Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  A word of narration. A valuable tool indeed, you can use it to expand or contract presentation as desired, leaping across centuries in a sentence or drawing a picture of a time or place that goes on for pages. Well handled, it enables you to slant a portrayal so readers love or hate a person or a situation.

  Because narration summarizes, however, it lacks the excitement dramatization brings. And since it represents the author telling, it may or may not be believable.

  Back to the matter of extended timespan. Ordinarily, such brings with it a need for more characters than in the simple, single-problem-oriented genre novel. Which means that you’ll have to conceive, conceptualize, and create said people, balancing them against those already in the story framework.

  Further, these characters must reflect their place and period. Attitudes of English Roundheads clashed with those of the Cavaliers. Chinese in the California goldfields mirrored one state of mind; those who made the Long March with Mao, another. The Irish immigrant, in his day, was disdained, and so was the Jew and the Italian, and the Appalachian poor white in Chicago in the sixties. The coal fields and the vineyards breed different attitudes. Anachronisms must be checked out, and so must speech patterns and dress and religious beliefs and racial prejudices and women’s place in the family constellation.

  Which means that you, author of a novel with breadth and sweep, have your research cut out for you, and it won’t necessarily be quick or easy. Invariably, some key background detail can’t be uncovered, and work is stymied. I’ve known any number of writers who spent a year or more just digging, before they ever sat down at the typewriter or word processor.

  Unless you’re determined to be truly scholarly, a rather obvious trick often will speed up research, however. Simply take a solid volume or two related to your subject and, when you need color detail, draw it from this source, rather than spend endless hours searching out a particular fragment. Thus, if you write mysteries, you may place great reliance on such books as LeMoyne Snyder’s old but still valuable Homicide Investigation, Charles Swanson’s Criminal Investigation, Phil and Karen McArdle’s Fatal Fascination, or Stanton Samenow’s Inside the Criminal Mind. Down the line you’re likely to accumulate a fairly extensive shelf on murder and related subjects. But for practical working purposes, picking items from two or three books can stand you in very good stead.

  Remember, too, that in any story, short or long, we’re dealing with emotion as the key dynamic. So for each of the characters you bring to life in new episodes, you must devise emotional involvements in keeping with time/place/situation that build/contrast/clash with those of your other people, just as if you were constructing a new story.

  There’ll also be the issue of viewpoint to complicate things. Through whose eyes will each episode be seen? Believe me, it can be a headache. But in a long book, some change is well-nigh essential. To make it more complicated, each viewpoint character calls for different handling. Certainly there must be contrast between them, and that means more digging, more research.

  Finally, what about space, geography? A panoramic war novel or a rich, far-ranging life story like Robert L. Duncan’s China Dawn will call for time-and-place research to fit your actors for their roles. When Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote their famous The Mote in God’s Eye, they created not only an imaginary world, but an entire universe.

  Even when you’re dealing with a shorter timespan—a cradle-to-grave biography, for instance—be prepared for emotional complexities. In any life, you’re confronted with the fact that a life moves through a series of emotional strata.

  Thus, a child’s focus may be on tensions growing from the demands of a father, a mother, or a sibling. And although conscious memory of these may pass, their emotional residue remains for years to influence Character’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.

  The early teens quite possibly brings a zeroing in on adventure, whether it be via sports or street gangs or school rivalries. Late teens see sex take the spotlight. Young adulthood brings concentration on career or marriage. And so on.

  In other words, such a novel is episodic, but on a different level than the generational.

  In all the long, passage-of-time/display-of-character books, you work in episodic units, jumping from episode to episode or linking episodes with narration. But within each episode, you still build with scene and sequel. They remain your foundation stones.

  Since you have more space to fill in the long story, more words to play with, you can have more characters, make them more complex, perhaps even change viewpoint. But you still start from the fundamentals of dominant impression, dominant attitude, and purpose.

  Don’t feel obliged to lengthen your cast or complicate your people, however. Many of the most memorable characters in fiction are the next thing to stick figures. Consider Cinderella, Romeo, Tom Sawyer or, for that matter, Frankenstein. Their creators did very nicely, if you please.

  THE CATEGORY CHARACTER

  The category or genre book is a novel aimed at readers with particular tastes, particular interests. They know what they enjoy reading and they buy it. Publishers, in turn, being sales and profit oriented, are more than happy to supply the desired volumes.

  The so-called categories range from romance and mystery to science fiction, western, horror, and adventure. Each of these major categories breaks down into sub-clusters. Harlequin romance groupings in one set of recent guidelines included “Harlequin Presents,” “Harlequin Temptation,” “Harlequin American Romance,” “Harlequin Romantic Intrigue,” and several others, each aimed at a particular reader public. In science fiction, one covey of fans insists on so-called “hard” science fiction—that is, fiction based on extrapolation from known physical science. Others like their stories social science-oriented, or prefer fantasy, “sword and sorcery,” etc. Mystery readers may demand straight detective, “hard-boiled,” “police procedural,” “private eye,” “cozy,” or espionage. And so it goes, category by category.

