O’Brien. I could go on with that list.
If Vlad Taltos does something that strikes me as out of character, I trust that the narrative will bring me ’round the circle and reconcile my confusion. And perhaps it is because of this expectation that it happens. It’s even multivalent. I was reading yet again through the Khaavren Romances last year, and I got to the bit in … I think it’s Five Hundred Years After … when the critic describes Paarfi railing against his publisher for a typo. At which point I had to put the book down because I was laughing too hard to keep reading. I had wondered, through Viscount, about the number of typesetting errors. There is, in Sethra Lavode, I think, what looks lie a missing line, because I’m convinced that Kana and his general switch places in the dialogue. And so when I read through Viscount again as part of my latest trip through the Romances, every typo I thought I saw, I examined and lingered over, and actually enjoyed as a sublime joke.
And maybe the joke is entirely mine, but if I can trust an author that much, why should I argue just because a character doesn’t behave like I would?
4 skzb // Feb 5, 2010 at 12:57 pm
bd: You’re introducing another, and interesting subject: what Teresa Nielsen Hayden calls, “God bless the reader.” I’m familiar with this mostly as a reader.
When a writer wins me over, at least within the context of a given story, I will go to any lengths in my own head to fill in plot holes, or come up with explanations about why something sloppy was actually deliberate. What it takes to win me over varies, but the most usual trick is just a sure, commanding voice that gives me the feeling I’m in good hands, in just the way that your favorite rock band lets you know from the first note of a live show that they’re in complete control.
My tendency to do this–to be won over by a story–is one of the reasons I’d never make a good critic.
Um. Did any of this make sense?
5 Andrea // Feb 5, 2010 at 2:07 pm
@skzb4: Makes perfect sense and in fact is why I always tell Reesa I can’t critique her work from a craft standpoint.
6 GWW // Feb 5, 2010 at 6:14 pm
At skzb in #4:
It makes perfect sense. That’s exactly how I am.
I tend to trust my writer. I mean, perhaps not always. There are some books that turn me off and I never build a relationship with the writer.
But that’s what it is. A relationship. Sometimes the relationship is hard and you have to work to make it work and sometimes it’s easy and you can lay back and just enjoy.
I trust them to shine a light in the dark places, or at the very least hint that somewhere there’s a flashlight that may or may not work well enough to illuminate the dark places.
As to internal logic, my internal logic rarely coincides with the internal logic of my friends and family, so I also tend to accept the internal logic of others even when I do not initially understand it. People do things all the time that seem crazy and illogical to me, I’ve come to realise over the years that they’re not crazy and illogical, they’re just different from me.
7 Robert The Addled // Feb 5, 2010 at 6:27 pm
Upon reflection, a good portion of the depth of a character is definately when they ask THEMSELVES why. Either by direct self questioning, or by the internal monologue of the subtext (both background and captured character thought). Vlad keeps the running commentary in his head – thats why ‘I’ personally think of him as developed. Probably because I’ve realized that I sort of keep a commentary in my own head – the kind of thing you only really notice when you are say – listening to a news story on the car radio and commenting to yourself about it – the constant internal dialog that is self identification. I have run across novels that are good even without the development of deep characters, but I don’t develop the deep reader bond the way I do with more developed lead characters. I should note, well established characters can become minor in sequels, and appear shallow (within the book) to meet the requirements of the current story focus (or focii). Equally, minor characters may be devoloped later. I (mentally) refer to the latter as ‘generational’ series – where the focus passes as the universe evolves and develops.
8 j h woodyatt // Feb 5, 2010 at 9:23 pm
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.” This was just the lesson I needed at exactly the right time.
9 bd // Feb 6, 2010 at 4:51 am
Of course. But I would beg leave to disagree about your critical ability in such cases. You may or may not be correct about yourself specifically, but I think there also exists in that condition the possibility that such a critic can help readers understand what they are seeing. Modern artistic criticism is often more about the critic than the art. To take an example not quite at random, how many times do we hear people criticize Catcher in the Rye because Holden Caulfield is a spoiled brat prig? This criticism is about the critic, whose sensibilities are offended because he cannot comprehend the seething belligerence of the narrative. But if the critic in this case sets his ego aside—how is it that one can be so offended by a fictional narrator?—it might be worth his time to consider that Holden Caulfield is, to put it mildly, suffering mental illness.
