Sunday, March 7, 2010
FOIL-ed Again: Or FOIL Method Characters in Novels
Most of my post-traumatic stress flashbacks are high school related. I’m sure that doesn’t exactly count in most mental facilities because being shot at is always much more stressful than having to go to Algebra class, but some days, I’d rather just be shot at. Take for instance, the FOIL method. You know this one: first, outer, inner, and last. It’s used to multiply two binomials, whatever the hell those are.
As you can imagine, my Algebra teacher lied because I’m relatively certain I have not used the FOIL method or almost any part of algebra in my everyday life since I graduated. Thank you, God.
Fortunately, math class wasn’t the only place we learned about foils. We also learned about foils in literature. For me, these types of foils made much more sense. A foil character is a person who is used to make another character, usually the main character, stand out more, done by contrast. The term comes from the word foil which is a jeweler’s practice of placing polished metal (foil) beneath a gemstone to make it shine more brightly. (Doesn't that sound lovely? You're making your book shine. Besides, I love jewelry.)
And whether you’ve even heard of the term foil character or not, I’m sure you could identify one without even thinking about it. In fiction, we frequently use mentors and/or best friends as foils to the hero/heroine. Roguish Captain Jack Sparrow is a foil to the honorable Will Turner. Will wants to ask permission; Jack wants to get forgiven (or at least not hanged) when all is said and done. Will wants to rescue the girl; Jack wants to save his own skin. Will wants to be a good and noble blacksmith with a good and noble sailor for a father; and Jack wants to be a pirate. Both of them get the job done, but differently.
In the Essex sisters series (Eloisa James), the sisters are foils to each other. Tessa, the oldest, is the caring, mother-nurturer one; Annabel is the mercenary one (so to speak, not wanting to marry for romance); Imogen is the romantic (can’t get any more romantic running off with neighbor boy gambler!); and Josie is almost a blend of the other three: caring, mercenary, and romantic (sensitive to what others think; practical in that she makes a list of what she needs to do to capture a man; romantic in that secretly she wants to be loved for herself.) And they all end up mentoring each other on some level throughout the books.
Foils are useful. They add contrast; they give humor. Best of all, if your FOIL character is likable enough, you can use them in another book.
So here is my FOIL method for making foil characters. It’s a lot easier than algebra and you’re much more likely to use it in your everyday life. FOIL stands for: Funny, Opposite, Insightful, and Lovable.
Funny: this character is usually used for comedic effect, even if he's the "straight man" and isn’t dropping one-liners. However, mentors and sidekicks (which can sometimes be played as the same character in a story) frequently are given the best lines. They can say things that the hero/heroine can’t. And really, it’s the least we can do for them: giving them the funny lines, because the hero is the one who’s going to get the girl, right? Throw the guy a bone. For instance, in Pleasure for Pleasure, Imogen—who never struck me as exactly a one-liner sort of character, being she was very romantic and “serious”—is advising Josie about men and age, “Thirty is a watershed year. If they’re going to develop intelligence, they do it around then, and if they don’t, it’s too late. So you mustn’t hanker after men in their twenties. That’s like buying a pig in a poke.”
Opposite: this character usually exhibits traits opposite of main character, to add humor, but also to exhibit good qualities of main character to literary effect. (Ex: a 401K-save-10%, loves the finer things accountant has a perpetually broke surfer friend who buys lottery tickets and ramen noodles; or a sweats-clad single social worker is friends with a bored housewife who shops on Rodeo Drive—how these people are friends is anyone’s guess, but it’s amusing to see how they work together and learn from each other.) Annabel is considered the beautiful, sexy sister, and Josie despairs of being anything like her because she’s too fat and self-conscious.
Insightful: Foils are often placards for “mentor” roles. Not only are they given the best lines, they are frequently given profound, INSIGHTFUL lines to make the character wake up and stop doing old behavior that will lose them the love of their lives. (See: Watershed year line above. Can’t get anymore insightful than that.)