  Since a prime characteristic of all these genres is that their readers know what they want, you need to know too if you plan to write in the field. Indeed, your best bet is to pick an area in which you yourself are a fan and have read widely, so the implicit rules and assumptions, the things fans take for granted, are already built into your head.

  That this will influence your choice and development of characters goes without saying, especially if you write romance. Thus, Silhouette’s guidelines described the heroine of its “Intimate Moments” series as “a sympathetic character. Independent, intelligent and strongwilled, she should also be emotionally vulnerable. Though she may find herself in circumstances unfamiliar to most readers, she reacts to them in a familiar and believable way.” Candlelight Romances says its heroine “should have been born in the United States and preferably raised there. Between twenty-two and twenty-eight years old, she has at least a high school education and preferably college. She should have a job which she enjoys with aspirations toward a high position or level of achievement . . .”

  One word of warning: Category book requirements are continually changing. Picking up a stack of old paperbacks to study can give you a dangerously wrong impression of where the market stands today. If you want to write for a category market, study only current guidelines or the most recent releases.

  And beyond this? The secret is to create good characters, likable characters, self-consistent/predictable characters, believable characters. By and large they’ll be interesting, colorful people who don’t take trouble lying down. Or, as one of my favorite editors once told me, “I want heroines, not victims!”

  THE RADIO CHARACTER

  Although radio no longer offers much of a market, that may not be the case for long. Taped fiction is coming up fast, with adaptations from both novels and short stories now being readied. A growing enclave of commuters, joggers, and just passive “readers” is opening to them.

  From the writer’s standpoint, a character on radio—or tape—rem
ains a character. Dynamically he or she is the same as in print, even though most of the time in all likelihood you’re going to have to simplify the character to fit the medium. To that end, concentrate on dominant impression (noun of vocation, adjective of manner), dominant attitude, and goal/purpose. Where presentation is concerned, only technical details change.

  Specifically:

  1. Your audience can’t see your people, only hear them.

  2. Getting inside a character on tape is going to be more difficult than it is in print.

  Let’s begin with Roadblock No. 1. Since you’re denied the visual element by the medium, you have to draw pictures of your people in sound.

  How do you do this?

  To begin with, the announcer is a great help. He can fill the listener in on time, place, and situation.

  ANNOUNCER:

  It’s a quiet evening in Rockville . . . especially quiet in the alley behind the real estate office. Ed and Olly are waiting in the shadows for the beat cop to check the door.

  Identity is something else again. You may designate one line for Ed, another for Olly, but how is Listener to know which is which? The answer is, he won’t—not unless early on you have one refer to the other by name:

  ED:

  Get back here, Olly! You want that cop to see you?

  OLLY:

  Aw, cool it, Ed. We’ll hear him before he turns in.

  And of course it wouldn’t hurt to give each character a verbal tag or two:

  ED:

  What I’m doing in this hick burg is more than I can figure. New York, New York—that’s my town!

  OLLY:

  (mimicking) New York, New York. That’s all you talk about. Me, I’ll take Kansas.

  Beyond obvious things like this, the trick is to create images—sound supplemented, where possible—with the things your people say. It’s not enough to have Ed cross to the desk where the manager keeps the safe combination, because radio listeners can’t see the action. Rather, you’ve got to translate it into audible words.

  ED:

  The combination, Olly! Get the combination!

  OLLY:

  Which desk?

  ED:

  The big one, dummy, the boss’s.

  Sound now takes over—the sound of Olly’s footsteps, then the scrape of a drawer opening, then the rattle of shuffling papers.

  OLLY:

  What’s it look like? This is just a bunch of papers.

  Well, this is supposed to be a text on character, not radio writing. But you get the idea.

  In developing your characters, beyond the things they themselves say, the things other characters say about them will help you give them added dimension. To this end, however, you need to give your primary people something to do for their fellows to talk about. What a character does defines him, so you devise bits, incidents, and situations that give him an opportunity to behave in character on a level that your audience can hear.

  Furthermore, “what he does” should have its origins in emotion, since that’s the bedrock on which your story rests.

  ED:

  You think I’m going to buy that? Booze is no excuse.

  SOUND: Bottle smashing.

  ED:

  To hell with you!

  SOUND: Door slamming.

  Yes, radio can capture emotion. A sob, a snarl, a laugh, a whisper will translate emotion into sound.

  What about the second roadblock we mentioned above: the problem of getting inside a character?

  Individual thoughts, stream of consciousness or the like can be achieved by a variety of technical tricks. One of the most common tricks is the use of an echo or filter microphone, both of which distort sound to create special effects in radio drama.

  ED:

  Get back here, Olly!

  (ECHO MIKE) My god, how did I ever get hooked up with this dodo? But I’ve got to get into that safe!

