character and caricature

Rambly ramble - I'll tag it meta because it's the best fitting tag I've got.


Ernest Hemingway once said, "When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."

And this got me thinking about shared universes, long-running serials, and fanon. So much of what we call characterization is caricature: a series of traits, descriptions, a name (or two or three). Leather-pants!Draco isn't a fanon character (as we usually think about characters), he's a caricature. The Goddamn Batman isn't a character either, except when he's grounded in a work, the mind of a particular writer, reader (and maybe groups of writers/readers?).

Hemingway's living person-character exists fully realized in the mind of the novelist, and in the novel's reader. On the stage, it's in the moment of performance - I think - the moment of actor-audience gestalt. How much of character is passed on to the next generation of stories and performances? How much of this shared characterization we like to talk about is actually shared? Is it a case of always creating a new character, each time based on the distilled caricature of what came before? Is Batman a character, existing in culture, or would he be better described as an archetype? a figure of myth? an icon?

This, I guess, all depends on accepting Hemingway's definition of character, caricature and the thing that lives in novels, but yeah. Discuss, for I am confused.

fyi for all you action writers

chn_breathmint is doing a series of fantastic firearms tutorials. It was inspired by, uh, bad firearms writing in Inception fandom but is both general and thorough enough to be a solid intro to conventional arms.