Eileen Gunn, author of Stable Strategies and Others:

This is more a problem at the novel level than at the short-story level. In a short work, you can just eliminate the boring characters: nobody will miss 'em, and the story will be stronger. But at novel length, sometimes you need a character to be more than a walk-on, for functional reasons.

I use the same strategy I use at a boring party: get the other person to r
ant. Ask them how they really feel about something, and don't be afraid to ask rude questions. In real life, you've got maybe a 50% chance of finding an interesting person under there and a 75% chance of getting slapped, but when you're writing, you're really channeling your own back-brain. Turn it loose. If you can get it to rant, it might say something surprisingly relevant to the rest of the book.

(I suppose this will put people on alert when they're talking to me at parties....)

Rachel Pollack, author of Unquenchable Fire and Temporary Agency, and writer of The Doom Patrol:

In regard to the question, getting rid of the character is definitely a possibility. With any aspect, if it's just not working, you might consider it's because it doesn't belong. But let's say you do want, or need, to include this character. One thing to do is raise the stakes for the character, have the person become more serious, with more depth. You can try some extra-novel approaches. That is, write a scene about this character completely outside the book, exploring something about his or her history. You can try writing a scene from this person's point of view, in case the problem is seeing hir from the outside. Or, you might read Tarot cards for the character, figuring out what hir questions might be, and then seeing how the cards suggest insights and directions.

Sean Williams, author of the Astropolis books, The Broken Land novels, The Books Of The Cataclysm and Star Wars: The New Jedi Order novels:

With characters, I apply the same test I would to any aspect of the story that isn't coming up to expectations: would the story suffer without them? If not, then they should go. This might sound harsh, but I reckon applying Occam's Razor liberally when anything goes wrong is a good technique. Even the most savage cuts can leave the heart of the story intact. In that sense, a novel is like a living body: everything has to connect to everything else. Anything that doesn't is a cancer, draining the vitality of everything around it. A story is only as successful as the weakest of its parts, so why be dragged down by anything?

Of course, applying this advice in the middle of a draft can be a purple pain in the arse—much better to have noticed the problem before you even started—but better to make the cut before the end, when an otherwise dull character might come to life, entirely, utterly too late.

Kelley Eskridge, author of Solitaire and Dangerous Space:

When a character's not clicking, it's because she's not real enough — either in the author's imagination, or on the page.

If she only ever turns up at just the right moment to provide crucial information or serve as a foil for the protagonist's important emotional realization, then she's just a red shirt, a story puppet. She needs to have personal, compelling (to her) reasons for everything she does, and they can't just be reasons that blatantly suit the convenience of the story. Real people are damned inconvenient: they avoid issues, have oblique conversations, feel things others don't understand, and are very rarely think out loud in a coherent and rational way so that the protagonist can get important information.

If the character is motivated by personal needs as opposed to story mechanics, then are her needs urgent enough? The higher the stakes at every moment, the more compelling she is, and the more strongly other characters (and readers) can respond to her. High stakes don't necessarily mean superflu or nuclear devastation — even getting to the library by closing time can be a high stakes issue in the right circumstances. People can make some pretty interesting choices when they're running late....

And finally, if she's real in my imagination — if she has her own drives and her own goals — then is she real on the page? That comes from specific choices in description, body language, dialogue and behavior that reflect her particular worldview and give clues to what's driving her. We decipher these clues all the time in our own lives — we know what it means when the teenage bagboy hesitates over the box of tampons, or when two people at a restaurant table eat an entire course without looking at each other. As in life, so in books: find the specific behavior, and the meaning — and the reality — will be plain.

At first glance, Dick's 1954 story "The Father Thing" is a standard riff on the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers theme of alien bug creatures replacing humans. (Another, earlier classic along similar lines, Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, is also available as a free online read.)

What sets "The Father Thing" apart is its more intimate, Twilight Zone-esque quality. The alien doppelgangers are a home invasion, not a planetary invasion. They only want to replace one single family — starting with the father, then moving on to the mother and finally the son. The son, Charles, is the only one who realizes that anything is wrong, and he quickly realizes that he won't be able to convince any adults to believe him. Instead, he goes to the neighborhood kids, who believe him instantly without even questioning. That's my favorite part of the story — the way in which the neighbor kids are just like, "Sure, your dad's been replaced with an alien. It sucks when that happens."

