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Author Topic: Everyman characters
wbriggs
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I want an archaeologist character as one of my POVs. She's there to show us the world through her eyes.

It seems that everyman characters are OK, to me. But I was getting from OSC that I needed to make my characters interesting. Maybe he doesn't do everymans. I thought about those that did:

Alice in Wonderland. She's there to be normal while the world is insane. A friend of mine says no, she's very unusual, in that she objects to illogic and is determined to overcome it. She's a 7 1/2 year old scientist.

Hastings (like Watson) are POV characters that are everyman, but they're not the MC; they watch the MC. My character isn't watching any one person in particular; she may not be able to fit that model.

Sandra, in Connie Willis's Bellwether, is a scientist studying fads. Most of what she does is observe the craziness in the world around her (like Alice) and wish to impose order on it. She also wants the answer to a scientific question. In that book, we don't get grounded in a particular time and place for 2 1/2 pages -- and we don't even get MC's name until about the same time! She's talking about science, fads, and falling in love, and that's what the story's about.

I'm tempted to do a lot of everyman. In fact, I get impatient when authors take a character whose purpose is to see strange events, and add a lot of detail about how he felt when his father didn't show up for his high-school football games, etc. etc. (Stephen King, The Stand). OSC said, make the characters interesting. I don't find anything in Characters & Viewpoint about "everyman."

When do you like an everyman MC? Any other thoughts?


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Ray
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I think you're going about "everyman" the wrong way. Trying to write about an average person while making them average not only is boring, but also false. All the friends and acquaintances I have are ordinary people, but none of them are alike. They all have their fascinating intricacies, something that makes them stand out for me and the others who know them.

An "everyman" isn't a nondescript person. They're fascinating people who don't move beyond their set social spheres, or at least, not often. One of the best stories loaded with the "everyman" is Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Every character is a completely regular person from beginning to end, and it's a wonderful showing of what their lives are like.


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hoptoad
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I like everymam characters, that's probably why Sam was always the hero for me in LOTR.
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ChrisOwens
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Peter Parker is a classic everyman character, designed so that despite superhuman abilities, every member of the audience can not only identify, but stand up and say, "That's me! They captured my essense!" It what's on the inside that makes an everyman character, no matter how extraordinary they are externally.
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Spaceman
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It isn't the ordinariness of the character that is appealing, it's the extrordinary deeds the ordinary character accomplishes that makes the character appealing.
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mikemunsil
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Yah, Everyman is not just vanilla pudding; Everyman is vanilla pudding surrounded by rainbow ice cream. At first you concentrate on the ice cream, but after a while you begin to realize that the pudding was there by choice, and it is that choice that sets the stage for the collaboration of colors.

Hmm. Does that make sense?


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Sara Genge
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wbriggs: I think you answered yourself. The only time an everyman character can be truely and utterly non-descript is in "milieu" stories when he's dumped into the middle of crazyness. See Gulliver. Alice and Guilliver are there so that the reader can have something "normal" to compare all the weirness with. Even in those cases, give the MC something to make him special. Nobody is really average. Even people who are think they're special.
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wbriggs
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(By "everyman" I certainly don't mean "boring" or "traitless" -- agreed.)

The crazyness angle I hadn't noticed. What do the rest of you think? Offhand, I can't think of an everyman I liked that *didn't* show up in a very odd world. But then I like to read about very odd worlds.

[This message has been edited by wbriggs (edited August 14, 2006).]


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Robert Nowall
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Like "wbriggs" said. I can't say I've thought of some of the characters mentioned here, particularly Gulliver and Alice, as "normal"---they have their own sets of pecularities.
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Zero
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Hey someone said,
quote:
I like everymam characters, that's probably why Sam was always the hero for me in LOTR.

I think that's not the whole picture. Sam was an interesting character, I thought, because of defined and amazing loyalty, resiliance, personal fortitude. He had a lot of qualities that I can identify in my best of friends that make him a very likable character. And when he endures and sticks by frodo, and kills Shelob, well, that isn't just an everyday character.

I would say a character can be quite interesting without being explicitly unique. He doesn't shoot torpedos out of his eyes and he can't fly, but he isn't the coward most real people would be when faced with his situation.


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Survivor
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I'm going to have to object to Alice being extraordinary. Yes, she objects to what she percieves as illogic, but so does every seven year old. Her objections are generally quite mundane, just the sort of thing that anyone used to our world would say about someplace completely different.

