Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Further, a dominant attitude quite possibly may be modified by other coexisting—and quite possibly conflicting—attitudes, for few of us are all of a piece. The example that comes to mind concerns a friend of mine, a United Auto Workers official. He was outspoken in his belief in racial equality. Only a trip with him to the Pacific Northwest, where he grew up, revealed that while equality for Blacks was fine, Filipinos were another matter!

  In other words, circumstances alter cases, so be sure you’ve considered all pertinent angles before you slap on labels. Thus, a character may have one dominant attitude in one story—that is, one particular set of circumstances. But another, different situation may bring a different attitude into focus.

  Note too that this business of character dynamics, what goes on inside a given story person’s head, is not necessarily revealed to readers save in terms of the way the character behaves. You, in contrast, must know Character’s thought patterns and propelling forces in that story, if the story is to make sense. Hemingway offers some brilliant examples. Or reread Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. At no point are you given any hint of what Sam Spade is thinking, save in terms of speech and action. But clearly, Hammett as the author had to know.

  HOW MUCH DO MOTIVES MATTER?

  Meet Pam. She’s a lovely girl.

  Her boyfriend, Terry, is the be-all and end-all of her existence. And as she’ll tell you, with or without provocation, her life’s ambition is to marry him.

  So far, so good. Pam has a goal-motivated drive, a purpose. That’s a big step forward in equipping her to become a major character in a story.

  Next question: What about her private world, the world inside her head?

  Or, to capture it in a word, what’s her motivation?

  It’s at this point that I take a somewhat different track than do most analysts of fiction. Because I tend to draw a line between motive and purpose.

  Purpose, as I see it, is what a character wants to do: kiss a girl, take a trip, go to church, rob a bank, rescue a baby from a burning building. In brief, purpose is something you can take action to accomplish.

  Motive, on the other hand, is why Character wants to do something. And often, not even the person himself understands the reason or reasons behind it, as witness the old line about “the devil made me do it.” Or, to put it another way, more often than not, motive is rationalization.

  Thus, Pam. Her purpose: to marry Terry.

  Her motive? Ah, now, that’s a different matter! Maybe she wants to marry him because she loves him. Or maybe it’s because he makes good money, or because he’s a neat dancer, or because she wants a child, or because she’s pregnant, or because she’s now thirty-one and her mother keeps nagging her about spinsterhood, or because she fears people will find out she’s a closet lesbian, or because she’s developed a warped notion that the insignificant bump on her nose (hereditary with her dead father’s people, her mother tells her) makes her unattractive to acceptable men. (Actually, they’re not even aware of it.) Thing is, no one, not even Pam, will ever really know her motives. Not for sure.

  The point to all this is that purpose is external-oriented, action-oriented, “to do”-oriented. It’s born of direction and drive and attitude.

  Motive, in contrast, is an internal, private world, rationalization kind of thing.

  For you as a writer, the key issue is to be sure that any major character has a goal, a purpose, no matter how far out in left field it may be, so long as it seems logical to Character at the time. After which, you reach inside Character’s head and select an appropriate excuse for her having it (motive, right?) and endow her with properly compelling pressures that force her to keep striving to attain it, physical and emotional reasons why she can’t quit.

  May this process start from either end? Yes, of course. You’re playing God for the duration of your tale, so if you prefer to begin with motive, the “Why?” approach, it’s perfectly acceptable that you do so. From a practical standpoint, however, ordinarily your task will prove infinitely easier if you begin with goal, with purpose, than if you wander off through a morass of pre-assigned motives. The trick is to decide what you want or need your character to do in order to move your story in the direction you want it to go. Then rationalize the necessary “whys.”

  And while it may appear I speak only of “major” characters above, this principle applies to all your story people, not just heroes, heroines, and villains. The issue is merely the degree to which you develop the picture.

  Have we said enough about the world inside your characters’ heads? More than enough, quite possibly, since the thing that really counts is your own work, your personal gropings and experiments and (sorry) failures.

  Be that as it may. Just bear in mind that in shaping up any given character, and regardless of whether or not you reveal it to your readers, it’s vital that you provide him with a private inner world compounded of direction, goal, drive, and attitudes. Without such you’ll have trouble to spare when you try to predict his conduct in your story.

  In addition, you’ll need to know how to bring your man or woman to life with words on the printed page. You’ll learn a proven approach to doing it when you turn the page to Chapter 7, “The Breath of Life.”

  7

  THE BREATH OF LIFE

  How do you bring a character to life?

  You make the character reveal emotion.

  Our most revealing moments are those in which we experience stress.

  What’s stress? Mental tension springing from emotion.

  What’s emotion? To oversimplify, it’s liking or disliking, feeling good or feeling bad about something.

  Emotion, feeling good or feeling bad about something, is what gives a character direction. If something gives him pleasure, he seeks it out. If it gives him pain, he avoids it.

  Direction is what makes us aware that a character is alive. Without it, a person or a character is a vegetable—eating and breathing and existing, perhaps, but going nowhere.

