Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Or let William Kienzle describe Father Fred Palmer in The Rosary Murders: “[He] was forty-seven years old, going on seventy.”

  Is this a tag of appearance, or manner, or attitude? It doesn’t really matter. Here we see a judgment of one person by another, captured in a phrase. “. . . forty-seven years old, going on seventy” is a tag that says it all, even though more details follow.

  Ross Thomas, in Briarpatch: “Harold Snow smiled back. It was a sheepish smile, patently false, that somehow went with Snow’s long narrow face, which the detective also found to be rather sheep-like, except for those clever coyote eyes.” Snow is tagged neatly with a “sheepish smile, patently false,” and a “long narrow face.” Then, the interpretive detail of “clever coyote eyes” adds dimension to the picture and lets us know that Thomas wants us to feel wariness in regard to the character.

  Character’s speech patterns may also be a matter of some import. Repetitions, for example, may help to identify him: “sir,” “laid back,” “awesome,” “dude.” Same for accents (Southern, Western drawl, Boston Irish, Brooklynese), ad infinitum. And each occupation has its own cant or jargon, as when a policeman refers to an offender as a “perp” (for perpetrator) or an airline pilot speaks of having his “flaps down.”

  Be careful, however, of introducing heavy, phonetically spelled dialect. Both readers and editors hate it. Why? Because it tends to confuse and slow the pace. You’re better off to avoid it.

  A good ear and wide human contacts are the best tools to use to capture speech patterns, perhaps supplemented by such works as the Vance Randolph and George P. Wilson volume, Down in the Holler, Ramon Adams’s Western Words, Eugene Landy’s The Underground Dictionary, or the like. But more of that later in Chapter 13, “The Things They Say.” And remember always that slang or colloquial terms tend to age rapidly, so any volume on the subject may be out of date virtually before it’s printed.

  The matter of mannerism (rubbing the chin, an eye tic, a frown, or raucous laugh) also needs to be considered. Jane Fonda’s continual business with cigarettes in Agnes of God is a mannerism. So is George Raft’s coin-flipping in old gangster movies. Same for the character who doodles as he talks, or bites his lip, or continually smooths his hair, or sneaks glances into mirrors. A neighbor has a habit of “neatening up” his front room by gathering any loose printed matter into piles. (It drives his wife crazy. Newspaper clippings and the like disappear into those piles, never to be seen again. But it’s a mannerism, like the others.) One and all, they help not only to identify Character, but to make him human.

  Attitude is a matter of behavior patterns—a character’s habitual way of reacting to a particular kind of situation. Mary Poppins’s eternal cheeriness reflects an attitude, and so does Rambo’s macho stance. Racism and sexism are attitudes. Ditto sanctimony or ingrained suspicion or anxiety or discontent. And if it pleases you to develop new and different categories of your own, so much the better. (I’ll discuss this in more detail in Chapter 6.)

  Closely related to tags is the matter of ability or capacity . . . the potential for Character to do whatever his role in the story calls for. If, for example, the story requires that he deal with a medical emergency, does he have the ability to do so? How about the skill to make a bomb, style a woman’s hair, change a diaper, lay cement blocks, clear a fuel line? Failure to provide Character with the ability to perform as required believably can destroy—or make—a story. Life gives you a host of examples. Look how the initial wimpish image of Bernhard Goetz in the New York subway shooting was changed, for example, when it was revealed that he had had handgun training and in crisis adopted a “combat stance.”

  How to reveal matters of ability? You as a fiction writer must think ahead and plant within your character the capacity to deal with the demands of your story situation. You’ll have to discover the tags or traits that fill the bill. Then, make reference to them later as the story develops.

  Perhaps this is also the place to remind you of the importance of contrast where tags are concerned. No Ann, Alice, and Agatha in the same story unless for a reason. No two blue-eyed blondes, no matching Indians, no stutterers in tandem. The object of tags, remember, is to help your reader identify, differentiate, distinguish.

