Characters

   As a member of a young writer’s forum, I’ve heard people say that their characters are completely their own entities. That some things they do are just utterly out of the blue, and while I agree with that to some extent, it has become glaringly obvious, particularly in the past few months of my life, that the characters of a writer are very much a part of them.

   I believe that, as writers, there is always some fundamental part of ourselves that gets injected into the characters we create. It may not necessarily be a character trait; maybe a hope, a dream, or a darkness that you hadn’t realized was inside of you.

   It’s said that the best way to teach is to show, so that’s what I shall do. As I stated above, I’ve come to realize that I share some rather intimate and personal traits with a few of my characters. And, of course, those characters are three of my most developed.

   One embodies my insecurities, my fears, my weaknesses. One embodies my desire to protect those I love, even if it means trying to hide myself away to do so. And the last embodies a wish. A wish to be able to love with all my heart, to be able to forgive… and then to forget.

   Jaydn Schaefe started out as an impetuous girl. Almost reckless, something of a daredevil, and definitely not fitting with the person she grew to be as I continued to work with her. Initially, she seemed fine. A bit quiet, a bit withdrawn, but I figured that was just her Gogamian heritage showing through.

   Not quite, as it turned out.

   I had always been curious to see what type of dynamic Jaydn and Nuridarr, Penny’s Gogamian character (see A Family and A Desert for details), would have. She was supposed to be something of a connector between Sarris and Nuridarr, and I believe that she did, to some extent. But, the dynamic.

   We hadn’t been sure how to bridge the fact that Nuridarr probably didn’t just pop in and drag Novarr and Sarris’ daughter off to attend some bounty hunter business or another, so we did a crossover to a different world that Penny has with a friend of hers. A Steampunk world, in a city called Sanbourne. At first, I immensely enjoyed it, staying up until the wee hours of the morn while we talk-gamed through their adventures.

   The point, though: Tara. Or, in that world, Natasha “Tasha” Bennet. They met/saved her within, oh, just a few days of our talk-gaming them and Jade was fine with her, in the beginning.

   But in Sanbourne, there was no Schaefe family. It was Jade and Nathaniel (Nuridarr) and they were pretty much everything to each other. I shouldn’t have been surprised with how Jade reacted to Tasha’s increased presence in their lives, but I was. Nathan fell in love with Tasha over the course of a few months, and when he did, Jade reacted… not violently, but emotionally violently.

   It’s still hard to say (or, perhaps, just hard to remember) what it was that Jade lashed out against so badly. Part of it was that she was in love with Nathan herself; she’d hoped she would be enough for him and couldn’t understand why he needed Tasha as well. It didn’t make sense to her, because it had always been just them, and then he just let Natasha in as well. And she felt replaceable, I believe. Unneeded. Her presence wasn’t something that was required for Nathan’s continued health and happiness, and so she retracted, trying to protect her heart from a breakage that was only caused by herself.

   It was only a downward spiral from there. She moved out, away from Nathan and Tasha after they got married. She started working alone instead of with Nathan, like they had since she was nine. It cost, eventually. There’s always a cost.

   Anyways. I’m sorry. Getting lost down that long, dreary road of memory.

   Long story short, all that I’ve described to you above is… Well, I didn’t see it at first, but it’s a large part of who I am myself. Not just Jaydn, me. It scared me rather badly to realize all the similarities between us and I’m still struggling with my own version of what Jaydn fought in the Sanbourne crossover. Feelings of abandonment, betrayal, a general feeling of not being wanted, when they are entirely unwarranted.

   That was a long bunny trail, but I hope you see what I mean. What began as a completely autonomous character made me see a part of myself I didn’t even know existed. And it really turned out to just be the surface of a boatful of doubt – both of others and myself – that I’ll probably be struggling with for a long time.

   But no, my discoveries in how my characters reflect myself are not all dark, gloomy, and bad for my emotional stability. As I’ve slowly recovered from whatever deep spot I dropped into, I’ve noticed other qualities in Sarris and Ruusan that I both hope I have and wish to be able to have someday.

