Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  How about individuals further out, however: career criminals, pedophiles, Black Moslems, you name it? Each lives in his own closed world-within-the-world, separated from outsiders by unvoiced beliefs and attitudes and feelings. The young woman working in a massage parlor has a private view of her customers and it’s unlikely to be the same as theirs. The outlook of the debutante—or her wealthy parents—may be one of disbelief at the pattern accepted as routine by the medical technician. The priest’s words from the pulpit may not be at all the same as his private thoughts. And anyone who has made even casual contact with the “simple life” of the various Old Order Amish groups knows that in its way it can be ever so complex, with taboos and sanctions that may govern anything from dress to farming. Some fellowships restrict transportation to buggies; others permit cars if they’re painted black—and that includes even the bumpers. There are bodies that feel marriage of a boy or girl even to a member of another Amish group is grounds for the form of ostracism termed “shunning.”

  Bear in mind that as the world changes, attitudes do too. Whose approach to casual sex can stay the same in a society where AIDS and its consequences hold the headlines? So-called “safe sex” has remolded the moonlight-and-roses of romance into a routine with clinical overtones.

  Those are today’s facts of life and we all know them—more or less, that is. But all too often they don’t reach our fiction, the stories we tell. Instead, we write of a never-never land in which the characters are those from our childhood fantasies.

  I have no objection to this, you understand, for I find fiction decked out in sociological terms less than a prize package. But failure to show awareness of the changing world creates both plot and character problems and, more often than not, destroys the realism of your story. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that one of the reasons editors feel your work isn’t on track is because it reflects beliefs, fears, and prejudices that don’t ring true for the contemporary present you’re striving to portray.

  Nor do I mean that you’ve necessarily made your story world as out-of-date as the old pulp detective stories in which the villain escaped on a street car. Quite possibly the issue is merely a matter of obsolete slang or thinking or hairstyles, or reference to events meaningless to present-day readers. All such change rapidly; witness today’s sudden surge of media attention on the environment, the homeless, and high medical costs.

  How do you insure that your characters are reasonably in touch with their particular aspect of the contemporary world, that their ideas and fears and thinking are geared to their roles, yet not so tied to fads as to be outdated tomorrow?

  1. Read.

  A trick I’ve found useful is to select a specialized magazine or two that reflects the world in which Character’s going to be involved, whether Rolling Stone or MAD or Easy Rider. Reading between the lines, you may gain insight into elements ranging from topic preoccupation to pay scales, legal issues to injuries on the job.

  Same for other enclaves. Are you dealing with people with more money than you’ll ever see? Try Town and Country, Connoisseur, Vanity Fair, and Architectural Digest. Family Circle, Woman’s Day, and Better Homes and Gardens tend to reflect the housewife’s world. Employed and career women may shape and be shaped by Working Woman, Executive Female, Women in Business, and New Woman.

  In the same way, read travel magazines for “in” places characters can visit and color details they can cite. Read fashion magazines, for what your characters wear and how they feel about it. Read sports magazines, so your people can sound half-way like normal human beings in incidental conversation. Read Mademoiselle and Cosmopolitan and Glamour to get an idea of what today’s young women are interested in and think about; read GQ and Playboy for men. Read specialty magazines, so your characters can voice an infatuation with motorcycles or woodworking or the outdoors. Give them interests and opinions and let them talk about them.

  Their reactions may be positive or negative. Just because a trend exists doesn’t mean your character must go with it. It’s perfectly legitimate for him to be on the other side—maybe outraged by it. Which can make for fine misunderstandings and conflicts between your story people to help you build your book or story.

  (Again, a case in point: A girl I met spoke bitterly of how boys, despite her protests, always took her for pizza, a food she detested.)

  Thing is, do your reading carefully. Check each and every fragment, whether copy or advertising, that surprises you or strikes you as new or out of key with your own view of life. Indeed, even your daily papers and news magazines can help, if you watch for the right fragments.

