Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (11 page)

And that’s the basic principle of handling background.

“Background” is a term that covers a lot of ground, however. To make it less intimidating, more comprehensible, let’s break it down into four elements: body, environment, experience, and ideas.

Do bear in mind, though, that while we may segment “background” for analytical purposes, it remains a whole where character—and life—are concerned. The human animal is a unit, an entity, not bits and pieces. Such organic unity emphasizes consistency, and consistency is the essential element in any character, any personality, no matter how disparate or unlikely of association its components may seem at first glance.

With this disclaimer, let us move on to consider the segments from which a character’s background is assembled . . . the jigsaw that forms the basis for his being the way he is.

You build a character’s background for three main reasons:

1. You want to make the character unique.

2. You want to give the character reasons for behaving as he does.

3. You want to make him believable, to give him depth.

Failure to develop background, in turn, frequently will result in caricature, the kind of characterization you get in cartoons, in which the obvious is so exaggerated as to result in easily recognized but ludicrous distortion. It can be useful for minor characters, bit players. But the picture that emerges will hardly resemble real people.

At the same time, don’t overload characters with background. As was pointed out earlier, a character is a
simulation
of a human being, not the real thing. Bear down too heavily on his or her past
history, and it takes over. The story stops, and your reader becomes confused or bored. And that, you can’t afford!

In any case, and regardless of whether or not you introduce the information you develop into the actual story, there’s no better technique for evoking it in yourself than to probe Character’s background, assigning the elements that have shaped him into the individual he is today. Knowing that he marched with Mad Mike Hoare in Katanga, or that his grandmother introduced him to
War and Peace
when he was four, or that he pledged himself to the church at age seven can’t help but give him dimension as you think his story through.

Your first step, of course, is to decide on the role Character plays—the things he has to do, the functions he has to perform.

Check this against each of the four components of background: body, environment, experience, and ideas.

Finally, choose and build up pertinent aspects from each, in terms of incidents, anecdotal bits, word pictures that create the impression you want Character to make on your readers.

You seek to convince Reader that Character is cruel and vicious, for example. So, you introduce an incident in which Character recalls the pleasure he felt when he revenged himself on his sister for some imagined slight by lying about her to her boyfriend, or destroying undelivered the letter that offers her a better job, or poisoning her beloved dog.

Or maybe you don’t introduce it. But just by the process of conceptualizing it you create a picture in your own mind and a reaction to Character that will help you on a subconscious level to select, arrange, and describe the current action in a manner that will evoke the response you seek from readers.

Body begins with history—or, to put it in more specific terms, ancestry—heredity, genetic roots.

Does ancestry make a difference? It does indeed. We all know that some of us are brighter than others, with a spread that extends from the “transcendent mental superiority” of a da Vinci or Einstein or Francis Bacon to the slavering helplessness of the hopelessly retarded. Heredity is what makes a dwarf a dwarf, while a Watusi grows to seven feet tall. Diabetes, allergic asthma, epilepsy, sickle
cell anemia—all tend to take their toll from one generation to another. Ancestry is why most Blacks have kinky hair and Baits have blue eyes. Genetic twists pop forth in Down’s syndrome and hemophilia and phenylketonuria and thin enamel on teeth. And where would Dracula have been had he not had his vampire forebears?

Indeed, the old nature-versus-nurture controversy is far from dead, for recent studies indicate that such traits as timidity, risk-seeking, aggressiveness, vulnerability to stress, and obedience to authority may be inherited, at least in part, rather than being the product of conditioning.

Beyond this, there’s the body of the character himself: the specific physical equipment with which he’s endowed. Thus, the pretty girl sees the world through different eyes than does her plainer sister, because her conditioning has accustomed her to being flattered and deferred to—perhaps spoiled. Consequently, she responds in a different manner. Depending on other modifying factors, she may consider a request for a date from a boy who can afford only hamburgers an insult. Or, she may look upon it as an opportunity to prove her egalitarianism and social consciousness. But she’s unlikely simply to be grateful that someone’s asked her, the way her homely sibling might.

In the same way, the six-foot athlete is used to one kind of treatment, the five-foot bookworm another. The man hailed as “Fats” doesn’t have the same outlook as the one called “Slats.” And can anyone doubt that the size of Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose played a role in shaping his personality? Would Long John Silver have been the same man had he not lost a leg? Was Quasimodo influenced by his hump, Superman by his indestructibility? And Theresa (in
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
), deformed by childhood polio—how would you rate the handicap as a factor in her murder?

Deafness creates a behavior pattern unlike that of the blind or nearsighted or cross-eyed. The stutterer’s speech may turn him into a recluse or a Demosthenes. Would Captain Hook have been as cold-hearted had he not lost his hand? Dyslexia and the learning problems that go with it may turn a happy child into a delinquent.

Or consider the plight of a high school friend of mine. His father had a clubfoot. The father, growing up in the Wabash River bottoms, had spent endless winter hours sitting at ice-edge—frustrated, freezing—watching friends skate. For him, the sport became a symbol for all the fun his handicap denied him.

As an adult, he still saw skating through a roseate haze, as irrational as it was glowing. When his wife bore him a son, he couldn’t wait for the child to grow old enough to glide over the ice at the local rink.

The problem was that the son, far from fulfilling his father’s dreams, detested skating. He hated the cold, the falls, the loss of hours when he wanted to be doing other things.

The father couldn’t understand such an attitude. He harangued his son endlessly about it. Result: bitterness, on a level that left a permanent breach between them.

All of which is merely another way of saying that circumstances alter cases, and different groups and societies hold to different standards. Witness the bound feet of Chinese women in the days of the empire and the scarification and tattooing of Melanesian Islanders. Each is prized in its own setting—and makes no sense elsewhere.

