Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (7 page)

Unhappiness? That’s the other side of the coin, something we all strive to avoid. Call it the loss of self-esteem as a result of disapproval by self or others. Perhaps it springs from a harsh word from the boss, a sidewise glance from a supercilious clerk, the sense of helplessness one feels when a loved one dies, the rage and frustration that comes of a picked pocket, a broken date, a crumpled fender.

But again, each of us is different. The prospect of a visit to the hospital may chill your blood, while I look forward to making such a visit because the anticipated pain will assuage a secret sense of guilt, or give me an excuse to wallow delightedly in self-indulgence, self-pity, or friends’ attention. My son-in-law’s insults may cut me to the quick, yet bring a certain grim pleasure as I gloat over the shock he’s going to get when my will is read.

Now these are things we all experience. Yet in the words of Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal Sherlock Holmes, we see but we do not observe.

This is a luxury which we as writers can’t afford. We
must
learn to pay attention to human behavior in all its varied shades and nuances. Most especially, we need to become reflex-familiar with those twists and turns that influence the manner in which people’s lives develop. Why? Because they’ll provide insight into possible paths our characters may follow and actions they may take.

Is it possible to attack the issue of character dynamics from a different angle? Yes, of course it is. You very well may begin from the assumption that
fear
is the underlying factor. In which case, the question to ask yourself is: What’s Character scared of?

Because all of us
are
scared. When the feudist in pioneer Texas cried, “I’ll die before I run!” what he really was saying was, “I’m less afraid of death than losing face.” And how many times, covering triangle murders, did I hear the line, “We couldn’t stand the shame of a divorce” as motive? It’s the same peer pressure thing that’s sent so many teenagers to death mainlining heroin with their friends.

The person—or the character—may not know he’s scared, of course, or if he does, he may not know just what he’s scared of. Fear of responsibility may lie at the heart of his secret inner dread, as witness many an educated, once-cultured bum along skid row, many a remittance man in Mexico or Monaco or Marrakesh. I have hypochondriac friends whose blind panic at the thought of disease has immobilized them for life. The fear of failure has locked hundreds, thousands, millions into private cells of never trying. A woman I know was so devastated by Depression poverty that today she lives the life of a virtual indigent though her net worth is more than half a million dollars. And Alfred Hitchcock so feared the possibility of a traffic arrest and jail that he never learned to drive a car.

So much for fear as a dynamic, a source of human conduct. But whether you choose to work from it or from man’s never-ending search for fulfillment and happiness, ultimately you’ll need to give special consideration to four other concepts:
direction, goal, drive,
and
attitude
.

We’ll take them up in the second part of this appraisal of the world within in the next chapter.

Each character about whom you write, whether you’re aware of it or not, must have a private future. That is, to go back to what we said in
Chapter 1
, he must care about something, feel that some aspect of his world is important—important enough to fight for.

To that end, and though they can hardly be separated in practice, you need to give him an appropriate
direction, goal, drive,
and
attitude
.

Let’s consider each of these separately.

A character’s
direction
may be defined as his tendency to lead the kind of life he enjoys. In effect, it’s a sort of unstated search that causes him to seek out experience he finds pleasurable and to act in a manner that fulfills a quite possibly unverbalized “dream of happiness” for him. That this dream may be vague—even nebulous or totally unformulated—is of no consequence. Nor does it matter whether it makes sense to anyone, including the character himself. It still shapes his behavior, just as the alcoholic continues to get drunk despite certain knowledge of the hangover to follow.

Thus, any character, any person—and that includes you, and me, and the woman next door, and the man down the street—lives from infancy to a greater or lesser degree in the grip of an indefinable inner hunger, a gnawing sense that something is missing from his life.

Actually, it may be that what’s missing is in the person himself. It’s rooted in the sense of inadequacy born of childhood helpless
ness. What he wants, realize it or not, is to control his life, his destiny.

Not grasping this fact, however, Person—or Character, where fiction is concerned—attempts to fill the void with ego-inflating exploits in the world outside him—his own private combination of what W. I. Thomas, respected sociologist of another day, termed the “four wishes”: the human animal’s desire for
adventure, security, recognition, response
. (Personally, I’m inclined to add a fifth item,
power,
to the list.) And the way you combine these, the ratio between the elements you zero in on, establishes the direction that you go.

When you translate this into more concrete form,
adventure
comes out as a yearning for new experience, as exemplified in activities ranging from climbing Mount Everest to throwing a brick through a neighbor’s window . . . joining the Marines or Peace Corps to signing up for a night course in computer graphics.
Security
? A job with the Postal Service, a bulging bank account, a well-tuned car engine, you name it. Spell
recognition
as fame via election as selectman, winning a breakdance contest, being awarded a scholarship, making headlines with a jailbreak. And
response,
for most of us, equals love on any one of its multitudinous levels: warming to the feeling that someone that counts cares about us. If you want to include
power,
obviously it’s exemplified in the authority to hire and fire, the officer’s command over his troops, and the woman who includes a potential palimony suit in her armorarium.

So much for the generalities of happiness. More to the point is the way that each of us, consciously or otherwise, selects a certain state or situation as, for us and for the moment, constituting bliss. Call it a symbol, if you will. It’s a condition which we subjectively visualize as creating the paradisiacal sense of self-worth/self-importance/self-esteem that we all yearn for.

(Assume that you win such happiness. Is it likely to prove enduring? Not necessarily; indeed, not even likely. The “perfect husband” turns out to be a penny-pincher. The “dream house” floods every time it rains. A failed bank swallows up your nest-egg savings. The town forgets football fame the day you graduate. And that’s life, as they say.)