  Example: The other day I chanced upon a feature about an organization called Debtors Anonymous, which attempted to salvage people trapped in the morass of credit card buying. The picture it drew, the trend it revealed, was one that provided a model contemporary touch for some character who buys and buys and buys until engulfed in debt, simply because credit is available and spending provides luxuries and flash that makes him feel important. Further, even though the organization goes away, the problem won’t, so you can use it.

  Does all this reading mean spending a fortune on printed matter? No. Libraries have periodical rooms that overflow with all sorts of publications. Take advantage of them.

  But don’t expect reading to create characters for you. You need to back it up with personal contact with all sorts of people wherever possible, so some nuance you haven’t captured won’t end up making one of your story people—and you—look ridiculous.

  2. Listen.

  Sounds do make a difference. The network TV shows will give you a picture of the world otherwise unavailable. Talk show radio is particularly valuable. So is junk television, with its continual deluge of interviews by Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera, and all the rest. New pop music and MTV help to capture the spirit of our period.

  Catch people talking. Become an eavesdropper. And not just on your friends. Try to hear what people outside your normal range of contacts have to say about abortion, corruption, homelessness, crime, the new buses, the old beggars, everything. The slurs, the stumbles, the mumbles, the nasals, the shrill jangles, the repetitions. Look always for the slang, the cant, the distortions and deviations.

  3. Look.

  At how people behave, that is. Go to restaurants. Cruise the thrift shops. Spend time in bars, parks, campuses, shopping malls, courtrooms.

  Check out the new styles, in store windows and on warm bodies of all ages. The old styles, too. The people who swarm about you—fat, thin, erect, slouched, stylish, sophisticated, dowdy, dirty. Give an eye to their hair—home cut, salon styled, GI cropped. How many rings do they wear? On what fingers? How about earrings, single or multiple?

  Above all—and this takes in everything that’s been said above—be aware. Given awareness, you’ll find you can work through every problem.

  Including the biggest problem of all, that of disbelief, the refusal of readers to accept your story. There are techniques to meet that, too. We’ll discuss them in Chapter 16.

  16

  THE DYNAMICS OF DISBELIEF

  How do you cope when readers don’t believe in your characters and stories?

  You plug the gaps where belief leaks out.

  It’s a fine story, the best you’ve ever written. Yet all it garners when you submit it is rejection. Why? Because, the editors say, there’s something wrong with one or more of the characters. Somehow, they ring false. Readers just can’t believe them.

  Whatever that means.

  Well, what does it mean?

  Bedrock, first. Fiction, it has been said, is based on a willing suspension of disbelief.

  That is, readers know a story isn’t real, isn’t true. But in their role of fiction fans, on an unconscious level they pretend it is true, accept it and live through it with the characters.

  A. Conan Doyle’s classic science fiction adventure novel, The Lost World, is a good example. It offers an imaginary world high on an une
xplored South American plateau inhabited by a variety of prehistoric monsters.

  Intellectually, most readers know such a “lost world” doesn’t really exist. But the concept fascinates them, so they read on, caught up in the excitement that engulfs Professor Challenger and his companions. During the time they spend with the book, they suspend their disbelief, their knowledge that the situation and the story aren’t true.

  The same principle applies to today’s top fiction figures, from Perry Mason to Gideon Oliver, Louis L’Amour’s western heroes and Fred Pohl’s science creations, even film and TV people like Rambo, Freddie (of Nightmare on Elm Street fame), Jessica Fletcher, and Murphy Brown.

  Your story, in contrast, simply didn’t bring that acceptance of the imaginary, that suspension of disbelief. Allegedly, it’s because of some flaw or flaws in your presentation of the characters.

  What flaws? What are some of the things your characters can do that disrupt readers’ suspension of disbelief in regard to your story?

  You name it. The number of possibilities is virtually endless. But the bulk fall into seven major categories.

