Older characters - and reading in an old-fashioned way

[MWagner]

Oh, I agree with you. I just meant that may be one of the reasons publishers see for using younger characters. For publishers, the goal is always to get as many people to buy the book as possible.

Absolutely. Book publishing is a business. And the decision to write a YA novel is much as commercial decision as anything. Look at the bios of the authors - hundreds of journalists and teachers hoping to become the next J.K. Rowling (or more realistically, the next Rick Riordan).

 

[MWagner]

On the subject of older protagonists - I actually believe that one day JK Rowling will start a new set of novels dealing with the original Harry Potter characters when they are 40 years old. Publishers will rush to name this as a new genre. I am not kidding in the least.

I think you're right!

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

It's probably a generational thing. I look at the library at my kids' school today and it's nothing but YA books.

Pop culture today is dominated by youth culture in a way it wasn't even back in the 60s when the Boomers came of age. Compare the top box-office movies of 1966 with today. Many of the most successful movies of 1966 held little appeal for 16-year-olds: Dr. Zhivago, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, A Man for All Seasons. Hard to imagine movies of that sort topping the box office today.

Both very disturbing observations and, assuming they do represent reality instead of biased perception, probably related. And (to throw in my own subjective and possibly biased observation) probably related to the dramatic shallowing of USnian (and world?) culture. I wonder if anyone has tried to gather some objective data set that reflects on these observations.

 

[HareBrain]

Great thread.

Has anyone else felt this?

Pretty much all of it.

Recently, I read an article by an SF fan which was basically a list of relationships that the writer had wished his favourite characters had had with one another. This is just alien to me. There was no sense that the characters were "mine" in that way. They did what they did in the book and there was no alternative, no "headcannon" or anything like that. For one thing, it didn't matter that much. It was the entire book that mattered, not my favourite characters.

I'm the same. Although I can be interested in what characters do or feel within the story, I don't think I've ever been the "fan" of a particular character since I was a child, nor imagined what they might do outside the story. I also never try to "cast" them with actors, or imagine what they might look like.

What used to worry me a bit was that this also applies to the characters I write. I've never done the classic exercise of sitting down and writing what happened in their childhoods, or deciding their favourite colour or animal. To me, that kind of thing wouldn't make them a more fully rounded person, it would just make them the same person with a load of unnecessary details tagged on.

if you posit a society in which people still age in the traditional way, it is only realistic that younger characters predominate because in truth the young ARE more often involved in the kind of dangerous activities that make good stories.

That's possibly true of the people who choose those dangerous activities, but in fiction many protagonists have their adventures thrust upon them, and there's no reason that should stop with youth.

Regarding mother characters, I recently re-read Tehanu by le Guin, the fourth of her Earthsea books, in which motherhood is a major theme. The book didn't impress me at all when I first read it many years ago, but it captivated me this time -- an effect of increased age and experience, I think, even though I'm not a parent.

 

[Dan Jones]

I also never try to "cast" them with actors, or imagine what they might look like.

I seem to remember doing this when I was really young, around 12-13, with Lord of the Rings. I imagined Sean Connery as Gandalf, and I think Danny DeVito as Gimli. I also wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but with Joseph Merrick as the protagonist. I still have it somewhere...

As for the older characters, it's a good question, and I can't remember reading too many in SFF. The Name of the Rose pops into my head - William of Baskerville in my head was around 50, and some of the characters are positively ancient, but that's not SFF, thought it's arguably speculative to classicists...

Clint Eastwood's latter-day movies are (arguably) his finest works - again not SFF (except perhaps The Hereafter, which was decidedly wafty). But Unforgiven, Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, all deal with older characters in different, powerful ways. Again, not SFF. But damn, a fantasy Unforgiven - that's a hit just waiting to be written*.

As for me, I wrote two older POV characters in my epic fantasy which is now collecting dust in my hard drive - one around 50, the other a still-active guard aged around 80. HB himself commented that the latter character was among the most interesting of the cast. Which was nice.

*jots down idea in ideas pad.

 

[Toby Frost]

What used to worry me a bit was that this also applies to the characters I write. I've never done the classic exercise of sitting down and writing what happened in their childhoods, or deciding their favourite colour or animal. To me, that kind of thing wouldn't make them a more fully rounded person, it would just make them the same person with a load of unnecessary details tagged on.

Very much the same for me, too. Different things work for different people, but I don't think this kind of approach would help me at all. For me, characterisation is about working out the broader attitudes of the character - a basic set of rules, in a way, that can be applied to any situation they encounter. Quite often, it's enough to say that they are That Kind of Person and go from there. That said - and I don't know if this supports my view or not - there are times when I actively don't want to know more about a character because what I've got is sufficient and any gap-filling would be worse than useless. If someone was to write a back-story for the Charlize Theron character in Mad Max, for instance, I wouldn't want to know, because what I've got from the film is enough, and the risks of it being cliched or cheesy are so high that it wouldn't be worth the bother.

