Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  I term the people who populate special story worlds characters out of time. They fall into three categories: those from the past (that is, history); those from the future, as in science fiction; and those who fall into what I call the “not-you” contemporary, the groups whose lifestyles are outside your ken, even though you may see and work with them every day.

  While the members of each of these groups certainly are as human as any other story people, dealing with them frequently involves special problems, for to make past, future, or not-you contemporary characters effective, you must fit their attitudes and responses to their milieus, the world or society in which they live.

  HISTORICAL CHARACTERS

  To create a solid character from the past, you first need to know the particular world through which Character moves, and the pluses and minuses that go with it.

  To that end, you must find out what’s different about it, beyond the beards, the armament, the funny-looking clothes. It’s not necessarily necessary that you be aware of who was king or what wars were fought or won or lost. Buy you must have an awareness of Character’s goals, attitudes, and feelings and how they fit into the patterns, beliefs, and thinking of the society in which he’s going to play his role.

  Thus, if your story is set in a society that thinks of women only as property, your approach and your handling of your heroine—and your hero too—will be different than it would be if the society were one that believes in romantic love. If your hero’s occupation is limited by guilds or class restrictions, his skills, status, and income won’t be the same as if his world were one in which he has the vocational freedom of the America’s nineteenth-century frontier. If his culture holds him down because he’s not of noble birth, he can’t function in the same way as if he were a pirate on the Spanish Main.

  Similarly, attitudes in France will be different than those in Japan. Behavior will follow one pattern in Russia in the 1700s, another today. And so on.

  The important thing to remember in any case is that while facts are ever so important, the feelings they engender are what make your story go. Your goal is to figure out how Character thinks, as a result of his situation. How does he see things? What are his feelings and ideas about the prevailing state of affairs? And how does he behave in view of said ideas, as contrasted with the action a man or woman of today might take?

  Take a simple and obvious case in point, a xenophobic society where inordinate fear of or dislike for foreigners or strangers is the rule. We saw this in our own country, when each wave of immigration brought a new crop of prejudices and hostilities. The Irish, for example, in their day were the victims of discrimination on every level. The Jews, the Italians, the East Europeans, each suffered in their turn. Today we still see more than vestiges of leftover antagonism focused on Blacks and Hispanics. Further, all through history xenophobia has played a major role in determining who’s permitted to marry whom, what jobs are available to what groups, and the pecking order that determines who’s to be at the top or bottom of the communal totem pole.

  That this affects fiction goes without saying. From Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to Sholem Asch’s East River to John Jake’s North and South to Janet Dailey’s Calder books, you’re dealing with cultural patterns with which many readers are unfamiliar. To reach them, you’re going to have to present these patterns, and the emotions and attitudes involved, in terms that “sell” them to your audience.

  Even more disruptive to our conceptions is the cultural situation that condemns the individual who rises above the group, as in the case of Latin attitudes in some areas even today. There, adding a room to your home may arouse such antagonism that your neighbors will come in the night to burn it up or tear it down. Among some American Indian tribes, an honored person gives lavish gifts to guests at a celebration as a means of equalizing wealth.

  Do you need to drag cultural patterns in by the heels? Not at all. What’s important is how your characters feel about them, how they react to them, and the kinships or conflicts that spring from them.

  Indeed, you may need no more than a few lines that indicate a character’s awareness of our attitude on a matter. But those few lines can make a difference, insofar as they add to your story’s and your character’s dimension.

  Is your story set in Victorian England? If the picture in your mind’s eye is limited to the popular image of the period as one of stiff-necked propriety, you open your range of character portrayal, potential conflicts, and story complications vastly when you broaden your vision to view a panorama that includes music halls, the secret vices of the rich, the thriving underworld, and its beggars and wanderers, cracksmen and footpads, whores and wastrels. Charles Dickens worked wonders with such.

  But remember: Ever and always, you must fit your characters’ thinking and feelings into the panorama, while at the same time you create understanding of and empathy with it in your readers.

  How do you uncover the information you need? You look it up. You dig it out.

  Don’t let this scare you off. A book or two on sociology, cultural anthropology, and social history will give you a good start on the things you need to know. These will lead you to others that fit your special needs. In the course of your poking, you’ll also pick up data on everything from cabbages to kings. Take advantage of it to keep an eye out for details that provide you with sensory perceptions. The drafts that whip flames about in a castle fireplace and blow out candles are a good example. Same for the feel of a horsehair couch, the unfamiliar smoothness of silk to a traveler in the Orient, the smells of spices or woodsmoke, the distortion of balance that comes with riding on a donkey or camel, the torment of flea bites, the taste of haggis or squid or buffalo tongue. One and all, they give you bits to help bring your characters to life and to reveal traits that define them—we still remember the princess so sensitive that she couldn’t sleep because there was a pea under the mattress.