  It’s also important that you decide on each major character’s traits: his or her habitual modes of response and patterns of behavior.

  How you go about attacking this issue is a matter of some disagreement. For example, my late, great colleague in the University of Oklahoma’s Professional Writing program, Walter Campbell, an analyst to the core, insisted that traits be divided into four groups: human, typical, social, and individual.

  In my own view this is mechanical, artificial, and of little practical value. What counts is that you be aware that people do develop distinctive ways of reacting to life’s demands, and that these reaction patterns tend to become habitual.

  To this end, you need to ask yourself how you want a given person to behave in a particular kind of situation. Is Character a worrier, a soft touch, a grouch, a freeloader, a bully? Is she cruel, kindly, pious, a hypocrite, selfish, unselfish, honest, honest only when observed, considerate, unaware?

  So, you decide. Then thrust Character into situations that will give her the opportunity to show the stuff she’s made of before a crisis arises, so your readers won’t be taken aback when Character behaves the way you need her to.

  What about relationship? Call it the way we interface with others, our associations with and reactions to the people with whom we deal or come in contact.

  Each of those contacts and dealings is different. How do we respond to each of these people? How do we feel about them? And yes, we do feel about them and respond to them, each and every one, even if it’s only in terms of standing up straighter, watching our grammar, or not making an off-color joke.

  For fiction purposes, however, we must consider these relationships a good deal more closely. Those individual connections will determine how our characters act and react, how they respond to things their story associates say and do as your epic progresses.

  Your most useful tool in handling the obviously complex issue of relationship in your stories will be habitual people-watching, coupled with reading both fiction and psychology.

  It also may help you in this area if you’ll bear two principles in mind, each with a proverb out of folk wisdom behind it.

  The first: Like attracts like.

  Second: Opposites attract.

  Now, obviously, neither of these aphorisms is universally true. But they are sound often enough to prove useful when you don’t know how to work through a scene. Is Heroine smitten because she and Hero both are Alabama WASPs and love swimming, tennis, camping, computer graphics, and iris culture? Or is the attraction based on the romantic fascination Hero’s inner city street-tough stance holds for sheltered, small-town Heroine?

  Another point you need to consider is whether to cast a given character to type or against type.

  To put this in down-to-earth form, consider your friend Alex, an individual whom we’ll arbitrarily label with a dominant impression as a scholarly professor.

  In keeping with this label, and helping to translate it into visual terms, we give Alex stooped shoulders, pale face, a frequently furrowed brow, a tendency to long pauses and staring off blankly into space, and a book always in hand.

  In so establishing and describing Alex, we’re taking the approach termed casting “to type.” That is, we’re accepting traditional stereotyping, the kind of patterning that gives us the Irish cop, the dumb blonde, the garrulous oldster.

  “Against type” means rejecting that image in favor of a more fresh and original picture—one that makes the character an individual rather than a stick figure.

  (Which doesn’t mean that characters cast “to type” are necessarily to be avoided. Types have their place, particularly where your minor people are concerned.)

  Were we to want to cast Alex “against
type,” however, we could make him egotistical, belligerently opinionated, full of erudite quotes, scowling and with head thrust forward as he attempts to force his ideas on everyone within earshot. He’d still come through as scholarly—but a different kind of scholarly.

  Is this enough to characterize Alex for your readers? Mightn’t they appreciate it if you’d sharpen the focus? Perhaps make the picture more graphic?

  Take his work, for example. There are professors and professors. Some are more drawn to campus politics than to teaching. Others like to ride the gravy train, sloughing off paper-grading or anything else that sounds like work on graduate assistants. Still others are socializers, or grandstanders, or promoters.

  His preoccupations, the interests that absorb him, also play a role. As a scholar, is his area of scholarship the issue? Is he totally engrossed in the sociopathy of juvenile delinquents? The poetry of Allen Ginsberg? The neurology of earthworms? Internal dissension among Shiite Moslems?

