Stock Characters

Jasper Fforde wrote a series of books featuring a literary Detective named Tuesday Next, who travels freely between reality and a world of fiction populated by fictional characters. She comes from a long line of time travelers whose responsibilities include correcting time anomalies so history doesn’t get screwed up. Her husband periodically appears and disappears, depending on whether someone is messing with his history.

Tuesday’s adventures are hilarious. She deals straight-faced and deadpan as characters like Humpty Dumpty and Colonel Bradshaw slip in and out of narratives where they don’t belong, like Jane Austen’s stories.

One of the things Fforde does particularly well is put a comic spin on one of the essential elements of fiction: stock characters. An author cannot afford to waste pages drawing detailed descriptions and applying well defined personality to characters that appear only peripherally in a story. If they did, readers would lose track of the plot and quickly abandon the book and the author.

Instead, authors use a quick shorthand to describe these fringe players using simple descriptions and highly circumscribed actions. Fforde plays on this by putting these players into little endless action loops where an actor does the same little task over and over, repeating the same snippets of dialog. When Tuesday Next encounters situations like that, she knows she is deep in a backstory where nothing important can happen. The characters are either slightly out of focus, with bland undefined features, or they are literally two dimensional cardboard cutouts.

While this makes for great humor, the point should not be lost that those stock characters are necessary to fill in the narrative without clogging up the story with unnecessary detail. Writers only need to be careful that the background characters don’t all blend together. Not all women are tall, buxom statuesque blondes. Not all bureaucrats are bald bespectacled accountants. Not all Nazi Assassins are muscular, blond Aryan gods.

Some of the shorthand is legitimate in the sense that stereotypes are recognizable for a reason. I recently drove past a party where most of the guests’ vehicles where jacked up pickup trucks. I saw one of the attendees. He was muscular and deeply tanned, with his spiky blond hair cut in a mullet. He was wearing a faded t-shirt with the sleeves torn off.

I couldn’t have drawn a better caricature if I was a cartoonist.