Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Each symbolizes that happiness differently, however. Thus, Bill enjoys the sense of duty fulfilled that comes with attendance . . . the warm feeling of being active on the right side. As a God-fearing man, he’s proud of raising his children in the right path, being head of a Christian family.

  Bob, in contrast, isn’t content merely to stand up and be counted. A business type and aggressive he wants to help run the show from the church boardroom. It’s one of the things that makes him feel that he’s important.

  Bert’s case is a little different. A bit paranoid, he’s suspicious of all authority. The church gives him a point of focus. Add to that his conservatism, his feeling that any change is dangerous, and he’s an ideal convert for those who feel the trend to modernization is endangering the church itself and springs from Satan.

  Three different men, three different personalities and attitudes. And despite what we’ve said here, any attempt to explain them is guesswork at best, born of our own views as much as of the facts.

  Or what about Woman A, with whom we started? What gives her the drive and strength to cut her caloric intake and increase her exercise to the point that she loses weight . . . whereas Woman B, verbalizing the same goals and desires, somehow never gets around to it?

  Because no one knows, your guess, your hypothesis—your rationalization, if you will—is as good as that of anyone else.

  Assuming, that is, that you don’t go at the task and process blindly. You still need to learn all you can about the foundations upon which rationalizations can reasonably be based.

  Don’t let your reasoning become involved to the point that it destroys credibility, however. Your fictional logic must, after all, reflect the thinking of your audience. Few Americans would accept the sexist orientation of Iran, with its requirements of the veil, the chador, and subservience of women, or our Hispanic maid’s idea that the stars caused disease. Likewise, few people today would see as a good father the domineering, razor-strop-wielding male prevalent a hundred years ago.

  It’s also one thing to build a solid case, another to dive off the deep end in the manner of the British psychoanalyst who argued that Welsh miners’ strikes sprang from guilt reactions over their “rape” of Mother Earth.

  In general, when setting up your people, you’ll find it most productive to explore again the three main areas of human activity: love, work, and society. Place special emphasis on the things we humans strive for: possession of (an object, a person, a status, a state of mind or being), relief from (fear, oppression, humiliation, loss), or revenge for (a slight, a loss, a betrayal), plus all the multitudes of variations and permutations of which you can conceive.

  2. GOAL: DISSATISFACTION AS DYNAMIC

  A goal exists only in terms of an existing situation.

  More specifically, it’s born out of dissatisfaction with that situa tion. In other words, it’s more specific than direction.

  Or, getting back to the capsule with which we opened, there’s some aspect of your situation that you’d like to see changed: The girl you adore is dating two other men. You’d like to persuade her to limit her attentions to you alone. Which means that your goal is to get her to agree to “go steady.”

  Or, your paycheck just won’t cover today’s inflationary outgo. So you make it your goal to change this sad condition by winning a raise.

  Or, your divorced sister has moved back home with her three unruly children, driving your aged parents to emotional and financial desperation. Your goal: to get Sister & Co. out again before Mother and Dad collapse or slash their wrists.

  Or, you’ve discovered that one of your superiors in the Defense Department is a mole, a secret Soviet agent. You must find which one (goal) before he can pass on vital data.

  It’s also worth pointing out that goals are of two types: general and immediate.

  The issue here rests on the difference between chronicle and story.

  A chronicle is a record of events, a statement of what happened in a given situation: The king married the princess and they had five children.

  A story is the record of how somebody deals with danger: The king married the princess and then found she planned to poison him.

  Finding that the new queen plans to poison him constitutes an unacceptable change in the king’s situation, his state of affairs, and state of mind.

  This change gives the king a general goal: to survive the queen’s plan.

  To reach this general goal, the king must attain a whole series of immediate goals. First, possibly, he must avoid drinking the flagon of poisoned wine the queen offers him . . . yet do so in such a way as not to reveal he knows what she’s up to. To that end, he pretends a courtier’s remark has affronted him, flies into a simulation of rage and, with appropriate byplay, flings the flagon at the unfortunate man, then stalks from the hall.

  One scene, one immediate goal out of the way. What next?

  Afraid to give the queen another chance at him by retiring to their bedchamber, the king goes alone to the castle chapel, allegedly to ask God for forgiveness for his unseemly display of wrath . . . then steal out a secret door to spy on the queen in an effort to find out whether others are conspiring with her in the attempt to kill him: a new immediate goal.

  Mysterious masked figures intercept him. Fighting them off, the king barely escapes. But he does glimpse that the queen has a caller, a woman. Which gives him a new immediate goal: Who is the woman? What is her role where the queen is concerned?

  Well, you get the idea. Our character’s attempt to attain a general goal results in one change after another in his original situation—in effect, each defeat or change creates a new situation and so plunges him into pursuit of a series of new immediate goals, each of which involves him in a new scene, a new conflict.

