Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Attitudes, too, change with age. Wasn’t it George Bernard Shaw who said that anyone under thirty who wasn’t a revolutionary was a dolt, whereas anyone over that age who still so believed rated as a fool?

  Similarly, where sex is concerned, girls used to be conditioned to react differently to the world and to life than were boys. In present society, however, although we all know women and men are different, they no longer are quite as different as they once were. Women today can drive eighteen-wheeler semis. They can work in mines or manage international corporations and do a host of things which were unthinkable a generation ago. Even though you still can find female subservience and male machismo, a housewife now is usually such by choice. She almost certainly is aware that other options are available to her.

  Health? The man racked with arthritis or asthma or ulcers lives in a different world than the one who claims he’s “never had a sick day in my life.” Malaria or diabetes or dysentery shape their victims’ thinking. So do the colds that continually drag some of us down. Vigor views exertion one way; debility, another.

  Yes, body indeed does make a difference!

  ENVIRONMENT: VERY SPECIAL WORLDS

  Milieu is a word I like. Because while, technically, it’s defined as environment or surroundings, it implies a great deal more.

  Specifically, it captures the feeling not just of setting or landscape, but of a society; a social as well as a physical locale. Growing up in San Francisco implies more than just the Golden Gate, Pacific Park, and Union Square. Life in the Mississippi Delta is one thing; that in a Pennsylvania Amish community, another. And double that in spades for a past in the slums of Juarez, the singles bars of New York’s Upper West Side, or a French convent.

  Such social settings reach out to embrace people as well as geography. They mold the various strata of society that fix standards, for mutually accepted norms and rules are the glue that bonds any group or class together. Shared customs, which clothes are acceptable for which occasions, and how to behave in church or mosque or synagogue are what create a society.

  Even more so are accepted modes of thinking. Is it permissible in your private world to say that you hate your brothers and sisters, or to consider rape or murder as a solution to your problems? Are you allowed to show curiosity about your neighbors’ affairs or about taboo topics? May you look a person you respect in the eye, or does politeness demand that your gaze be downcast?

  Mere physical boundaries of a society have little to do with determining what behavior is considered acceptable. Witness the Thugs of India, those devout stranglers who killed in the name of the Goddess Kali. Joining bands of travelers, they murdered as prescribed by their religion—because they existed as a society within a society, a separate strand within the overall fabric of Indian life.

  Or, if India strikes you as too far afield to wander, how about the confidence men and pocket-picking “whiz mobs” in our own land? And certainly it should come as no shock to anyone to discover that a girl whose mother is a whore and who grows up in a brothel may prove promiscuous, or that a boy from a street gang finds nothing immoral about theft. (If you want a good picture of this, read Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy. It may change the way you think about rehabilitation.) Send a child to school where more than fifty percent of the students smoke pot, and odds are that he or she soon will come to see drug use as acceptable relaxation and recreation.

  The same principle applies where more acceptable behavior is concerned. Members of the American Bar Association hold to one orientation, those of the American Medical Association another. Yet both also “belong” to the larger society that is the United States.

  Creating a character, you need to ask yourself, “To what societies does this person give allegiance? What do these groups demand of him? Do they involve implicit beliefs and standards that might affect my story, yet be overlooked?”

  Special problems arise if your story line calls for Character to change from one stratum, one milieu, to another. Thrusting a thief into “straight” society gives birth to situations that can be comic, or tragic, or both. The maid or farm girl trying to flounder through a world of Main Line “old money” brings automatic confusion and conflict. So does the conscientious objector somehow trapped into military service. A Costa Rican street boy, brought to the U.S. as an adoptee at age thirteen, may be overwhelmed by the wealth he sees here, to the point that he can’t resist helping himself to tempting objects regardless of who they belong to. Social workers and counselors drawn from American middle class society, on the other hand, may have trouble understanding that he has no notion of “right” or “wrong” within the framework of his new home’s standards. And how many times have writers of novels and screenplays alike teamed professors or such with strippers, to the delight of the public?

  Which is why you should never forget that each of your story people is a product of his or her milieu . . . a social as well as a physical environment. The child of a rich, powerful family will think and act differently than will the youngster of the poor and helpless.

  This being the case, you yourself must of necessity (1) know the rules and conduct patterns that govern behavior in that particular setting; (2) know the degree to which Character follows these rules; and (3) know whether your story takes place in that milieu or a divergent one.

  Then, develop people to fit, assigning them to their roles with appropriate consideration of their backgrounds. And if you take that to mean that it might not be wise to write about a mafia don or a sugar beet farmer or a fashion model unless you know about such via personal contact or on-the-turf research, that might be a good idea too.

  EXPERIENCE: THE BEST TEACHER?

  Experience shapes people, folk wisdom tells us. The question is, how, and to what degree?

