Dynamic Characters- How to create personalities that keep readers captivated

by Nancy Kress

  The next step is to add personality elements that will strengthen the story's meaning. Perhaps the real Aunt Minnie is a gregarious person. She has many friends, one current and two ex-husbands and six kids. However, kleptomania feels lonely to you. The more you think about it, the more you sense a connection between social isolation and the need to make pathetic connections through pointless theft. So you make your fictional Aunt Minnie friendless, with a workaholic husband who ignores her and one grown son wrapped up in his own life. That change, in turn, suggests others. Minnie steals different kinds of things than your real aunt does, because she's meeting different needs. She steals from different sorts of places, in different ways. She displays her booty differently.

  The fictional Minnie thus becomes a different person from the original. Some traits are highlighted, some deleted, some added. Her "disguise,'' it should be noted, is not at all superficial, not the equivalent of a fake mustache and dark wig. The disguise consists of genuine changes, growing out of the needs of the story itself as it evolved in your mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that Jay Gatsby started as a man Fitzgerald knew, ''but then became himself.''

  So can Aunt Minnie.

  ANOTHER WAY TO DISGUISE CHARACTERS

  An alternate approach is to combine two or more real-life models. Many writers do this. Literary historian William Amos has this to say about Anthony Trollope's famous fictional prime minister and hero of a book series, Plantagenet Palliser:

  For his patriotic tenacity, honesty, and modesty, Palliser is supposedly modeled upon Lord Palmerston. His candor and lack of social graces are believed to come from Lord John Russell, a poor mixer and of a retiring nature. Something of this stiffness of demeanor is also probably derived from Edward Henry Stanley, Fifteenth Earl of Derby. Trollope was a member of the committee of Royal Literary Fund, over which Stanley presided. The Earl considered him to be incorrigibly middle class.

  Maybe Aunt Minnie could be both disguised as a person and strengthened as a character by combining her with your next-door neighbor, a woman over whom loneliness hangs like mist. You might use the neighbor's timid manner and speech patterns, Minnie's stealing and your dentist's unexpectedly biting jokes. Does that work?

  A variation of this approach is to combine characteristics of the model with aspects of your own personality. Nearly all writers, to some degree, depend on their inner lives to fuel their fiction. You have probably never, for instance, committed a murder. Yet you know what it's like to feel angry enough that you want to kill somebody, and from that emotion you create the thoughts of a murderer.

  Similarly, when the fictional Minnie feels lonely, her loneliness will inevitably have the flavor of your own. Since this process is going to go on anyway, exploit it for purposes of disguise. Where can you graft aspects of yourself onto Minnie? Where might the plot be able to use them?

  THE FINAL DECISION

  Basing characters on real people can be a great starting point. However, it is only a starting point. For literary as well as legal reasons, you'll want to augment, modify and heighten the original. If you do a good enough job of this, it's possible that Aunt Minnie won't even recognize herself in the finished work. (Seventy-two different women claimed to be the model for one of Honoree de Balzac's heroines!)

  It's also possible that she will recognize herself, and you'll have to deal with the consequences. Should you write the story anyway? That's up to you. Consider, however, that your decision may confer or withhold immortality on someone else. Would the world now recognize the names Tom Blankenship, Delphine Delamare or Dr. Joseph Dillon? Well, it recognizes their fictional counterparts. And so would you.1

  SUMMARY: BASING CHARACTERS ON REAL PEOPLE

  • To successfully sue for libel, a plaintiff must prove that your character is recognizably based on her, is a negative portrait and has injured her emotionally, socially or financially.

  • You have more leeway in writing about a public figure or a dead person than about a living private citizen.

  • Avoid legal action and strengthen your novel by disguising characters in substantial ways.

  • Strengthen those traits that highlight the story's meaning, and delete those that do not. Let the character evolve in your mind.

  • Consider combining aspects of the original model with aspects of another real person or of your own personality.

  Four teenage boys are hanging around the mall. Their externals are alike: same baggy, colorful clothes. Same jewelry. Same carefully sloppy posture. Same slang, same intonations, same jokes and buzzwords. In their pockets are the same objects: bus tokens, a few dollars, a comb, high school ID card and music cassettes of bands that, to adult ears, also sound all alike. These objects hardly characterize.

  And yet, these are four very different kids. In ten more years, the differences will be evident. One boy will be a teacher. One will be an expatriate, the social toast of Buenos Aires. One will play professional ball. And one will be in prison for murder. For now, however, these four seem alike on the outside, and you, their creator, are taxed with the job of letting us know just how individual they really are.

  You do this, of course, by letting us inside. You show us the boys' thoughts, feelings, attitudes, fears, longings, neuroses, driving compulsions. What goes on in their gray matter, where each of us is irrevocably different and irrevocably alone.

  Let's start with overall attitude toward the world.

  BRAIN WAVES: REACTIONS vs. PERIPHERALS

  Doug Hoover's got an attitude. So does Gene Forrester, Frederick Henry, Adam Dalgliesh and Harold, the dog who lives with the Monroes. And it's a good thing these fictional characters do have pronounced attitudes—good for their literary creators, good for the stories they inhabit, good for readers.