  Similarly, a narrator may be used to reveal information not normally put in actual dialogue. It also saves time.

  NARRATOR:

  Lord knows Ed didn’t want to crack that safe, but it was Julie’s neck for sure if he didn’t. Only he couldn’t let Oily know that. Oily had to think he was just after the dough.

  The point I hope I’m making here is that radio has its limitations where character presentation is concerned. But given a bit of imagination and persistence, you probably can work out a satisfactory handling.

  THE STAGE CHARACTER

  What about characterization in the theatre?

  A stage play gives you both sight and sound to work with where your people are concerned. But this doesn’t free you quite as much as you might imagine.

  To begin with, you have to use dialogue to provide information on anything that happens offstage. And it’s every bit as hard—maybe more so—to get inside the head of a character in a stage play as it is to invade the thoughts and feelings of one designed for radio. Narrators, Greek choruses, and asides to the audience are out of style and blackouts in the “Waiting for Lefty” mode tend to seem artificial—as they are. So most often you’re left with the task of revealing everything in action and dialogue (primarily dialogue), or else devising tricks to surmount the limitations.

  In addition, you face the problem that presentation will be “broad”—that is, action must be exaggerated enough to reach a relatively distant audience.

  Also, the proscenium arch holds the scene of action to a relatively small area and limits the action itself. And arena staging has its own problems.

  Nor are actors and directors always an unadulterated joy to work with. Both tend to change your lines to suit their own ideas, even though the Dramatists Guild says you call the shots. In consequence, you have no choice but to attempt to design a so-called “actor-proof” play—one that will bring down the house no matter how clumsily presented.

  Yes, it can be done, but it isn’t easy. The answer, insofar as there is one, is to create characters the audience can believe in and cheer for, caught up in a situation that freezes said audience in its seats.

  In other words, create men and women who care desperately about something that’s threatened and will fight to get or keep it. In comedy as well as drama? Yes, and maybe even more so.

  This book gives the fundamentals of how to create such people. To adapt them to the stage is a matter of understanding the theatre as well as writing, however. To that end, immerse yourself in the atre as fan, actor, stagehand—watching plays, reading plays, writing plays without number until one hits.

  THE FILM/TV CHARACTER

  Where characterization for film and television is concerned, the big plus is that it isn’t limited by the proscenium arch, as is the stage. There is no “offstage,” since the camera can jump anywhere, whether it’s next door or to Kenya or on the moon.

  In addition, clothes and sets help to characterize your people.

  Film also has the tremendous advantage of the closeup. That is, the camera can fill the screen with any fragment of action or expression desired, whether it be a postage stamp upside down on a letter, a shot of eyes going wide with panic, or a breath sucked in in a manner that leaves no doubt of the character’s passion. Attention can be focused on a watchface or a ring or a pistol in a hip pocket without need of action or dialogue. There is the problem of revealing thoughts or bringing the past into the present, but flashbacks and other similar devices can take at least acceptable care of that.

  Remember John Wayne’s insightful comment that in film, actors react rather than act. And study of a few movies or TV episodes will show you that by the very nature of the medium actors perform actions more than they seem to think. This performance is a reaction resulting from a thought, and it interests audiences more than does the thought itself.

  Indeed, the worst aspect of film/TV may be that its great strength lies in its very capacity for showing action. In consequence, it tends to concentrate on fights, cataclysms, and car chases. The quiet and the thoughtful too often are i
gnored or relegated to talking heads.

  For the writer, this means that he ordinarily has little future in the field unless he turns out strongly plotted “action stuff.” If that’s to his taste, he may have a career. If it isn’t, perhaps he’s better off with print.

  Be that as it may, a writer still wants to write, which makes characters his business.

  Sometimes those characters may be in the past or future, or aspects of present society with which the writer is unfamiliar.

  That poses problems, but they can be solved. So, let’s take a look at them in the next chapter, “The Character Out of Time.”

  15

  THE CHARACTER OUT OF TIME

  How do you get people to read about characters in unfamiliar worlds?

  You provide emotional insight into the world and individuals involved.

  This chapter concerns characters who live in worlds separate from our own, milieus that each have their own peculiarities and uniquenesses.

  As mentioned briefly in Chapter 14, those separate worlds, those milieus, shape the characters who live in them. If you don’t have a grasp of the world you focus on, it means that you may—probably will—fail to understand the characters also, for often they play by rules different than those we ordinarily assume.

  Your readers, in turn, must know and understand the world in which any given story takes place in order for that story to be effective. You the writer are the person who, with the images and insights you paint with words, helps them to attain that understanding. Failure to make the story world and its special rules clear to readers automatically limits you to the shoot-’em-up level of fiction.

  Even an unfamiliar geography may change the rules, the circumstances. The adventure set in Timor or Patagonia calls for knowledge of those places. Too many service veterans and travelers have seen the landscape and the culture for you to get away with faking.