    When it comes to Sarris, I like to think she and I share this desire to protect those we love from things that would harm them. Even if it means protecting them from ourselves. For Sarris, that might mean pushing people away with a surly attitude and a sharp word or even just walking away. For me, that means not saying what’s on my heart, which is a chronic failing of mine. I won’t get into it.

   I guess what I’m saying is, that, with Sarris, I like to think that I’ve got the same ability to protect inside of me that she has inside of her. Sarris would gladly lay down her life for Tara, Novarr, her daughters, even Nuridarr, who she doesn’t like that much. And, even though I haven’t really had a chance to test it (probably a good thing), I want to believe that I would give up my own future for my siblings or friends.

    Lastly now, Ruusan. There hasn’t been a day that I’ve regretted the conception of the idea for her character, unlike her little sister, who I regret every time I think of her. Ruusan has one of the purest hearts my characters have ever had, and she is capable of so much love that it takes my breath away sometimes.

    For instance, Ruusan was an ERTP. That is to say, an Emergency Response Transport Paramedic. She worked as a medic in a sci-fi ambulance, in littler words. She spent a good deal of time in the hospital as well, where she met Cameron. I knew from the moment I came up with Cameron that he was going to die.

   Terminally ill, not likely to last more than a year, and Ruusan married him despite all that. She knew her heart would break one day but she gave it up anyways. Their daughter, Vivian, was born the day that Cameron died. (Author powers give one the ability to cause really convenient coincidences.)

   She moved to a planet called Norsha’ac after Cameron death with a two month old Vivian and stayed in an apartment near her Aunt Tara and Uncle Nuridarr because it was a bit too much for her to stay at home on Sinjaro Kahn.

   Ruusan has a heart created to love, though. She needs someone to take care of, but she needs to be taken care of in return and even though neither of them planned it (at all, but I totally did since the first day I knew about them both) Ruu fell in love with Jhidek Vhander.

   They’re adorable, really. The stories I could tell you… but won’t, because then I’d be really, really off the beaten path.

    That is all what amazes me, though, and what I wish I was capable of. Pure, unimpeded love for everyone I care about. Yes, Ruusan and Jhidek have had their differences, but she never once doubted him, while I doubt constantly.

   Ruusan is what I hope I can be, maybe one day.

   I hope that this very lengthy post has accomplished what I set out to do with it. To demonstrate that while, yes, our characters can make choices we definitely wouldn’t normally make, they are still a part of us. (Villains are a different matter altogether, of course, and one that I haven’t really thought about.) If there’s a recurring trait in your characters, maybe stop and look at that aspect of them more closely, and then compare it to your own persona.

   You may be surprised by what you find.

    Ad astra per aspera.

    To the stars, through difficulties.

Music: A Family and a Desert

   "Desert Symphony" by the PianoGuys.

 

  

     This song, ever since I listened to it a few weeks ago, has held a lot of meaning for me in the way of story. But, to warn you, it has a lot of backstory before I can get to what it is that I actually enjoy about it (beyond that it's just a pretty song, of course) so I hope you're comfortable.

     A while ago, my best friend, Penny, came up with an alternative storyline for her characters Nuridarr Vhander and Tara Benson. It was just one little tweak, but it was enough to send massive ripples through the entire sequence of events in the original storyline. It was quickly named the Deviant Storyline, and has remained as such since.

    In this Deviant Storyline, Tara Benson gets stuck on this planet called Gogam. (This is a sci-fi setting, just FYI.) In the original, she was soon rescued from this planet by her brother, Luke, but not without the help of a local by the name of Nuridarr. What changed between the original and the deviant was that she didn't get rescued. Luke was unable to locate her and remove her from Gogam.

    To understand why this is such a bad thing, you need to know about Gogam.

    In this galaxy, the Zephron Galaxy, there are quite a few planets, not many of which whose names I recall, but of them all, Gogam is decidedly the worst. It is a desert planet, filled with people who are the living embodiment of survival of the fittest. Another suitable label would be, "kill or be killed". And there is a lot of killing on Gogam. They are a rough, harsh people who have no moral issues with knocking off anyone who keeps them from reaching their goal.

