Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (3 page)

This was equally true for the Reverend Mr. Dunbar, who claimed he’d seen an angel in a vision, and Tom Resnick, whose fidelity to his wife was well-nigh legendary, and Susan Garland, who spent her Sundays visiting the sick and lonely.

Not that any of these people’s beliefs, estimable or otherwise, were necessarily wrong, you understand; quite possibly they were right on target. It’s just that there was no way, no way whatever, that you could prove or disprove them. Indeed, it was entirely possible to advance other, equally plausible hypotheses to account for each individual’s behavior. The Behaviorists could give you one interpretation, the Freudians another, and the Evangelicals yet a third.

Which in turn meant that, for me as a fiction writer, character conception and development took on an entirely new and different twist than I’d originally expected. Specifically, it meant that, within the bounds of my imagination, I was free to create any kind of character I wished, and have him do anything I might conceive,
provided only that I rationalized the character’s behavior in such a manner that readers believed it
.

What goes into rationalization? Perhaps another example from my newspaper days will help to clarify the process.

I was interviewing a particularly cold-blooded murderess in jail that day. Finally the session was over. Thanking Murderess, I got up to go.

“That’s OK,” she shrugged. “But ain’t it hell we had to meet in here?” Her gesture summed up the cell’s vomit-green walls, the
bars, the strap-iron cot. “What a hell of a party we could have had if we’d been outside!”

Her words sent a chill through me. I mean, my psyche was terrified. Because in that moment I found pictures flashing through my head of how a trusting boyfriend, dancing with her, had died.

More to the point, it dawned on me how completely she and I lived in two different worlds.

That matter of private worlds—it’s a subject to which I’ve given a lot of thought in the years since then. From it, increasingly, I’ve gained insight into what a writer does . . . the difference between the storyteller and other people.

Specifically, in the act of thinking through a story, the writer temporarily suspends his own standards and adopts those of someone else. That’s what a writer does when he creates a character. Because he’s in the character-creation business, he must learn to put his own beliefs and attitudes in limbo temporarily and adopt those of someone else: the person about whom he’s writing, the character he’s creating.

Or, if you want to put it in the bluntest possible terms, he must become a hypocrite, a person who pretends to personal qualities or principles not actually possessed.

That’s what I’d done where Murderess was concerned. For the sake of insight and a good story, I’d tried to put myself in her place, pretended to see her situation through her eyes. And I’d done it convincingly enough that she’d assumed we were on the same wavelength to a degree that, under different circumstances, might have led to parties.

Such affectation of empathy isn’t limited to writers, of course. Actors share it with us, and so do lawyers and con men and spies and undercover police agents and really successful salesmen. The writer who’s unable to simulate it faces an almost impossible task, for certainly his characters ever and always will lack the breath of life.

And there’s the heart of the matter. Consciously or unconsciously, by nature or by learning, the writer must have or acquire the ability to put himself in another, perhaps unlikely person’s place. Sometimes empathy will come in a flash, through intuition
or osmosis. A character may spring into being full blown, alive and breathing from the moment of conception. More often, in whole or in part, he and his situation will have to be constructed, fabricated . . . built in steps or stitches through the writer’s skill at rationalization. But whatever the process, it remains at the heart of the matter.

Do you see the implications of such thinking? Simple and obvious though it be, it provided me with a map for any road I wished to travel . . . gave me a key to unlock the secrets, thinking, and mysteries of any and all story people.

Beyond this, character is also inextricably linked to context. Separated from situation, it becomes meaningless. Sans puzzles to solve, Sherlock Holmes fades to a shadow figure and holds little interest. Patty Hearst minus the Symbionese Liberation Army is hardly memorable, and neither is Moses unchallenged by an enslaving Egypt, Romeo and Juliet cut loose from the feud between Montagues and Capulets, Captain Queeg apart from the
Caine,
or Hercules without his Labors.

Your unconscious knows this. In consequence, and whether you will it or not, it sees each character that flashes by within the framework of a circumstance, a situation. Instinctively, it conceives and measures your story people against the demands made by particular roles and functions. Out of hand, it rejects the dullard, the weakling, the distasteful—unless that kind of person is what the story demands, or unless some quirk that can give them life and color has caught your fancy.

That being the case, in all likelihood you’ll find that automatically, spontaneously, you’ll conceive your people in context.

It will help you in all of this if you’ll teach yourself to think in terms of your own likes and dislikes. These are always your basic raw material when it comes to character construction. In the manner of a “method” actor, search your past for memories vibrant with emotion—experiences that still have the power to stir your blood, quicken your breathing. Now is the time to make those moments of pain, rapture, and humiliation pay off. What spurred them in the first place? What made you cringe, or catch your breath, or burn with shame to the very roots of your hair?

Why? Because these
reactions
are something you share with the whole human race—not the experiences that evoked them necessarily, you understand. Your agonies of grief may reflect a puppy
you lost in childhood rather than the anguish of a husband as the clods thud on his dead wife’s coffin. The rage that still knots your belly, when you let yourself think about it, is quite possibly the product of a girl’s casually contemptuous laugh, not the frenzy of being falsely accused of treason or the fury of seeing your daughter’s murderer go free.

What counts, then, is that you
feel
—and feeling makes you kin to all mankind.

It also links you to your story people. It’s the core of character we talked about in
Chapter 1
.

This fact was driven home to me by the experience a friend of mine had a few years ago. It involved a lady named Clarice.

Clarice’s trade was pornography. She was a writer of what in the trade were known as “docs”—pseudo-sociological paperbacks that pretended to be scholarly and factual and that bore titles like
Aggression, Repression and Rape, Secretaries and Sex,
and
The Lesbian Housewife
—that kind of thing.