  It should be obvious enough that the life you lead is going to have a bearing on the person you ultimately become. If you’ve been a Charles Manson groupie or a resident of the New Mexico commune known as the Hog Farm, your point of view is unlikely ever to coincide with that of a deputy sheriff in rural Kansas. Growing up in the construction trades in Milwaukee seldom prepares you to think like a Yale professor of musicology or a Buddhist monk.

  (Though you never can say for sure, you understand. Man’s diversity is a major reason he intrigues us, and his flexibility, adaptability, and unpredictability is legendary. I once knew a longtime member of the Sailors Union of the Pacific who went on to become a certified public accountant, then changed gears to spread his wings as a leading mystery writer.)

  What about what might be called shock impact—the kind of experience that so stuns as, allegedly, to turn a character’s hair white overnight, or to induce lasting amnesia or paralysis or blindness?

  Well, it does happen the psychiatrists tell us. The diagnosis frequently is one of conversion hysteria, and writers without number have used it as both a plot and character device. So many, in fact, that you can legitimately label it as overworked and so walk wide around it.

  More realistically, will one traumatic event blight a life forever? Or can the victim rise above it? Do years of rigid discipline and conditioning erect so strong a wall that the person so trained can never escape it?

  To ask such questions is to answer them. All of us have known far too many people who went their own way despite all pressures to the contrary. Carol Burnett overcame a childhood shared with alcoholic parents. Mary Higgins Clark suffered a series of traumatic losses in the deaths of those near and dear. Many Amish young people abandon the traditional life of their religion each year.

  The issue, of course, is that no two of us respond to an experience, traumatic or otherwise, in precisely the same way. We each interpret each event that impinges on us in a highly individualized manner. I’ve known a number of cops who came out of the ghetto, including a few who had siblings in prison.

  It’s not the experience that creates the trauma, you see, but the way the character reacts to it. Insult one man, and he apologizes for e
xisting. Another explodes in loud-mouthed anger. A third punches you in the nose. A fourth brushes off your insolence with a smile that hides his resolution that unpleasant things are going to happen to you in a darkened alley in the near future.

  Generations of writers have taken advantage of this fact, and so should you. Indeed, that’s why I talked about rationalization at such length in Chapter 2. It’s the reason one person finds a joke hilarious, while another takes it as a wearisome bore. It’s the key factor that makes one boy become a cop, his twin, a crook.

  As a writer, you decide the impact of experience on your characters. Indeed, you devise experiences, incidents, to fit your story needs . . . then give them the meaning, to Character and to Reader, that you want them to have.

  In a word, you rationalize each, precisely as described in Chapter 2.

  What lies behind this strange anomaly? Quite possibly it’s a vital, yet too often overlooked, constituent in the molding process that perhaps outweighs all the others. It’s that of . . .

  IDEAS: THE ULTIMATE CONDITIONERS

  Too many years ago, in Depression days in Jackson, Michigan, the town where I grew up, I stumbled upon an informal organization that called itself the Thinkers Exchange.

  Would that every boy might be as lucky! It reshaped my life.

  The Exchange’s membership was a disparate and unlikely group. It included, as I recall, a railroad fireman, a tool and die maker, a factory foreman, a blueprint technician, and a bicycle repairman. Lined faces, work-scarred hands, and broken nails were the order of the day. Virtually all those attending were self-educated. High school diplomas were a rarity. I doubt that a college degree ever darkened the group’s conclaves.

  Meeting once a month in a night-empty courtroom, the members mulled over topics ranging from events of the day to the meaning of the universe.

  Yet the organization’s name was no misnomer. Though limited as to background and formal education, and frequently arriving at what today seem strange conclusions indeed, these men were readers and thinkers, every one. Night after night, the shabby old courtroom vibrated with ideas. Here it was that I first heard of Charles Darwin and Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx. Clarence Meily’s Puritanism and Paul Lafargue’s The Right to be Lazy passed from hand to hand. The pros and cons of vaccination, vivisection, and euthanasia were debated fiercely. Fervent voices quoted Clarence Darrow and Margaret Sanger and Judge Ben Lindsay and Havelock Ellis and Robert G. Ingersoll. I found myself plunged into Morgan’s Ancient Society and Ward’s The Ancient Lowly and Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution.

  It was, I grant you, a unique situation. As I look back on it, I’m not at all sure that the years spent since in assorted colleges and universities contributed as much to my development.

  So it is with ideas. Like body, environment, and experience, ideas shape both you and the characters about whom you write. It would be a mistake if you didn’t consider such as you build your stories.

  Also, as I hope I’m making clear, ideas don’t spring just from books. People are far and away your greatest source and resource. Put yourself in contact with them every chance you get. Take advantage of their diversity to broaden your world, expand the limits of your own experience. Listen to them, talk with them, learn what they know and how they think and feel and reason.

  I can’t overemphasize the importance of this aspect of your development as a writer, as witness the case of a librarian under whom I worked for a time. Her story still fascinates me.