  Specifically:

  1. You can fall out of viewpoint.

  2. You can fail to do enough research.

  3. You can tell your story instead of showing it.

  4. You can leave gaps in the motivation/reaction (M/R) stairway.

  5. You can fail to plant the things you should.

  6. You can give your characters things to do that your readers find distasteful.

  7. You can make the characters themselves less than likable.

  Let’s take these one at a time.

  1. Viewpoint weaknesses

  Viewpoint, as I’ve said at some length elsewhere, is the angle or position from which you present your story. Ordinarily, that involves a “Whose skin are you in?” approach, a selection of a person who tells the story or through whose experiences it’s seen/heard/smelled/tasted/touched/thought/felt.

  Viewpoint goes far beyond the physical, however. It isn’t just the point or person we’re seeing the story from; it’s how we’re seeing, and the essence of that how lies in the viewpoint character’s beliefs and attitudes and prejudices, the emotion that drives him, the way he reacts to what happens, the stimuli that impinge on him.

  Each of us responds to each person we meet, each thing that happens, according to our already existing attitudes, our feelings. If I feel my brother is forever bossing me, I may respond with hostility instead of gratitude when he, with the best possible intentions, lines me up for a high-pay job. As an aging mother, I may burst into tears of grief if my daughter—again, with all good intentions—surprises me with the gift of a luxury condo that will take me away from my run-down neighborhood, with its familiar church and stores and all my friends. And I still remember a fist-fight I had under a small-town street light because I’d unknowingly outraged another boy by calling him by a middle name he hated.

  Is this matter of emotion and experience conditioned reactions limited just to stimuli from people? No, of course not. We respond to everything in the world about us, from weather to decor to what’s on our plate at dinner. Automatically and without volition, we act out our feelings and past conditionings on everyone and everything we experience . . . pass judgment on events and circumstances as well as individuals. Thus, a man or woman registers on us when we meet him or her: “What a slut!” “How dowdy!” “What an oaf!” “Too slick to trust,” “Oh, God, another women’s libber!” “Those hands! Arthritis that bad, how can he hold a steering wheel? They ought to take away his license.”

  But we also have other feelings: “Damn lawn! I hate it.” “Rain, rain, rain. I’ve got to find a better climate.” “When will I get bright and lay off the beer?”

  Such attitudes, insofar as they bear on your story, need to be taken into account as you conceive, develop, and write about your viewpoint character.

  Does this mean we must continually bounce in and out of your viewpoint character’s mind?

  No, of course not. The key issue is that you’ve thought Character through to the point that you write about him as if his attitudes were on parade, even though we never state them. We reveal them in such fragments as “He eyed her quizzically,” as contrasted with “Coldly, she looked him up and down”; “She touched his arm. ‘Here, let me help you’” instead of “‘Move over, Jack. I’ll handle that.’”

  Is this important? Yes. When your story’s properly in viewpoint, inside somebody’s head, your reader well-nigh automatically identifies with that somebody.

  Beyond this, viewpoint flaws lead to disbelief when they confuse your reader . . . when they show a character who doesn’t ring true to reader . . . that goes against your reader’s own experience with life and people. Then the reader is shunted off the smooth flow of the story. In spite of himself, he frowns. Logical thinking and questioning, replaces the hypnotic state the story’s induced and, too often, disbelief moves in to replace it.

  If you jump about in viewpoint, entering one skin, one head, after another, your reader’s likely to have difficulty following the story’s emotional line, for automatically, the change jolts him. It’s as if you were lining up a final putt in a golf game, your every iota of attention focused on it. Then, some idiot behind you says, “Hey, look at his frayed sweater,” or “That’s sure not the way I’d play that.” It’s not surprising, under such circumstances, that you’ll miss the shot—and neither is it surprising if, in a story, a viewpoint change will distract a reader.

  It’s even worse when viewpoint is, for the moment, unclear, and readers don’t know whose skin they’re in. Do avoid it!

