Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  So, how do you create characters readers will like?

  To begin with, the character who turns us on is somehow like us. Not necessarily physically like us, you understand, but like in terms of attitudes and standards and beliefs, the things we care about and feel to be important.

  Thus, if you accept and approve of monogamy, higher education, water fluoridation, or vegetarianism, you’ll feel more at home with others who agree with you and share those beliefs, rather than with outspokenly promiscuous swingers, hillbillies who think any schooling beyond readin’-’ritin’-’rithmetic is a waste of time, dedicated anti-Communists who consider fluoridation a Soviet plot, or enthusiastic carnivores. So while you may tolerate life in a society that places you side by side with those who hold such opposing views, you’re not likely to enjoy reading stories that feature heroes or heroines who mirror such lifestyles and whose behavior is diametrically opposite to your standards.

  Many readers today can’t identify with a virtue-for-virtue’s-sake attitude in a heroine, or rejection of a little marijuana at a party, or the concept of sacrificing years of a life to repay a debt. All these have been used successfully in the past, but will they prove successful today, in view of changing audience mores? It’s a vital question, and one you certainly need to bear in mind as you plan your stories.

  This is not to say that a hero or heroine must share all your beliefs and attitudes. Quite possibly Hero is a bank robber or con man; Heroine, a femme fatale on a mission of assassination. But each holds, in addition, some aspect of outlook in common with Reader; some feeling with which Reader can identify, as when Hero is deeply concerned about his mother’s welfare or Heroine yearns for home and children. It’s the old familiar prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold pattern, the murderer who worships his wife or loves his dog.

  But fiction that merely portrays people as being like you isn’t enough for a character—especially a successful leading character. Such a story person must not only be like us, he must be like us and more, in the same way Superman is like us, and more.

  Specifically, Character must be larger than life in that he takes on challenges over and beyond us. To that end, he must have a quality that, secretly, we all wish we had but frequently do not.

  That component is courage, the kind of courage that enables Hero to challenge the fate life has dealt him in the story.

  Not that this quality will necessarily be labeled as courage, you understand. But it’s there implicitly, in the fact that Character re acts as he does when faced with what appears to be certain disaster. It’s captured in the old verse born of scripture:

  Dare to be a Daniel,

  dare to stand alone.

  Dare to have a purpose firm;

  dare to make it known.

  Such courage raises Character above the crowd (even if you don’t necessarily say so to your readers) and gives him the strength to fight on, win or lose. Where most of us would back down, give up, surrender, he refuses to accept defeat. Faced with the safe that can’t be cracked, he cracks it. Forbidden to seek answers to dark questions, he turns the spotlight on them. Cataclysm is a thing he meets head-on, as well as all the lesser levels of trouble that spring from the pattern of change on which your story is built.

  Such courage is something we all yearn for. It binds us to a story with chains of envy for the larger-than-life character who has it. Consciously or otherwise, we thrill at the idea of being like him, so the story in which he appears provides us with that pleasurable release of tension the psychologists call catharsis.

  This pattern is at the heart of the phenomenon of reader identification—an often misunderstood term that means only that the behavior of a character in the story situation is such that it excites and fascinates readers and leaves them feeling satisfied with the story’s resolution.

  Further, a frequently overlooked aspect of this picture is that readers don’t identify with just one character in a story. At various points and for various periods, the behavior of other story people may take the spotlight as they exhibit intriguing behavior and cold nerve, so that Reader identifies with each of them in turn also.

  To conceive a character redoubtable enough to take on such challenges may require you to scrutinize Character’s past history, his background. For techniques for so doing, check out the next chapter, “Bent Twigs.”

  8

  BENT TWIGS

  How much background should you give a character?

  Only enough to make your reader—and you—believe in him.

  Herewith, a character. He has a proper label, plus an inner world. And he’s fleshed out with appropriate tags, traits, relationships, and preoccupations.

  Next question: What has shaped him so?

  The answer, of course, is his background. To understand the present and future, explore the past.

  So, you give Character a background.

  Where does said background come from?

  From you, of course. You, the writer, the creator.

  Why? Because to write effectively about a character, you yourself must understand people enough that you can devise a believable background for your character.

  Understanding people is what this chapter’s all about.

  Understanding can spring only from an awareness of key elements in Character’s background—that is to say, Character’s roots, regardless of whether or not you choose to reveal these roots to your readers.

  Or, to put it another way, your rationalization of each character and his or her behavior will make sense only if Character has a past.

  How much past?

  No more than is necessary to make Character’s emotional state clear to your readers.

  This is how it works:

  In most instances a person’s set, his attitudes, are learned behavior, based on long-time conditioning . . . repetition of an experience or pattern over and over. But for story purposes a certain degree of simplification and dramatization is not only warranted, but well-nigh essential. To this end, you as a writer need to try to tie Character’s key attitude in any incident to a single, memorable, past event, insofar as possible.

  If you can capture that formative event in a mental picture, a sensory snapshot that tends to flash into Character’s mind’s eye any time he thinks about Event, so much the better.