When creating story people give attention, too, to such factors as
age, sex,
and
health
.

Thus, a child’s response is different than that of an adult. The teenage girl who, on a dare, dances nude in a car’s headlights on a country road, seldom would repeat the performance at forty. At twenty a sailor may glory in his tattoos; at fifty, he pays through the nose to have them removed. The oldster who once reveled belligerently in his strength now may tend to walk wide around conflict or heavy manual labor, simply because he recognizes the limitations the years have put on him.

Attitudes, too, change with age. Wasn’t it George Bernard Shaw who said that anyone under thirty who wasn’t a revolutionary was a dolt, whereas anyone over that age who still so believed rated as a fool?

Similarly, where sex is concerned, girls used to be conditioned to react differently to the world and to life than were boys. In present society, however, although we all know women and men are different, they no longer are quite as different as they once were. Women today can drive eighteen-wheeler semis. They can work in mines or manage international corporations and do a host of things which were unthinkable a generation ago. Even though you still can find female subservience and male machismo, a housewife now is usually such by choice. She almost certainly is aware that other options are available to her.

Health? The man racked with arthritis or asthma or ulcers lives
in a different world than the one who claims he’s “never had a sick day in my life.” Malaria or diabetes or dysentery shape their victims’ thinking. So do the colds that continually drag some of us down. Vigor views exertion one way; debility, another.

Yes, body indeed does make a difference!

Milieu
is a word I like. Because while, technically, it’s defined as
environment
or
surroundings
, it implies a great deal more.

Specifically, it captures the feeling not just of setting or landscape, but of a society; a social as well as a physical locale. Growing up in San Francisco implies more than just the Golden Gate, Pacific Park, and Union Square. Life in the Mississippi Delta is one thing; that in a Pennsylvania Amish community, another. And double that in spades for a past in the slums of Juarez, the singles bars of New York’s Upper West Side, or a French convent.

Such social settings reach out to embrace people as well as geography. They mold the various strata of society that fix standards, for mutually accepted norms and rules are the glue that bonds any group or class together. Shared customs, which clothes are acceptable for which occasions, and how to behave in church or mosque or synagogue are what create a society.

Even more so are accepted modes of thinking. Is it permissible in your private world to say that you hate your brothers and sisters, or to consider rape or murder as a solution to your problems? Are you allowed to show curiosity about your neighbors’ affairs or about taboo topics? May you look a person you respect in the eye, or does politeness demand that your gaze be downcast?

Mere physical boundaries of a society have little to do with determining what behavior is considered acceptable. Witness the Thugs of India, those devout stranglers who killed in the name of the Goddess Kali. Joining bands of travelers, they murdered as prescribed by their religion—because they existed as a society within a society, a separate strand within the overall fabric of Indian life.

Or, if India strikes you as too far afield to wander, how about the confidence men and pocket-picking “whiz mobs” in our own land? And certainly it should come as no shock to anyone to discover that a girl whose mother is a whore and who grows up in a
brothel may prove promiscuous, or that a boy from a street gang finds nothing immoral about theft. (If you want a good picture of this, read Nicholas Pileggi’s
Wiseguy
. It may change the way you think about rehabilitation.) Send a child to school where more than fifty percent of the students smoke pot, and odds are that he or she soon will come to see drug use as acceptable relaxation and recreation.

The same principle applies where more acceptable behavior is concerned. Members of the American Bar Association hold to one orientation, those of the American Medical Association another. Yet both also “belong” to the larger society that is the United States.

Creating a character, you need to ask yourself, “To what societies does this person give allegiance? What do these groups demand of him? Do they involve implicit beliefs and standards that might affect my story, yet be overlooked?”

Special problems arise if your story line calls for Character to change from one stratum, one milieu, to another. Thrusting a thief into “straight” society gives birth to situations that can be comic, or tragic, or both. The maid or farm girl trying to flounder through a world of Main Line “old money” brings automatic confusion and conflict. So does the conscientious objector somehow trapped into military service. A Costa Rican street boy, brought to the U.S. as an adoptee at age thirteen, may be overwhelmed by the wealth he sees here, to the point that he can’t resist helping himself to tempting objects regardless of who they belong to. Social workers and counselors drawn from American middle class society, on the other hand, may have trouble understanding that he has no notion of “right” or “wrong” within the framework of his new home’s standards. And how many times have writers of novels and screenplays alike teamed professors or such with strippers, to the delight of the public?

Which is why you should never forget that each of your story people is a product of his or her milieu . . . a social as well as a physical environment. The child of a rich, powerful family will think and act differently than will the youngster of the poor and helpless.

This being the case, you yourself must of necessity (1) know the rules and conduct patterns that govern behavior in that particular setting; (2) know the degree to which Character follows these rules;
and (3) know whether your story takes place in that milieu or a divergent one.

Then, develop people to fit, assigning them to their roles with appropriate consideration of their backgrounds. And if you take that to mean that it might not be wise to write about a mafia don or a sugar beet farmer or a fashion model unless you know about such via personal contact or on-the-turf research, that might be a good idea too.

Experience shapes people, folk wisdom tells us. The question is, how, and to what degree?

It should be obvious enough that the life you lead is going to have a bearing on the person you ultimately become. If you’ve been a Charles Manson groupie or a resident of the New Mexico commune known as the Hog Farm, your point of view is unlikely ever to coincide with that of a deputy sheriff in rural Kansas. Growing up in the construction trades in Milwaukee seldom prepares you to think like a Yale professor of musicology or a Buddhist monk.