  Or is his scholarship merely a financial facade, while his real focus is on world peace or real estate or travel? Or collecting coins or pornographic photos or Mayan artifacts? Whatever you choose for him will both help to individualize him and influence his behavior in your story.

  His love life is an additional matter to consider. For one thing, does he have one, or is he an asexual loner? Is he a happily married man, or are one-night stands his thing? How about “sequential monogamy”—one woman/wife after another? A fascination with young girls, the Lolita syndrome? Homosexual cruising? Do think about it!

  His attitude towards society itself is another constituent. Is he gregarious, everybody’s friend, a joiner? Do worthwhile causes attract him? Is he active in his community, his professional group, his political group? If not, why not?

  Consider, too, your character’s weaknesses. What flaws do you want to show in the course of your story—and yes, Character does have them; we all do, and you’ll be wise to reveal them, for the “perfect” person tends to disgruntle readers. (My own tendency, incidentally, is to speak of a character as “non-perfect.” For whatever obscure reason, to say that somebody has a weakness puts a judgmental label on that person that bothers me.)

  A good example of such a “non-perfect” person is Murphy Brown (played by Candice Bergen), a character in a TV situation comedy. Murphy is a top TV newsperson—intelligent, efficient, gorgeous to look at. But she’s also a recovering alcoholic, a heavy smoker suffering the agonies of quitting, and so aggressive, opinionated, and jealous of her status that she makes your teeth ache. But because she’s so human, viewers love her.

  Why give a character flaws and weaknesses? Because they constitute tools you can use to help control reader reaction to a character—to make the reader like or dislike her; accept her or reject her. But more of that in Chapter 7, “The Breath of Life.”

  And so it goes. All these are factors that influence and individu alize a character. Some characters, some stories, call for close attention to these factors. In others, the barest minimum will do. You and your audience are the ones who decide.

  Beyond such generalities, there are all sorts of rule-of-thumb devices to help you give dimension to a character. How would her best friend describe her, for example? What would Friend say about her? What would her worst enemy’s reaction be? How would she see and rationalize herself? What do people like or dislike about her? Do they admire her, pity her, fear her? Does she feel superior to others? Inferior? Does she see herself as good-humored, honest, hard-working, clever, kind, short-tempered, timid, aggressive, understanding, stingy, generous, or what?

  Bear in mind, however, that all such traits are abstract and general. Behavior is concrete and specific. “What does he or she do?” that demonstrates any given point is what’s important.

  To that end, you must devise incidents and specific details that show the trait in action. Never just say a character is irritating. Make him do something recognizably irritating. Telling simply isn’t good enough. If you want him to be likable, admirable, courageous, or such, figure out a way to prove it in action; that’s what writing’s all about.

  Also, to a degree, you may use what I term the testimonial technique—that is, let some other character recall or describe succinctly a convincing incident that makes the point.

  How far will he go in his efforts to attain a goal? What are his limitations? Will he lie? Steal? Kill? Reject a friend? Betray a loved one? You need to decide, because, for the duration of the story, you’re god. “What will he have to do?” you need to ask. “How can I make it believable that he’ll do it?” Is his behavior a matter of attitude? Function? Potential?

  Where do you get all this material? The answer, I must repeat, even though it grows tedious, is through observation and introspection—a study of living, breathing, human beings in their native habitat, and that includes yourself. Nothing will substitute for watching, on the one hand, and probing your own most secret thoughts, on the other.

  This is a subject we’ll discuss elsewhere in more detail. But it’s important to plant the thought in the back of your head early. Nor will it hurt to make contact with others’ observations, others’ conclusions, as set down in texts on psychology, sociology, and other aspects of behavior.