Lovable: They have to be at least likable, but lovable is better. No one wants their hero to be friends with a complete asshole—or if they are, they better have a damned good reason. If the FOIL character is an asshole and doesn’t change, it’s possible the hero may have to cut ties when he realizes this behavior is not doing anyone any good. Imogen goes through a period of very self-destructive behavior before she becomes “worthy” of being a heroine. And again, if you make them likable, you can probably use them for the next book. (I also think “loyal” works here because FOIL characters are usually loyal to the hero/heroine, and loyalty goes a long ways to negating any bad behavior that character might have.)
So what do you think of foil characters in books? Do you consciously or unconsciously give your “mentor/friends” characters opposite traits to your hero/heroine? Do you give them the best lines? Who are some of your favorite foil characters? And does anyone actually understand how the FOIL method works in algebra?
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32 comments:
Busy as hell at present but couldn't resist a peek....just for a laugh! *g*
Multiplying binomials was considered trivial when I was taught and certainly not dignified with a name!
(a+bx)(c+dx) a,b,c,d are numbers, x is variable
=a(c+dx) +bx(c+dx)
=ac+adx +bcx+bdx**2
=ac+(ad+bc)x +bdx**2
Foil characters are essential. I think of the term more in connection with fencing though. From my recent reading, Sergeant Lewiss provides the target for Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse to test his rapier like crime detection theories. Of course its a delight when Lewis finds the vital clue that enables Morse to solve the mystery!
I like this! It's a great way to categorize the stuff that is floating around in my brain -- now I can actually retrieve it when I need it!
And the cartoon made me think of one when I was in college (WAY back when!). The professor is standing at his lectern, looking grim, and he says, "Everything we didn't cover in class and everything that isn't in the textbook WILL be on the test." LOL
I don't think I consciously create foils. Though maybe I should reconsider. :) Now that you point it out, they are useful. Must consider more fully.
Algebra was fine. Geometry, a little more complex, but fine. Trig made me mix those two and while I had some issues initially, it all worked out.
Now, Calculus? That just turned out to be more than I could manage. Too many planes of thinking.
awesome blog, Hellie! I don't remember FOIL from algebra (says the high school drop out -- I was traumatized by high school too. Getting shot would have been *so* much less painful!), but I vaguely remember the concept from accounting classes. The same concept is used in inventory, right? Or maybe that's a different acronym. Clearly, math is not my strong suit.
I don't think I consciously do this, but I think focusing on this could really help with my secondary characters. I have kind of random, secondary characters floating around. I never thought of using them to highlight the hero/heroine. What an excellent idea!
Q, I love how you remind me that the FOIL method is so trivial that they didn't bother to make up a cute name for it when you learned how to do it. I can't tell you the number of nights I woke up in a cold sweat, trying to remember how to do it and for it to make sense. (I could usually do it enough to pass, but never enough to "understand" and therefore care.)
Fencing is another great example of foils. That one was mentioned too when you google foils. (I've heard we can take fencing lessons around where I live--which would be a big deal, this is not exactly an area where you think you could learn fencing. We can barely get oscar-nominated films to be shown here--and I thought they'd be a hoot to try.)
I'm not sure I get the reference of the characters and mystery solving? Are they fencing while they talk about possible solutions? I always love how exercise sometimes jogs the answer out of the mystery solver. They'll be jogging along, see a seagull, remember that seagulls on a certain beach would have something in particular in their feces--and voila, discover that the feces discovered on the corpse was from seagulls on a different beach, so the body was moved from that location.
Well, you know...something like that. It's early and I haven't had my mountain dew yet.
Hi Donna!! *LOL* NICE. I had college professors like that. Everyone was always scrambling to take his class, so the first week of classes, when you could still add/drop, he'd drone on and on about 50 page papers we'd have to write, and essay exams, and mountains of reading...and by the end of the week, a number would drop--then he'd be, "Finally, now we can get serious."
We never wrote anything over 10 pages. That man didn't want to read it.
I don’t think I consciously create foils. Though maybe I should reconsider. :) Now that you point it out, they are useful. Must consider more fully.