I’m just sayin’ ….
And I know it’s a simplistic example, but it’s also a shorter one than trying to explain how a trusting reader might be able to help another understand thematic multivalence, thus increasing the other’s entertainment and enlightenment.
Then again, I had a moment last night trying to explain thematic multivalence to a seven year-old. Maybe my confidence is just shaken.
10 skzb // Feb 6, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Interesting. I know it was just an example, but my impression was that Holden Caulfield’s mental illness was mostly being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
And it is cooler than I can describe to consider that you were trying to explain thematic multivalence to a seven-year old.
11 bd // Feb 6, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Certain stressors, though, contributed to his response to what he witnessed. Maybe without a family tragedy and a “murder by suicide” at his school, he would not have gone off on such a wild and dangerous bender. (Resulting in a very boring story that sheds very little light. Or, perhaps he would have been a matchstick on a mountain.) It was a repressed era, and even more so the culture around him; he was probably neurotic enough without the specific catalysts. But in trying to understand what he perceived, he somehow opened that eye, and ….
Sorry. It seems I’m getting pedantic. It’s a bit past noon on the west coast; normally I don’t get pedantic on the weekends until the evening.
And, to be honest, the bit with thematic multivalence was necessary. Sometimes we corner ourselves, and in this case, I just couldn’t lie to my own daughter to get out of it, and I simply couldn’t think fast enough to devise any other answer. (It was one of those “awkward questions” we always hear people refer to.) So I explained how a joke can do several things at once, and how you can string several jokes together to make one big joke, and so on. And she got that part, I think. We’ll see what the future brings, so to speak, as I could still come to regret this. It was certainly easier than trying to explain the multivalence of the particular example at hand; there were the individual jokes, the larger punch lines of the episode itself, and how those fit into the underlying caricatures and artistic themes of the series. And I knew the question was coming in that “someday” sense, but did nothing to forestall it.
I should probably return this thread to its regularly-scheduled broadcast. Thanks and apologies alike.
12 will shetterly // Feb 7, 2010 at 4:51 pm
In haste:
If I ever make a list of questions that it might be useful for a writer to ask about a character, I hope this would be included: “What does the character think is in his or her best interest?”
13 Dan'l // Feb 8, 2010 at 1:53 am
Actually, I think Steven does this well, and even plays with it in fun ways, letting us see the same incident from different points of view, and allowing us as reader to see where our narrator is not necessarily being honest with himself or with us.
I can think of a Teckla’s account of his eviction from his mistress’ abandoned estate, and then of hearing the same events told by Paarfi, from Aerich’s perspective – Paarfi having clear biases in the Lyorn’s favor.
Vlad, of course, lets us see this process of self-justification most clearly.
And while I am never sure what is going on in Sethra Lavode’s head, it is plain that as often as she has taken a role adversarial to one party or another that she clearly has reasons for so doing that seem sufficient, even imperative, to her.
14 JP // Feb 8, 2010 at 8:39 am
Wow, do I feel this subject. The odd point I’d like to interject concerns the belief that we all have the capacity to act in manners breathtaking beatific and horrifyingly hellish. I read most things to at least look at life from a different perspective and perhaps to learn something.
In that context, fiction containing villains or other actors who do BAD things that also does a fair job explaining why that character thinks it is okay or laudable to so act — well that takes me places in my skull I’d rather not go, but benefit from having gone anyway.
Morrolan, to name a character not at random, is both extraordinarily urbane and thoughtful, and at the same time sacrifices whole villages to verra. To paraphase Mel Brooks, It’s good to be an aristocrat. And aren’t we all secretly wishing, at least occasionally, that we could be one?
15 Tegan // Feb 8, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Villains with strong internal logic are so hard to find in fantasy. Few people do nasty things because they want to be evil. They do it because they can justify it to themselves. Whenever the villain isn’t Evil McEvilson cackling in his black castle and murdering babies for fun, it’s a win in my book.
