Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (5 page)

Or let William Kienzle describe Father Fred Palmer in
The Rosary Murders
: “[He] was forty-seven years old, going on seventy.”

Is this a tag of appearance, or manner, or attitude? It doesn’t really matter. Here we see a judgment of one person by another, captured in a phrase. “. . . forty-seven years old, going on seventy” is a tag that says it all, even though more details follow.

Ross Thomas, in
Briarpatch
: “Harold Snow smiled back. It was a sheepish smile, patently false, that somehow went with Snow’s long narrow face, which the detective also found to be rather sheep-like, except for those clever coyote eyes.” Snow is tagged neatly with a “sheepish smile, patently false,” and a “long narrow face.” Then, the interpretive detail of “clever coyote eyes” adds dimension to the picture and lets us know that Thomas wants us to feel wariness in regard to the character.

Character’s
speech patterns
may also be a matter of some import. Repetitions, for example, may help to identify him: “sir,” “laid back,” “awesome,” “dude.” Same for accents (Southern, Western drawl, Boston Irish, Brooklynese),
ad infinitum
. And each occupation has its own cant or jargon, as when a policeman refers to an offender as a “perp” (for perpetrator) or an airline pilot speaks of having his “flaps down.”

Be careful, however, of introducing heavy, phonetically spelled dialect. Both readers and editors hate it. Why? Because it tends to confuse and slow the pace. You’re better off to avoid it.

A good ear and wide human contacts are the best tools to use to capture speech patterns, perhaps supplemented by such works as the Vance Randolph and George P. Wilson volume,
Down in the Holler
, Ramon Adams’s
Western Words,
Eugene Landy’s
The Underground Dictionary,
or the like. But more of that later in
Chapter 13
, “The Things They Say.” And remember always that slang or colloquial terms tend to age rapidly, so any volume on the subject may be out of date virtually before it’s printed.

The matter of
mannerism
(rubbing the chin, an eye tic, a frown, or raucous laugh) also needs to be considered. Jane Fonda’s continual business with cigarettes in
Agnes of God
is a mannerism. So is George Raft’s coin-flipping in old gangster movies. Same for the character who doodles as he talks, or bites his lip, or continually smooths his hair, or sneaks glances into mirrors. A neighbor has a habit of “neatening up” his front room by gathering any loose printed matter into piles. (It drives his wife crazy. Newspaper clippings and the like disappear into those piles, never to be seen again. But it’s a mannerism, like the others.) One and all, they help not only to identify Character, but to make him human.

Attitude
is a matter of behavior patterns—a character’s habitual way of reacting to a particular kind of situation. Mary Poppins’s eternal cheeriness reflects an attitude, and so does Rambo’s macho stance. Racism and sexism are attitudes. Ditto sanctimony or ingrained suspicion or anxiety or discontent. And if it pleases you to develop new and different categories of your own, so much the better. (I’ll discuss this in more detail in
Chapter 6
.)

Closely related to tags is the matter of
ability
or
capacity
. . . the potential for Character to do whatever his role in the story calls for. If, for example, the story requires that he deal with a medical emergency, does he have the ability to do so? How about the skill to make a bomb, style a woman’s hair, change a diaper, lay cement blocks, clear a fuel line? Failure to provide Character with the ability to perform as required believably can destroy—or make—a story. Life gives you a host of examples. Look how the initial wimpish image of Bernhard Goetz in the New York subway shooting was changed, for example, when it was revealed that he had had handgun training and in crisis adopted a “combat stance.”

How to reveal matters of ability? You as a fiction writer must think ahead and plant within your character the capacity to deal with the demands of your story situation. You’ll have to discover the tags or traits that fill the bill. Then, make reference to them later as the story develops.

Perhaps this is also the place to remind you of the importance of
contrast
where tags are concerned. No Ann, Alice, and Agatha in the same story unless for a reason. No two blue-eyed blondes,
no matching Indians, no stutterers in tandem. The object of tags, remember, is to help your reader identify, differentiate, distinguish.

