A large piece of Plexiglas covers the top of my desk. Beneath this shield, I keep bits and pieces to serve as inspiration or to cheer me up in those moments of bleak despair when Iâm wondering why Iâve taken on one difficult project or another. Among these items I have a copy of John Steinbeckâs letter to Herbert Sturz on the subject of The Grapes of WrathâI find his comments about critics particularly smile-producingâas well as pictures of my dog, of myself grinning inanely alongside a wax effigy of Richard III from Madame Tussaudâs waxworks in London, and several quotations from writers on one subject or another. One of those writers is Isaac Bashevis Singer who, in an interview with Richard Burgis in 1978, said the following:
Thatâs where I want to begin, then, in laying the foundation for my exploration of craft: with character.
Not with idea? you may ask, aghast. Not with where a writer gets ideas? What a writer does with ideas? How a writer molds ideas into prose?
We will get to that. But if you donât understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.
What we take away from our reading of a good novel mainly is the memory of character. This is because eventsâboth in real life and in fictionâtake on greater meaning once we know the people who are involved in them. Put a human face on a disaster and you touch people more deeply; you may even move them inexorably toward taking an action they might have only idly contemplated before that disaster was given a human face. Munich â72, the Achille Lauro, Pan Am 103, Oklahoma City, 9/11âŠWhen these tragedies become human by connecting them to the real people who lived through them or died in them, they become imprinted indelibly on the collective consciousness of a society. We start with an event as news, but we almost immediately begin asking Who? about it.
Itâs no different with fiction. The trial of Tom Robinson is maddening, disturbing, and heartbreaking in its injustice, but we remember the trial long after itâs over because of Tom Robinsonâs quiet dignity and because of Atticus Finchâs heroic representation of the man, knowing all along that his client is doomed because of the time, the place, and the society in which they both live. To Kill a Mockingbird thus rises to the level of timeless, classic literature not because of its ideaâthe innocence of childhood set into an ugly landscape of prejudice and brutalityâbut because of its characters. This is true of every great book, and the names of those men, women, and children shine more brightly in the firmament of literary history than do the stories in which they operated. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, Jem and Scout Finch, Captain Ahab, Hester Prynne, Sherlock Holmes, Heathcliff, Ebenezer Scrooge, Huckleberry Finn, Jack-Ralph-and-Piggy, Hercule Poirot, Inspector Morse, George Smiley, Anne Shirley, Laura IngallsâŠThe list can stretch from here to forever. With the exception of the last, not a single character is a real person. Yet all of them are, because the writers made them so.
Once we have begun it, we continue reading a novel largely because we care about what happens to the characters. But for us actually to care about these actors in the drama on those printed pages, they must become real people to us. An event alone cannot hold a story together. Nor can a series of events. Only characters effecting events and events affecting characters can do that.
I try to keep some basic guidelines in mind when Iâm creating my characters. First, I try to remember that real people have flaws. Weâre all works in progress on planet Earth, and not one of us possesses physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological perfection. This should be true of our characters as well. No one wants to read about perfect characters. Since no reader is perfect, there is nothing more disagreeable than spending free time immersed in a story about an individual who leaps tall buildings of emotion, psyche, body, and spirit in a single bound. Would anyone want a person like that as a friend, tediously perfect in every way? Probably not. Thus, a character possessing perfection in one area should possess imperfection in another area.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle understood this, which is one of the reasons that his Sherlock Holmes has stood the test of time for more than one hundred years and counting. Holmes has the perfect intellect. The man is a virtual machine of cogitation. But heâs an emotional black hole incapable of a sustained relationship with anyone except Dr. Watson, and on top of that, he abuses drugs. He has a series of rather quirky habits, and heâs unbearably supercilious. As a character âpackage,â he emerges unforgettably from the pages of Conan Doyleâs stories. Consequently, itâs difficult to believe that any reader of works written in English might not know who Sherlock Holmes is.
As individuals weâre all riddled with issues of self-doubt in one area or another. This is the great commonality of mankind. So in literature, we want to see characters who make mistakes, who have lapses of judgment, who experience weakness from time to time, and this is the second of the guidelines I try to remember when Iâm creating a character.
As an example, consider the poor narrator in Rebecca. Hereâs a girl who is incapable of seeing her own appeal to the rich and brooding Maxim de Winter. She goes through life terrified of causing offense, so much so that when she breaks a figurine in her own home, she hides it in the drawer of a desk lest she get in trouble for having knocked it over! We cringe when she does this. But we also empathize with her humanity because weâve all had moments when weâve doubted who and what we are, when weâve wondered if we could truly be lovable to another person. We identify with this narrator and we care about her, so when she finally says to the nasty Mrs. Danversâhousekeeper of Manderley and flamekeeper of Rebeccaâs memoryââI am Mrs. de Winter now,â we want to cheer as she comes into her own. Of course, Manderley burns to the ground and thatâs too bad. But the characters continue to live.
They do this because, if the novel is well written, they have grown and changed during the course of the story, and this is the third guideline I try to keep in mind. Characters learn something from the unfolding events, and the reader learns something, too, as a character is revealed slowly by the writer, who peels away a layer at a time.