Similarly, the need to match characters up that some fans have bewilders me. There seem to be lots of Star Wars fans who want all the main characters to turn out to be someone's offspring, which to me feels more like the bloodline of a backwater dutchy in the Habsburg Empire than the egalitarian galaxy of opportunity that I would expect Star Wars to be.

 

[galanx]

On the subject of older protagonists - I actually believe that one day JK Rowling will start a new set of novels dealing with the original Harry Potter characters when they are 40 years old. Publishers will rush to name this as a new genre. I am not kidding in the least.

Once-Young Adult?

 

[galanx]

I wouldn't say so. In the thread about literary criticism of YA fiction, I commented that in the past people would read different things at 15 and 35 and 55, and that seems to be less true today, when theatres showing superhero movies are packed with 30-somethings and 40-somethings. Pop culture today is dominated by youth culture in a way it wasn't even back in the 60s when the Boomers came of age. Compare the top box-office movies of 1966 with today. Many of the most successful movies of 1966 held little appeal for 16-year-olds: Dr. Zhivago, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, A Man for All Seasons. Hard to imagine movies of that sort topping the box office today.

Top Ten Movies: 1950s

Lady and the Tramp (1955)
Peter Pan (1953)
The Ten Commandments (1956)
Ben-Hur (1959)
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Around the World in 80 Days (1956) (tie)
This is Cinerama (1952) (tie)
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) (tie)
The Robe (1953) (tie)
Cinderella (1950)
Seven Wonders of the World (1956)
Quo Vadis (1951)

Top Ten Movies: 1960s



The Sound of Music (1965)
101 Dalmatians (1961)
The Jungle Book (1967)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
The Graduate (1967) (tie)
Mary Poppins (1964) (tie)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
My Fair Lady (1964)
Thunderball (1965)
Funny Girl (1968)
Cleopatra (1963)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (tie)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) (tie)
Goldfinger (1964)

Top Ten Movies: 2000s


Avatar (2009)
The Dark Knight (2008)
Shrek 2 (2004)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Spider-Man (2002)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
The Passion of the Christ (2004)

Top Ten Movies: 2010s

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
Jurassic World (2015)
Marvel's The Avengers (2012)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)
Toy Story 3 (2010)
Iron Man 3 (2013)
The Hunger Games (2012)
Frozen (2013)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011)
Despicable Me 2 (2013)
Deadpool (2016)
Inside Out (2015)
Furious 7 (2015)

 

[galanx]

Fill in the blanks:
1970s
Star Wars (1977)
Jaws (1975)
The Exorcist (1973)
Grease (1978)
The Sting (1973)
Saturday Night Fever (1977)
(National Lampoon's) Animal House (1978)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
The Godfather (1972)
Superman (1978)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977/80)
Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Rocky (1976)
The Towering Inferno (1974)
American Graffiti (1973)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Love Story (1970) (tie)
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) (tie)

1980s

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Batman (1989)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Ghostbusters (1984)
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Back to the Future (1985)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Tootsie (1982)

1990s

Titanic (1997)
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Forrest Gump (1994) (tie)
The Lion King (1994) (tie)
Independence Day (1996)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Home Alone (1990)
Men in Black (1997)
Toy Story 2 (1999)
Twister (1996)

 

[Vertigo]

Toby you asked for examples; I have an Elizabeth Moon book - Remnant Population - on my to read list (so I can't comment on how good it is but it has 2530 GR ratings giving it an average of 4.0) but the blurb has the MC as an older woman: "she has lived and loved, weathered the death of her husband, raised her one surviving child, lovingly tended her garden, and grown placidly old" and then the story begins.

I'd have thought a great deal of classic fantasy contains old characters with all the old wizards. But much less common in SF I'd agree.

 

[The Big Peat]

Clint Eastwood's latter-day movies are (arguably) his finest works - again not SFF (except perhaps The Hereafter, which was decidedly wafty). But Unforgiven, Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, all deal with older characters in different, powerful ways. Again, not SFF. But damn, a fantasy Unforgiven - that's a hit just waiting to be written*.

*jots down idea in ideas pad.

High Plains Drifter too early to be counted? Because there's a whiff of the SFF to that too I'd have said.

And I have an idea that's not a million miles away from fantasy Unforgiven... maybe not close mind, but, you've given me ideas... although please write fantasy Unforgiven anyway.

 

[galanx]

Fantasy derives from Romanticism, and Romanticism is a young person's game. You either die early - Shelley, Byron, Keats- or end up growing out of it- Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe (and BTW, have any poets been so fortunate in the early death of their successors as Wordsworth and Coleridge?)