Remember, too, that both in life and in fiction characters operate on separate wavelengths, different levels of intensity. Consider two women, for example.
Slender
equals
happy
where both are
concerned. But for whatever reason,
slender
is a compulsion for Woman A. Woman B, on the other hand, finds
slender
in competition with a growling stomach. Result: Woman A stays svelte. Woman B? Fat.

The same principle applies to men, of course. Staying thin is often important in terms of appearance, job promotion, and health. Yet loud are the wails that rise from many as they have to buy new wardrobes because their weight has gone up or down.

Or observe three churchmen—all thoughtful, all dedicated. Religion is important to each—a vital element of their happiness, you might say.

Thus, Bill is not only a believer, but a regular member and attendee.

So is Bob. But in addition to belonging and attending, he sits on the church board.

Bert? A member and attendee too, he has his own private ideas about religion.

Each pays tribute to his faith in a characteristic manner. Bill, for example, follows the rules and is present whenever he’s supposed to be.

Bob carries his devotion a step further. Sitting on the board, he plays a definite role in church politics.

Which puts him in direct conflict with Bert, for Bert believes that the church’s trend toward modernization and the contemporary is part of the devil’s plot to corrupt both the Word of God and the congregation, especially the young.

The result, frequently, is a fine Donnybrook that nearly comes to fisticuffs in the nave. Hot tempers, hot words spill over the sanctuary like blazing oil.

Yet each of these men and women operates from the same basic principle: a yearning for fulfillment, for happiness.

Each symbolizes that happiness differently, however. Thus, Bill enjoys the sense of duty fulfilled that comes with attendance . . . the warm feeling of being active on the right side. As a God-fearing man, he’s proud of raising his children in the right path, being head of a Christian family.

Bob, in contrast, isn’t content merely to stand up and be counted. A business type and aggressive he wants to help run the show from the church boardroom. It’s one of the things that makes him feel that he’s important.

Bert’s case is a little different. A bit paranoid, he’s suspicious of
all authority. The church gives him a point of focus. Add to that his conservatism, his feeling that any change is dangerous, and he’s an ideal convert for those who feel the trend to modernization is endangering the church itself and springs from Satan.

Three different men, three different personalities and attitudes. And despite what we’ve said here, any attempt to explain them is guesswork at best, born of our own views as much as of the facts.

Or what about Woman A, with whom we started? What gives her the drive and strength to cut her caloric intake and increase her exercise to the point that she loses weight . . . whereas Woman B, verbalizing the same goals and desires, somehow never gets around to it?

Because no one knows,
your guess, your hypothesis—your rationalization, if you will—is as good as that of anyone else.

Assuming, that is, that you don’t go at the task and process blindly. You still need to learn all you can about the foundations upon which rationalizations can reasonably be based.

Don’t let your reasoning become involved to the point that it destroys credibility, however. Your fictional logic must, after all, reflect the thinking of your audience. Few Americans would accept the sexist orientation of Iran, with its requirements of the veil, the chador, and subservience of women, or our Hispanic maid’s idea that the stars caused disease. Likewise, few people today would see as a good father the domineering, razor-strop-wielding male prevalent a hundred years ago.

It’s also one thing to build a solid case, another to dive off the deep end in the manner of the British psychoanalyst who argued that Welsh miners’ strikes sprang from guilt reactions over their “rape” of Mother Earth.

In general, when setting up your people, you’ll find it most productive to explore again the three main areas of human activity: love, work, and society. Place special emphasis on the things we humans strive for: possession of (an object, a person, a status, a state of mind or being), relief from (fear, oppression, humiliation, loss), or revenge for (a slight, a loss, a betrayal), plus all the multitudes of variations and permutations of which you can conceive.

A goal exists only in terms of an existing situation.

More specifically, it’s born out of
dissatisfaction
with that situa
tion. In other words, it’s more specific than direction.

Or, getting back to the capsule with which we opened, there’s some aspect of your situation that you’d like to see
changed:
The girl you adore is dating two other men. You’d like to persuade her to limit her attentions to you alone. Which means that your
goal
is to get her to agree to “go steady.”

Or, your paycheck just won’t cover today’s inflationary outgo. So you make it your
goal
to
change
this sad condition by winning a raise.

Or, your divorced sister has moved back home with her three unruly children, driving your aged parents to emotional and financial desperation. Your goal: to get Sister & Co. out again before Mother and Dad collapse or slash their wrists.

Or, you’ve discovered that one of your superiors in the Defense Department is a mole, a secret Soviet agent. You
must
find which one (
goal
) before he can pass on vital data.

It’s also worth pointing out that goals are of two types:
general
and
immediate
.

The issue here rests on the difference between
chronicle
and
story
.

A chronicle is a record of events, a statement of what happened in a given situation:
The king married the princess and they had five children
.

A story is the record of how somebody deals with danger:
The king married the princess and then found she planned to poison him.

Finding that the new queen plans to poison him constitutes an unacceptable
change
in the king’s situation, his state of affairs, and state of mind.

This change gives the king a general goal: to survive the queen’s plan.

To reach this
general
goal, the king must attain a whole series of
immediate
goals. First, possibly, he must avoid drinking the flagon of poisoned wine the queen offers him . . . yet do so in such a way as not to reveal he knows what she’s up to. To that end, he pretends a courtier’s remark has affronted him, flies into a simulation of rage and, with appropriate byplay, flings the flagon at the unfortunate man, then stalks from the hall.

One scene, one immediate goal out of the way. What next?