  Herewith, a mousy little man, Mr. Holcomb. A wimp, a nonentity, a nothing. So far as most of us are concerned, he might as well not exist.

  Only then, one day, something leads Mr. Holcomb into a display of emotion. Something makes him mad or glad—the neighborhood hoodlum drives a car across Mr. Holcomb’s freshly seeded lawn, let’s say. Or the woman across the street towards whom Mr. Holcomb has entertained tentatively amorous thoughts presents him with a spectacular Valentine’s Day cake. Or the sister who’s his only living relative dies. Something like that. At which point Mr. Holcomb screams or beams or hangs himself. And because this is so, all at once he exists . . . takes on a new dimension and acquires a focus.

  Why? You already know the answer: Mr. Holcomb cares about something, so he reacts to something that affects it.

  In a word, emotion has brought him to life.

  Or consider Alice Withers, the woman in the shabby house on the corner. Old and pale and without color, she is, in a word, another nonentity. But unknown to those about her, somewhere deep inside she still feels.

  Then something stress-provoking happens: The husband who deserted her thirty years ago comes back.

  Joyously, Alice welcomes him to her bed.

  And cuts his throat.

  Instantly, as in the case of Mr. Holcomb, Alice comes to life for us. We’re fascinated by her. She’s enveloped in a pulsing cloud of speculation, gossip.

  And all because, all at once, she’s displayed emotion.

  Actually, the issue isn’t just that the person involved has revealed emotion. It’s because, in showing emotion, she’s roused emotion in us too. By feeling strongly, she’s led us to feel also.

  Indeed, this is what empathy means. It says that we feel with another.

  In helping readers to empathize with story people, you as a writer are selling them emotion . . . your ability to rouse feelings in them, good or bad.

  Feelings come in all shapes and sizes. Quite possibly the reader who�
��s totally disenchanted with blood and violence or purple passion will respond with great waves of throbbing nostalgia to your description of a sagging, gray-weathered Ozark farmhouse at dusk. And though often overlooked, fragments of daily routine or ineptitude or stupidity that we ourselves have experienced can go a long way towards helping us to feel warmth and sympathy for a character.

  The message here is that it’s to your advantage to consider the tastes and prejudices of your particular audience. Are you writing for men or for women? For “young adults” or the Modern Maturity set? For people who love pets and rural life or apartment dwellers? It does make a difference!

  Also, most readers prefer fiction that rouses their emotions and evokes their feelings as soon as possible. They seek the promise that something interesting—that is, emotion-provoking—is going to happen, and the sooner the better.

  To this end, most writers tend to try to capture their readers’ attention (“hook” them, in the parlance) quickly.

  A hook may be defined as a scene at the beginning of a story that is striking and self-explanatory and plunges some character (the hero or heroine, preferably) into danger in a manner that intrigues your readers.

  Ordinarily, you do this by raising the fear that something will or won’t happen. For example, in the film Jaws, a picture that concerns the menace of a shark in a beach area, the shark is introduced early. The hint of disaster to come is riveting beyond escape. Other ploys that have proved highly successful at one time or another include the case of the hero who awakens to find a murdered girl sharing his bed or a deadly coral snake coiled on his bare stomach. And the play that opens with a sinister character surreptitiously planting a bomb under the sofa on which other characters take seats moments later allegedly is surefire theater.

  Or if you prefer something less redolent of blood-and-thunder, there’s always the “springboard scene” to fall back on. In its simplest form it, in effect, relies on a character engaged in some motivated action, whether or not it’s apparently related to the overall story. What counts is that it presents Character as having direction, being involved in some exhibition of relatively inconsequential purpose, which builds into a scene that puts the character in a position to be endangered; his ordered existence is disrupted. You see it when Heroine telephones her boyfriend, but gets a wrong number—another, different man. Or when Hero, opening his mail, spills $500 from an envelope that bears no return address. Or when, hearing an ambulance siren, someone goes to the window—just as said ambulance brakes to a halt in front of the house. What counts is that you present a character who has direction, some pattern of existence, which is interrupted by a change that forces him or her to make an adjustment.

  (Would you rather make your readers smile? A TV commercial not long ago showed a boy racing to his girl’s house under the delusion that her parents were away. But when he rings the bell, her father opens the door. Which demonstrates that danger can be a happening that merely disrupts anticipation.)

  Why is this such a useful pattern? First and foremost, because every story is the record of how somebody deals with danger.

  One way or another, every change constitutes a danger. And yes, I do include the situations of every father who finds his young daughter has tied up the bathroom, every mother who discovers that someone’s turned off the oven while the cake is baking, every boy who finds his date has stood him up, every girl who learns the job she sought has gone to the boss’s daughter.

  The point is that change demands that we adjust, adapt to a new set of rules, a different circumstance. But we may not be able to make that adjustment successfully, no matter how minor the alteration demanded appears. Therefore, it constitutes a threat and potentially holds danger. The more important the status quo is to a character, the greater the emotion it will evoke.