The point about the role of an everyman I'll substantiate. That is, I agree that the role of an everyman is to provide a surrogate for the audience in dealing with a strange milieu, someone who asks the questions that a character from that milieu would never think to ask. Thus you only find everyman characters in stories that deal predominantly with the totally unfamiliar. Ransom in Out of the Silent Planet is an everyman. In Perelandra he begins to lose his everyman quality and becomes more a hero in a variant form of a story with wich we are all somewhat familiar. By That Hideous Strength he is even beyond being the hero, he is almost a demi-god. Of course he undergoes significant change, but most of that occurs at the end of Perelandra. The reason he is not an everyman in Perelandra has more to do with the underlying familiarity of the milieu, not its lack of essential strangeness.

An everyman shouldn't be particularly average. But the everyman shouldn't deviate from those qualities that are nearly universal amongst the intended audience. The point of an everyman is that he comes from the audience's milieu.


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ChrisOwens
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Maybe not the audience's milieu per say, but a milieu they can relate to.

For instance in, again the WOT: Rand, Mat and Perrin are everyman's. But the initial setting is very familar to most, a rather mundane rural village very removed from the world at large, full of farmers and shepards, blacksmiths, roofthachers. From these everyman's we learn of the world as they begin thier journey set for Tar Valon. We learn of it as they do, as well as the concepts of the One Power.

Of course, the Two Rivers was a clone of Tolkien's Shire, another springboard for ordinary character into a fantastic millieu.


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pantros
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Everyman makes a perfectly good MC when the world around them is not their usual world, like Alice, ...Yankee in King Arthur's court, etc. The Everyman becomes exceptional in the environment of the unusual.

You can't have an Everyman MC in his everyday world with his everyday friends. That's boring, nothing to tell.


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Survivor
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Hmmmm...I don't think that I can count the callow youth on his first quest as an everyman. It's a separate archtype. But the function is similar.
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ChrisOwens
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Maybe, but the children are the future...

Everyman definition according to dictionary.com: An ordinary person, representative of the human race.

Youths are people too. And in a way, very representative of the human condition overall, in that humanity as a whole is far from mature.

[This message has been edited by ChrisOwens (edited August 14, 2006).]


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hoptoad
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When you see those people interviewed on TV who have done something miraculously heroic and they say, 'I just did what anyone would have done in that position.' I think there is a lot of truth in what they are saying. Sure, others may have acted differently BUT they where Johnny-on-the-spot and why should we discount their opinions en masse?

Ordinary people presented with extraordinary circumstance will act, and those actions will always appear extraordinary -- extraordinarily good or extarordinarily bad. Never ordinary.

If you really want a clue to Sam Gamgee, at the end of third book he turns to his wife and say something like, 'Well I'm back now.' indicating he has exited what he considers an extraordinary world and is back to his ordinary life, one of work and family and stuff. His adventure was never over in his mind until he said that.


The fact that it is Sam that most fully follows the Monomyth Cycle format indicates, to me that he became the master of two worlds, happy in the ordinary but unafraid of the extraordinary.

quote:

loyalty, resiliance, personal fortitude


Certainly qualities everyman potentially possesses, or hopes they do.

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited August 14, 2006).]


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hoptoad
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PS: Who has read Plague Dogs?
They were dogs but they were everyman.

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited August 14, 2006).]


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rstegman
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If you read a lot of stories, you will find that even the most "normal" and "average" character is a super hero and super genius.
They have physical abilities and knowledge we could never achieve, especially under pressure. They are also extremely lucky.

To really test this, consider carefully as to whether you, under your exact knowledge, exact skills, exact physical abilities, could ever survive in any world you create.
I have never created a world I could survive in. I could walk two miles, but I would be laid up for a month afterwords because of foot problems. I could not put in a whole hour of physical labor because I am used to a desk job. My knowledge is of the kind that cannot come up with the best answers at the spur of the moment. I can solve problems, but it is slow and plotting. I don't do well in game shows.
The few of my real skills could be useable outside my father's 90 year lifespan or my eventual 90 year lifespan, because of changes in technologies. Simply put, A tolerably average person such as myself would DIE in any world I create.

Because of this, one has to "improve" the character to survive riggors of the story. They are not average, they are superior to the average person.


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hoptoad
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yes, my point is that the reader wants to believe they possess some, some, of the character's traits.
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Robert Nowall
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You might say your viewpoint character---the character in the story who is closest to what you are---isn't so much you as you are, but you as you would like to be...
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