  Your story requires, for example, that a man be thrown into a state of hysterical panic. You need a credible reason for said panic. So, you hunt through possible rationalizations that might fit the circumstance, the story.

  Well, plenty of people are well-nigh paralyzed at even the thought of contact with snakes. So how about introducing a snake? One way or another, you can find a plausible excuse—rationalization, that is—for the reptile that will make sense within the plot line’s framework.

  Next question: Why does this particular person react so strongly to serpents?

  Answer: You—the writer, the rationalizer—decide that, back in Character’s childhood, a sadistic older sister, resenting him and vindictive, acquired a three-foot garter snake on a biology field trip. Waiting till Little Brother’s asleep that night, she drapes the snake across his face, then pricks his neck with a teasing needle.

  Brother wakens. The snake writhes across his face. Screaming, clawing, convulsing, Brother goes into psychic trauma on a level so deep that it still lives with him today.

  You the writer put this into words—a sensory image that recaptures the moment as Brother experiences it in the present:

  The snake—!

  In a flash he was back in the blackness of that other night so long ago—feeling the needle-sting below his jaw; the dry, scaly coils writhing across his face; the terror erupting into a sound . . .

  Warren’s control exploded. Lurching backward, arms flailing, he screamed: a raw, unintelligible, incoherent cry.

  Do you get the idea, overwritten and corny as the presentation may be? Background, past history, prior experience, now undergirds rationalization, so readers believe
it and read on.

  Obviously, and despite this example, extremes are by no means essential. The fragrance of a particular shaving lotion may turn a girl’s thoughts from the man she’s with to her father. Whereupon, her reactions will be those you wish to evoke: favorable, if the sensory image called forth is of her kind, good father tenderly stroking her hair as she cries over a bruised knee; unfavorable, if the picture that flashes through her mind is of a womanizing father preparing for an extramarital liaison while her mother sobs in the blinding pain of an appendicitis attack.

  Clearly, you don’t have to spell out the reasons for everything your story people do, you understand. For bit players, and sometimes even those more important, it’s often enough that a character simply have a fear of heights or a love of fudge or a belief in ghosts, sans explanations. But if you do need backup for your rationalizations—well, now you have a tool to help you handle the problem.

  What if you want to keep Mysterious Mike’s thought processes a secret, at least for the time being, or if you’re not in his viewpoint? One approach is to state it cold turkey, as an author describing a bit of business: “Grimly, Talley scrubbed his hands. Endlessly, it seemed. ‘Germs,’ he said between clenched teeth. ‘They’re dangerous. I know. I watched my cousin die of anthrax.’”

  Another device is to let other story people speculate: “I wonder why she did that. I don’t care much for garlic either. But to slap a guy’s face just because it’s on his breath . . .”

  Or present the pertinent data subjectively, in Character’s viewpoint, as we did with Warren and the snake.

  Where do you find the sensory images you need to bring off this kind of thing?

  There are the obvious sources, of course. The newspapers and magazines and books you read, the plays and movies and television shows you see. The people you meet, the trips you take, the jobs you’ve worked at.

  Beyond this, however, and above all, probe your own past, then meld the bits and pieces you recall from early childhood. They’ll have a color and ring of truth nothing else can match.

  Then, when you use these fragments, make them important to your characters by assigning each memory a lesson learned or an emotion evoked, in keeping with the rationalization to which you link it for story purposes.

  Remember, too, that reader recall is short, so don’t hesitate to make an emotional habit pattern a running gag. Wave it as a tag, as described in Chapter 4. Quite possibly you’ll want to have Character feel pain or tenderness or rage every time he encounters a foo dog or Dali painting or blue-eyed blonde. Maybe he doesn’t even know why. But you know—because you’ve rationalized it, thought up reasons why it’s so, things and events from the past that account for it.

  And that’s the basic principle of handling background.

  “Background” is a term that covers a lot of ground, however. To make it less intimidating, more comprehensible, let’s break it down into four elements: body, environment, experience, and ideas.

  Do bear in mind, though, that while we may segment “background” for analytical purposes, it remains a whole where character—and life—are concerned. The human animal is a unit, an entity, not bits and pieces. Such organic unity emphasizes consistency, and consistency is the essential element in any character, any personality, no matter how disparate or unlikely of association its components may seem at first glance.

  With this disclaimer, let us move on to consider the segments from which a character’s background is assembled . . . the jigsaw that forms the basis for his being the way he is.

  HOW TO BUILD A BACKGROUND

  You build a character’s background for three main reasons:

  1. You want to make the character unique.

  2. You want to give the character reasons for behaving as he does.

  3. You want to make him believable, to give him depth.

  Failure to develop background, in turn, frequently will result in caricature, the kind of characterization you get in cartoons, in which the obvious is so exaggerated as to result in easily recognized but ludicrous distortion. It can be useful for minor characters, bit players. But the picture that emerges will hardly resemble real people.

  At the same time, don’t overload characters with background. As was pointed out earlier, a character is a simulation of a human being, not the real thing. Bear down too heavily on his or her past history, and it takes over. The story stops, and your reader becomes confused or bored. And that, you can’t afford!