At the moment, Clarice had an idea for what she swore would prove an all-time best seller. But she felt she needed a collaborator, and my friend was elected.

Her idea? To produce what she referred to as a “turn-on” book.

“Everyone in this world is trying to score,” she explained. “Trouble is, they don’t know how. The men can’t figure out what turns women on, what turns them off. Vice versa for the women. So they jump the track, make wrong moves, do things that upset the apple cart.”

“So where do I come in?” Friend asked.

“Isn’t that obvious?” Clarice patted him on the knee. “Kelsey, you’re all the men in the world. I’m all the women. So, you spell out what women do that turns you on, what turns you off. I do the same for men. So what if we aren’t one hundred percent on target? We’ll hit often enough that the customers will more than get their money’s worth.”

Well, they never did get around to writing the book. But Clarice’s logic, the principle on which her turn-on book was to be based, remains sound: Certain aspects of human behavior rate positive with the vast majority of members of our culture. Others come through as negative. So if you set up your characters with these in view, you’ll improve your odds in favor of winning favorable reader reaction.

In practical terms, this means your first step towards creating an effective character is to look around for people who rouse strong feelings in you. People you admire, one way or another. People you like. People that bother you or baffle you or that you detest. People who intrigue you. People you envy, or with whom you’d like to trade places—not just in terms of situation or status, but of attributes.

Your next step is to ask yourself, considering the kind of story you want to write, might any of these people, these attributes, fit in? Is there a woman you wish you knew? A man who has the qualities—unlikely qualities, quite likely—that might fit a different hero? Can you conceive a unique villain, or band of villains—remember the Alec Guinness film,
The Lavender Hill Mob,
or Jack Bickham’s
The Over-the-Hill Gang
?

None of these may strike a note, you understand. I never said writing was easy. But at least now you know what you’re looking for: the character who turns you on, excites you. And yes, you’ll find that character, if you keep hunting.

Whereupon, you’ll move on to Character No. 2. A compatible character, of course, one who fits in with Character No. 1 on one level or another.

And then to Character Nos. 3 and 4 and 5 and any others you may need. And no, quite possibly you won’t do them one by one as I have here. You play it by ear, juggling and manipulating and balancing one of your group against another, until you’ve got a cast that has you so high you just can’t wait to work with it.

Not that that’s all there is to this business of searching out your characters. Far from it. But it’s a start, a first step, and experience will teach you what comes after.

Meanwhile, it’s time to move on to another vital matter: How to label each story person so he or she strikes a clear and distinctive note and makes the right first impression on your readers.

We’ll take it up in the next chapter.

So there’s this woman. You were introduced to her at a party a week ago. Now you can’t place her.

“Oh, you know!” your wife reminds you. “She was the loud, pushy one. The one who used to be a travel agent.”

Indeed, now, you do remember. Because your wife has given Woman
labels
. She has defined Woman as
loud, pushy,
and
travel agent
.

An important step, that, for we live in a world of labels, of identifying designations. One way or another, each of us makes an impression on those around us. Our friends and associates think of us as bumbling or belligerent, active or anemic, crude or crabby. Justly or otherwise, we go through life cataloged as sinner or saint, extrovert or egghead, nice or nasty. Doctors diagnose us as “Type One diabetic” or “Cushingoid” or “hypertensive.” Police classify criminals in terms of verbal description (“
portrait parle
“), fingerprints, DNA,
modus operandi
(method of operation in committing crimes). Teachers describe our children as cooperative or withdrawn or disruptive.

Thus it is that Wife has brought Woman into focus for you. Specifically, she has captured and verbalized Woman’s
dominant impression
. . . the amalgam of qualities that makes Woman memorable to others.

That matter of dominant impression—few tools are more useful to a writer who seeks to characterize his story people. Four basic elements go into it:
sex, age, vocation,
and
manner
.

The first two of these components might be termed implicit, the second two, explicit.

Item one, sex, is simple enough. Describing anyone, we almost automatically zero in on gender: “this man,” “that woman,” “he,” “she.”

Item two, age, gets attention primarily in terms of deviations from an assumed norm of adulthood, as in “little girl,” “boy,” “old man,” “young woman,” “teenager,” and so on.

The other two constituents, those which I term explicit, operate on a considerably different level.

Item three, vocation, is a noun, a special noun. I call it a
noun of vocation
, because it states the person’s occupation—his role in society, what he does for a living. Here we encounter not only the usual range of doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, and the familiar trades, but also some we may not normally think of in occupational terms—housewife, bum, invalid, bag lady, “significant other.” Yet each defines a group and gives dimension to its individual members and so should be thought through and included.

Finally, item four brings us to what I designate as an
adjective of manner
—an element which I firmly believe to be the most important factor in creating a dominant impression.

Manner is, of course, an individual’s personal bearing; his or her habitual stance and style. When your wife says a woman is “loud and pushy,” she defines her far more sharply for story purposes than any description of blue eyes, blonde hair, or pug nose.

Why? First, because manner is what impresses those who meet Character. More than appearance, ordinarily, you
notice
that a boy is timid, a girl shy, a woman whiny, a man grouchy.

Second, manner indicates to a considerable degree what’s going on inside Character. Irascibility of manner is a red flag warning of a potential punch in the nose. The bold-eyed girl isn’t likely to be taken aback by a boy’s brash come-on. A prospect’s air of cringing humility tends to bring gladness to the aggressive salesman’s heart.

Test this against your own experience. Isn’t Old Max frequently identified as “that clumsy mechanic”? Edna is “the nosy clerk at the Welfare.” Lorraine? “Our sympathetic schoolteacher.” Tom? “The driver with all the jokes.” And Mr. Sloan, the office manager, will live forever as “his moronic majesty.”