Something Charles Dickens does extremely well is use stock characters in complex ways. The usefulness of a stock character is that it makes them immediately pop off the page and stick in your eyes and ears.
Stock characters get a bad reputation because they lack complexity. Which is all fine and good and true. But the way Dickens uses them is to create complexity in the novel. Joe Abercrombie does this very effectively as well. But by making characters leap into our minds and stick in our memories, it gives great contrast and greater depth to our protagonists, to our heroes, to our POV characters, which deepens the novel.
More than that, though, what you can do with a well used stock character is gradually give them greater shape and depth. Abercrombie loves to do this, but Dickens was a fair hand at it as well, of course.
And this is something I’ve been thinking about as I slowly read through this novel again, and it’s giving me movement, giving me more chances to play, to create expand this novel beyond the story of a child coming of age.
Of course, some of this runs into the provincial nature of this first novel. I’ll have much more use for these stock characters and ideas in the second and other subsequent novels.
I keep getting ideas for the second novel, which may expand dramatically from what I initially envisioned. I mean, there’s no may to it. This will happen. It’s happening already.
It’s a bit strange to write 100,000 words over about six weeks and then to slow down so dramatically to write poems, to take breaks, to take time, to get this right.
Because that’s the important thing. Not the doing of the thing, but doing it well.
And so now I’m slowly going back through this novel to make it shine all the brighter before I race towards the conclusion, because it is true that this novel has not yet been resolved. I still need to figure out how to wrap this up, and though I’ve seeded a few ideas of how to get from this first book to the second, I need to sort out the actual correct way to accomplish it.
Likely, the simple and obvious way is probably the correct one.
After all, I need my young child protagonist to wander away from all he knows due to calamity.
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