  But such fragments are only a bonus. The feelings and attitudes that spring from environment are your primary target.

  That means it’s your privilege to scan and be selective. You’re not going to have to pass a college test at the end of your reading. Make notes on the bits that strike you as valuable or add color. Ignore the rest.

  Search, particularly, for works that describe life in your place or period. Journals, diaries, or autobiographies may prove excellent sources. When I was writing westerns—a field in which there’s a whole library of works—I soon discovered that Everett Dick’s The Sod House Frontier, Carl Coke Rister’s Southern Plainsmen, Foster-Harris’s The Look of the Old West and an 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalog solved my problem very nicely most of the time. Count on it—a few hours, a few books, and you’ll be off and running!

  Don’t limit yourself to research in books, however. If your story takes place within the past couple of hundred years, you may find much valuable material in newspapers and magazines of the period about which you’re writing. Museums often will become treasure houses for you. So may historical societies. A drama school costume teacher may prove an asset beyond imagining if you remember that the issue is how a garment felt to the person wearing it, not just how it looked. And James M. Cain speaks of going over court transcripts of the Civil War period in search of authentic speech patterns.

  (I’ll warn you yet again, though: Many of you are going to be trapped by your material. That is, some of the items you find will fascinate you to the point that in spite of yourselves you go on and on and become scholars without portfolio. That’s what happened to me, at least, with the result that any day now we may have to move into a tent on the front lawn because books have taken over the house.)

  But enough of history, or at least history as we normally think of it. It’s time we moved on to the years, centuries, and eons ahead . . . the worlds of science fiction and what might be termed “future history.”

  FUTURE HISTORY

  Here, let me recommend a book by William F. Noland and George Clayton Johnson. It’s t
itled Logan’s Run. It also was made into a highly successful film.

  The story draws a devastatingly realistic picture of a future world. Overpopulation is its problem; the solution, a law that decrees death by painless sleep as soon as a person reaches age twenty-one. In consequence, with the dread of impending “sleep” forever looming, life is one long, furious pursuit of pleasure as each individual tries to cram as much sensual stimulation as possible into the too-short years before the time-measuring “flower” in his or her palm turns black.

  The hero, Logan, in turn, is one of the officers whose duty it is to enforce the death rule. But when his own palm-flower begins to blacken, he can’t accept the thought of oblivion. He becomes one of those who, rebelling, flee their fate—a “runner,” in the jargon of the period.

  It’s a fascinating premise, and the “run” that follows is exciting indeed. For our purposes here, however, the key point is that the Nolan and Johnson story world is based on believable sociological projection, an extrapolation which readers can believe. Or if you want to go even further, consider Neal Barrett Jr.’s Through Darkest America, with its virtually surrealistic picture of post-World War III life. The message: To create a solid character in future time, just as in history, you first need to conceptualize a unique world with intriguing problems for him to live in.

  Next question: What kind of men and woman populate this world? What have the changes in environment and life done to them? Even today, conditioning and behavior modification and genetic engineering are closing in on us. How will they reshape the human animal? Will the computer replace thinking and so-called artificial intelligence take over? Are machines with personality in command? Will electrical or chemical stimulation of selected areas of the brain make possible what one writer has referred to as “unbearable pleasure, infinitely prolonged,” and if it does, what effect will it have on society? What feelings and fears and attitudes do you foresee? Is “free will” ever actually free? Has humankind, in your story, gone forward into some sort of nirvana, or back into the pre-industrial world? When does education become brainwashing? What about brain grafts? In the past, we’ve always assumed that fictional characters have human form, but is this necessarily so? May shared mental activities come to pass? Telepathy? Clairvoyance? Teleportation? May man’s goals change and new outlets for individualism be substituted for those we know? What about the pre-programming of personality and individuality?

  Clearly, these days, not even the sky’s the limit. But whatever world we create, we still come back to the principle laid down when we discussed the character from history. Regardless of the period or conditions about which you write, it’s essential that you know the implicit or explicit ground rules of your character’s society, his world, because Character’s attitudes and feelings must reflect the thinking and attitudes of his time and place. Books like George Orwell’s 1984, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, and C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen will give you an idea of what I mean.

  Here, since we’re dealing with tomorrow . . . how do you create a future world?

  If you’re a science fiction buff (and odds are that you are, if you’re contemplating a story laid in the future) you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of that from your prior reading in the field.

  Just as in past-history work, you have a volume of existing material to help you—Brian Stableford’s Future Man, for example; Gene Bylinsky’s Life in Darwin’s Universe; Peter Nichols’s Science Fiction Encyclopedia and The Science in Science Fiction; Robert Forward’s Future Magic; John Taylor’s The Shape of Minds to Come, and ever so many others. Couple such with the convolutions and warpings of your own imagination and you’re bound to come up with something fascinating.

