Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  John Kemp felt unduly pleased that the luck of the draw had put him beside Barbara Kilmer, but that advantage was canceled out by Gam Torrigan being seated on her left . . .

  Again,

  Agnes Partridge Keeley felt curiously isolated from the group. At her left . . .

  Back to Miles again:

  Miles thought the food tasted a bit strange, and he looked up and down the table . . . He made a mental note to talk to Margarita and Esperanza about serving. It was unnecessary to bang things down so briskly.

  And so it goes as MacDonald moves us skillfully from character to character, building each into an individual with private quirks and tastes and goals.

  Let me point out, too, my use of that word “skillfully” in the paragraph above. For because MacDonald has skill born of long experience, he can handle author omniscient with an ability most of us lack.

  Because “author omniscient” flits from character to character pretty much sans pattern, it both tends to prove confusing and to lack the emotional impact that comes from living through the story with a single (or possibly two or three) highly involved people. At the very least, ordinarily, it should stay with a character for a chapter at a time. Otherwise the cost frequently is higher than the return.

  What about the technique of telling the story entirely from outside any character—the objective, “I Am A Camera” approach?

  Well, obviously, it can be done. Hammett became famous for it in The Maltese Falcon.

  Again, however, the issue is skill. Can you create feeling and emotion in a character, and for readers, without going inside his head? If you can, fine, but for most of us it isn’t nearly as effective as presenting our story in terms of a subjectively oriented central figure.

  Most fiction today uses this technique. It focuses on and resolves around a viewpoint character who’s the chief sufferer, the individual who’s most involved emotionally and who has the most to win or lose. It presents the story from inside this character—letting the readers see what Character sees, hear what Character hears, taste/smell/touch/think/feel what Character does. In a word, readers experience the story, live through it, with the viewpoint character, and thus receive maximum emotional impact and satisfaction.

  Choosing the right viewpoint is vitally important. Suppose, for example, that you have a story that centers on high school football. Three of the major characters are the star running back, the coach, and the running back’s girlfriend. Colored by his or her own feel ings and desires, each sees the situation differently. Which should you choose as viewpoint?

  Let’s look at a fragment of a game as each experiences it.

  First, the player, the running back:

  As if somehow frozen in time, slowly, slowly, the pigskin spiralled down. Desperately, Steve raced to intercept it . . . poised beneath it, heart pounding and standing still at once. Nail this pass and he’d have it made—the play, the game, the championship. And Vonya.

  The boldface italics mark Steve’s viewpoint. Only he, the viewpoint character, could know what’s in his heart and mind at this moment.

  Second, the coach:

  Atkins’ fists clenched so tight they ached. He couldn’t get breath into his lungs. If that damn ox Steve tripped over his feet again, missed this one—

  Do you see the pattern? Only Atkins can know that his fists ache or that he can’t get breath into his lungs, let alone know his thoughts about Steve.

  Finally, Vonya:

  Vonya hung suspended in an awful, downward spiral like the ball. Steve mustn’t catch it! He mustn’t! Not when she’d already promised Tony about tonight.

  Vonya’s thoughts, Vonya’s feelings. Her emotional reactions to the situation. That’s what constitutes viewpoint. And as you see, each individual has his own.

  Above and beyond that, if you’re limited to one of these story people’s viewpoints, which will you pick to tell your tale? Which will be most effective? Which will prove most gripping for your readers?

  I can give you no answer, of course. The decision, ever and always, must be yours. It will depend on your decisions, your insights, the story you want to tell. All I can do is warn you to make your decision carefully, looking at the problem from all angles. Because it’s one of the most important choices you can make.

  It will help, however, if you remember five things where your viewpoint character is concerned.

  First, it’s through the viewpoint character that you orient your readers to a story, let them know whose story it is.

  Second, being inside somebody’s skin is a major way—maybe the major way—to grip your readers. It provides instant identification and empathy with the character.

  Third, once you’re inside somebody’s skin—that is, in viewpoint—you can’t legitimately enter another character’s mind. You can show him only in terms of externals, what he says and does.

  Fourth, a viewpoint character can’t lie about his inner feelings. The reader is inside the character, so what the character feels or thinks or sees or whatever, the reader knows about. Which means that if Character is a con man, you can’t edit the fact that he’s trying to marry Heroine for her money from his thoughts.

  (Do you want to keep your readers guessing? Then don’t go inside the character’s head.)

  Fifth, your audience in all likelihood will be a key factor in your choice of viewpoint. In our Steve-Coach-Vonya specimen, for example, Steve will probably be the viewpoint character if the story’s aimed at a teen sports magazine. A girl’s magazine? Vonya. A sports or service magazine? Quite possibly Coach Atkins.

  Beyond this, you as writer have a whole series of additional choices to make.

  Thus, whatever Character’s position, whether as protagonist or observer, this individual, this viewpoint character, may be presented in first person (“I”) or third person (“he”/“she”) or, on rare occasions, second person (“you”). It’s a matter of personal choice.

