Creating Unforgettable Characters (2 page)

You're doing general research when you take classes in psychology, art, or science. Later, what you learned may give you the details you need for your next story.

Many writing teachers say, "Write what you know about"— and for good reason. They recognize that this constant lifelong observation and general research yields many details that might take months or years to learn if you were writing about an area outside your experience.

Carl Sautter, writer, former story editor of "Moonlighting," and author of
How to Sell Your Screenplay,
recounts the story of a writer who pitched a Fort Lauderdale story to him. "He wanted to do a film about four girls who go to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. It's an all-right idea, but I discovered that he had never been to Fort Lauderdale during spring break. We continued to talk and I discovered he came from a little farm in Kansas. And then he said, 'It's a shame I'm not there this week because this is pancake week.' This little town was having their annual pancake festival. And he starting describing all the things they do with pancakes, and all the details about the festival. And I said, Now there's a story. There's a wonderful setting for a movie.' And I said, 'Why take a story that two thousand people could write better than you can, about a situation you've never experienced? Write about something you know.'"

The creation of character begins with what you already know. But general research may not yield enough information. You'll also need to do specific research to fill in character details that may not be part of your own observation and experience.

Novelist Robin Cook
(Coma, Mutation, Outbreak,
etc.) is an M.D., but he still has to do specific research for his medical fiction books. "Most of the research is reading, " he says, "but I do talk to doctors who specialize in the subject of my novel. In fact, I normally will work in that particular field for a few weeks. When I wrote the book
Brain,
which deals with a neuroradiologist, I spent two or three weeks with a neuroradiologist. For
Outbreak,
which was about a modern-day plague, I talked to the people at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, and researched viruses. For
Mutation,
I researched the science of genetic engineering. The pace of change in that field is so rapid that most of what I had learned in medical school was no longer valid. I put out a book a year. I usually spend six months of research, two months of generating the outline, two months writing the book, and a couple of months doing other things such as publicity and working at the hospital."

THE CONTEXT

Characters don't exist in a vacuum. They're a product of their environment. A character from seventeenth-century France is different from one from Texas in 1980. A character who practices medicine in a small town in Illinois is different from someone who's the pathologist at Boston General Hospital. Someone who grows up poor on an Iowa farm will be different from one who grows up rich in Charleston, South Carolina. A black, or Hispanic, or Irish-American will be different from a Swede from St. Paul. Understanding a character begins with understanding the context that surrounds the character.

What is context? Syd Field, in his book
Screenplay
, gives an excellent definition. He compares context to an empty coffee cup. The cup is the context. It's the space surrounding the character, which is then filled with the specifics of the story and characters.
¹
The contexts that most influence character include the culture, historical period, location, and occupation.

CULTURAL INFLUENCES

All characters have ethnic backgrounds. If you're a third-generation American of Swedish-German background (as I am), the influence of this background may be minimal. If you're a first-generation black Jamaican, the ethnic background could determine behavior, attitudes, emotional expressiveness, and philosophy.

All characters have a social background. It makes a difference whether someone comes from a middle-class farming family in Iowa or an upper-class family in San Francisco.

All characters have a religious background. Are they nominal Catholic, Orthodox Jew, followers of New Age philosophies, or agnostic?

All characters have educational backgrounds. The number of years of schooling, as well as the specific field of study, will change a character's makeup.

All of these cultural aspects will have wide-ranging influence upon the makeup of the characters, determining the way they think and talk, their values, concerns, and emotional life.

John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) came from an Irish-American home, but observed his Italian neighbors across the street. He says, "I saw that they had better food. They were more connected to their bodies. When they spoke, they spoke with their whole selves. There were things about the Irish that I liked, too. They could, for example, outtalk the Italians. And they had a different brand of charm. So I took the best of both . . . for my writing and for my life."
²

William Kelley researched Witness for about seven years, studying the Amish culture and trying to find a way to get more information from people who were not interested in talking to the public. "The Amish were very distrustful of Hollywood so I really had a terrible time breaking through until I met Bishop Miller—a buggymaker—and happened to mention to him that we would need about fifteen buggies to do this movie. Miller built buggies and being a good businessman he immediately said Uh-huh' and I suddenly had an entree into viewing the Amish life."

Bishop Miller became the prototype for Eli in Witness. Through this association, Kelley learned that the Amish were bawdy, that they were "a good judge of horseflesh," that they had a good sense of humor, and that the women could be coy and flirtatious.

Culture determines speech rhythms, grammar, and vocabulary. Read out loud the dialogue that follows, to hear the voice of the characters.

In
Crossing Delancey,
by Susan Sandler, the Upper West Side language contrasts with that of the Lower East Side. In this case, all of the characters (except the poet) have a Jewish context, and come from a particular location in New York. Both of these contexts influence their speech.

Upper West Side Izzy describes her situation: "I met someone. It was an arranged meeting with a marriage broker. Grandmother set it up."

