CREATING CHARACTERS: How to Build Story People
Dwight V. Swain
University of Oklahoma Press
2800 Venture Drive
Norman, Oklahoma 73069
www.oupress.com
Originally published by Writer’s Digets Books, an imprint of F&W Publications, Inc., Cincinnati, Ohio, copyright © 1991 by Dwight V. Swain. Oklahoma Edition copyright © 2008 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Manufactured in the U.S.A.
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For Phyllis A. Whitney . . .
fine writer and good friend
CONTENTS
Preface
ONE/THE CORE OF CHARACTER
What’s the one key element any major character must have?
The ability to care.
TWO/SEARCHING OUT YOUR CHARACTERS
How do you find the right character?
You scan the applicants until you locate one who turns you on and fits the part.
THREE/LABELS, LABELS
Why do you label a character?
Your reader needs some clue or two to help him recognize each of your story people.
FOUR/FLESHING OUT
How do you make a character real?
You provide him or her with appropriate tags, traits, and relationships.
FIVE/THE WORLD WITHIN: 1
How do you motivate a character?
You devise something that he or she must change in order to win happiness.
SIX/THE WORLD WITHIN: 2
How do you keep a character moving?
You point that character towards his or her private future.
SEVEN/THE BREATH OF LIFE
How do you bring a character to life?
You make the character reveal emotion.
EIGHT/BENT TWIGS
How much background should you give a character?
Only enough to make your reader—and you—believe in him.
NINE/WILD CARDS
What goes into building an offbeat character?
The same elements that you use in creating any story person—only more so.
TEN/THE ROLE OF ROLES
How do you treat a hero?
You shape the hero to fit the job he or she has to do.
ELEVEN/THE LIGHT TOUCH
How do you make a character amusing?
You replace reader assumptions with offbeat alternatives.
TWELVE/THE RIGHT WORDS
How do you describe a character effectively?
You build the character with significant specifics that lead readers to feel the way you want them to feel.
THIRTEEN/THE THINGS THEY SAY
How do you write good dialogue?
You pay as much attention to feelings as to words.
FOURTEEN/VARIATIONS ON A THEME
How do you treat characters in the various lengths, media, and genres?
You design your people to fit your market.
FIFTEEN/THE CHARACTER OUT OF TIME
How do you get people to read about characters in unfamiliar worlds?
You provide emotional insight into the world and individuals involved.
SIXTEEN/THE DYNAMICS OF DISBELIEF
How do you cope when readers don’t believe in your characters and stories?
You plug the gaps where belief leaks out.
SEVENTEEN/THE SEARCH FOR ZEST
How do you maintain your cutting edge as a writer?
You draw on the stimulus of story people.
Appendix: For Further Reading
Index
PREFACE
Fiction grows from story people.
This book is designed to help you bring such people into being. From it you’ll learn barn-brush characterization. Subtlety you’ll have to master on your own.
(Remember what Somerset Maugham said about that? “I was surprised when a friend of mine told me he was going over a story he had just finished to put more subtlety into it; I didn’t think it my business to suggest that you couldn’t be subtle by taking thought. Subtlety is a quality of the mind, and if you have it you show it because you can’t help it.”)
Why will you learn barn-brush characterization? Because I learned my basics in the action pulps, that’s why. Anything else is after the fact.
Beyond that, barn-brush handling is what you need to start. It focuses you on the basics and it’s easy for both reader and writer to understand.
Not that you’ll stop there, please note. Indeed, you can’t stop, because with every story you write your mind will automatically reach out, groping for better, more effective ways to draw your people. As you find them, make them part of your private kit of literary tools—your skill will increase and your work will improve in keeping with your taste and the direction of your aspirations.
So, here we’ll start with the broad strokes of a barn brush, and don’t be disdainful of the techniques this approach offers. It works, believe me. Indeed, if you’re of an analytic turn of mind, you’ll soon discover that, each in his or her own way, the men and women who created the world’s classics used the same devices presented here.
How should you use this book? A good way to start, it seems to me, is a quick scan. That will give you an idea of your present skill, and where you’re strong and weak. Then you can decide for yourself what’s old and what’s new—to you, that is—and where you need to dig in and bear down.
I do not suggest that you work by the numbers, as it were. That’s a sure way to make writing a drudgery, and writing’s hard enough without that. Rather, fly by the seat of your pants, setting down characters as they surface in your story. Then, go back and troubleshoot the product, reworking to improve any of your people whom you feel might benefit.