It’s also important that you decide on each major character’s
traits:
his or her habitual modes of response and patterns of behavior.

How you go about attacking this issue is a matter of some disagreement. For example, my late, great colleague in the University of Oklahoma’s Professional Writing program, Walter Campbell, an analyst to the core, insisted that traits be divided into four groups: human, typical, social, and individual.

In my own view this is mechanical, artificial, and of little practical value. What counts is that you be aware that people do develop distinctive ways of reacting to life’s demands, and that these reaction patterns tend to become habitual.

To this end, you need to ask yourself how you want a given person to behave in a particular kind of situation. Is Character a worrier, a soft touch, a grouch, a freeloader, a bully? Is she cruel, kindly, pious, a hypocrite, selfish, unselfish, honest, honest only when observed, considerate, unaware?

So, you decide. Then thrust Character into situations that will give her the opportunity to show the stuff she’s made of
before
a crisis arises, so your readers won’t be taken aback when Character behaves the way you need her to.

What about
relationship
? Call it the way we interface with others, our associations with and reactions to the people with whom we deal or come in contact.

Each of those contacts and dealings is different. How do we respond to each of these people? How do we feel about them? And yes, we
do
feel about them and respond to them, each and every one, even if it’s only in terms of standing up straighter, watching our grammar, or not making an off-color joke.

For fiction purposes, however, we must consider these relationships a good deal more closely. Those individual connections will determine how our characters act and react, how they respond to things their story associates say and do as your epic progresses.

Your most useful tool in handling the obviously complex issue of relationship in your stories will be habitual people-watching, coupled with reading both fiction and psychology.

It also may help you in this area if you’ll bear two principles in mind, each with a proverb out of folk wisdom behind it.

The first:
Like attracts like
.

Second:
Opposites attract
.

Now, obviously, neither of these aphorisms is universally true. But they are sound often enough to prove useful when you don’t know how to work through a scene. Is Heroine smitten because she and Hero both are Alabama WASPs and love swimming, tennis, camping, computer graphics, and iris culture? Or is the attraction based on the romantic fascination Hero’s inner city street-tough stance holds for sheltered, small-town Heroine?

Another point you need to consider is whether to cast a given character
to
type or
against
type.

To put this in down-to-earth form, consider your friend Alex, an individual whom we’ll arbitrarily label with a dominant impression as a
scholarly professor
.

In keeping with this label, and helping to translate it into visual terms, we give Alex stooped shoulders, pale face, a frequently furrowed brow, a tendency to long pauses and staring off blankly into space, and a book always in hand.

In so establishing and describing Alex, we’re taking the approach termed casting “to type.” That is, we’re accepting traditional stereotyping, the kind of patterning that gives us the Irish cop, the dumb blonde, the garrulous oldster.

“Against type” means rejecting that image in favor of a more fresh and original picture—one that makes the character an individual rather than a stick figure.

(Which doesn’t mean that characters cast “to type” are necessarily to be avoided. Types have their place, particularly where your minor people are concerned.)

Were we to want to cast Alex “against type,” however, we could make him egotistical, belligerently opinionated, full of erudite quotes, scowling and with head thrust forward as he attempts to force his ideas on everyone within earshot. He’d still come through as scholarly—but a different kind of scholarly.

Is this enough to characterize Alex for your readers? Mightn’t they appreciate it if you’d sharpen the focus? Perhaps make the picture more graphic?

Take his work, for example. There are professors and professors. Some are more drawn to campus politics than to teaching. Others like to ride the gravy train, sloughing off paper-grading or anything else that sounds like work on graduate assistants. Still
others are socializers, or grandstanders, or promoters.

His preoccupations, the interests that absorb him, also play a role. As a scholar, is his area of scholarship the issue? Is he totally engrossed in the sociopathy of juvenile delinquents? The poetry of Allen Ginsberg? The neurology of earthworms? Internal dissension among Shiite Moslems?