As for ASOIAF, Martin supposedly based it on the War of the Roses, reminding me of this quote from Churchill's "History of the English-Speaking Peoples"

No quarter was given. The Duke of York was killed; his son, the Earl of Rutland, eighteen years old,
was flying, but the new Lord Clifford, remembering St Albans, slaughtered him with joy, exclaiming, “By God’s blood, thy father slew mine; and so will I do thee, and all thy kin.”
Henceforward this was the rule of the war. The old Earl of Salisbury, caught during the night, was beheaded immediately by Lord Exeter, a natural son of the Duke of Buckingham. Margaret’s hand has been discerned in this severity. The heads of the three Yorkist nobles were exposed over the gates and walls of York. The great Duke’s head, with a paper crown, grinned upon the landscape, summoning the avengers.

Hitherto the struggle had been between mature, comfortable magnates, deeply involved in State affairs and trying hard to preserve some limits. Now a new generation took charge. There was a new Lord Clifford, a new Duke of Somerset, above all a new Duke of York, all in their twenties, sword in hand, with fathers to avenge and England as the prize.

 

[Toby Frost]

I also wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but with Joseph Merrick as the protagonist.

I must have missed this the first time around. Is that Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man? That's got to be one of the most original bits of casting ever!

please write fantasy Unforgiven anyway

Actually, one of the four main characters in the book I'm currently writing is at least 60, and another is middle-aged. I must admit that I've rigged it so that neither has a family, at least not to worry about, but they do do "older" things and have different outlooks. I would use this as an opportunity to advertise the book but at the moment I've no idea how and when it will see print!

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

"The Whenabouts of Burr" by Michael Kurland

The protagonist is a retired private eye with 2 grown children. The 2nd banana is a schoolmate of the US prez so he must be over 35 at least. I'd have mentioned this in my earlier post, but I'd forgotten the age of the main character.

This is actually one of my all time fav SF novels. Earlier I posted about it here:
What do you think Are the Best Classic Fantasy And Science Fiction Books and Stories of All Time?

Yesterday, while swimming through the debris in my house, my copy of this floated to the top, so I'm re-reading it. I'd forgotten how funny it is. A sample:

"These Indians are in your service?" Swift asked, ceasing to crouch behind the stone slab.

"Certainly," Hamilton affirmed. "Well, ah, to be technical about it; actually they think I'm some sort of a god. They work much cheaper if they think you're a god."

"Why do they think that?" Swift asked.

"Well, you know, it's because I told them I was, that's why." Hamilton looked embarrassed.

"You told them you were a god?" Swift asked, the astonishment evident in his voice.

"Yes. Well, I suppose I could have told them about Jehovah, Original Sin, Purgatory, and the Elect, and all that; but I didn't think it would do either of us much good. Since all the Elect live in Boston, and this is on the other coast, I didn't think they'd appreciate that particularly overmuch."

 

[Brian G Turner]

Since this thread was started, I'm itching to read a fantasy novel about a hero with a family doing good in the world. I think the trope of the lone hero definitely needs challenging.

Unfortunately, I fell for it myself in my own writing, but it's too late for me to rewrite that. But I will bring parenthood and family in later during the series, though that was always going to happen anyway.

 

[Kylara]

The last couple of the ender quartet have ender and his family, and also the father daughter of Path. Lovely books.

 

[Toby Frost]

Unfortunately, I fell for it myself in my own writing, but it's too late for me to rewrite that. But I will bring parenthood and family in later during the series, though that was always going to happen anyway.

I had the same problem and, ultimately, I cheated: character A was a widower, and character B got a distant, bored husband who would tolerate her painting because it brought in some cash. That said, I've discovered two interesting things: firstly, there are problems of older people that you don't need a family to write about, including, I think, the fear that the world is changing in ways you don't like, and that you are no longer wanted by those around you. Secondly, going back to Space Captain Smith, I'm struck by how much the four main characters have come to resemble a family: mother, father and two kids (or one kid and a talking pet). I find this quite cheering in a strange way.

As has been said, with people who are normally accompanied, one of the real problems is getting them into a position where they can actually have adventures. Even in a double act, unless they're Bonny and Clyde, one will slow the other down or introduce some sanity. I'm reminded of those Enid Blyton-type children's books where the first thing that had to happen was to get the parents out the way so the adventures could happen. Off to the mad professor uncle on Danger Island you go, kids!

Whatever you think of the greater representation issue - and perhaps more importantly, how greater representation should happen - it's harder to write a greater range of main characters, because you generally don't have the safety net of stock characters to fall back upon, and quite often whatever stock characters there already are are much less politically correct that the Man With No Name hero and might not be worthy of use.

 

[EJ Heijnis]

I enjoy older protagonists. The passion of youth and all that is exhausting to me, and I prefer reading about experienced people with measured reactions. That doesn't mean they don't have goals or drive, but they understand the world (any world) is not a simple place. Maybe that's why I have a hard time appreciating YA fiction. It's definitely why five of my six main characters are over 30.