  In any case, and regardless of whether or not you introduce the information you develop into the actual story, there’s no better technique for evoking it in yourself than to probe Character’s background, assigning the elements that have shaped him into the individual he is today. Knowing that he marched with Mad Mike Hoare in Katanga, or that his grandmother introduced him to War and Peace when he was four, or that he pledged himself to the church at age seven can’t help but give him dimension as you think his story through.

  Your first step, of course, is to decide on the role Character plays—the things he has to do, the functions he has to perform.

  Check this against each of the four components of background: body, environment, experience, and ideas.

  Finally, choose and build up pertinent aspects from each, in terms of incidents, anecdotal bits, word pictures that create the impression you want Character to make on your readers.

  You seek to convince Reader that Character is cruel and vicious, for example. So, you introduce an incident in which Character recalls the pleasure he felt when he revenged himself on his sister for some imagined slight by lying about her to her boyfriend, or destroying undelivered the letter that offers her a better job, or poisoning her beloved dog.

  Or maybe you don’t introduce it. But just by the process of conceptualizing it you create a picture in your own mind and a reaction to Character that will help you on a subconscious level to select, arrange, and describe the current action in a manner that will evoke the response you seek from readers.

  BODY: THE PLACE IT ALL STARTS

  Body begins with history—or, to put it in more specific terms, ancestry—heredity, genetic roots.

  Does ancestry make a difference? It does indeed. We all know that some of us are brighter than others, with a spread that extends from the “transcendent mental superiority” of a da Vinci or Einstein or Francis Bacon to the slavering helplessness of the hopelessly retarded. Heredity is what makes a dwarf a dwarf, while a Watusi grows to seven feet tall. Diabetes, allergic asthma, epilepsy, sickle cell anemia—all tend to take their toll from one generation to another. Ancestry is why most Blacks have kinky hair and Baits have blue eyes. Genetic twists pop forth in Down’s syndrome and hemophilia and phenylketonuria and thin enamel on teeth. And where would Dracula have been had he not had his vampire forebears?

  Indeed, the old nature-versus-nurture controversy is far from dead, for recent studies indicate that such traits as timidity, risk-seeking, aggressiveness, vulnerability to stress, and obedience to authority may be inherited, at least in part, rather than being the product of conditioning.

  Beyond this, there’s the body of the character himself: the specific physical equipment with which he’s endowed. Thus, the pretty girl sees the world through different eyes than does her plainer sister, because her conditioning has accustomed her to being flattered and deferred to—perhaps spoiled. Consequently, she responds in a different manner. Depending on other modifying factors, she may consider a request for a date from a boy who can afford only hamburgers an insult. Or, she may look upon it as an opportunity to prove her egalitarianism and social consciousness. But she’s unlikely simply to be grateful that someone’s asked her, the way her homely sibling might.

  In the same way, the six-foot athlete is used to one kind of treatment, the five-foot bookworm another. The man hailed as “Fats” doesn’t have the same outlook as the one called “Slats.” And can anyone doubt that the size of Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose played a role in shapi
ng his personality? Would Long John Silver have been the same man had he not lost a leg? Was Quasimodo influenced by his hump, Superman by his indestructibility? And Theresa (in Looking for Mr. Goodbar), deformed by childhood polio—how would you rate the handicap as a factor in her murder?

  Deafness creates a behavior pattern unlike that of the blind or nearsighted or cross-eyed. The stutterer’s speech may turn him into a recluse or a Demosthenes. Would Captain Hook have been as cold-hearted had he not lost his hand? Dyslexia and the learning problems that go with it may turn a happy child into a delinquent.

  Or consider the plight of a high school friend of mine. His father had a clubfoot. The father, growing up in the Wabash River bottoms, had spent endless winter hours sitting at ice-edge—frustrated, freezing—watching friends skate. For him, the sport became a symbol for all the fun his handicap denied him.

  As an adult, he still saw skating through a roseate haze, as irrational as it was glowing. When his wife bore him a son, he couldn’t wait for the child to grow old enough to glide over the ice at the local rink.

  The problem was that the son, far from fulfilling his father’s dreams, detested skating. He hated the cold, the falls, the loss of hours when he wanted to be doing other things.

  The father couldn’t understand such an attitude. He harangued his son endlessly about it. Result: bitterness, on a level that left a permanent breach between them.

  All of which is merely another way of saying that circumstances alter cases, and different groups and societies hold to different standards. Witness the bound feet of Chinese women in the days of the empire and the scarification and tattooing of Melanesian Islanders. Each is prized in its own setting—and makes no sense elsewhere.

  When creating story people give attention, too, to such factors as age, sex, and health.

  Thus, a child’s response is different than that of an adult. The teenage girl who, on a dare, dances nude in a car’s headlights on a country road, seldom would repeat the performance at forty. At twenty a sailor may glory in his tattoos; at fifty, he pays through the nose to have them removed. The oldster who once reveled belligerently in his strength now may tend to walk wide around conflict or heavy manual labor, simply because he recognizes the limitations the years have put on him.