Doyle really didn’t have enough material to fill four novels and fifty-six short stories’ worth of paper. The plots are fairly trite, the mysteries are sometimes clever but mostly commonplace, the insights into human nature are fairly shallow, and the prose is expedient if unremarkable… But there is one thing Doyle had that makes up for all the other shortcomings: he had a frickin’ incredible character in Sherlock Holmes himself…

I find that when I think back on the great stories I’ve read in my lifetime, SF/F or otherwise, it’s generally the characters that I remember. That’s why I can barely remember a single plot from the original Star Trek, but I know the triad of McCoy, Spock and Bones like the back of my hand. (Same goes for The Next Generation, though the only truly great character from that show was Picard.) That’s why I remember Long John Silver but barely remember Treasure Island. And that’s why, for all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s insane worldbuilding and linguistic inventiveness, the first thing I think of when I think of The Lord of the Rings is Gandalf leaning on his staff (or Gollum writhing on the ground pining for his preccccccccious).

Go make my editor happy, and post your comments on the Pyr-o-mania blog.

Update 2/18/09 @ 12:41 PM: Fixed the link to the blog piece.

I think it’s more useful to think of the art of characterization as something akin to the art of additive sculpture. When you build a character, you’re not describing an existing personality so much as building one from the ground up… Just like with sculpture, when building characters you’ll often throw in materials that you’ve got lying around the shop. And just like with sculpture, your characters don’t have anything that you don’t explicitly put there yourself…

4. A thematic purpose. Why did you decide to put this character in the story? You should have a reason for every character you’re going to put on paper. If you take the classic Star Wars trilogy, you’ll see that every major character serves a purpose vis-a-vis our protagonist, Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader represents what will happen to Luke if he continues down the path of anger and impetuosity; Leia stands for the home, family, and society he’s trying to defend; Han Solo represents the temptation to abandon community and responsibility; and so on.

Go read and comment on the DeepGenre blog, if you’re so inclined.