I'm not sure a lot of authors consciously do. (I'm pretty sure it's my OCD English major self who looks for this stuff.) But I think if you thought about your main hero and his best friend, you'd find they are opposites in a lot of key ways. Think of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson--foils of each other. Both SMART and such, but just the detail would be different. I think characters who are friends with each pick people with core beliefs similar to their own (don't we all), but the funny stuff to focus on are the differences. Finding the quirky and odd can give great comic timing and relief if you're writing something darker. You know, like Monk behaves on that TV show...or on Castle, Castle is goofy and inwardly a 12 year old boy--while he's paired up with Beckett who is the "straight man", no nonsense cop.
I don’t think I consciously do this, but I think focusing on this could really help with my secondary characters. I have kind of random, secondary characters floating around. I never thought of using them to highlight the hero/heroine. What an excellent idea!
Awesome! I mean, I'm sure in the long run editors are probably looking for a more consistent plot or BIGGER main characters, but I like looking for the joke...and this is one of the ways I like to do it. I think even the darkest book can use a joke here and there. Even The Hurt Locker had some humor (however dark) in it--and the main character and his partner were definite opposites. *LOL*
I'm with you on the math, Hellie. Despite curriculum decisions and math teacher sermons, I've never found a use for the math I was forced to take beyond 6th grade.
I think the first-of-semester scare days are fairly standard in higher education. I always counted on having at least five drop by the end of the first week (and the courses I taught maxed out at 20-30). :)
Your blog post has set me thinking about foils. I don't think I've ever consciously used a character as a foil in my writing, but I can certainly see contrasts if I look at my characters analytically. I think we internalize a lot of techniques when we read that we then apply to our writing without analyzing our choices.
Janga, I think everyone has been saying they don't do it consciously--and really I don't think of it consciously-consciously. I do consciously go, "What trait can so-and-so have that would be humorous here? That would contrast against stuff that the hero does?--but I do it for the joke. But contrasts and foils can be used for so much more than the joke.
I think--like a lot of the things I focus on *LOL*--it's one of those things that is better served in revision than initial writing. After all, in the original foil, it's about putting a piece of shiny metal beneath a gem to make it shine brighter. Clearly it's the gem that's the most important, the piece you have to find and polish first. Then you can concentrate on the metal beneath. :)
Poor Terri emailed--she's sick and hanging off the railing in misery. (I think the paint fumes got to her--but the painting is done...so maybe we should send up a cheer to Terri for finishing her painting!)
I use algebra all the time. Only I don't call it algebra, I call it figuring something out. For instance, I might use it to figure out if I got totally screwed on my recent car purchase since the stupid thing doesn't seem to be getting the gas mileage it should, and how do I convert from kilometers to miles again? I better grab my daughter's math book and double check.
Hi, Alice! I solve for X a lot with figuring car mileage too. My old car is getting less and less efficient as time goes on, poor thing.
Actually I do long division. *LOL* I divide the miles driven by the gallons of gas I just chucked into it and it usually averages about 20 miles to the gallon. Which I think my car is supposed to get 27 miles to the gallon on the highway, but I don't think I'm that lucky. I think the city driving is more in tune with 20 miles a gallon anyway.
I read this last night, sighed and didn't comment. Brain was not up to considering anything quite so complex. Much like algebra...
I'm still not quite up to speed, though not having the poisonous paint fume heaves as Terrio is.
I believe when I write I'm think of the secondaries as sidekicks. I realize I do a lot of buddy writing and you're right, they do tend to reflect what is best for each other. But that is about as far as I'm ready to take it.
I do love a good villainous foil... I swear, Disney does this great... The Emporer's New Groove...Eartha Kitt as Yzma and Patrick Warburton as Kronk were brilliant. John Cusack as Igor with Steve Buscemi as Scamper.
Or the brilliance of Bolt, with Bolt, Mittens and Rhino.
Why, you might wonder, does Chance's brain always see things more clearly when animated... I think because it's so exagerated even someone as dense as I can easily spot it!