  I can’t overemphasize the importance of this matter of goals. Why? Because when you strive to attain a goal, you test characters. Only when a story person fights against odds does he demonstrate whether he’s worthy of reward—or, to put it on the most practical level, whether he’s worthy of readers’ attention. It’s the key factor behind the old Hollywood question, “Who do we cheer for?” Readers won’t cheer, that is offer interest, unless characters—especially key characters—have goals. And if you don’t believe me, how many people cheer for a horse grazing in a pasture, as compared with the number who evidence excitement when the same equine’s leading the pack at a racetrack?

  3. DRIVE: THE “GIVE A HOOT” FACTOR

  Drive, as I use the word here, may be defined as inner pressure, the intensity with which a character wants to change or reshape his situation.

  It also, again, points up the absolute necessity of building your story around people who have the capacity to care, to feel that something or other’s important.

  The end product of drive is attainment of a goal. Thus, given a particular goal, is this goal truly important to Character? How highly does he value it? To what extremes is he willing to go in order to attain it?

  In brief, does he really give a hoot about it? Because if he doesn’t, for all practical purposes he’s useless in a story.

  This factor of drive is devastatingly important. It’s the key in gredient of the vital element we call commitment. Couple it with direction and goal, and you equip yourself with the priceless “desire plus danger” combination that keeps pages turning far into the night. Failure to provide it in major characters can prove the kiss of death where your story is concerned. For regardless of writing skill or literary values, the thing that leads most of us to read is still the age-old question that focuses on the hero as he fights against fate: “Will he succeed or won’t he?” Where the overwhelming majority of us are concerned, it remains the most solid foundation upon which to build a story.

  This brings up a related question: In life, are most people really motivated? And the answer is, no. Not to bog down in semantics, but the majority of us have drift, not drive. That is, we fall into things through happenstance and foll
ow the line of least resistance. The term that best describes our progress is random. The job the average person chooses likely is the first one offered. The girl he marries is his sister’s friend or his neighbor’s daughter or the double date that proves amenable to heavy necking. Given a menu that includes octopus or truffles, he’ll choose roast beef and mashed potatoes every time.

  Why does one person have drive, another not?

  Partly, the issue likely is inertia, or ignorance of a special sort an inability to grasp the potentialities of impinging situations. Or, call it fear of change, an overweening doubt that change might be beneficial or desirable or fun. Most of us live like Jean Giono’s villagers in Le Moulin de Pologne: “. . . we fear knives and wild beasts less than a life style which is different from our concept of how life should be,” and so automatically answer, “Oh, I couldn’t do that!” to most possibilities.

  So, most people drift.

  Or, as my wife succinctly puts it, “Most of us, most of the time, are impulse buyers in the supermarket of life.”

  Beyond this, however, can it be that drift, in its own way, constitutes a sort of drive—an unverbalized goal of avoiding the discomfort that comes with involvement and “giving a hoot”?

  It seems at least possible to me. Thus, some years ago I knew a handsome, cultured, literate man in his thirties who worked at an extremely routine job in a film library. The tasks assigned him clearly were far below his capacity and everyone knew it.

  Finally one Friday afternoon the supervisor called him over. “Ed,” he said, “you rate a better spot than this. I’m promoting you.”

  “If you do,” Ed retorted, not so much as blinking, “then I quit.”

  “Go on,” the super laughed. “You take over as chief of section Monday morning.”

  “Goodbye,” Ed said.

  He never came back after the weekend.

  What was behind it all? I’ll never know, though certainly I’ve speculated enough. Fear may have been the issue, as when you’re afraid you can’t deliver what’s called for, or when in the past you’ve made some tragic error and can never forget the possibility of another. Or guilt. Or a private ethical standard that says you shouldn’t rise above your fellows. There may even have been a physical angle—ulcers, heart trouble, some nervous disorder.

  What about such “drifting” characters where your story is concerned?

  That depends. An individual who changes course with every passing breeze may prove perfectly adequate if cast in a bit part—playing a spear-bearer in the chorus, as it were. But at best he’ll prove a frail reed; count on it.

  Or, as Joseph Campbell has summed up the situation in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call [to adventure] unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in by boredom, hard work, or ‘culture,’ the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. . . . All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.”

  On the other hand, is it possible you can give a character—any character—drive?

  Yes. The trick is merely to decide on what Character cares about, what’s important to him—and whether he realizes it or not.

  Consider a character drifting through life who, without thinking about it, thinks of himself as being honest.

  Now, out of a clear blue sky, someone empties the cashbox where he works. Though there’s insufficient evidence to convict, circumstances point to Character. In the eyes of those who count (“significant others,” in the sociologists’ phrase), Character sud denly finds himself reclassified from decent person to probable thief.

  Does this bother Character? Of course it does—especially if you build it up properly. All at once it’s vital to his emotional well-being that he prove he’s innocent; and the only way he can do that is to catch the real thief. Whereupon he not only acquires a general goal but a drive to reach it.

  Let’s run that by again, a step at a time.