Of course, it's all a metaphor for coming-of-age crap and feeling alienated from your parents and realizing that you and your peers belong to a different world than the older generation. But it's also a nice dose of Dickian paranoia, especially as the story gets creepier and creepier.

Meanwhile, I praised Kelley Eskridge's story collection Dangerous Space a while back, and three stories from it are online. All three stories clearly deal with the theme of art and artificiality. And the dangers and challenges involved in trying to reach an authentic artistic voice in a world of shapeshifters, emotional broadcast technology and dystopian art lords. And two of the stories, "And Salome Danced" and "Dangerous Space (PDF)," feature the same protagonist, the genderless producer/director named Mars. The third, "Strings," features a violnist who dares to improvise in a world that's rejected spontenaeity in music.

All these stories are well worth spending a Sunday afternoon reading, with a mug of tea. And there's plenty more at the link. [via Free Speculative Fiction Online]

"The Father Thing"-inspired photo by Demcanulty.

The novella, also called "Dangerous Space," follows Mars, an impressario whose gender is never specified and who also stars in the story "And Salome Danced." Mars has a dangerous habit of getting too closely involved with the artists he/she works with, and so it is in "Dangerous Space." Mars goes to work for a rock band called Noir, who need some help hitting the big time, and gets involved with the lead singer Duncan Black.

A lot of the novella deals with the relationships between Mars and Duncan, and the young sound tech that Mars schools, and the other bandmembers. Plus the creative process and the stormy personalities that go into a band on the rise. But then Eskridge throws in the cool invention of F-tech:

F-tech was just coming into use around that time in the pharmaceutical industry: feeling technology that allowed researchers a first-hand experience of reactions in subjects testing new drugs — nausea, fatigue, the specific location of headache, all available through an adaptation of augmented cognition technology that mapped limbic brain activity and physiological sensation. It took some bright spark from marketing who didn't give a shit for the purity of science to realize the tech was a better product than any of the drugs it was helping to test. The company began marketing to doctors: instead of relying on the patient to fumble his way through metaphor or vague pointing, just put on the funny wire hat and for those few moments, make his experience your own. Feel your appendix swell inside you; share Alzheimer's dementia; find out what PMS is really like.

It took a second and a half for the adult entertainment industry to get in on the game, and have some fun with the name F-tech, with dramatic results: since it was real-time tech that only worked with real-live peole, porn was out and peep shows were in — and everyone was curious to find out how the other half lived.

Just when the twisted egos and skewed emotions between Duncan, Mars and the rest of the band are at their most treacherous, the band decides to play a show using F-tech to let the audience members "feel" what it's like to be in the band. With fascinating results.

A lot of the other stories in the book deal with feeling and artistry as well: in "Strings," a violinist plays a Stradivarius in a dystopian future where you're not allowed to create or improvise, only play existing music with total precision. "Monitors" watch and grab anyone who makes mistakes or, worse yet, expresses themselves. (It feels more like a metaphor than a plausible future, but it's no potent for that.) In "Salome Danced," Mars gets involved with Jo, a seductive chameleon who seems to switch genders at will, first playing John the Baptist, then Salome, and finally wanting to play Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. In "Alien Jane," Rita gets a new roommate in a mental institution: a woman named Jane who can't feel any physical discomfort, making her an attractive target for doctors wanting to do bizarre inhuman experiments. (Sort of like the comic and TV show Painkiller Jane, except that this Jane's natural anaesthesia turns out to be a bit more complicated.)

Taken as a whole, it's a thrilling look at the vulnerability involved in performance: both in the obvious sense of having to open yourself up in front of an audience, but also in the more subtle sense that artists often wind up having to share a lot of intimacy with their fellow performers and creators, in public. The title story, in particular, is a great primer in how to create a captivating future technology that transforms society — and then use it to help tell a small, personal story. [Amazon]