Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (12 page)

(Though you never can say for sure, you understand. Man’s diversity is a major reason he intrigues us, and his flexibility, adaptability, and unpredictability is legendary. I once knew a longtime member of the Sailors Union of the Pacific who went on to become a certified public accountant, then changed gears to spread his wings as a leading mystery writer.)

What about what might be called shock impact—the kind of experience that so stuns as, allegedly, to turn a character’s hair white overnight, or to induce lasting amnesia or paralysis or blindness?

Well, it does happen the psychiatrists tell us. The diagnosis frequently is one of conversion hysteria, and writers without number have used it as both a plot and character device. So many, in fact, that you can legitimately label it as overworked and so walk wide around it.

More realistically, will one traumatic event blight a life forever? Or can the victim rise above it? Do years of rigid discipline and conditioning erect so strong a wall that the person so trained can never escape it?

To ask such questions is to answer them. All of us have known far too many people who went their own way despite all pressures to the contrary. Carol Burnett overcame a childhood shared with alcoholic parents. Mary Higgins Clark suffered a series of traumatic losses in the deaths of those near and dear. Many Amish young people abandon the traditional life of their religion each year.

The issue, of course, is that no two of us respond to an experience, traumatic or otherwise, in precisely the same way. We each interpret each event that impinges on us in a highly individualized manner. I’ve known a number of cops who came out of the ghetto, including a few who had siblings in prison.

It’s not the experience that creates the trauma, you see, but the way the character reacts to it. Insult one man, and he apologizes for existing. Another explodes in loud-mouthed anger. A third punches you in the nose. A fourth brushes off your insolence with a smile that hides his resolution that unpleasant things are going to happen to you in a darkened alley in the near future.

Generations of writers have taken advantage of this fact, and so should you. Indeed, that’s why I talked about rationalization at such length in
Chapter 2
. It’s the reason one person finds a joke hilarious, while another takes it as a wearisome bore. It’s the key factor that makes one boy become a cop, his twin, a crook.

As a writer, you decide the impact of experience on your characters. Indeed, you devise experiences, incidents, to fit your story needs . . . then give them the meaning, to Character and to Reader, that you want them to have.

In a word, you
rationalize
each, precisely as described in
Chapter 2
.

What lies behind this strange anomaly? Quite possibly it’s a vital, yet too often overlooked, constituent in the molding process that perhaps outweighs all the others. It’s that of . . .

Too many years ago, in Depression days in Jackson, Michigan, the town where I grew up, I stumbled upon an informal organization that called itself the Thinkers Exchange.

Would that every boy might be as lucky! It reshaped my life.

The Exchange’s membership was a disparate and unlikely group. It included, as I recall, a railroad fireman, a tool and die
maker, a factory foreman, a blueprint technician, and a bicycle repairman. Lined faces, work-scarred hands, and broken nails were the order of the day. Virtually all those attending were self-educated. High school diplomas were a rarity. I doubt that a college degree ever darkened the group’s conclaves.

Meeting once a month in a night-empty courtroom, the members mulled over topics ranging from events of the day to the meaning of the universe.

Yet the organization’s name was no misnomer. Though limited as to background and formal education, and frequently arriving at what today seem strange conclusions indeed, these men were readers and thinkers, every one. Night after night, the shabby old courtroom vibrated with ideas. Here it was that I first heard of Charles Darwin and Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx. Clarence Meily’s
Puritanism
and Paul Lafargue’s
The Right to be Lazy
passed from hand to hand. The pros and cons of vaccination, vivisection, and euthanasia were debated fiercely. Fervent voices quoted Clarence Darrow and Margaret Sanger and Judge Ben Lindsay and Havelock Ellis and Robert G. Ingersoll. I found myself plunged into Morgan’s
Ancient Society
and Ward’s
The Ancient Lowly
and Kropotkin’s
Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution
.