Bubba, the grandmother, speaks with another rhythm: "You want to catch the wild monkey, you have to climb the tree. A dog should live alone, not people."

Sam, the pickleman, from the Lower East Side, has a different style of speech: "I'm a pretty happy fella. I like to get up in the morning, hear the birds tweet tweet. I put on a clean shirt, walk to shul, make the morning prayers. Nine o'clock my doors open."

And the poet says, "You do have an exquisite stillness, Izzy."

Listen to the rhythms from the Irish play
Riders to the Sea,
by John Millington Synge: "They're all together this time, and the end is come. May the Almighty God have mercy on Bart-ley's soul, and on Michael's soul, and on the souls of Sheamus and Patch, and Stephen Shawn; and may He have mercy on my soul, Nora, and on the soul of everyone is left living in the world."

Listen to the difference in language between Eli, the Amish man, and John Book, the Philadelphia policeman. These rhythms are very subtle, but if you read the dialogue out loud, you'll hear the difference between the slight lilt in Eli's speech and John's directness.

ELI: You be careful out there among the English.

JOHN BOOK: Samuel, I'm a police officer. My job is to

investigate this murder.

Many times, your stories will have characters from several different cultures. For those from your own culture, you can turn to your own experience to find the rhythms and attitudes. For characters from other cultures, you may need extra research to make sure that their cultures ring true, and to be sure that you've created separate characters—not simply characters with different names who all sound and act the same.

THE HISTORICAL PERIOD

It is particularly difficult to set a story in another period. Generally the research is indirect. A writer can't get direct information from walking the streets of twentieth-century London when the story takes place in the sixteenth century. Listening to the speech of the modern Englishman sheds only a bit of light on the speech that existed four hundred years before. The vocabulary is different, the rhythms are different, and even the words are different since many words and meanings have become obsolete.

Novelist Leonard Tourney, a history professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara, has written several books about sixteenth-century England, including
Old Saxon Blood
and
The Players Boy Is Dead.
His professional background provides him with a knowledge of the period, yet he still has to research specific details when writing his books.

Leonard says, "I might need to know about the Inns of Court and its history and practices during the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. One of my novels dealt with a witch trial. I had to learn whether a defendant would have been represented by counsel in the early seventeenth century. The answer was no—which makes the trial look strange. I had to learn how many judges sat on the panel, and whether there would have been a jury, and how many jury persons would have served. I had a kind of license based upon what I had learned that any kind of suspicious behavior at this time would have been adequate evidence to convict a suspect of witchcraft. I had to learn what punishment was meted out to witches."

Recently I consulted on a project about the Mormon trek west to Salt Lake City in the mid-nineteenth century. Kieth Merrill, writer and director, supplied the research information about historical speeches and details of the journey. Writer Victoria Westermark, who has written a number of scripts set in the nineteenth century, did a rewrite and polish. She explains how she was able to build upon past experience when determining characteristics and period language for the script,
Legacy.

"Usually I pore over diaries, original letters, speeches the person might have made, if available. Although the written word is different from the spoken word, people reveal themselves through diaries. Letters can be very stiff. For another approach to the time, I read the local late-nineteenth-century newspaper, where I found the rhythms of the general public, their adamant likes and dislikes, and even the swearing.

"I've also researched at the Huntington library in Pasadena, where I was able to read original diaries. I keep lists by decade of interesting words or phrases that aren't in common usage but that add flavor and don't throw an audience by sounding too dated."

Even after copious research, you will often need to imagine details that you can't find, using everything you have learned so that the period will ring true.

LOCATION

Many writers set their stories in familiar locations. If you grew up in New York, many of your stories may take place there. Hollywood has thousands of scripts about people coming to make it in Hollywood. Or writers set scripts in places they've visited or lived in for short periods of time. The more knowledgeable someone is about the location, the less research is necessary. However, writers who know the area often find they need to return for specific research.

William Kelley had lived in the Lancaster County area of Pennsylvania. He already had a good start on location research for
Witness.
However, he still returned to the area to look for models for his characters, and to expand his knowledge of the Amish for this specific project.

James Dearden, writer of
Fatal Attraction,
is British, but he's spent considerable time in New York City—the setting for his film.

Two of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels,
Dr. No
and
Live and Let Die,
and several of his short stories were set in Jamaica, where he maintained an estate, Goldeneye. He visited Tokyo before writing
You Only Live Twice,
and wrote
From Russia with Love
after riding the Orient Express.

Location affects many different aspects of a character. The frenetic rhythm of Philadelphia in
Witness
is different from the slower-paced life on the Amish farm. The rhythm of the West in
Electric Horseman
is different from the rhythms of New York in
Working Girl.
And each will have an effect on the characters.

If you were writing the story "Rain," by Somerset Maugham (later made into two films), or
Night of the Iguana,
by Tennessee Williams, or
The Power and the Glory,
by Graham Greene, you would want to capture in your characterizations the sense of oppression from the heat and humidity, or the claustrophobic feeling that can come from the constant rain in the tropics.