Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (10 page)

One reason for this is that more emotion—that is, interest—is generated when goal-oriented effort is frustrated than when routine action simply goes in a straight line, with no complicating problems.

To try to accomplish anything, change anything, Character must of necessity be in the grip of some emotion. He must
feel
—he must feel like doing something, or
not
doing it.

Anything that
doesn’t
make him so feel, that doesn’t arouse a drive to do or not do whatever it is, isn’t worth putting in your story.

How do you create emotion in a character?

The best way is to start by feeling the emotion yourself. To that end, search your own background for moments in which you felt strongly.

Such moments don’t necessarily have to be related to your character or your story. It’s enough that
you
felt.

Can you recall a moment when you were so angry at someone that you wished you could kill him?
Really
wished it, on a level
that made your fists tremble and your jaws ache and tears come to your eyes?

Live through that moment again now, in emotional memory. Paint a picture of it in your mind’s eye. Experience the tension, the dryness of your mouth, the smell of dust or perfume or sweat or tobacco or burning bacon. Were your hands wet or dry, your vision clear or rage-blurred, your brain racing or frozen or racked with pain sharper than any migraine? What was said or done that triggered your reaction—not in broad-brush generalities, but in detail?

Then, assign some of those same feelings to your character, selecting and arranging them for impact, capturing them in words so your readers will experience them as you did.

Do the same for other frozen fragments of time you’ve lived through: the anguished hour of your father’s death; the excitement you felt as the bobsled hurtled down Joker’s Hill or you shot the pier at Gray’s Beach on your surfboard; the panic when you knew for sure your car was going to crash; the way your heart pounded when the new boy kissed you; the shame when the principal caught you smoking in the restroom. The list goes on and on. . . .

Where you the writer are concerned, just hunting for such bits that will make you—and your character—feel is a worthwhile enterprise.

Recognize, too, that when you “take an interest” in something, that means you have a feeling about it. You’re experiencing emotion.

Boredom? It’s what you feel when you wish you were doing something else. Even if you don’t know what that something is.

Any goal is, of necessity, rooted in emotion. If you don’t know what that emotion is, ask yourself the simple question raised in earlier chapters:
Why doesn’t he quit?

The answer will breathe life into your characters, I promise.

This is perhaps a good place to take up the matter of how to control reader reaction to each of your story people. It’s important and I’ve discussed it at some length in my earlier books,
Techniques of the Selling Writer
and
Film Scriptwriting: A Practical Manual
. But here, especially, in regard to the problem of characterization, we need to give reader reaction close attention.

So, how do you create characters readers will like?

To begin with, the character who turns us on is somehow like us. Not necessarily physically like us, you understand, but like in
terms of attitudes and standards and beliefs, the things we care about and feel to be important.

Thus, if you accept and approve of monogamy, higher education, water fluoridation, or vegetarianism, you’ll feel more at home with others who agree with you and share those beliefs, rather than with outspokenly promiscuous swingers, hillbillies who think any schooling beyond readin’-’ritin’-’rithmetic is a waste of time, dedicated anti-Communists who consider fluoridation a Soviet plot, or enthusiastic carnivores. So while you may tolerate life in a society that places you side by side with those who hold such opposing views, you’re not likely to enjoy reading stories that feature heroes or heroines who mirror such lifestyles and whose behavior is diametrically opposite to your standards.

Many readers today can’t identify with a virtue-for-virtue’s-sake attitude in a heroine, or rejection of a little marijuana at a party, or the concept of sacrificing years of a life to repay a debt. All these have been used successfully in the past, but will they prove successful today, in view of changing audience mores? It’s a vital question, and one you certainly need to bear in mind as you plan your stories.

This is
not
to say that a hero or heroine must share
all
your beliefs and attitudes. Quite possibly Hero is a bank robber or con man; Heroine, a
femme fatale
on a mission of assassination. But each holds, in addition, some aspect of outlook in common with Reader; some feeling with which Reader can identify, as when Hero is deeply concerned about his mother’s welfare or Heroine yearns for home and children. It’s the old familiar prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold pattern, the murderer who worships his wife or loves his dog.

But fiction that merely portrays people as being like you isn’t enough for a character—especially a successful leading character. Such a story person must not only be like us, he must be like us
and more,
in the same way Superman is like us, and more.

Specifically, Character must be larger than life in that he takes on challenges over and beyond us. To that end, he must have a quality that, secretly, we all wish we had but frequently do not.

That component is
courage,
the kind of courage that enables Hero to challenge the fate life has dealt him in the story.

Not that this quality will necessarily be labeled as courage, you understand. But it’s there implicitly, in the fact that Character re
acts as he does when faced with what appears to be certain disaster. It’s captured in the old verse born of scripture:

Dare to be a Daniel,

dare to stand alone.

Dare to have a purpose firm;

dare to make it known.

Such courage raises Character above the crowd (even if you don’t necessarily say so to your readers) and gives him the strength to fight on, win or lose. Where most of us would back down, give up, surrender, he refuses to accept defeat. Faced with the safe that can’t be cracked, he cracks it. Forbidden to seek answers to dark questions, he turns the spotlight on them. Cataclysm is a thing he meets head-on, as well as all the lesser levels of trouble that spring from the pattern of change on which your story is built.

Such courage is something we all yearn for. It binds us to a story with chains of envy for the larger-than-life character who has it. Consciously or otherwise, we thrill at the idea of being like him, so the story in which he appears provides us with that pleasurable release of tension the psychologists call catharsis.