  Attitudes are only personal thoughts, feelings and opinions—the stuff that goes on in our brains when we're not talking aloud to someone else. Characters with attitudes are lively and interesting. This makes them both easier to write about and more absorbing to read. On the other hand, characters who have few thoughts, or whose thoughts can't be inferred even from the action, come across as automatons: limited, dull and sometimes unbelievable. When was the last time you met a person in real life without a thought in her head?

  But, you may ask, if I show my characters thinking about everything they see, won't I slow my plot to a crawl? Won't I be stuck with large chunks of digression? Won't I be setting myself up for readers to mutter, ''Oh, for God's sake, get on with the story already''?

  Not necessarily. It depends on several things: What thoughts are you stopping the story to allow your character to express? How long is he allowed to ruminate on them? What function do these particular thoughts and attitudes serve in the plot? (There again is that inescapable interweaving of plot and character.) And how fresh and interesting are the attitudes in and of themselves?

  There are two kinds of thoughts your character can express to himself (and us): thoughts about events that have just occurred, and peripheral thoughts that could actually be omitted without damaging the primary plot. Let's discuss the latter first.

  USING PERIPHERAL THOUGHT TO ILLUMINATE CHARACTER

  The primary function of peripheral thoughts is to build characterization, to let us know what habitually occupies your protagonist's mind. ''I think, therefore I am,'' Descartes said. He might also have said, "What I think, I am.'' The man who goes to sleep every night with thoughts of mathematical problems in his head is not the same type of person as the man who courts sleep with thoughts about assassinating the president. This is why it's important to consider carefully what your character spends time (and page space) thinking about.

  Maybe he really dislikes cabbage. If this is going to be a plot device you use later, then it's fine to use space for him to think anticabbage thoughts (maybe someone will be poisoned by a homegrown cabbage, which absolves your protagonist; he gets sick if he gets within smelling distance of the stuff). If not, then don't bother writing this in, becau
se a hatred for cabbage simply doesn't tell us much about personality or character. Anybody can hate cabbage.

  On the other hand, here's Doug Hoover, hero of Neal Barrett Jr.'s wacky novel The Hereafter Gang, thinking about motels:

  Doug had always been drawn to the security of motels. When you closed that door and set the heavy brass chain you left your troubles all behind. The room was like a tree-house, a cave on the bank of a creek. No one even knew you were there. You could do whatever you liked. Just anything at all. The church offered sanctuary in medieval times. Now it was Rodeways and Ramadas. They couldn't touch you in there.

  The novel has very little to do with motels—its major scenes actually take place in heaven—but nonetheless, Doug's thoughts about motels are not gratuitous. They subtly confirm his character as we see it unfold: secretive (''No one even knew you were there''), escapist (''you left your troubles all behind''), childish (''like a treehouse, a cave on the bank of a creek'') and deeply distrustful of human intimacy and responsibility (''They couldn't touch you in there''). Motels may not matter to the plot, but the motels in Doug's mind matter a lot to the story—because Barrett makes them matter through giving Doug a definite attitude about them. His thoughts mean something.

  Even at the very beginning of a story, where every word has to count, it can be worthwhile to show us your character thinking about a seemingly irrelevant topic. Here is the opening paragraph of the children's classic Bunnicula, by Deborah and James Howe:

  I shall never forget the first time I laid these now tired old eyes on our visitor. I had been left home by the family with the admonition to take care of the house until they returned. That's something they always say to me when they go out: ''Take care of the house, Harold. You're the watchdog.'' I think it's their way of making up for not taking me with them. As if I wanted to go anyway. You can't lie down at the movies and still see the screen. And people think you're being impolite if you fall asleep and start to snore, or scratch yourself in public. No thank you, I'd rather be stretched out on my favorite rug in front of a nice, whistling radiator.

  What Harold thinks about going to the movies is irrelevant to the story; neither he nor anybody else will go to another one. But his thoughts about movies set up his character: home-loving, conservative, a little lazy, not particularly imaginative. These are the same traits that will fuel his actions later in the story. And they make him a nice foil for Chester, the family cat, who has a manic disposition and a decided penchant for the melodramatic.

  USING INNER THOUGHTS AS PLOT ELEMENTS

  The other purpose of letting us see your character's actual thoughts is to directly affect plot. This happens when your character is reacting not to peripheral thoughts drifting through his head but to story events that have just occurred. Used in this way, thoughts can either drive plot or validate it.

  A common way for inner thoughts to drive plot is to start with a character possessing that commonplace of the contemporary scene, an ''attitude problem.'' Such characters are disaffected, out of synch with their world, surly, abrasive. They don't fit in. During the course of the story, the character either undergoes an attitude change (the ''character learns better'' plot) or else is confirmed in his belief that the world is such a rotten place that his original attitude was the correct one (the ''look out for number one or die'' plot). Either way, the thoughts in his head are key to our understanding the plot.

