characterization Archives

Posts Tagged ‘characterization’

“You are not a very good spy.”

Lots of spies and crypto and crime in my reading life right now – I’m reading The Code Book, by Simon Singh, which is a page-turner. Meanwhile, my wife and I are catching up on Leverage, she’s watching Burn Notice in five-minute increments on her study breaks, and I’m about 60% of the way through Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. (I don’t tend to read more than one book at a time, but I’m paused on Tinker Tailor, not because it’s a slow book, but because if I don’t start finishing books and returning them to the library, the ninja doom librarians will come after me again). All these different visions of spies, secrets, and crime are crashing in my head to odd effect. I try to imagine what George Smiley, the competent, dangerous, but also sixty-something, overweight, cuckolded, and cautious spymaster from LeCarre’s novels, would say to Michael Westin, a super-operative who’s several shades more realistic than the graduates of the Bond & Bourne school of agentry, but still pretty fantastical. I wonder what an actual operative would say to either. Spies, doctors, writers, lawyers, cops, boxers, thieves, ‘hackers’ – stories provide interlocking images and models for people who participate in certain professions, that map onto the real world in odd ways. It’s one thing to read Hagakure, another to watch The Seven Samurai, and yet another to watch Samurai Champloo.

The original quote, from the estimable Kate Beaton,about monastics and fan fiction: “You are not a very good monk.” (A little far down, but everything on that page is golden – Ismbard Kingdom Brunel especially.)

William Gibson at the Paris Review

William Gibson’s interview with the Paris Review is just about as thoughtful and complex a piece of work about writing novels – especially science fiction novels – as I’ve read. I love his thoughts on tradecraft, and the following spot of self-awareness made me laugh out loud in the middle of my office:

GIBSON

Of course, for the characters themselves, cyberspace is nothing special—they use it for everything. But you don’t hear them say, Well, I’ve got to go into cyberspace to speak to my mother, or I’ve got to go to cyberspace to get the blueberry-pie recipe. That’s what it really is today—there are vicious thieves and artificial intelligence sharks and everything else out there, swimming in it, but we’re still talking to our mothers and exchanging blueberry-pie recipes and looking at porn and tweeting all the stuff we’re doing. Today I could write a version of Neuromancer where you’d see the quotidian naturalistic side, but it wouldn’t be science fiction. With the fairly limited tool kit I had in 1981, I wouldn’t have been able to do that, and, of course, I didn’t know what it would be like.

INTERVIEWER

What was needed that you were missing?

GIBSON

I didn’t have the emotional range. I could only create characters who have really, really super highs and super lows—no middle. It’s taken me eight books to get to a point where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationships with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet is, Shall we have sex, or shall I kill you? Or you know, Let’s go rob a Chinese corporation—cool!