Meet Your Characters
By Dave King | October 18, 2016 |
Once again, the comments section of last month’s article sparked enough ideas to inspire a whole new article. In this case, someone asked how you let your characters’ cultures shape who they are without creating stereotypes – slow-moving southerners, taciturn Yankees, or excessively polite Canadians?
The obvious answer is that culture isn’t the only influence on your characters. Just show these other elements — education level, childhood trauma, various accidents of birth – at play as well. We’re all a mishmash of all sorts of different influences, and how they work together or against one another is what makes us unique.
But this raises the larger question of how you balance all these elements, showing how they reinforce and undermine one another? How do you turn all these variables into a single, plausible person? I’ve seen too many characters who are the product of a single source — psychopaths with childhoods filled with sex and violence or emotionally needy characters who lost their parents at an early age. While a single influence might occasionally predominate – psychopaths often have abusive childhoods – all your characters need some balance to be individuals.
A lot of writers get around the question by simply basing their characters on people they know. And a lot of good literature can be written this way – Harper Lee’s Dill was Truman Capote, after all. But basing your characters on real people has its limits, besides the risk of having your friends recognize themselves when the book comes out. Even when you base a character on someone you know well, your own imagination is going to have to fill in a lot of the details. If you’re not consciously aware how much of the character you’re supplying, then your characters can easily wind up being mostly you. This gives them a sameness that’s hard for you to see because you’re too close to it.
Of course, many writers are comfortable with having at least their main character be mostly them — a lot of novels start with the question, “What would I do if this happened to me.” And, again, a lot of good books get written this way – I suspect Kinsey Milhone is made up in large part of Sue Grafton. But even if your main character is essentially you, you still have to create a plausible cast of minor characters, and they can’t all be you. One reason Sue Grafton sells as well as she does is that her other characters are as distinct as Kinsey.
Basing your main character on yourself carries another danger: ego gratification. I see books by a lot of clients whose heroes are brave, intelligent, make all the right moves, save the day, and win romance in the end — fulfilling all the author’s fantasies. And while even this approach has its place – think Bond, James Bond – you’re much more likely to sell if your main character is flawed enough to be sympathetic. Most of us find it hard to look into ourselves and then parade our flaws to our readership.
So how do you take conscious control of the influences that shape your characters? First, a word of warning – don’t overthink this. If you have a character you just know, whose head you can inhabit naturally, don’t mess with that. The time to start thinking about how you build characters is when the ones you have aren’t working. When you reread your manuscript and realize that your characters all feel the same, for instance. Or when you get feedback from critiquers or agents saying that the characters just didn’t grab them. That’s the time to start thinking about where your characters come from.
The place to start is to bear in mind all the different influences that could come to bear on your character. What was their home life like in childhood? How did they do in school? Were they the first one or the last one picked to be on the team? Did they have siblings, and how were they treated relative to them? Did their parents fight about money? What made them what they are?
Remember that character creation can’t be done mechanically – choose one influence from column A and another from column B, spackle over the seams, and call it a person. But there are other ways you can invest your imagination in understanding where your characters come from.
For instance, write a scene from a key moment in your character’s childhood, one that your readers may never see and your character may not even remember. Get into their head when they weren’t yet quite themselves. You can also try interviewing your main characters. Just write out a dialogue in which you ask them questions about their past and how they feel about it.
Or you could write up scenes that have nothing to do with your story, just to see how your characters act when they’re not caught up in the action. Write out the scene of their first kiss, say, or what they do on their day off. Or pick two of your characters, put them together in a stalled elevator, and see how they get along. Spend time with them away from your story. Learn to inhabit their heads.
What I’m suggesting is less a way of creating a character from scratch and more a way of getting to know the characters you’ve created better. As you explore who they are, you may find that they are behaving more like real, individual people. When you put them back into the story you want to tell, they may even start telling you just what their story is.
[coffee]
Dave King has been editing for nearly 40 years now. He is co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a former contributing editor to Writer’s Digest, and has contributed more than 100 articles over the last 12 years to Writer Unboxed. He lives on 25 acres in rural Massachusetts with his business partner and wife, Ruth Julian, who also edits his work. His other day job, at least on Sundays, is as the organist at a Lutheran church in Greenfield, Mass.
My current novel in progress is the first time I started with a character, then developed the story around her. It seemed to flow much more naturally that way. By the tim I wrote the first scene, she was directing the story’s path. I’d always tried, before now, developing a plot, and then creating a character to fit the necessary action. That’s probably why they never felt quite right to me.
Thanks for the post, Dave.
Like I say, don’t mess with that. It sounds like you’re doing it right.
Inhabit your characters. Good advice.