What the writer knows as she does this is that characters are interesting in their conflict, their misery, their unhappiness, and their confusion. They are not, alas, interesting in their joy and security. The first gives them a pit out of which they climb during the course of a novel. The second robs them of story.
If youâre wondering about the truth of any of this, consider the following set of characters as they were revealed to me in a writing class that I taught a number of years ago.
One of my students was creating a private investigator who would work in Boston. She brought in her first ten or fifteen pages for the class to evaluate. In these pages we met the PI, his sister, their mother, and their stepfather. The PI was from a large Irish family. His sister worked for him. He and his sister got along well; they were practically best friends, and they loved each other to pieces. On the night in question as the novel opens, the PI and his sisterâloving each other to piecesâare going over to their motherâs house for St. Patrickâs Day dinner. They adore their mother and wouldnât miss a St. Patrickâs Day dinner for all the corned beef and cabbage in County Clare. Plus, their mother is a superb cook, the best cook ever, in fact. Their childhood memories are filled with meals eaten around that old kitchen table, the joy of familial conversation buzzing in the fragrant room. So they go over to their momâs house, and the first person they see is their stepfather. Heâs a wonderful man. They worship him. He made their childhood bliss. He married their mom when she was widowed and nothing could have pleased them moreâŠ
At this point in the chapter, one was praying for someone to come along and put all of these characters out of the readerâs misery. Why? Because there was no conflict. There was nothing but happiness, joy, and familial bliss. Alas. There was no story.
So the basic guidelines in creating characters should be: Give them flaws, allow them to doubt themselves about something, see to it that they grow and change, and make certain you are putting them into conflict. Once you have committed yourself to following those guidelines, you can begin designing the characters themselves.
Note, I use the word design. For you are both the master architect and the general contractor here, and this is the most creative part of the entire novel-writing process, save for your manipulation of language.
When Iâm designing a character, I begin with a name. To my way of thinking, itâs impossible to create a character without one. The name I choose cannot be arbitrary, either. Itâs the first of the tools that I can use in revealing who and what my creation is, and silly is the writer who fails to recognize this and just slaps any old name on a character without realizing that nameâs import to the reader. Names can suggest just about anything to the reader. As Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter point out in their writing exercise book What If, names can suggest traits of personality (Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Roger Chillingsworth, Mr. Knightley). They can suggest social and ethnic background (Captain Ross Poldark, Tom Joad, Mrs. van Hopper, Maxim de Winter, Winston Nkata). They can suggest geography (Hank will be on a ranch, probably not at Harvard), attitude, or even events that are yet to happen in the story.1 Names influence how a reader will feel about a character. They also make it easier for the writer to create a character.
Consider the following, taken from the annals of my own literary history. When I was writing In the Presence of the Enemy, I created a very hard-edged and determined career woman whom I called Eve Bowen. To me that was a nice, hard, assertive name. A no-nonsense name. I had no trouble working with it to bring the character Eve Bowen to life. Set against her would be her husband. I wanted him to be her equal, a man capable of going mano a mano with her, a man not intimidated by her successful political career. He would be tough, a successful entrepreneur who grew up in Newcastle of a working-class family and essentially reinvented himself. He would brook no nonsense. He would not suffer fools.
So I began with his name. I called him Leo Swann. Then I sat and stared at my computer screen for a good twenty minutes, unable to write a thing about him until I realized that Iâd given him the wrong name, that a character called Leo Swann could not be as I wanted this man to be. Once I changed his name to Alexander StoneâAlex StoneâI could work with him. That name suggested strength to me; it suggested determination and a refusal to be cowed. Leo Swann did not. And, more important, I did not believe Leo Swann would suggest that to a reader.
Once I have the name of the character, I create an analysis of that character, something that I will explore in more depth later. Suffice it to say now that the analysis begins with a basic list of facts about a character, which soon expands to a full report. In this report, I become the characterâs psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, probation officer, and biographer because I know that the more I know about my characters before I write the novel itself, the easier it will be to make each of them distinct and to give each of them a voice unlike any other characterâs voice.
The purpose of doing this work in advance of what seems like the âfun stuffâ of writing the novel itself rests with my belief that you cannot bring a character to life in a book unless he or she is alive before the book begins. If I donât know a character before I place him into the crucible of the plot, I run the risk of either not knowing how that character is going to react to what happens orâjust as badâfalling back on same-old, same-old to illustrate that reaction. The truth of the matter is that we all react to the circumstances of our lives differently. So should characters.
This is doubly true for how we speak, and the creation of characters allows me to understand how that character will talkâwhat his actual dialogue will be likeâas well as how that characterâs narrative voice will sound if I choose to put a scene in his point of view. The words a character uses, the syntax he employs, and his diction thus become another tool to reveal character to the reader. A characterâs dialogue will illustrate not only his opinions and his personality, it can display his educational level, his economic background, his attitudes (one of the key elements of characterization), his beliefs, his superstitions, his pathology, and just about anything else. But it canât display any of this if I donât know what the âthisâ is in the first place because I havenât created him prior to putting words in his mouth.
If character is story, then dialogue is character. Take a look at the following abbreviated scene from Harper Leeâs To Kill a Mockingbird.