  This is not to say that an initial change may seem to be of particular consequence. Quite possibly it will appear to be, at best, trivial . . . then lead into another event or events that reflect pure trauma. Witness a New York friend of mine, who coming out of an office building in heavy rain, was deluged by gutter water when a cab swerved to the curb. His pants were so soaked he couldn’t make what turned out to be a vital meeting.

  (A side note: It’s axiomatic in fiction writing that it’s permissible to use coincidence to get your hero into trouble, never to get him out.)

  Am I exaggerating the chances of such things happening? Of course. But it’s the way you must learn to think if you’re to be a writer. Indeed, it seems to me, one of the most vital qualities for a writer to have is an ability to see the potentialities of impending doom in everything that happens.

  This is not to say that your writing must present emotion in supercharged terms. To the contrary. In humor, or stories told with a light touch (the old Craig Rice mysteries come to mind) the wry and the whimsical frequently work better than does the heavy-handed. But the emotion, the like/dislike factor, is still there, no matter how masked with drollery.

  Emotion also may lie screened in apparently non-emotional material. Many of Dell Shannon’s books offer fine cases in point. The writing at first appears flat, uncolored, stripped of feeling—strictly work-a-day reporting. Yet the facts, the details cited, in themselves accumulate to draw a response from readers. Why? Because we, the audience, are pre-conditioned to react to certain things in a certain way—that is, with certain emotions. The very fact of death or sex or potential danger or humiliation evokes feeling. A character’s behavior in a situation involving a dog or a baby or an aged couple both characterizes the character and creates emotion. So does portrayal of frustrations, as when someone has trouble repairing a faucet, raising tropical fish, or coping with a rebellious seven-year-old . . . because readers have themselves been frustrated. (As a bonus, it also provides human touches and so builds identification and empathy.)

  What counts most of all, however, is that your major characters somehow exhibit purpose and show direction.

  Indeed, to reiterate, Character doesn’t necessarily need to know he has a goal. Quite possibly it will be enough if he simply behaves as if he’s trying to attain an objective: the boy who “accidentally” breaks a dish he doesn’t want to wipe, or clowns in an unconscious effort to attract a girl’s attention; the man who consistently fails when thrust into a job he feels too much for him; the woman who, convinced that she’s unattractive, dresses in a manner that stresses her bad points. We all can think of a dozen cases from life without even trying. The issue is, when action clashes with words, we judge a man by what he does, not what he says—and the same principle applies in fiction.

  However, a central character, a hero, ordinarily will prove more satisfactory and easier to work with if he’s consciously trying to do something, accomplish something—that means he’s trying to change some aspect of the situation with which he’s confronted and meets with trouble in the process.

  One reason for this is that more emotion—that is, interest—is generated when goal-oriented effort is frustrated than when routine action simply goes in a straight line, with no complicating problems.

  To try to accomplish anything, change anything, Character must of necessity be in the grip of some emotion. He must feel—he must feel like doing something, or not doing it.

  Anything that doesn’t make him so feel, that doesn’t arouse a drive to do or not do whatever it is, isn’t worth putting in your story.

  How do you create emotion in a character?

  The best way is to start by feeling the emotion yourself. To that end, search your own background for moments in which you felt strongly.

  Such moments don’t necessarily have to be related to your character or your story. It’s enough that you felt.

  Can you recall a moment when you were so angry at someone that you wished you could kill him? Really wished it, on a level that made your fists tremble and your jaws ache and tears come to your eyes?

  Live through that moment again now, in emotional memory. Paint a pic
ture of it in your mind’s eye. Experience the tension, the dryness of your mouth, the smell of dust or perfume or sweat or tobacco or burning bacon. Were your hands wet or dry, your vision clear or rage-blurred, your brain racing or frozen or racked with pain sharper than any migraine? What was said or done that triggered your reaction—not in broad-brush generalities, but in detail?

  Then, assign some of those same feelings to your character, selecting and arranging them for impact, capturing them in words so your readers will experience them as you did.

  Do the same for other frozen fragments of time you’ve lived through: the anguished hour of your father’s death; the excitement you felt as the bobsled hurtled down Joker’s Hill or you shot the pier at Gray’s Beach on your surfboard; the panic when you knew for sure your car was going to crash; the way your heart pounded when the new boy kissed you; the shame when the principal caught you smoking in the restroom. The list goes on and on. . . .

  Where you the writer are concerned, just hunting for such bits that will make you—and your character—feel is a worthwhile enterprise.

  Recognize, too, that when you “take an interest” in something, that means you have a feeling about it. You’re experiencing emotion.

  Boredom? It’s what you feel when you wish you were doing something else. Even if you don’t know what that something is.

  Any goal is, of necessity, rooted in emotion. If you don’t know what that emotion is, ask yourself the simple question raised in earlier chapters: Why doesn’t he quit?

  The answer will breathe life into your characters, I promise.

  This is perhaps a good place to take up the matter of how to control reader reaction to each of your story people. It’s important and I’ve discussed it at some length in my earlier books, Techniques of the Selling Writer and Film Scriptwriting: A Practical Manual. But here, especially, in regard to the problem of characterization, we need to give reader reaction close attention.