  First person offers a level of intimacy and insight that’s very effective. To a considerable degree, however, it puts a straightjacket on the writer, for it also limits the scope of presentation to what the “I” storyteller can observe and makes it awkward to change viewpoint. Some readers and some editors loathe it. But it’s overwhelmingly popular with others, and thousands of short stories and novels using it have been published.

  Third person, in contrast, tells the story “he/she,” as a participant observer might. Ordinarily that observer is one of the characters. Its weakness lies in the fact that it prevents the viewpoint character from seeing himself in action. By and large, it means that you can’t describe Character’s appearance save as other characters see him.

  Second person? It tells the story as “you” experience it. The best example of it with which I’m acquainted is Ralph Milney Farley’s “The House of Ecstasy,” and its very rarity as a technique is proof of the difficulty of managing it effectively. I’d class it as a tour de force and not worth bothering with except as an experiment.

  What about having more than one viewpoint? It’s legitimate enough, certainly—I recall at least one suspense novel where the author had a different first-person viewpoint character for each of twenty chapters, heaven help me! And to have two or three viewpoints is not at all unusual.

  Remember, though, that viewpoint switches may be confusing and hard to handle. It takes space to establish each viewpoint—and in a short story you seldom have that much wordage to squander. In consequence, multiple viewpoint tends to be limited to the longer forms.

  Yet a change in viewpoint allows you to introduce information known to or experienced by the new character, and that’s a plus. In a suspense novel, for example, a switch to what my friend Jack Bickham refers to as “villain’s viewpoint” can reveal how the hero’s best laid plans will be thwarted, thus heightening tension immeasurably. It’s a device that can prove effective in almost any genre.

  In general, if you’re going to introduce more than one viewpoint, it’s a good id
ea to put in a big enough chunk of each so your readers can adjust to it. My own tendency is to limit myself to not more than one viewpoint per chapter.

  On the other hand, don’t allow any viewpoint to run on so long that the others are forgotten.

  Be sure to establish time, place, circumstance, and viewpoint each time you change, though. Not to do so is an open invitation to reader confusion—and irritation.

  I’ll talk about other viewpoint issues in the “long story” part of Chapter 14.

  THE PROTAGONIST

  The protagonist in a story is most often termed the hero or heroine. But that can be deceiving. Actually, the protagonist is the character who has a goal, the individual who’s trying to achieve something.

  A good case in point is Crossing Delancey, a play by Susan Sandler that later was made into a movie. At first glance it appeared to be a simple love story about a Jewish girl, clerk in a bookstore, who’s moved Uptown from the Lower East Side. An East Side pickle peddler is her would-be suitor.

  Who’s the protagonist, girl or suitor?

  Surprisingly enough, it’s neither. The central figure, if you check closely, is the girl’s Jewish grandmother, who’s determined to see Girl married to a nice Jewish boy and secure in a traditional home.

  Thing is, Girl is happy as she is. Boy isn’t at all certain that Girl is the right bride for him. But Grandmother, unhappy because a change has come into her life—that is, Girl has abandoned her heritage for Uptown—has a goal: She’s going to bring Girl back to her roots. To that end, she sets out to manipulate Girl into a proper marriage and acknowledgment of her Jewish values.

  Do you see the pattern? As I’ve noted before, a story is the record of how somebody deals with danger. The protagonist is that somebody—a character made unhappy by a change in his or her situation and thus goal-motivated to a course of action that will return the happiness. Most often, that makes the protagonist what we commonly call the hero, but not always. Goal orientation or purpose is the issue.

  Most often, too, the protagonist is the character readers care most about or are most interested in. But again, not always. The grandmother in Crossing Delancey has been so skillfully disguised that at first glance we tend to think of her as incidental, whereas actually she’s the key to the puzzle.

  What’s your first step where building a protagonist is concerned, then? It’s to ask yourself the essential question, “Whose story is this?” Because, believe me, it is somebody’s, and that somebody is the person endangered, whether through threat to life, threat to happiness, or threat to dignity. Making the right decision as to who’s threatened, choosing the right person for the role, is vital.

  Note, too, that “protagonist” is a neutral term where sex is concerned. The old days when it automatically called forth masculine images is gone. Today, female protagonists often hold center stage.

  It’s also highly desirable to keep your protagonist an individual rather than a group. While we may cheer for a ball team, zeroing in on one player who has a private world to win or lose makes for an infinitely stronger effect.

  So you have a proper hero or heroine. How do you make the story turn out “right,” come to a proper conclusion?

  You set your protagonist up with what I call climax potential. This means the protagonist has two things vitally important to him, not just one—love and security, for example; love being exemplified by a man or woman, security by the job he’s always wanted, one tremendously desirable and with fantastic pay.

  At the climax, your protagonist faces some form of physical or emotional disaster that forces him to choose between the two big things he cares about. The job, the security, offers an easy way out of an impending disaster. To choose the love side of the equation—the man or woman the protagonist yearns for—can lead only to cataclysm. (Or vice versa, of course. Love doesn’t always triumph, nor does the other factor in the equation). But you plan and plant the story circumstances in such a manner that when Character makes the “right” choice—morally right, that is, in the view of your readers—he’s rewarded with the happiness he sought at the story’s beginning.