It was, I grant you, a unique situation. As I look back on it, I’m not at all sure that the years spent since in assorted colleges and universities contributed as much to my development.

So it is with ideas. Like body, environment, and experience, ideas shape both you and the characters about whom you write. It would be a mistake if you didn’t consider such as you build your stories.

Also, as I hope I’m making clear, ideas don’t spring just from books. People are far and away your greatest source and resource. Put yourself in contact with them every chance you get. Take advantage of their diversity to broaden your world, expand the limits of your own experience. Listen to them, talk with them, learn what they know and how they think and feel and reason.

I can’t overemphasize the importance of this aspect of your development as a writer, as witness the case of a librarian under whom I worked for a time. Her story still fascinates me.

Librarian was the daughter of a wealthy, metropolitan banking family.

One day, Emma Goldman came to speak in Librarian’s city.

This was the period just preceding World War I. Emma Goldman was a strident voice of militant anarchism, and of the radical feminism of the period.

For no reason beyond casual curiosity that I could ever ascertain, Librarian (who was a blighted socialite rather than a librarian at the time) went to hear Miss Goldman. And somehow, unfathomably, the things Emma Goldman said, the ideas she advanced with such fervor, struck a spark of social awareness within Librarian. Overnight, with new-convert zeal, she plunged into a tumultuous life of carrying the farther reaches of left-wing thought to the masses, on a level that soon had her in and out of jail on a well-nigh weekly basis.

Well, there’s considerably more to Librarian’s story, of course. But the thing that gripped and held me was the way an idea, the idea of anarchism (which I never could buy, incidentally, despite all Librarian’s efforts to convert me) had transformed and reshaped a woman’s life.

And mine also. Just knowing her, being fascinated by her, I found my own thinking about and insight into people expanded and given new facets and dimensions.

Nor are Librarian’s case or mine isolated instances. Look around you at the people you know who have found new meaning in life through their contact with ideas, whether from print or people. Robert Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land
influenced a whole generation, and so did Joseph Heller’s
Catch 22,
and Jerry Falwell’s preaching, and Timothy Leary’s “drug revolution.”

Or, if you feel I’m concentrating too much on the far-out fringes of our culture, consider the way that we grow up with such concepts as thrift or honesty or cynicism, progress or fate or kindliness or patriotism or devotion to duty conditioned into us.

Yes, ideas do count. You’ll be shortchanging yourself and your characters alike if you don’t bear them in mind when you create your story people. Let them think, let them believe, let them explore unique alleyways of opinion. Give them private concepts to ponder. Your stories will be the richer for it; your readers fascinated by the extra spice they offer.

Will the world accept such? Yes, if you don’t allow the characters’ attitudes to fall over the brink into propaganda. If you don’t believe me, look over the mysteries of William Kienzle, whose ma
jor story people are Roman Catholic priests, or Harry Kemelman’s series about a rabbi.

The insight and information these books give is, I believe, a major factor in making them best-sellers.

Background can be summed up as “reasons why”:

• Reasons why a character does the things he does.

• Reasons why he doesn’t do others.

What’s known as the “principle of parsimony” applies. That is, the simpler you can keep said reasons, the better. Which shouldn’t be too difficult, since as writer, creator, you’re in command. You simply rationalize the reasons.

Thus, as you prepare to write a story, most of the things you need to know about your characters will pop up automatically—by osmosis, as it were, through your skin, the way a frog takes in water. Only when they don’t come do you need to sift through backgrounds in a systematic way.

When you do, simply ask yourself such questions as are needed—and only such; after all, you’re writing a story, not working through research for a doctoral dissertation.

So, ask questions—

• Does anything about this character’s
body
have a bearing on his feeling, his thinking, his behavior, within the story framework?

• How about his
environment?

• His
experience?

• His
ideas?

Keep at it, and believe me, you’ll get answers to solve your problems.

One word of warning, though: The degree to and manner in which you develop characters depends on the kind of story you’re writing and the audience for which you’re writing it.