    You see why Tara's being stuck here is such a problem, yes? There aren't a lot of people who weren't born on Gogam that can go to Gogam and remain intact, either physically or psychologically. It gets in your head and tears you apart, whether you try and fight it or not.

   

    Tara could have well and truly been dead within a few months time or less without the intervention of Nuridarr. The best metaphor for them would be that opposites attract, and they took that to the extreme. At least, in the original storyline.

    In the deviant, though, Tara became quite a bit more Gogamian that she otherwise would've been over the following nine years. But that isn't the end of the story. Not yet, anyways.

    Now I have to back it up again to the original storyline and tell you about the Schaefe family, all of whom are my characters. 

  A short explanation for each family member:

  Novarr Schaefe - Bounty hunter, good friend of Luke Benson, and quite the imperturbable fellow.

  Sarris Nadir - Gogamian, originally, but got off the planet and became a Uhrician Elite Force Warrior. She struggles with her heritage a lot and is (unspoken) best friends with Tara Benson, who is much her opposite in many ways. My oldest, most developed character to date.

  Ruusan Dekker - Ruu was adopted into the Schaefe family when she was just a few months old. She has an incredibly long back-and-forward story that we won't get into right now, but she has one of the biggest hearts you can imagine and worked as an Emergency Response Transport Paramedic (ERTP) on Sinjaro Kahn for a handful of years.

  Jaydn Schaefe - Jade is not a birth daughter of Novarr and Sarris either. She is Gogamian and was adopted at the age of five. Originally, I'd been very excited to see what her character would become, but she spiraled downward very quickly in recent months. I finally killed her to end all of our misery, and her unanticipated antagonistic side has been a weight on not only my shoulders, but of my characters, Penny, and her characters.

    Right. Now that you've got all that, let's focus on Jaydn. She is one of my greatest regrets, not just in a character, but in that she revealed a lot of personal details to me about myself while on her path of darkness. Anyways. Penny and I, and both of our characters never liked the way it had ended with her.

    So we decided to give her a second chance in this deviant storyline with Tara and Nuridarr. We figured that being raised in familiar terrain, and being instilled from a younger age with a lot of important, moral qualities would help her turn out for the better in the end.

    And thus far, it has worked. Jaydn has been incredibly happy with Tara and Nur, reaching a degree that I never found within her in the original storyline.

     Now I can explain about this song. "Desert Symphony" by the PianoGuys. The first time I listened to it, I didn't click too much with it. I liked it a lot, yes, but it took hearing the title and connecting that "Desert" with Gogam to see the Vhander family with this song.

The soft beginning is reminiscent of just Nuridarr and Tara, relying on each other for strength and support as they live the life of bandits, constantly running and hiding from Gogamians seeking to kill Nuridarr. (He betrayed his tribe, you see, to protect Tara, and Gogamians never take betrayal well. Stubborn brutes, that lot.)

     As the music grows and swells, Jaydn joins them and, though she is still young, both in body and in heart, she combines her love and her strength with theirs. Their love for each other as a family is steadfast and unyielding, despite the challenges that face them, despite the dangers that chase them.

     And their love remains as it has been from the beginning as they search for a way to leave Gogam, a way to leave the constant wariness and fear to a place that is safer. It may be a place that Nuridarr -- and Jade -- know nothing about, but they went through the hell that is Gogam together, as a family, and survived. What more can the galaxy offer to attempt to tear them apart?

...I apologize. Words run away with me at times, but I had to attempt to capture what comes to mind when I listen to this song. Not so much the struggles they endured, but how their bonds to each other strengthened with every passing day together.

With that, I shall close. Kudos to the Piano Guys for another amazing song and I hoped you enjoyed this brief glimpse at one of the multitude of worlds that I have characters within.

Ad astra per aspera.
To the stars, through difficulties.