Creating Unforgettable Characters (19 page)

Character shticks work best when they pay off in the story, and when there is a compelling reason for them to exist. In A
Fish Called Wanda,
Otto reads Nietzsche to prove that he's not dumb. In
Airplane,
the jeopardy of the situation caused confusion and panic. The jive-talking woman and the punching nun functioned by solving the problem.

Occasionally, the color or background of the character creates a character type.

Character types are not meant to be stereotypes. They aren't defined by their role, gender, or ethnic background (as in the "dumb secretary" or the "cool black") but are defined by their action. They are meant to be so broadly drawn that they are instantly recognizable to audiences.

Throughout the history of fiction writing, writers have relied on types. In Roman plays, types included the braggadocio soldier, the pedantic scholar, the parasite, the foolish father, the shrew, the fop, the tricky slave, the scheming valet, the buffoon, the trickster, the rustic. In later plays, we have seen the scheming maid, the lovestruck lad, the fool. And melodrama took the type as far as it could go, giving us such cardboard figures as the villain twirling his mustache, the handsome hero, and the sweet young thing.

In the above cases, the defining characteristic—foolish or pedantic, etc.—never says that "all fathers are fools" or "all scholars are pedantic, " but that within the larger classification of fathers or scholars, there's a certain type that's a fool or a pedant. Whereas a character type can be an important element in many stories, a stereotype only limits the story. (Stereotyping will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9.)

Sometimes it is important to use a type. "When you're creating minor characters for a TV series, " says James Burrows, "you try to make them on the nose. If you've got a bully, you try to cast a bully. If you cast a guy who's a bully, but doesn't look like one, it will take the audience too much time to figure out that character. Whereas if you cast a bully everybody can identify, you can then work on working him off the other characters, and making him funny."

Character types can be broadly drawn, or they can be drawn with great attention to detail. Tartuffe (from Moliere's play) is a character type, a hypochondriac; Polonius from
Hamlet
is a doddering father; but both contain considerable detailing.

When the acting teacher and director, Constantin Stan-islavski, worked with actors, he encouraged them to continually add great detail to their portrayals. His description of the process can be of help to writers creating a character type.

"It is possible to portray on the stage a character in general terms—such as a soldier. For instance, a professional soldier as a general rule holds himself stiffly erect, marches around instead of walking like a normal person, clicks his heels together to make his spurs ring, speaks in a loud, barking tone out of habit. . . . But this is oversimplified . . . and passes for a portrait but not the character. . . . These characters are traditional, lifeless, hackneyed portrayals . . . not live people but figures in a ritual. Other actors, who possess more acute powers of observation, are able to choose subdivisions in the general categories of stock figures. They can make distinctions among military men, between a member of an ordinary and a guard's regiment, between infantry and cavalry, they know soldiers, officers, generals. . . . Other actors add a still more heightened, detailed sense of observation. We now have a soldier with a name, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, and with features not duplicated in any other soldier. "
²

Although it is not the job of the writer to put the pauses, the gestures, the exchanged looks into the script (this is the work of the actor), there still needs to be some sharp definition of the essence of the character that goes beyond broad generalities.

Actors cannot act generalities—and a general character will not attract an actor to the role, or a reader to the book.

FILLING IN THE CHARACTER

By understanding the function, and adding color and texture, you will come close to creating a fully realized character. But it may also be necessary to add details that come from your own observation, and through your own experience.

Sometimes this means putting yourself into the character. Seth Werner, creator of the California Raisins commercial, comments, "A lot of people have said that the people that I put into commercials have a little bit of me in them. Somebody said you could pick me out in the line of dancing raisins. It's the way I walk and the way I would dance. The commercial is a little off the norm. And that's what gives it a little personality and magic. Even when our animators were actually making the raisins out of clay, you would see them look in a mirror and make an expression and copy it on the face of the raisin. I think work should come from your heart, and when it does, other people feel it. It reaches. It's hard to say what it is exactly, but it is these small touches and subtleties that make it special."

Robert Benton created a number of his characters for
Places in the Heart
by remembering and observing people he had known. "I had a great-uncle who was blind. I was sitting with my relatives talking about the script when one of them reminded me of my Uncle Bud. We started telling stories about him and he became the basis of Mr. Will. With Will I wanted to show a man who is very smart, who had lost his eyesight, who had cut himself off from life and through the course of the movie is reintroduced back to his life. I wanted a kind of intelligence and kind of an anger about his life. Now my uncle had the intelligence, but not the anger. I wanted to get a sense that Will was out of keeping with the rest of the people, that he was a little more sophisticated, a little more neurotic than anyone else. Will gives contrast and a varied texture to the story. Everybody in that town can't be nice small-town people. Somebody has to be different from that.

"Margaret and Vi are based on an amalgam of two or three people I had known. They were based on people I had gone to high school with.

"I particularly loved the character of Wayne. I grew up in the Southwest in the thirties and forties with hillbilly music, and hillbilly music was about grand passion. I wanted someone with a grand passion and a set of problems that weren't what you'd think of as being in a small, God-fearing town. Country-western music was about 'Don't rob another man's castle,' and about going out honky-tonkying, and it was about great passions in this most ordinary setting."