While this is a point we’ll discuss in more detail in
Chapters 10
and
14
, it should do no harm to warn you here that an action
thriller ordinarily requires less depth and detail in regard to character than does a literary story.

But all this is extraneous to another issue which calls for immediate attention: how to create far-out story people when and if you need them.

We’ll explore the subject in “Wild Cards,” our next chapter.

A wild card, in poker, is one that may be played as any value the player wishes to assign it. Thus, a “wild” trey may be played as an ace, a jack, a seven, or anything else the player who holds it needs.

When you’re writing a story, you sometimes need a character like that—one who doesn’t fit the norm, the pattern of accepted values. A wild card, as it were. An individual who’s so far out and off the beaten track that he gives you a manipulative edge as needed.

Judging by the standards to which most of us adhere, virtually all such offbeat characters march to the storied different drummer. Specifically, we see key aspects of their behavior as
irrational
—warped, distorted, illogical, deviant. Which is to say, some such characters are, at the very least, eccentrics. Others, even farther out, are those colloquially dubbed psychos.

How do you create such a character?

The procedure is the same as for developing any other story person. You label him with a dominant impression . . . flesh him out with tags and traits . . . assign him an appropriate rationale as needed in terms of purpose, motive, and background.

There are, however, a few caveats to bear in mind . . . chugholes and pitfalls you should be aware of. They’re the topic of this chapter.

First of all, what about . . .

My dictionary says that an eccentric is someone who deviates from accepted usage or conduct.

“The true eccentric,” says Carl Sifakis in his
American Eccentrics
, “follows his own rules of behavior twenty-four hours a day—because he knows his code is the right one and everyone else is wrong; because he does not want to compete by conventional standards; or because eccentricity seems the only way to gain recognition as an individual. Even among the super-rich, there are those who turn to the outrageous in their desire not to be considered just another millionaire.”

It’s a definition that covers a lot of ground. It has to, if it’s to include Hetty Green, the miserly “Witch of Wall Street,” a millionairess who saved soap by washing only the bottom inches of her long black skirts . . . John Symmes, a retired infantry captain who spent years trying to persuade Congress that Earth was a hollow ball, which could be entered via a hole at the North Pole . . . James Eads, the “millionaire hobo” who nearly starved to death when he refused to spend inherited money because he hadn’t earned it . . . Ferdinand Demara, the “Great Imposter,” a high school dropout who passed himself off as a Canadian naval surgeon, a Trappist monk, a college teacher, and a prison guidance counselor . . . and Lillie Coit (for whom San Francisco’s Coit Tower is named), socialite beauty and the Knickerbocker Engine Company’s fire buff supreme.

Eccentrics and eccentricity are valuable to a writer because, being out of skew from the accepted pattern of behavior, by their difference and uniqueness, frequently they create reader interest beyond that generated by the ordinary run of characters.

Such deviations from the norm are, obviously, a matter of degree. They can range from your friend who’s bothered if he steps on a crack in the sidewalk, to the individual who wears a top hat and scarlet-lined opera cape every day, to the monomaniac who tries to strike up a conversation on the evils of water fluoridation with anyone he meets. Agatha Christie’s books are full of them, and so are those of Martha Grimes, Gary Jennings, and Stephen King.

And that’s not even to mention Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, or Stevenson.

What makes an eccentric? A variety of factors, of course. Ordinarily, it seems to me, he’s someone who, consciously or unconsciously, feels a tremendous need to maintain his individuality. To that end, he has selected some limited aspect of life and living in which he holds unbendingly to his private standards. His whim is
the Gibraltar to which he clings and on which he has erected his entire personality structure. In some respects, in all likelihood, he’s obsessive-compulsive, as in the case of our sidewalk crack-avoider. In others, he quite possibly is schizoid—a loner, shy and unsociable, who has focused on some narrow vein of interest well-nigh to the point of paranoia.