  For instance, Gene, protagonist of John Knowles's novel A Separate Peace, has a definite attitude problem during his last year of private school: He's insecure, jealous of his best friend Phineas, frightened about World War II looming on his personal horizon. When Phineas says what he likes best about a tree on campus, Gene responds:

  ''Is that what you like best?'' I said sarcastically. I said a lot of things sarcastically that summer; that was my sarcastic summer, 1942.

  ''Aey-uh,'' he said. This weird New England affirmative— maybe it is spelled ''aie-huh''—always made me laugh, as Finny knew, so I had to laugh, which made me feel less sarcastic and less scared.

  By the end of the novel, Gene's thoughts have changed completely: about Phineas, about the war and about being sarcastic. He has negotiated his separate peace. But if Knowles had not so clearly shown us Gene's beginning thoughts, the changes might have seemed arbitrary or—worse—incomprehensible. To solve an attitude problem, you have to show us clearly that one existed in the first place.

  This is, incidentally, the basic plot for much contemporary young adult fiction: The youthful protagonist encounters a problem with dating, divorce, drinking, drugs, death or some other disaster, and then spends the length of the story undergoing an adjustment to how he thinks about these things. In the adult, antihope version, the youth discovers that his bad attitude actually fit his world all along. See, for instance, Harlan Ellison's chilling science fiction story, ''A Boy and His Dog,'' in which Vic learns that murder is a completely appropriate way to preserve what's important to him.

  Sometimes characters' thoughts are explicated at the end of the story, not the beginning. Ending with character thoughts serves as validation for the plot events that formed them: Yes, this is what it all means; you the reader interpreted it right. There is obvious danger in doing this. The reader may feel lectured, which he will resent. Also, the writer may look uncertain of his material, wrapping it up in a neat attitudinal summary posing as character insight, because he doesn't trust the plot events to have already made the meaning clear.

  However, when the summarizing thoughts expressed by a character constitute a genuine change in him, earned with enough pain to make it seem natural that he would be dwelling on it, then ending with a direct view into the character's mind can be very effective. Here is Ernest Hemingway's Frederick Henry, in a famous passage near the end of A Farewell to Arms:

  If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

  Without this direct expression of Henry's thoughts about what has happened to him, the novel would have been far less moving. Henry is not a man who usually reveals much directly; we need to be shown what these events mean to him. When Hemingway lets us share Henry's thoughts directly, we see just that.

  It is also possible to play inner thoughts and outer action against each other, thereby creating tension. The woman who expresses misery at her own wedding, the soldier facing death with relief, the ano-rectic cook who shudders at the smell of bacon frying—all command our interest, but only if you make their thoughts explicit and clear.

  HOW LONG CAN CHARACTERS JUST STAND AROUND AND THINK?

  There's another important point to be made about paragraphs that stop the story action in order to express character's thoughts: Such passages have to be either fascinating or short.

  Brevity is especially important for those sections of thought that characterize but don't contribute directly to plot. Look back at our first two examples. Doug gets one brief paragraph in a novel of 348 pages to air his attitude about motels. Harold, the movie-disdaining dog, gets four sentences. Few readers will object to these expository breaks; most won't even consciously notice them.

  Sometimes, however, a character has much longer and more involved thoughts about some crucial subject (don't you?). These will stop the story dead, so you need to be sure you're gaining more than you're losing, which means that the thoughts expressed had better be pretty interesting to the reader in and of themselves. The catch here, of course, is the question: interesting to which reader?

  P.D. James's editor, Rosemary Goad, has told the story of a long passage in which James's hero Adam Dalgliesh is viewing a stained-glass window and thinking about its details. Dalgliesh has strong attitudes about church architect
ure. Goad cut the passage from the novel, only to find it reproduced word for word in James's next book—and then in the next, and the next, until Goad finally let it stand. Dalgliesh finds stained glass fascinating; James finds his thoughts interesting; Goad did not. It came down to a judgment call, as will those passages in which your protagonist has lengthy ruminations on Japanese cuisine, golf technique or quilting. If you do decide to allow such extended sections of thoughts, the viewpoint had better be original, the prose sparkling and the details fresh.

  Giving your character an attitude—or three, or five, or twenty— can be fun. It makes him that much more vivid in your own mind, which in turn makes him vivid on the page. And readers will respond.

  However, as with dialogue, there is another half to this subject. You need to consider not only the content of your characters' thoughts, but the way they're expressed: the diction, sentence structure, even punctuation. All this in the next chapter.

  SUMMARY: YOUR CHARACTERS' OPINIONS

  • Your character should not be affectless; to be interesting, she should have attitudes about the events and objects in her world.

  • Character's thoughts that are present in the story solely to characterize should usually be brief.

  • Any long expressions of attitude should be worth stopping the story in order to air them. Are your character's editorial digressions original, quirky, thoughtful, important, well-written—in a word, interesting?

  • Character's thoughts that are there to drive plot should be clearly shown at the beginning of the story, so we can see what will change from the start of the story to its end.