This pattern is at the heart of the phenomenon of reader identification—an often misunderstood term that means only that the behavior of a character in the story situation is such that it excites and fascinates readers and leaves them feeling satisfied with the story’s resolution.

Further, a frequently overlooked aspect of this picture is that readers don’t identify with just
one
character in a story. At various points and for various periods, the behavior of other story people may take the spotlight as they exhibit intriguing behavior and cold nerve, so that Reader identifies with each of them in turn also.

To conceive a character redoubtable enough to take on such challenges may require you to scrutinize Character’s past history, his background. For techniques for so doing, check out the next chapter, “Bent Twigs.”

Herewith, a character. He has a proper label, plus an inner world. And he’s fleshed out with appropriate tags, traits, relationships, and preoccupations.

Next question: What has shaped him so?

The answer, of course, is his background. To understand the present and future, explore the past.

So, you give Character a background.

Where does said background come from?

From you, of course. You, the writer, the creator.

Why? Because to write effectively about a character, you yourself must understand people enough that you can devise a believable background for your character.

Understanding people is what this chapter’s all about.

Understanding can spring only from an awareness of key elements in Character’s background—that is to say, Character’s roots, regardless of whether or not you choose to reveal these roots to your readers.

Or, to put it another way, your rationalization of each character and his or her behavior will make sense only if Character has a past.

How much past?

No more than is necessary to make Character’s emotional state clear to your readers.

This is how it works:

In most instances a person’s set, his attitudes, are learned behavior, based on long-time conditioning . . . repetition of an experience or pattern over and over. But for story purposes a certain degree of simplification and dramatization is not only warranted,
but well-nigh essential. To this end, you as a writer need to try to tie Character’s key attitude in any incident to a single, memorable, past event, insofar as possible.

If you can capture that formative event in a mental picture, a sensory snapshot that tends to flash into Character’s mind’s eye any time he thinks about Event, so much the better.

Your story requires, for example, that a man be thrown into a state of hysterical panic. You need a credible reason for said panic. So, you hunt through possible rationalizations that might fit the circumstance, the story.

Well, plenty of people are well-nigh paralyzed at even the thought of contact with snakes. So how about introducing a snake? One way or another, you can find a plausible excuse—rationalization, that is—for the reptile that will make sense within the plot line’s framework.

Next question:
Why
does this particular person react so strongly to serpents?

Answer: You—the writer, the rationalizer—decide that, back in Character’s childhood, a sadistic older sister, resenting him and vindictive, acquired a three-foot garter snake on a biology field trip. Waiting till Little Brother’s asleep that night, she drapes the snake across his face, then pricks his neck with a teasing needle.

Brother wakens. The snake writhes across his face. Screaming, clawing, convulsing, Brother goes into psychic trauma on a level so deep that it still lives with him today.

You the writer put this into words—a sensory image that recaptures the moment as Brother experiences it in the present:

The snake—!

In a flash he was back in the blackness of that other night so long ago—feeling the needle-sting below his jaw; the dry, scaly coils writhing across his face; the terror erupting into a sound . . .

Warren’s control exploded. Lurching backward, arms flailing, he screamed: a raw, unintelligible, incoherent cry.

Do you get the idea, overwritten and corny as the presentation may be? Background, past history, prior experience, now undergirds rationalization, so readers believe it and read on.

Obviously, and despite this example, extremes are by no means
essential. The fragrance of a particular shaving lotion may turn a girl’s thoughts from the man she’s with to her father. Whereupon, her reactions will be those you wish to evoke: favorable, if the sensory image called forth is of her kind, good father tenderly stroking her hair as she cries over a bruised knee; unfavorable, if the picture that flashes through her mind is of a womanizing father preparing for an extramarital liaison while her mother sobs in the blinding pain of an appendicitis attack.

Clearly, you don’t have to spell out the reasons for everything your story people do, you understand. For bit players, and sometimes even those more important, it’s often enough that a character simply have a fear of heights or a love of fudge or a belief in ghosts,
sans
explanations. But if you do need backup for your rationalizations—well, now you have a tool to help you handle the problem.

What if you want to keep Mysterious Mike’s thought processes a secret, at least for the time being, or if you’re not in his viewpoint? One approach is to state it cold turkey, as an author describing a bit of business: “Grimly, Talley scrubbed his hands. Endlessly, it seemed. ‘Germs,’ he said between clenched teeth. ‘They’re dangerous. I know. I watched my cousin die of anthrax.’
”

Another device is to let other story people speculate: “I wonder why she did that. I don’t care much for garlic either. But to slap a guy’s face just because it’s on his breath . . .”

Or present the pertinent data subjectively, in Character’s viewpoint, as we did with Warren and the snake.

Where do you find the sensory images you need to bring off this kind of thing?

There are the obvious sources, of course. The newspapers and magazines and books you read, the plays and movies and television shows you see. The people you meet, the trips you take, the jobs you’ve worked at.

Beyond this, however, and above all, probe your own past, then meld the bits and pieces you recall from early childhood. They’ll have a color and ring of truth nothing else can match.

Then, when you use these fragments, make them important to your characters by assigning each memory a lesson learned or an emotion evoked, in keeping with the rationalization to which you link it for story purposes.

Remember, too, that reader recall is short, so don’t hesitate to make an emotional habit pattern a running gag. Wave it as a tag,
as described in
Chapter 4
. Quite possibly you’ll want to have Character feel pain or tenderness or rage every time he encounters a foo dog or Dali painting or blue-eyed blonde. Maybe he doesn’t even know why. But
you
know—because you’ve rationalized it, thought up reasons why it’s so, things and events from the past that account for it.