The key word above, please note, is improve. Anyone can create a character. What I offer here are merely some time-tried devices by which to make such pseudo-beings better. Sometimes. Because even the best of devices won’t always work. At its heart, ever and always, writing remains—to a greater degree than we like to admit—a trial and error process. So as you work and study to acquire skill, never forget to pray a little too, for in the clinch we all need to have Lady Luck riding high upon our shoulders.
It’s the custom in a book like this for the author to acknowledge the help he’s received from others along the way.
For me, the list would be far too long to include here—the more so, since memory being as fallible as it is, some not included would be sure to have hurt feelings. Let me say only, therefore, that I’ve learned about character and characterization from every book I’ve ever read, every student I’ve ever taught, every editor who’s bought or rejected my work.
One name just can’t be left out, however: that of my wife Joye R. Swain
, whose keen insights and discerning eye—and whose too-often frayed and raveled patience—helped to give this book its cutting edge.
Words can’t express my gratitude to her.
1
THE CORE OF CHARACTER
What’s the one key element any major character must have?
The ability to care.
The core of character, experience tells me, lies in each individual story person’s ability to care about something; to feel, implicitly or explicitly, that something is important.
Be aware, please, that it doesn’t matter whether this something is major or minor, cataclysmic or trivial, or at any level in between. It may be money that’s important to him, or family, or world peace, or ecology, or a vacation, or country living. What matters is that he cares about it.
Additionally, it really is inconsequential whether Individual is aware that he feels the way he does. The crucial issue is that the feeling exists to the point that it’s strong enough to move him.
How does this build into a story?
Here is a man—an orderly man, we’ll say arbitrarily. He’s neat by habit—so much so that he’s hardly conscious of it, doesn’t even think about it. His shirts are folded neatly in their drawer, his ties hung on a proper rack, the bills in his billfold arranged in order so that the fifties are in the back, the ones in front.
Now he marries. His wife, it proves, is content to let dirty clothes pile up in the corner of the bedroom. The living room floor is ankle deep in junk mail and old newspapers. Dishes go unwashed for two days, three days, a week.
Order is important to Husband, he discovers—far more important than he realized. Or maybe he doesn’t discover—that is become aware of—his compulsion to orderliness, save in terms of scowls and sullenness and flaring temper. He forgets all the reasons he married Wife—her charm, her intelligence, her spontaneity, her sense of humor, her laid-back, relaxed way of looking at the world. All he can think of now is her insouciance where order is concerned.
Do you see what’s happening? We started with a stick figure labeled “man.” Add something that’s important to him, something that he cares about consciously or otherwise—the focus on order—and he becomes a person. A character has begun to take form.
Is this all there is to it? Don’t be ridiculous. Character creation is a deep and involved subject, as witness to that you’re holding a whole book focused on it. But no matter how far or fast you go, the core is still an individual character’s capacity for caring, his ingrained ability to feel that something is important. Once you understand that, you’ve jumped the highest hurdle in the process of creation.
You need to remember, however, that not all characters have the same potential for building into a story. The freaky, the repellent, the boring are unlikely candidates. Indeed, quite possibly they’ll alienate most readers. Your best bets are sympathetic characters—characters with whom the reader is able to share and empathize, at least in imagination. And if we use evil characters, they must intrigue us, even though we can’t accept their goals.
That said, let’s take the story/character building process a step further. How do you make a character feel that something’s important?
As a writer, it’s alleged that you’re creative. So, faced with conceiving a character, you devise—spell that “think up”—an idea or approach that appeals to you. That is, you ask yourself, “How do I bring this lump of mud to useful life? How do I turn him on so he’ll move through my story like a reasonable, believable human being?”
The answer to those questions, nailed down as specifically as I know how, is: You assign him an element about which he can care, a factor that looms important to him. You make him a boy with bad eyes; he can’t play baseball in a school that lives and breathes the game, and that makes his tape collection the most vital thing in the world to him. Or she’s a girl who aches so badly for the father she never knew that she’d sell her soul for kind words from an older man.
You do this flat-footedly. Why? Because you’re the boss, the writer. You know what you need, so you brush aside the temptation to vaporings and the permissive, and approach Character on the same level that a housewife stirs up a cake or a brick mason mixes cement. It’s no time for whims and fancies. There’ll be opportunity and then some for them later. Right now, what you need is a light to guide you.
When assigning a “caring” element to a character, you commit him to a stance which, implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously, he automatically will live by. Knowing this is Character’s dominant dynamic, you write with more confidence and more assurance. You’ll find few tools more valuable.
You fit this to your needs, of course; choose what Character is to find important in keeping with the story you plan.