I find that talking with them, though, bears the risk of talking to myself. My characters will then tend to think, speak and act as I would. I know this from critique group comments like, “I don’t think she’d do/say/think that right now.”
Better, though harder, is to talk to others, particularly those who’ve been through a character’s experience. For my WIP I had to research what it felt like to be abducted. For some reason, I don’t know anyone who’s been through that. Enter Google.
I also had to understand the experience of lymphoma. I noticed that another novelist who sometimes comments here on WU had been through that. She generously shared her cancer story, which I borrowed wholesale.
For a new project I’m developing, I’m not only plotting and building arc and theme and all of that. I’m adding the intention in each scene to work with character layers, including their contradictions.
Authenticity. Layers. Complexity. That’s how I think of it. There is one more thing, though, that your excellent post does not touch upon: likeability. That’s one area in which I rely on my own observations. What do I like about people? What do I admire?
That’s definitely going in too.
You’re right that you can learn to inhabit a character’s head by talking to people who have gone through what they’ve gone through. Though even there, different people react differently to the same circumstances.
As to the problem of talking to yourself, you’re right, it’s a problem. I don’t know, there may be a bootstrapping effect involved. As you talk to your characters, you get to know them better, and you wind up talking to yourself less and less, which lets you understand them even better.
It also helps to get to know people who think very differently from you.
And likability? It’s absolutely necessary. But that might be an article in itself.
Great post, Dave.
Whenever I’m creating/developing a protagonist and other key characters, I think about where they were born, what their parents do/did for work, how many siblings they have/had, what their most embarrassing moment was, et. al. Things I rarely even mention in the actual book but that help to inform each character’s “current” decisions and behavior.
Also, I interview them. In fact, the latest post over on my blog is an interview with the protagonist from my recently published satirical thriller, Sick to Death. (I won’t provide a link because I don’t want to steal any attention from your post. But yeah, I had to mention it. I’m sly like that.)
Thanks again for the compelling and actionable post!
Best,
Greg
I borrow a lot from real life; it’s as if God put all these fascinating people in my path just for me. Still, once they’re on the page, they do take on a life of their own. The process is all a bit mysterious to me, but at least I’m not being punished for day-dreaming …
Hi, Dave:
This returns me to my most recent post where I discussed the issue of a character’s soul — i.e., a sense of purpose, direction.
One key point in that discussion was that, absent some inborn sense of purpose, we become mere victims of circumstance.
To avoid this in characterization, you not only have to get a sense of the character’s ideal self– who they wish to be, what life they want to live — but how the events in their life have helped both mold and undermine that vision.
Your focus on writing scenes, something Lisa Cron also emphasizes, I believe is crucial. Mere information — like static character biographies — create flat characters.
In exploring my characters’ back stories, I usually look at key moments in their past that reflect both the positive and negative influences on their sense of self and meaning:
A moment of profound fear or even cowardice.
A moment of significant courage.
A moment of terrible shame.
A “golden moment” of great pride.
A moment creating serious guilt.
A moment when the character forgave someone else or was forgiven.
A moment of life-changing loss, betrayal, or death.
A moment of profound connection or love.
If I cover those eight areas, I know I’ve seen my character in serious, life-defining moments — both for good and for ill. I see both their potential for success and what is holding them back. I’ve seen their will in action and seen it hampered, broken, even defeated.
And often, once I’ve done this work through scenes, the characters have taken shape in my imagination the way a real person I’ve met does. I not only see them but intuit their larger personality — not just what they’ve done but what they’re capable of.
And yet I still don’t know everything about them. There’s still much to discover, which makes me excited about exploring their stories.
Last, you rightly caution on using real people for inspiration. I think it can ground a character in real, perceived truth. But remember that we don’t know the secrets of others. If they have chosen to reveal a secret, it’s no longer a secret, but a confidence. We know no one totally, and shouldn’t presume we know our friends so perfectly we can imagine them as characters without the help of our imaginations.
As always, wonderful post.
I like the key scenes you recommend, and thank you. And you’re right about the limits of character biographies as a way of understanding your characters. Essentially, it’s the difference between narrative summary and scenes.
Dave:
I’m running out of words to describe your posts. “Genius” is probably a bit much . . .
I was imagining my interview with a protagonist who’s been percolating in my brain. She’s based on a dear neighbor who is self-conscious about growing up poor and poorly educated. After answering one question, she gasps, “You won’t tell that to anyone, will you?” That’s my two-bits’ worth: What would your character be embarrassed/ashamed/afraid to have revealed?
Nice suggested question, Christine. What embarrasses people can often be revealing.
By the way:
https://www.thesaurus.com/
This is great stuff for a newcomer to writing. I have a few characters I’m working on and they all tend to sound the same. I’m going to try this now. :)