  To cite Dashiell Hammett again, you’ll find a beautiful example of this pattern in The Maltese Falcon, when at the climax Sam Spade gives up the woman he loves because his integrity is more important to him.

  This also brings into focus the answer to another oft-asked question: Must a story always have a “happy” ending?

  Answer: That depends on what Character sees as constituting happiness.

  Thus, for Sam Spade, happiness meant being able to live with himself. So The Maltese Falcon had a happy—even though in its way tragic—ending.

  Similarly, in a magazine novel I once wrote, the ending saw hero and heroine starting off up a mountain pursued by New Guinea headhunters. Odds were they’d end up dead meat at a cannibal barbeque. But for now they had each other, and if they died, they’d die together.

  Readers loved it.

  On the other hand, the other night I watched a play by a new playwright unfold. It was a skillful job, until the end. But the end ing, unhappily, proved nothing, demonstrated nothing about the characters except that, in the old phrase, “Life is real, life is earnest, and we all die sometime.” The audience left, muttering disappointment. Why? Because the story wasn’t set up to provide the hero with an opportunity to make a meaningful choice, a decision that would leave the audience feeling fulfilled and satisfied. As it was, the hero had taken no stand that left him in a decisive position in relation to what the future might bring, so the story came to no real conclusion. It wasn’t so planned as to give the protagonist climax potential.

  Does a story have to have a happy ending? Not necessarily. After all, consider Macbeth or Driving Miss Daisy, which both end with the death of a main character. What you need is a fitting ending, one that is geared to the behavior of the character in the story. A good example is William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley. It concerns a carnival con man who exploits, corrupts, and robs virtually everyone with whom he comes in contact. The ending, which left me gasping, found him with only one road open—to become a “geek,” a drunk who bites the heads off live chickens in a sideshow. Not a happy ending, certainly, but a fitting one the character had deserved.

  Remember, too, that you, the writer, can make any ending happy if you build the characters in such a manner as to prove the protagonist worthy of happiness by his display, however subtly, of moral courage at the climax. Ever and always, the “right” ending is the satisfying ending, and a satisfying ending is happy.

  Or, to put it another way, you the writer can make any ending a happy ending if you build your characters in such a manner as to give it meaning.

  THE ANTAGONIST

  The antagonist, in the popular view, is the villain.

  Unfortunately, people tend to think of villains as wearing black hats and twirling the traditional long black mustache while they tie hapless, helpless Sophronia to the railroad tracks. The protagonist/hero is the noble soul on a white horse who comes to rescue her.

  While you may find this pattern of good guy-versus-bad guy in many stories, it’s far from a universally true picture these days. A villain may be better defined merely as Hero’s opponent and so antagonist. Thus, he’s not necessarily a bad person. He very well may be just as good a man as Hero. But if he gets what he wants, Hero can’t achieve his heart’s desire.

  Consider, for example, two totally estimable astronauts, each seeking to be chosen for a Mars flight. Only one can go. That makes them antagonists. But you, the writer, by small details of phrasing and handling and choice of empathetic fragments of behavior, guide your audience to root for the one you’ve selected to win. That character is your hero.

  Is the antagonist, the opponent, the villain, important? He is indeed. Dynamically speaking, he’s probably more vital than your hero, for as old hands used to hammer at me when I was learning the trade, “The strength of your villain is the strength of your s
tory.”

  You see, change, a disruption of your protagonist’s status quo, is where your story starts. Protagonist just can’t stand it, so he sets out to achieve a more satisfactory situation.

  This brings him into conflict. Conflict with who? The antagonist, of course; the villain—for it’s the villain who’s instituted the change that’s shattered your hero’s status quo.

  And as we’ve already pointed out with our astronauts, above, the villain quite possibly is just as decent a person as your hero. But he’s determined to win, to have his own way. Therefore, he fights back ruthlessly against Hero—just as Hero would, were he in Villain’s shoes.

  Remember, then, that the villain is not necessarily villainous in the traditional sense. But he is determined and so he fights, meets Hero’s efforts to restore Hero’s status quo head-on.

  Remember also that this isn’t necessarily a battle that’s waged with guns or daggers. It may involve no more than a developer’s efforts to gain control of a sylvan valley for a subdivision, while an environmentalist hero seeks to preserve its beauty untouched for nature lovers. The key issue, for you, is that both sides are convinced they’re right and both are willing to fight—with no bloodier weapons than votes or legal writs, quite possibly—to have their way.

  THE LOVE INTEREST CHARACTER

  Really, the only reason I feel it necessary to include the love interest character here is because, too often, he or she is pictured as merely a sexy part of the furniture.

  Well, the sexy part is fine, especially if we substitute “desirable” for sexy. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as I’ve noted elsewhere. What counts is that Hero react favorably to the female paragon we set before him. Or, if the story is female-oriented, vice versa.

  In these days, however, readers are no longer content to have the love component be just a mindless romance or sex romp. They insist that the female participant come through as a real person—that is, that she have goals and attitudes and preoccupations and a self-concept every bit as well-developed as her male compeer’s. It makes for a more complex, more realistic, more interesting story. If you want an example, put a tape of The African Queen on your VCR and watch Katharine Hepburn in action.