  To give a character drive:

  1. You devise something for him to care about, consciously or otherwise.

  2. You fit him out with a suitable goal, in view of the direction you’ve postulated for him.

  3. You threaten that goal, that something he cares about.

  4. You establish reasons for him not to quit, reasons to continue to fight against the threat and reach his goal.

  Reasons not to quit may be external, or internal, or both.

  You already know about external reasons: The boat is sinking; if Hero doesn’t bail or pump he’ll drown. Heroine’s brother is in the death house; unless she finds evidence to clear him he’ll be executed. Things like that.

  Internal reasons are the ones inside Character’s head. Pride: “I won’t crawl.” Its reverse, shame: “They mustn’t ever know.” Duty: “I couldn’t let the team down.” Gratitude: “He saved my life.” Loyalty: “She’s my mother.” Intense to the point of obsession, they won’t allow Character to rest.

  How does Character acquire these ideas? And yes, you do need to know. Not to keep you in suspense, they’re the product of lifelong conditioning, as explained in Chapter 8.

  4. ATTITUDE: CHARACTER PLUS HANGUP

  What do we mean by attitude? To oversimplify, call it a feeling about some situation or subject; a consistent (yet quite possibly irrational) disposition that Character is reluctant to relinquish.

  In other words, an attitude is a hangup that’s hard to get rid of. A stripper in all likelihood will have one attitude towards men; a Carmelite nun, another. When a pedophiliac organization cries “Sex before eight or else it’s too late,” it reveals an attitude towards both sex and children that most of us find revolting.

  Similarly, Character may see the world as making steady progress or, contrarily, as going to hell in a handbasket. The younger generation is Earth’s hope for the future, or it’s the plague that will bring down civilization as we know it. He may stand firm for abortion rights or loathe it as cold-blooded murder of the unborn. He dotes on hot fudge sundaes, or detests them because he believes they give him pimples. Noodling for catfish is great sport, or a species of insanity that may end with a water moccasin chomping on your biceps.

  Be sure, however, that a character’s attitudes fit his noun. A policeman has one set of attitudes, a lawyer another, a criminal, a third. Same for teacher and student, boss and worker.

  Attitudes are products of conditioning, as we’ll see in Chapter 8. Meanwhile, just bear in mind that they’re not one, but many.

  Taken collectively, grouped together, they constitute an entity commonly called point of view: a character’s generally habitual, to-be-expected reactions to whatever aspects of life and the world that come to his attention in the story. (Note that here I’m using “point of view” in its general meaning of outlook or opinion—not in the technical sense of “viewpoint character,” the person from inside whom the reader experiences the story as it happens. That approach is correct when you’re setting up your material for presentation to your reader. But the writer himself needs to be aware of the thinking and feeling of all his story people, each and every one, not just that of the key figure.)

  Each major character’s attitude is something that you as a writer need to understand, though not on a definitive level, necessarily. That kind of study would call for long-time scrutiny. The broad outlines will be enough, with occasional sidetrips into the swamps and bayous of personality to add color and interest.

  In particular, you’ll need to become aware of the special areas of mind and thought that your story brings into focus.

  You can do worse than to term this collective pattern your character’s dominant attitude.

  Thus, in a romance, Female Lead’s dominant attitude very well may center on the way she sees—and, in actio
n, reacts to and behaves towards—men. Are they dominating bullies, like her boss? Frail reeds, in the manner of her hopeless, helpless uncle? Eternal womanizers who zero in on every passing skirt? Shadow images of her boastful, bragging brother? Potential sources of security via marriage? Tender father figures in whom she can find solace? Romantic heroes to thrill and excite her? Stalwart partners for a lifetime of warmth and peace? The list could go on and on.

  In a science fiction story, in contrast, Hero’s dominant attitude very well might revolve around his conviction that the human race is doomed—or will only be saved—by continued psychic interbreeding with superior aliens from beyond the galaxy.

  The suspense novel character? Perhaps, cynically, he looks out on a world of potential victims. Whoever he meets, male or female, he always sees johns or suckers. Or, conversely, he naively finds good in the most hardened villains and stands convinced that he must capture them in order to help them see the light. And the character in the tale of the occult may be totally conditioned by his belief in clairvoyance or reincarnation or the Great God Ptath or the writings of H. P. Blavatsky.

  Nor is application of this principle limited to genre fiction. Mainstream books abound in which characters live in the past, or are forever racked by jealousy or greed or family pride or worry or the compulsion to do the right thing no matter what the consequences. Sholem Asch offers excellent examples in his best-selling East River. Moshe Wolf Davidowsky is an orthodox Jew striving to practice his faith in the new world and pass on Old World traditions to his children. His every action and thought are dominated by his attempt to follow his religious beliefs. Patrick McCarthy, in turn, reflects his Irish Catholic upbringing in his violent hatred of Jews. Can such conflicting values survive when Moshe Wolf’s son, Irving, marries Patrick’s daughter, Mary? It’s Old World attitudes in the parents, confronted with New World attitudes in the children.