Or is his scholarship merely a financial facade, while his real focus is on world peace or real estate or travel? Or collecting coins or pornographic photos or Mayan artifacts? Whatever you choose for him will both help to individualize him and influence his behavior in your story.

His love life is an additional matter to consider. For one thing, does he have one, or is he an asexual loner? Is he a happily married man, or are one-night stands his thing? How about “sequential monogamy”—one woman/wife after another? A fascination with young girls, the Lolita syndrome? Homosexual cruising? Do think about it!

His attitude towards society itself is another constituent. Is he gregarious, everybody’s friend, a joiner? Do worthwhile causes attract him? Is he active in his community, his professional group, his political group? If not, why not?

Consider, too, your character’s weaknesses. What flaws do you want to show in the course of your story—and yes, Character
does
have them; we all do, and you’ll be wise to reveal them, for the “perfect” person tends to disgruntle readers. (My own tendency, incidentally, is to speak of a character as “non-perfect.” For whatever obscure reason, to say that somebody has a weakness puts a judgmental label on that person that bothers me.)

A good example of such a “non-perfect” person is Murphy Brown (played by Candice Bergen), a character in a TV situation comedy. Murphy is a top TV newsperson—intelligent, efficient, gorgeous to look at. But she’s also a recovering alcoholic, a heavy smoker suffering the agonies of quitting, and so aggressive, opinionated, and jealous of her status that she makes your teeth ache. But because she’s so human, viewers love her.

Why give a character flaws and weaknesses? Because they constitute tools you can use to help control reader reaction to a character—to make the reader like or dislike her; accept her or reject her. But more of that in
Chapter 7
, “The Breath of Life.”

And so it goes. All these are factors that influence and individu
alize a character. Some characters, some stories, call for close attention to these factors. In others, the barest minimum will do. You and your audience are the ones who decide.

Beyond such generalities, there are all sorts of rule-of-thumb devices to help you give dimension to a character. How would her best friend describe her, for example? What would Friend say about her? What would her worst enemy’s reaction be? How would she see and rationalize herself? What do people like or dislike about her? Do they admire her, pity her, fear her? Does she feel superior to others? Inferior? Does she see herself as good-humored, honest, hard-working, clever, kind, short-tempered, timid, aggressive, understanding, stingy, generous, or what?

Bear in mind, however, that all such traits are abstract and general. Behavior is concrete and specific. “What does he or she
do?”
that demonstrates any given point is what’s important.

To that end, you must devise incidents and specific details that
show
the trait in action. Never just
say
a character is irritating. Make him
do
something recognizably irritating. Telling simply isn’t good enough. If you want him to be likable, admirable, courageous, or such, figure out a way to prove it in action; that’s what writing’s all about.

Also, to a degree, you may use what I term the testimonial technique—that is, let some other character recall or describe succinctly a convincing incident that makes the point.

How far will he go in his efforts to attain a goal? What are his limitations? Will he lie? Steal? Kill? Reject a friend? Betray a loved one? You need to decide, because, for the duration of the story, you’re god. “What will he have to do?” you need to ask. “How can I make it believable that he’ll do it?” Is his behavior a matter of attitude? Function? Potential?

Where do you get all this material? The answer, I must repeat, even though it grows tedious, is through observation and introspection—a study of living, breathing, human beings in their native habitat, and that includes yourself. Nothing will substitute for watching, on the one hand, and probing your own most secret thoughts, on the other.

This is a subject we’ll discuss elsewhere in more detail. But it’s important to plant the thought in the back of your head early. Nor will it hurt to make contact with others’ observations, others’
conclusions, as set down in texts on psychology, sociology, and other aspects of behavior.

Neither should you neglect the work of other fiction writers. Their work offers insight on a wide variety of levels, as witness the traditional wisdom that novelists were the first psychiatrists, and that books like Robert Bloch’s
The Scarf
have been reviewed in psychiatric journals.