  I’m not talking about major viewpoint changes, you understand, as when you’re moving from one chapter to another. There, you’re going to stay with one of your story people long enough that the confusion issue is minimized. But even then it’s highly desirable to establish time, place, circumstance, and viewpoint whenever a change in any of them are made. Do it as soon as possible, as in terms of on Page One; even better, in Paragraph One or Two.

  There are two other points I’m going to put under this category of viewpoint flaws, even though some might question their inclusion.

  First, readers seldom like a stupid character as viewpoint. To take an all-too-common example, the heroine in a mystery or romance receives a message telling her to go alone to the blood-drenched tower of the old manse at midnight for whatever reason. Heroine goes—and Reader throws down the book in disgust because he can’t believe that any modern woman in her right mind would so act. By failing to show even reasonable common sense, Heroine has lost his sympathy and shattered his acceptance of the story. He no longer wants to identify with Heroine, because none of us care to feel stupid—which Heroine, behaving in a stupid manner, now makes us feel. Where Reader’s concerned, Heroine and story no longer are believable.

  Same way, Hero, weaponless, charges in on three armed killers, apparently operating on the “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure” theory. Well, maybe. But readers will accept the clash more easily if Hero also has at least a vestige of an intelligent plan, even though in execution said plan fails and he has to wing it.

  It’s hard, too, to think of Villain as a real menace if he has Hero trapped and all he has to do is pull the trigger to solve all problems, only instead he launches into a long-winded explanation of why he’s going to postpone Hero’s demise till a later time or place, meanwhile leaving Hero tied up and thus given an opportunity to escape.

  Enough of stupidity. Let’s move on to point two, the negative aspects of intelligence.

  Too great intelligence is negative where a viewpoint character is concerned. The acceptable hero or heroine will prove more satisfactory if he or she is a solid normal, for most of us are less than enthusiastic about the individual we think of as The Brain. Why? Because we know we ourselves aren’t all that smart, and we feel uncomfortable with or inferior to the person who clearly
is our superior.

  If you do want a brilliant hero or heroine, make him or her modest too. Or present him as Rex Stout handled Nero Wolfe: brilliant but with foibles, and with an ever-so-down-to-earth normal aide, Archie Goodwin, as viewpoint.

  Finally, remember that the things a character notices and the amount of space you, the author, devote to that noticing are part of characterization.

  Take these lines from Earl Emerson’s Fat Tuesday. We’re in the hero’s viewpoint as he interviews a mother. Three children come in, and there’s a bit of byplay establishing them. Then the mother says,

  “There’s a stain on your dress, young lady.” The girl peered down guiltily.

  “Michelle did it.”

  “Lucy.” Veronica Rogers’s tone was controlled, but the message stung. Lucy turned around obediently and marched away behind the two boys. She didn’t need spurs for these kids. Like a Comanche warrior on horseback, she had them trained to knee commands.

  You see? Mother acts, and her action characterizes her. Hero notices and interprets, in character, and that characterizes him.

  Or here, when Hero gives his first major description of the mother:

  Mrs. Rogers had short blond hair and a tan that, considering the Northwest’s winters, had probably been nursed under a sunlamp. She was one of those women who made you wonder how far the tan extended. You felt impolite wondering, but you wondered all the same. She wore a loose print blouse under a waist-length jacket and expensively faded charcoal jeans that were tight enough to make you remember them but not so tight as to beg fashion. Her high-heeled shoes were a bright cherry red, her sockless feet evenly brown.

  Clearly, the amount of space, of description, of this woman not only draws a picture of her but indicates that she’s important to the story. And the manner in which Author has Hero describe her, the details picked out for emphasis, show us the state of mind, the feelings, she engenders in Hero. Despite her cool, controlled appearance, Hero’s interested in her—to a degree sexually interested—but not panting; and the ground is laid for further developments and the climax of the book. It’s a skilled use of viewpoint by Emerson.