Then, you figure out (“rationalize” is the dictionary term for it) why Character feels the way he does.
When the time at last comes to write the story, plunge him into a pre-planned situation that challenges the part of him that cares, threatens the thing he feels is important.
You focus and sharpen this to the point that Character just can’t stand it, and then chronicle the thrust-and-parry of the challenging element and Character’s reactions clear through to the story’s ending.
Does this apply on all levels? Test it yourself on whatever literary figure you choose, from Batman to Raskolnikov. And yes, it is flexible, adaptable.
Thus, life and the drive to survive being the force that it is, a madman with an axe will get a response from virtually any of us. At the other end of the scale, is dignity the issue? There are those to whom it’s so important that ridicule may well loom more threatening than death. Money? Slum children can respond to it in terms of peddling crack, just as the Ivan Boeskys and Robert Vescos react to the same stimulus with financial chicanery and market manipulation. A girl may feel that the disapproval of her boyfriend is a disaster worse than an unwanted pregnancy. Her mother, a fading beauty queen, may try to forget her mirror in a bottle.
Am I oversimplifying? Yes, of course. But we’ll explore the ramifications of such dynamics—in people and characters alike—in more detail in later chapters. For the moment, however, be content to know that only the character who cares about something, finds something important, is worth bothering with. Ever and always, caring is the core of character. Without it, you have nothing.
Work to make every man and woman in your story a separate and distinct individual—at least, an imitation of an individual. I’ve frequently (for the sake of clarity) used relatively stereotyped people as examples in this book, but don’t let that make you think all characters should be this broadly drawn. Competing in the market, you can’t afford that kind of thing. Your characters must appear to be individuals if you’re to succeed.
What we’re concerned with here is how to build a character from scratch, not story construction and dynamics. So though there’s no such thing as a standard operating procedure or one right way where creating story people is concerned, it’s time we explored Chapter 2, “Searching Out Your Characters,” which gives a tentative mode of attack on the problem of creation that many writers have found useful.
2
SEARCHING OUT YOUR CHARACTERS
How do you find the right character?
You scan the applicants until you locate one who turns you on and fits the part.
Building a character begins with deciding which character to build.
Or, to put it on the practical level, if you need a plumber, you hire a plumber. Maybe you check the classifieds or call the union or look in the yellow pages.
Unfortunately or otherwise, there are no yellow pages in the writing business. Which is the trouble with analogies. They so seldom fit exactly.
So, in practice, how do you create characters?
You start from a foundation of your own fantasies and feelings. Because the character you can’t fantasize and feel with will fail.
Back to our plumber analogy. When at last he
shows up on your doorstep, you look him over and decide whether you like his looks—whether he impresses you favorably or not. And you probably don’t go with the filthy one or the one with booze on his breath or the one that flicks cigar ash all over your prized oriental rug.
In other words, you hunt till you find one whose looks you like . . . one who fits your private standards.
You do just that. You find them. And no, I’m not joking.
Perhaps another analogy will make the point clearer—one that will ring bells of memory with virtually all of us, a practically universal experience, at least for males.
Picture yourself, if you will, as male, aged sixteen or eighteen or twenty, and as lonely for female companionship as only a sixteen- or eighteen- or twenty-year-old man can be.
Now, here comes a girl. Maybe you know her; maybe you don’t. Maybe she’s pretty; maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s black, maybe she’s white, maybe she’s Oriental or Hispanic or Amerind or Hottentot. It doesn’t matter. Because win, lose, or draw, she simply doesn’t turn you on. You couldn’t care less if she had a full beard or three heads.
Exit Girl No. 1. Enter Girl No. 2. A blonde, this time, complete with Dolly Parton cleavage, swivel hips, and a sidewise glance that makes words strictly superfluous.
The eyes of the boy next to you go wide. “Hey, will you look at that!”
“You look,” you shrug. Because Little Miss Swivel-Hips, like Girl No. 1, leaves you cold.
A third girl passes. A fourth. A fifth. And still your pulse stays steady; your temperature just won’t soar.
Only then, along about Girl n, something happens. Why, you don’t know. Maybe you never will. But all at once there’s a quickening of the blood, a feeling you haven’t felt before. And it doesn’t matter that Buddy makes moaning sounds and mutters, “What a dog!” or calls attention to the pustulant acne or the horn-rimmed glasses or the Hindu caste mark or the wrestling champ escort. Because this time, all that matters is that, somehow, a psychobiological spark has been struck and you know that win, lose, or draw, you want to know Girl n better.
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