Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (6 page)

A final question that sometimes comes up in regard to fleshing out story people is the matter of character dossiers, files that catalog the tags and traits and labels and other characteristics of your cast. To what extent should you develop them and use them?

Later in your career, you may work with a series character—one originated and developed by someone else. Nick Carter is a recent case in point and so is Nancy Drew. A dozen or more writers have written books in these names, on assignment. As you sell more and more material, an editor or publisher may ask you if you’d be interested in doing a book using one of the house’s characters.

In that case, the character has already been established, complete with tags, traits, relationships, and background. You receive this information in a statement, a dossier, termed a “bible.” The longer the series has been in existence, the more specifically the character has been defined—and the more you as a writer are boxed in. Once the character has been given a wife or a twelve-year-old daughter, you’re stuck with them. Same for a finger cut off, a phobia about ghosts, a problem with alcohol. You merely integrate this already existing person into a plot.

But we’ll assume you’re not doing such a series. Should you work up character dossiers? And if so, how detailed should they be?

Most writers give solemn lip service to them, and I’d be the last to say them nay. But I’ve noted in my contacts with a fair assortment of my fellows that they give more honor to such catalogs in the telling than the fact.

My own tendency is to reverse the pattern most often recommended. Why? Because I get bored at what too often strikes me as busy work. (I remember one writer on writing who insisted that you should know whether your heroine prefers ice cream or pineapple ice.) I also feel that too many details decided early tend to lock you in and make it harder for you to adapt your character to story needs.

In consequence, instead of starting with a detailed dossier, I make a quick pass at laying out my characters. That means assigning each (tentatively and subject to change if my first notion doesn’t work out) an occupation, fragments of physical description, dominant impression, and basic attitudes, plus any color details that come to mind.

(This matter of collecting color details, striking fragments and bits of business, is tremendously important, incidentally. Try to think them up when you need them and your brain will tend, too often, to go blank. Better by far to jot them down as they flash by in odd moments. Later, you’ll be glad you did.)

Then I write. And as I write, I find I need things. Character A, for instance, needs to know how to pick a lock, so I give her a bit of background involving time spent years before with a locksmith uncle. Character B is going to have to deliver a baby; I plant references to his training as a paramedic. Character C? Her mother was an amateur gemologist/rockhound, so she can identify semiprecious stones.

All this material goes into a sort of working file—a dossier after the fact—as my story progresses, creating the details of characterization catch-as-catch-can as I go.

Then, when my rough draft is finished, I go back and edit and correct and insert.

This is the moment of truth. I discover that I’ve accidentally included a Joe and a Jobe in the story, and that all three females are redheads. (My wife once was unkind enough to point out to me that my women always had breasts that “rose and fell too fast.”) And I’ve even discovered that the protagonist’s goal really was too weak to carry 40,000 words, and had to go back and do a major patch job.

Would I have avoided these flaws with more detailed planning? In some cases, yes. But not always. You simply can’t foresee all the facets of a story’s development, and trying to out-guess every turn and twist may hang you up for longer than you think. Nor can you fuss and fidget over each precious line—not if you’re being paid by the word the way we were in the old pulp days. What we had to do was get the story down on paper; and that, to my way of thinking, is still what’s important. Instruction’s vital, true. But in the last analysis, in large measure you learn to write by writing.

Indeed, that’s why I’ve handled this book as I have. The raw
material is all here, but I’ve spread it out so you can pick and choose pieces that you need at the moment or that strike your fancy, rather than trying to force patterns on an entity that, after all, is supposed to be your own creation. So much for fleshing out your characters, giving them physical and psychological dimension. It’s also important that you have at least some idea why they’re the way they are, what cast them in their present mold. To that end, it’s important that you know at least key portions of their background.

It’s a topic we’ll begin exploring in the next chapter, “The World Within: 1.”

When we talk about the world within a character, at root we’re discussing motive: “A mental force that induces an act; a determining impulse. Intention; purpose; design,” as one dictionary puts it. It is the spine of any story.

Motive, in fiction, is another name for a
desire for change
on the part of some character or other.

It works this way:

Happiness is the universal human goal.

Un
happiness, regrettably, is all too often the human state.

For an individual to move from unhappiness to happiness ordinarily means that some aspect of his or her situation—state of affairs or state of mind—must be changed.

Change may be anything from getting a raise to humiliating an enemy to experiencing the feeling of youth again.

If the desire for change is so strong as to impel an individual to do something about it, take action to achieve it, it constitutes a motive.

Stated thus bluntly and simplistically, the picture is obvious. Give a character so compulsive a desire to make a given change that he can’t let it be, and you have the basis for a story.

In life, the issues may come through as a bit less easily understood.

Why? Because in life we can’t see inside other peoples’ heads.

Back when I was a boy, a young man of perhaps eighteen or twenty lived down the block from us. Though he bothered no one, he perpetually wandered about at loose ends, jobless and clearly a
bit strange. People felt sorry for his decent, hardworking parents.

Then one day, abruptly, the situation changed. Police appeared with the young man in tow—first questioning his family, then searching a shed behind the house.

Their findings chilled the neighborhood. Unsuspected by anyone, the young man apparently lived a macabre inner life that saw him secretly prowling local cemeteries while his parents assumed him to be asleep. A couple of nights before, he had reopened a grave and mutilated the corpse of a young woman buried that afternoon, removing selected organs in the manner of an inept Jack the Ripper. These he took home and stored in Mason jars in the shed.