  One word of caution: While you’ve created a new world in your own eyes, to your characters it’s work-a-day familiar, so don’t slip into the error of having them show too great a fascination with the technology and social patterns that have developed.

  THE NOT-YOU CONTEMPORARY

  This segment concerns contemporary characters.

  Many of such characters may be just like you: the same sex, the same age, the same background, the same occupation, the same social groups. With these you need no help.

  Others, however, on one level or another, operate by different standards. Each in his own way, they pledge allegiance to alien groups and live in separate worlds.

  Why? Because their attitudes are different.

  Not just their attitudes, either. Their hopes and ambitions, too, may be on an unfamiliar level. Their moral code. Their priorities. Their thinking. Their emotional reactions. Their feelings.

  Especially their feelings. Emotion undergirds all the other factors.

  If you eliminate these people when you cast your stories and only write about men and women wholly like you, you limit the scope and interest of your work. Perhaps drastically.

  That’s a luxury most of us can’t afford.

  Because this is so, you need to research these people so like, yet unlike you, just as you would someone out of history or the future. You can’t assume that a character from a university background will think and behave the same way a character from a sharecropper’s shack will. You just don’t dare to take it for granted that the views of a fifty-year-old on sexual conduct will duplicate those of a seventeen-year-old or a thirty-year-old. Nor will such an individual’s ideas necessarily prove consistent. A professional bank robber may have one attitude towards his trade, another where adultery or lying is concerned.

  If you don’t recognize this and have a depth of insight into a given character’s private world, you’ll have difficulty grasping that different players play by different rules, and those rules may be different than those we ordinarily assume.

  You’re contemporary, right? Well-geared to our present world in all respects?

  Or are you? Can you get inside the head of, for example, a young girl from a devoutly religious home? A dope-head out of the inner city slums? A cruising butch lesbian on the prowl? Do you see eye to eye with a deserted mother working overtime to support three latch-key children? How about a trucker about to lose his rig? A man who grew up in a hippie commune in New Mexico? A woman who spent years of her youth with the Weatherman in the period when sexual fidelity was forbidden? A group of high-schoolers caught up in today’s wave of satanism?

  Thing is, if you fail to understand the thinking, attitudes, and feelings of people in other milieus within our culture, you limit yourself drastically in your choice of characters.

  Case in point: An older writer of my acquaintance was in the process of working up a female character. He needed a contemporary romantic song as part of the atmosphere, so he consulted his nearest available expert on pop music, a young professional woman who lived next door.

  “What,” he asked, “is an appropriate number for a girl to be seduced by these days?”

  A moment’s pause, while Expert pondered. Then a giggle.

  “More likely,” she said, “she’ll do the seducing.” And then, after another giggle: “I mean, it’s liberation time. These days, guys don’t always take the lead.”

  She went on from there. By the time she got through, my friend, grinning wryly, admitted he’d learned all sorts of things.

  Finally, Expert glanced at her watch. “Hey, I better go. Ed should have supper on by now.”

  It turned out that Ed, her live-in boyfriend, was cook for this particular contemporary family. He also did the laundry and ironed his own shirts. And neither he nor the young woman seemed to find anything unusual about the situation.

  This didn’t surprise me too much, but it certainly did my friend, because it contradicted major concepts he’d held since childhood. Being older, the fact that a whole broad range of traditional behavior patterns had reversed for many people simply hadn’t dawned on him. Today’s focus on instant gratification had passed him by. He was unaware of how great a role conspicuous consumption plays with the present generation; how men and w
omen coming out of school take it for granted that they can automatically step into the level of living their parents worked twenty or thirty years to attain; that one-on-one dating is pretty much out of style, replaced by small-group get-togethers. “Do your own thing” and “If it feels good, do it” were alien concepts to him. He didn’t realize that what he thought of as irresponsibility was a state of mind that said self-expression and individuality were more important than staying with an unsatisfying job. Or that authority is no longer accepted for its own sake, and that a large segment of society takes affluence for granted.

  The lesson here is, as my friend discovered, times have changed, so the things your characters think and do should reflect it.

  Further, age is far from being the only issue. Whether you’re seventeen or twenty-seven or thirty-seven, you’re in contact every day with people who have different feelings and attitudes than you do, even if they don’t express them.

  These people aren’t different just in occupation. Take, for example, men and women who have done their share of time in law enforcement. They have a different view of life than do civilians, see the people they meet through different eyes. Years of dealing with “perps,” lawbreakers, tends to make them suspicious, cynical. To a degree they tend to live in a closed society of their kind.

  These are facts you need to recognize if you hope to achieve any degree of realism when you use an officer as a character. He’s not just a man; he is, in effect, a member of a special club. And while you may modify such elements to suit your needs and tastes, you don’t dare to ignore it.

  This is relatively close to the normal pattern. You can understand such people without too much difficulty and adjust your handling of them as characters to fit.