Supporting characters, like major characters, are created through small details. Even if they are less important characters, they still can be sharply drawn.

CREATING THE VILLAIN

There is one other character that must be discussed, who is sometimes a major character, sometimes a supporting character. That's the villain.

Everything mentioned up to this point will be useful for creating the villain. But the villain presents some unusual problems.

By definition, the villain is the evil character who opposes the protagonist. Villains are usually the antagonists, although not all antagonists are villains. Antagonists won't be villains, for example, if they oppose the protagonist not out of bad motives but because it's their function in the story. If the main character wants to go to Harvard but doesn't have the grades to get in, the representatives of the school will become the antagonists since they are opposing the protagonist, but they won't be villains. The role of the villain always connotes evil.

Whether villains wear black hats (as in the old Westerns), or fly fast jets and commit corporate crime, they place problems in the path of the "good guy," and generally wreak social and personal havoc.

On the simplest level, stories that contain villains are usually stories about good and evil. Usually the protagonist stands for the good, and the villain opposes the good. Most villains are action-oriented. They steal, kill, betray, wound, and work against the good. Many of them begin to look alike. Often there's a tendency for them to be poorly motivated, and one-dimensional. The reasons for their evil actions are rarely explained, as if people do evil just because they feel like doing it.

It is possible, though, to create dimensional villains. Depending on the style of the story, and how much depth you want to bring into it, villains can be just as unforgettable as any other character. Certainly such characters as Captain Bligh in
Mutiny on the Bounty,
Salieri in
Amadeus,
or the particularly dimensional villains in the miniseries "Holocaust" come to mind as well-drawn villains.

To understand the villain, it's helpful to understand the relationship between the good and evil that exists in most stories.

F. Scott Peck, in his book
People of the Lie,
defines evil as live spelled backward, i.e., as that which opposes life. Using this definition, the good character stands for an affirmation of life. He or she stands for saving the ranch for the sake of the family (
Shane
and
Places in the Heart),
for overcoming abuse
(.Nobody's Child, The Burning Bed),
for self-esteem
(The Color Purple),
for realizing one's potential (
The Karate Kid, Heart Like a Wheel),
for reaching out to others
(Rain Man),
for recognizing the humanity of those unlike ourselves
(Bill, E.T.),
for the promotion of growth and transformation
(The Turning Point).

Evil then opposes good. It tyrannizes, restricts, represses, puts down, defies, and puts limits on others. Whether he employs obvious evil, such as murder and other forms of violence, or some of the more subtle forms of abuse, the villain has the same function in the story: to work against the good.

What are the different approaches to creating dimensional villains? First of all, it is necessary to ask why they act the way they do. Their motives can be explained through exploring the villain as victim, or the villain as self-serving agent. In the first case the villain is defined through reaction; in the second case, through action.

For many villains, the doing of evil
comes
as a result of negative influences in their own lives. As a writer creating this kind of a character, you might explore the backstory, looking at social and personal factors that might have created these negative characteristics. You would recognize that nobody is "purely bad," and round out the character by showing good points, complex psychology, and emotions such as fear, frustration, anger, rage, and/or envy. Most analyses of real-life violent crimes focus on the "villain as victim," searching out the reasons, perhaps, why a quiet, unassuming man murders someone. Emphasis is usually placed on a difficult and unstable family life, often poverty and abuse, repression of the person's feelings, and a solitary, nonrelational life-style.

If you choose to create an active, rather than a reactive, villain, you could dimensionalize the character through exploring the complex unconscious factors that motivate him or her. It has been said "No one is a villain in his own eyes." No one believes he is doing evil. Most villains justify their actions, thinking they are doing it for a greater good. These people usually have strong defense mechanisms. They're unaware of the unconscious forces driving them. Generally they are driven by their shadow side, and are continually justifying their actions.

Don Corleone in
The Godfather
is partially motivated by love of his family. Although Gordon Gekko in
Wall Street
admits to being motivated by greed, to him, "greed" is a good word, connoting accomplishment and success and ambition.

If you were creating villains, you would try to discover the greater good, or what they consider the greater good, that is driving them. Is it a desire for safety? Love of family? Security (for themselves or others close to them)? A better world (perhaps a world of one class and one color)? Although such a motivation might have positive aspects to it, it will take form in negative actions because of a desire to impose the villain's value system on others. Ultimately, it will result in some kind of repression.

Villains may be unaware of what they do. Rather than justifying their actions, their evil actions are the result of unconscious forces that they don't understand. The violence and repression that come from these characters tend to be more subtle, but they are still effective. These villains deny their actions and their motivations, a form of denial that can be found in compulsive behaviors, addictions, and abuse. These are the characters who say, "It was only a spanking; it didn't hurt my child, " or "I only had a couple of drinks, not enough to get me drunk and violent," or "I love my wife, certainly she's not afraid of me!" The villains in
The Burning Bed
and
Nobody's Child
are unaware of the negative effects of their actions.

Villains of any type suffer from a kind of narcissism, an inability to see, and respect, others' reality. It's an inability to recognize the humanity of other people, or to affirm their right to be who they are.