It was a situation fit for Robert Bloch or Stephen King, but that’s not the point. The issue is that no one suspected that our addled young man, in some private world, was motivated to set to digging in the night-darkened graveyard. His secrets remained secrets until, returning to the cemetery, he was caught in the act of further desecrating the girl’s body . . . because none of us could see inside his head.

Another case in point—less gruesome, even if for me almost as disturbing. The incident concerns a man with whom I worked many years ago while editing labor papers. He was president of the union at a local factory. I think I can safely say that we rated as close friends—working together, drinking together, vacationing together, sharing a wide range of interests.

And then, one day, almost by accident, it was discovered that my friend held down a second job, one about which he hadn’t shared confidence with me. For he wasn’t just a worker or a union president. First and foremost, he was a labor spy, on the payroll of one of the nation’s major industrial security agencies. And all those weeks and months I’d thought I’d known him so well, I’d been deceived. Because try as I might, I couldn’t get inside his head.

I can’t tell you what a cataclysmic shock that was, back in those days when the struggling union movement was fighting to survive. I seldom—maybe not ever—have suffered such a blow. The very fact that it still stands out so sharply in my mind after half a century tells the story.

Nor is my experience unique. Every wife or husband betrayed, every employer who finds that a trusted employee has tapped the till, every parent shattered by the discovery that a son or daughter is doing drugs goes through the same bitter trauma. And “He was
always such a good boy,” said in regard to assorted serial killers, is a line so familiar it has become almost a litany.

Not that we’re talking only of unhappiness or disillusion, you understand. Revelations may be positive as well as negative. Witness the notorious tightwad who, after death, is found to have sponsored dozens of poor students who needed help in financing their educations. The quiet man who’s never mentioned military service, but who has the Congressional Medal of Honor tucked in the back of a dresser drawer. The woman with crippling arthritis who conceals her youthful fame as a nationally acclaimed dancer.

(Indeed, my friend Phyllis Whitney, suspense novelist supreme, has projected this to a highly effective plot device. Every major character, she says, should have a secret: some hidden something that he or she doesn’t want exposed to the world. She’s got a point. But more of that later, in
Chapter 6
.)

For now, though, the thing to bear in mind is that no matter what you may suspect, you can’t really read another person’s thoughts or get inside his head.

As a matter of fact, a character either in life or in fiction, may, for his own personal reasons, intentionally convey a false impression.

Item:
The girl with the hideously bad disposition who’s doing her best to project an aura of sweetness and light until she can land the man she wants.

Item:
The man who oozes perfect poise until you discover him weeping in the company restroom.

Item:
The woman who wallows in piety for the benefit of her church friends, while on the job she embezzles bank funds.

Item:
The friendly retiree whose young manhood included years working in the gas chamber in a Nazi death camp in Poland.

So much subterfuge, so much deceit, so many false impressions.

Yet you, as a writer, can’t afford to be taken in by such deceptive masks. Remember, always, that
you
are the creator; first and last,
you
are in control. Deceit and subterfuge are merely tools you use to give your story people depth and interest. Understanding their dynamics, you bring them on as needed, neatly packaged and inserted into characters’ heads.

How do you gain the necessary insight into the human reaction
process? Specifically, what principles undergird people’s—which is to say, characters’—thinking and behavior?

Shall we start with a basic premise—the one set forth in the summarizing capsule on which we opened? The thing all of us seek, at root, is what we call happiness.

What constitutes happiness? Call it a state of mind that exists in a person when, his bodily needs satisfied, he also feels a sense of self-importance, self-worth.

That sense of self-worth takes all sorts of forms. You find it in an illiterate, immigrant Vietnamese mother who sees her only surviving child graduate from high school. It sparks again when a doctor saves a life . . . a lawyer wins a case . . . a farmer banks the check for a bumper crop . . . a housewife wins a garden show . . . a teenage swinger beds a rock star. It glows in the sense of superiority a carny feels as he short-changes a mark or a vacationing couple boards a plane for Acapulco under the envious eyes of friends who must stay behind. Each finds what, for the moment, he or she calls happiness—“fulfillment of function,” in academic gobbledegook. One way or another, each can approve of himself, however briefly. And if others see fit to approve also, so much the better.

Such a state may prove murderously difficult to achieve, however. Why? Because the world and life keep throwing trouble at us—circumstances that block our efforts to attain our goals, shatter our dreams, make us feel helpless and ridiculous and unimportant. Yet in spite of everything, most of us keep striving.

Also, happiness is different things to different people. Inheriting a fortune may, to me, bring only panic at the thought of the responsibilities that will ensue. Or I may so thrill to the excitement of battle that I forget the fear of death.

Too, it may operate on a variety of levels. Witness what’s come to be known as the “generation gap.” In large measure it sprang from a clash between the traditional concept of “earned happiness” that dominated an earlier period and the “instant happiness” of an affluent society, in which credit cards and bankruptcy filings and singles bars took over. In the past a couple may have attained feelings of self-worth by caring for their elderly parents. Today, some couples seeking instant happiness may consign their parents to a
nursing home and get their ego boosts from driving two cars and living in a bigger house. (Which isn’t to say, of course, that a nursing home may not be the only answer in many cases.)

Whether these changes in society are good or bad is subject to debate. But the sun has set on the era when women found pride solely in managing a home. Men today are no longer ashamed to be seen changing the baby’s diapers or cooking a meal. Some, by choice, stay home as house-spouses, while their wives work outside the home for financial support of the family. And often both spouses must work, just to make ends meet.

Fact is, contemporary marriage no longer follows traditional male/female sexual stereotypes, and your characters had better reflect those changes if you hope to appeal to modern readers.