  Librarian was the daughter of a wealthy, metropolitan banking family.

  One day, Emma Goldman came to speak in Librarian’s city.

  This was the period just preceding World War I. Emma Goldman was a strident voice of militant anarchism, and of the radical feminism of the period.

  For no reason beyond casual curiosity that I could ever ascertain, Librarian (who was a blighted socialite rather than a librarian at the time) went to hear Miss Goldman. And somehow, unfathomably, the things Emma Goldman said, the ideas she advanced with such fervor, struck a spark of social awareness within Librarian. Overnight, with new-convert zeal, she plunged into a tumultuous life of carrying the farther reaches of left-wing thought to the masses, on a level that soon had her in and out of jail on a well-nigh weekly basis.

  Well, there’s considerably more to Librarian’s story, of course. But the thing that gripped and held me was the way an idea, the idea of anarchism (which I never could buy, incidentally, despite all Librarian’s efforts to convert me) had transformed and reshaped a woman’s life.

  And mine also. Just knowing her, being fascinated by her, I found my own thinking about and insight into people expanded and given new facets and dimensions.

  Nor are Librarian’s case or mine isolated instances. Look around you at the people you know who have found new meaning in life through their contact with ideas, whether from print or people. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land influenced a whole generation, and so did Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, and Jerry Falwell’s preaching, and Timothy Leary’s “drug revolution.”

  Or, if you feel I’m concentrating too much on the far-out fringes of our culture, consider the way that we grow up with such concepts as thrift or honesty or cynicism, progress or fate or kindliness or patriotism or devotion to duty conditioned into us.

  Yes, ideas do count. You’ll be shortchanging yourself and your characters alike if you don’t bear them in mind when you create your story people. Let them think, let them believe, let them explore unique alleyways of opinion. Give them private concepts to ponder. Your stories will be the richer for it; your readers fascinated by the extra spice they offer.

  Will the world accept such? Yes, if you don’t allow the characters’ attitudes to fall over the brink into propaganda. If you don’t believe me, look over the mysteries of William Kienzle, whose ma jor story people are Roman Catholic priests, or Harry Kemelman’s series about a rabbi.

  The insight and information these books give is, I believe, a major factor in making them best-sellers.

  TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

  Background can be summed up as “reasons why”:

  • Reasons why a character does the things he does.

  • Reasons why he doesn’t do others.

  What’s known as the “principle of parsimony” applies. That is, the simpler you can keep said reasons, the better. Which shouldn’t be too difficult, since as writer, creator, you’re in command. You simply rationalize the reasons.

  Thus, as you prepare to write a story, most of the things you need to know about your characters will pop up automatically—by osmosis, as it were, through your skin, the way a frog takes in water. Only when they don’t come do you need to sift through backgrounds in a systematic way.

  When you do, simply ask yourself such questions as are needed—and only such; after all, you’re writing a story, not working through research for a doctoral dissertation.

  So, ask questions—

  • Does anything about this character’s body have a bearing on his feeling, his thinking, his behavior, within the story framework?

  • How about his environment?

  • His experience?

  • His ideas?

  Keep at it, and believe me, you’ll get answers to solve your problems.

  One word of warning, though: The degree to and manner in which you develop characters depends on the kind of story you’re writing and the audience for which you’re writing it.

  While this is a point we’ll discuss in more detail in Chapters 10 and 14, it should do no harm to warn you here that an action thriller ordinarily requires less depth and detail in regard to character than does a literary story.

  But all this is extraneous to another issue which calls for immediate attention: how to create far-out story people when and if you need them.

  We’ll explore the subject in “Wild Cards,” our next chapter.

  9

  WILD CARDS

  What goes int
o building an offbeat character?

  The same elements that you use in creating any story person—only more so.

  A wild card, in poker, is one that may be played as any value the player wishes to assign it. Thus, a “wild” trey may be played as an ace, a jack, a seven, or anything else the player who holds it needs.

  When you’re writing a story, you sometimes need a character like that—one who doesn’t fit the norm, the pattern of accepted values. A wild card, as it were. An individual who’s so far out and off the beaten track that he gives you a manipulative edge as needed.

  Judging by the standards to which most of us adhere, virtually all such offbeat characters march to the storied different drummer. Specifically, we see key aspects of their behavior as irrational—warped, distorted, illogical, deviant. Which is to say, some such characters are, at the very least, eccentrics. Others, even farther out, are those colloquially dubbed psychos.

  How do you create such a character?

  The procedure is the same as for developing any other story person. You label him with a dominant impression . . . flesh him out with tags and traits . . . assign him an appropriate rationale as needed in terms of purpose, motive, and background.

  There are, however, a few caveats to bear in mind . . . chugholes and pitfalls you should be aware of. They’re the topic of this chapter.

  First of all, what about . . .

  THE ECCENTRICS

  My dictionary says that an eccentric is someone who deviates from accepted usage or conduct.