  Neither should you neglect the work of other fiction writers. Their work offers insight on a wide variety of levels, as witness the traditional wisdom that novelists were the first psychiatrists, and that books like Robert Bloch’s The Scarf have been reviewed in psychiatric journals.

  A final question that sometimes comes up in regard to fleshing out story people is the matter of character dossiers, files that catalog the tags and traits and labels and other characteristics of your cast. To what extent should you develop them and use them?

  Later in your career, you may work with a series character—one originated and developed by someone else. Nick Carter is a recent case in point and so is Nancy Drew. A dozen or more writers have written books in these names, on assignment. As you sell more and more material, an editor or publisher may ask you if you’d be interested in doing a book using one of the house’s characters.

  In that case, the character has already been established, complete with tags, traits, relationships, and background. You receive this information in a statement, a dossier, termed a “bible.” The longer the series has been in existence, the more specifically the character has been defined—and the more you as a writer are boxed in. Once the character has been given a wife or a twelve-year-old daughter, you’re stuck with them. Same for a finger cut off, a phobia about ghosts, a problem with alcohol. You merely integrate this already existing person into a plot.

  But we’ll assume you’re not doing such a series. Should you work up character dossiers? And if so, how detailed should they be?

  Most writers give solemn lip service to them, and I’d be the last to say them nay. But I’ve noted in my contacts with a fair assortment of my fellows that they give more honor to such catalogs in the telling than the fact.

  My own tendency is to reverse the pattern most often recommended. Why? Because I get bored at what too often strikes me as busy work. (I remember one writer on writing who insisted that you should know whether your heroine prefers ice cream or pineapple ice.) I also feel that too many details decided early tend to lock you in and make it harder for you to adapt your character to story needs.

  In consequence, instead of starting with a detailed dossier, I make a quick pass at laying out my characters. That means assigning each (tentatively and subject to change if my first notion doesn’t work out) an occupation, fragments of physical description, dominant impression, and basic attitudes, plus any color details that come to mind.

  (This matter of collecting color details, striking fragments and bits of business, is tremendously important, incidentally. Try to think them up when you need them and your brain will tend, too often, to go blank. Better by far to jot them down as they flash by in odd moments. Later, you’ll be glad you did
.)

  Then I write. And as I write, I find I need things. Character A, for instance, needs to know how to pick a lock, so I give her a bit of background involving time spent years before with a locksmith uncle. Character B is going to have to deliver a baby; I plant references to his training as a paramedic. Character C? Her mother was an amateur gemologist/rockhound, so she can identify semiprecious stones.

  All this material goes into a sort of working file—a dossier after the fact—as my story progresses, creating the details of characterization catch-as-catch-can as I go.

  Then, when my rough draft is finished, I go back and edit and correct and insert.

  This is the moment of truth. I discover that I’ve accidentally included a Joe and a Jobe in the story, and that all three females are redheads. (My wife once was unkind enough to point out to me that my women always had breasts that “rose and fell too fast.”) And I’ve even discovered that the protagonist’s goal really was too weak to carry 40,000 words, and had to go back and do a major patch job.

  Would I have avoided these flaws with more detailed planning? In some cases, yes. But not always. You simply can’t foresee all the facets of a story’s development, and trying to out-guess every turn and twist may hang you up for longer than you think. Nor can you fuss and fidget over each precious line—not if you’re being paid by the word the way we were in the old pulp days. What we had to do was get the story down on paper; and that, to my way of thinking, is still what’s important. Instruction’s vital, true. But in the last analysis, in large measure you learn to write by writing.

  Indeed, that’s why I’ve handled this book as I have. The raw material is all here, but I’ve spread it out so you can pick and choose pieces that you need at the moment or that strike your fancy, rather than trying to force patterns on an entity that, after all, is supposed to be your own creation. So much for fleshing out your characters, giving them physical and psychological dimension. It’s also important that you have at least some idea why they’re the way they are, what cast them in their present mold. To that end, it’s important that you know at least key portions of their background.