Hellie - I love inserting humor too. My stuff is really dark, but there's always a few smart-ass comments thrown in there.
I did that in my last MS. Josephine was the hero's sidekick/partner. The hero, Kersey, was too honorable to just shoot all the other characters and be done with the whole thing. Jo kept trying to talk him into killing people, would get all excited when she thought she was going to have the chance to blow some things up, and would pout when Kersey said no. Personally, I find that hilarious :)
Of course, now she's a heroine herself, so she's got to be less trigger-happy. In my mind, that equates to much less funny too. *g*
2nd: I loved Mittens. She was so adorable and cynical. I totally wanted to take her home and make her my cat.
Disney does excellent foil villains to the hero; and that's another excellent place to use foils. (Though I still prefer the sidekick. I prefer humor, you know.)
Jo kept trying to talk him into killing people, would get all excited when she thought she was going to have the chance to blow some things up, and would pout when Kersey said no. Personally, I find that hilarious
That's the kind of character I'm talking about! *LOL* I love these kinds of characters! The little out there character, who does or says the things that the hero can't really say. For the most part, the hero of a piece, can't go around saying, "Let's kill that guy!" Mostly. I'm sure someone has done it somewhere--but for some reason it's more acceptable when the sidekick acts this way instead of the hero.
I just like what the sidekick gets away with.
In my story, Lucy is the sidekick. He gets to do all sorts of stuff a hero wouldn't. His idea of finding available women is to go to a stripclub. Could a hero make this suggestion? NO.
In my story, Lucy is the sidekick. He gets to do all sorts of stuff a hero wouldn’t. His idea of finding available women is to go to a stripclub. Could a hero make this suggestion? NO.
LMAO!!! Love this!
Love this blog!
My secondary characters often try to take over, and this blog on FOIL characters really helped me think about that line I have trouble with sometimes of when it's okay for them to take over and when it's too much; they're encrouching on the hero or heroine's territory.
I guess I think of it also like a play; a reminder of who is supposed to headline the show. I do like that FOIL characters can occassionally be scene stealers and get the best lines, but their name is, for good reasons, in smaller font than the big star.
My only example in mind is the play I just read in Lit class, "A Streetcar Named Desire." Before I read the play (and I hadn't seen the movie, but saw it on AMC this weekend), I had the idea that Stella was the star. All I'd seen was the infamous clip with Marlon Brando bellowing, "Hey, Stella!"
But Blanche is the star. (I didn't know. One of many of my gaps in pop culture!) True, Stella gets that memorable "Hey, Stella!" scene and some good lines, but they don't shift the focus from Blanche.
I loved, loved, loved this play. The movie? Not so much really. Too much left out or run past too fast, although it did seem like Vivian Leigh was sort of playing Scarlet O'Hara (in Blanche) 10 years later!
I only wish all the painting was done. I only finished the living room. But at this point, I do believe I might stop with the dining room. Unless I find some cheap labor to help with the bedrooms.
And the heaving seems to have stopped. I've attempted to swallow dry wheat toast. Fingers crossed it stays down.
I know I'd heard of FOIL characters years ago but never thought to use them until Hellie told me I needed a foil in a short I was writing a couple years ago. She was right, of course, and I've been conscious of using them ever since.
Though this has resulted in the same problem Melissa mentions. Sometimes the FOIL character steals the scene and I have to hold them back. For some reason, all my heroines start out as bland characters with big haired/big personalities BFFs.
I'd like to say the heroines come around, but I haven't gotten to the end of a story to find out. :)
Oh, and I use algebra in my current job quite a bit. But then I loved math. Until Calculus. I'm with you on that, Marn. They took away the numbers! It's not math anymore if there aren't any numbers!
Melissa, I sympathize and empathize. Lucy frequent hijacks scenes with his charming self. I've had to delete scenes I've adored because it didn't help my main characters. *LOL*
Hell, I had to delete a scene with a hairstylist--which I love my description of him (I'll have to kill that darling) because I reference him as a mortal version of Edward Cullen. But he is only a stylist and is only in that main scene. It'll have to be cut. *LOL* But at least it amused me. *LOL*
My secondary characters always hijack scenes.