16 Christian Severin // Feb 9, 2010 at 9:53 am
skzb@4:
Something like the hero worship in The Sun, the Moon and the Stars:
“Gee, I wonder why he did that”, hmm?
17 Christian Severin // Feb 9, 2010 at 9:57 am
Tegan@15:
That’s what makes George R R Martin’s “Song of Fire and Ice” series so great: the viewpoint changes with every book, and you get to spend time in several villains’ heads. And everything makes perfect sense.
Nasty. :-)
18 TheBlueOne // Feb 10, 2010 at 4:40 am
If I may be critical and specific, and I loathe to be, as a huge, giant fan of the Vlad series but Vlad’s internal logic has been rubbing my the wrong way of late.
Frankly I’m upset that he hasn’t gotten more batshit insane and long horizon sublime as time has gone on. He has managed to retain his limited, cynical, streetwise mode of operation despite of some major experiences.
I grok that in the Dragerean world magic, sorcery, gods, odd temporal shifts, glowing imperial orbs, ghostly lands of the dead, huge seas of chaos magic are, well “normal” but..it seems that there are one set of characters – mostly Vlad’s circle of friends, who seem very comfortable traveling at the very edges of this world (“Sure, what? Walk the Paths of the Dead and return? pffft. Who hasn’t done that!”) and another set who know these things exist but have no real meaningful interaction with them – the average Teckla, Jhereg, Dragon foot soldier, Orca Merchant, etc…
To make it topical, there are those of us here in America who KNOW there are two wars being fought somewhere out there and we nod sagely to whatever talking head mouths an opinion similar to ours on it, and then there are those who are actually over there bleeding in them, and then there are those at a whole ‘nother level of experience managing them at a policy level.
Those that are involved in those things carry a different “internal logic” about them then those of us shopping at home.
I mean, Vlad just hasn’t developed that 100 yard stare vision, or even hints of it, and it bugs me that he HASN’T. I think he’d be more on the “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tannuser Gate…”, especially when he mingles with and gets frustrated by the characters in that world that haven’t Walked the Paths of the Dead or carry their friends soul enshrined in a Great Weapon on their hip.
I expect Vlad to be a bit more shellshocked and arrogant, as primarily an easterner and street kid , albeit a talented one operating in some rarefied elements of a rarefied world. Being “grounded” by his grandfather is a piece, but it doesn’t seem influential enough to explain Vlad’s LACK of change in internal logic across the time span in the books.
Just an itch I’ve been having Steve as of late with the series. Still love it though…
19 Dennis // Feb 10, 2010 at 9:49 am
Tegan @15 Granted, but sometimes absolute evil or near absolute evil can work well too. Consider Hannibal Lecter. In Silence of the Lambs, he’s the most memorable character precisely because he’s Evil McEvilson—a man aware of and in harmony with his compulsions. “Nobody made me this way.” By the time Hannibal Rising rolls around, he’s just another misunderstood goth (except he eats people).
Lots of times it just comes down to the quality of writing: A good (or at least convincing) writer can make Evil Lord Evil work, even if it is a cliche. Someone not as good isn’t going to be able to make the character’s motivations convincing no matter what he does.
20 Reesa // Feb 10, 2010 at 10:29 am
@The BlueOne — That’s interesting! I believe I disagree, assuming I’m reading you correctly. For me, Vlad’s internal logic changing throughout the forward chronology of the books is precisely why he hasn’t gone more of the 1000 yard stare route.
If the young angry punk Vlad of Taltos and Yendi era hadn’t grown and changed his thinking along with the experiences he lived through, then I seriously doubt he could have survived them, and certainly not without serious damage along the haunted, “you don’t know what I’ve seen” path. The very fact that middle-aged Vlad is a little more calm, a little more tired, and a little more willing to consider solutions other than those involving pointy bits, to me shows that Vlad’s flexibility of internal view is part of what helped him retain his resilience and basic character even throughout all the crazy changes and stuff he’s lived through (so far).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and getting me to think about this, that was fun!
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