Actors tend to play the same roles over and over (think of Ben Stiller or even Ben Affleck: same guy, over and over), like writers tend to write the same core heroes over and over. We write/act what we know.
Blanche was another displaced Southern Belle, wasn't she? In a sense, she was playing another form of Scarlett O'Hara.
Terri, glad the heaving has slightly resided. Hope the toast holds.
I too have lots of blandish main character with outsized personality-clad sidekicks. For some reason, I'm unwilling to give my main characters the same kind of quirks I'm willing to give sidekicks. It's a flaw. I think my heroine/hero won't find love if his quirks (whatever they are) are out there, hanging out for all of us to ogle.
Geometry was okay--I couldn't do it now. Algebra was a trial in all forms. We did a bastardized version of Calculus for Physics, and ironically I actually got it. But mostly it was remembering formulas and applying them. So I wasn't learning anything. *LOL*
Well, Hel, with Disney foils, they are usually the place humor comes home to nest!
But I do tend to write the buddy stuff more than the FOIL... I think. You know, it's been a hairy week, I'm not sure I can simply wrap my brain around it today!
Ter - Glad the toast is staying put! Hope you feel best soon!
Buddy stuff and foiling aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
It IS Monday, and probably too early in the week to attempt math or science. Unless you're Q. *grins*
Not a rule. Just something to keep in mind if it's useful to you.
But he is only a stylist and is only in that main scene. It’ll have to be cut. *LOL* But at least it amused me. *LOL*
That's where I get stubborn. If I love something, some description or it "amused me" (and I often crack myself up - scary, but true), then my questions of "if it doesn't move the story along or say something about the main character" turn into...can it? I'll change everything around what doesn't do those things rather than cut what does amuse me! *LOL*
I think I need a rubber room today. Somewhere to just throw myself around and bounce back without really hurting myself.
I'm having a Scamper day! (I really need to buy that DVD.)
Of course, now she’s a heroine herself, so she’s got to be less trigger-happy. In my mind, that equates to much less funny too. *g*
But that IS funny, Hal! The whole change is funny in it's unique way. I wonder, did you have to give her something (uhm, legal?) to replace being "trigger-happy"? :)
Sweet lord, the first comment I see is Q, spouting off some letters equal math nonsense. Had to skip it posthaste. Sorry Q. I do love you dearly, but the math thing only makes me want to ruin you to the point you can't remember the math stuff anymore.
Love FOIL characters and I love how you've made this your own Hells! Great blog for a Monday.
Imogen was my favorite heroine of the Essex sisters. I loved her character. Loved her will and her destruction and the building blocks to build her character back up in her book with Rafe.
And I wrote yesterday.
Don't ask me how many words. Its embarrassing. But I managed to do it. I might actually manage to have something for our meeting this weekend. Woot, woot.
I do tend to give my characters someone to balance them out. I mean, Kiki has Tory. I'm attempting to give Kiki and Tory the same type of relationship I have with my best friend. Not an easy task. Tory's not comedic relief in the slightest. Kiki and Tory are way too much alike for being completely different people. Tory doesn't get the best lines or the most insightful lines all the time but says what needs to be said at the right minute. She's a bit sarcastic and jaded, but she's loyal to a fault.
Thank you, Sin. :) Ms. Yount must have turned us onto Foil characters or something. *LOL*
Your characters might be more realistic in that they don't always have the one-liners.
I like how heroes and heroines foil each other, look completely opposite on the surface, but beneath, they share some very important key neuroses. *LOL* I love how authors reveal that in stories. You go, "Oh! That's what they have in common! Would you look at that?"
New words is great words. You'll have plenty for the weekend. Besides it's about the enchiladas.
I never have the good one liners. In fact, it's hard enough for me to write dialog since I don't like to speak as it is, let alone make my characters speak. That's one thing I've had to work on. Cut out the description so much and add in some damned dialog.
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