Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (2 page)

When assigning a “caring” element to a character, you commit him to a stance which, implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously, he automatically will live by. Knowing this is Character’s dominant dynamic, you write with more confidence and more assurance. You’ll find few tools more valuable.

You fit this to your needs, of course; choose what Character is to find important in keeping with the story you plan.

Then, you figure out (“rationalize” is the dictionary term for it) why Character feels the way he does.

When the time at last comes to write the story, plunge him into a pre-planned situation that challenges the part of him that cares, threatens the thing he feels is important.

You focus and sharpen this to the point that Character just can’t stand it, and then chronicle the thrust-and-parry of the challenging element and Character’s reactions clear through to the story’s ending.

Does this apply on all levels? Test it yourself on whatever literary figure you choose, from Batman to Raskolnikov. And yes, it
is
flexible, adaptable.

Thus, life and the drive to survive being the force that it is, a madman with an axe will get a response from virtually any of us. At the other end of the scale, is dignity the issue? There are those to whom it’s so important that ridicule may well loom more threatening than death. Money? Slum children can respond to it in terms of peddling crack, just as the Ivan Boeskys and Robert Vescos react to the same stimulus with financial chicanery and market manipulation. A girl may feel that the disapproval of her boyfriend is a disaster worse than an unwanted pregnancy. Her mother, a fading beauty queen, may try to forget her mirror in a bottle.

Am I oversimplifying? Yes, of course. But we’ll explore the ramifications of such dynamics—in people and characters alike—in more detail in later chapters. For the moment, however, be content to know that only the character who cares about something, finds something important, is worth bothering with. Ever and always, caring is the core of character. Without it, you have nothing.

Work to make every man and woman in your story a separate and distinct individual—at least, an
imitation
of an individual. I’ve
frequently (for the sake of clarity) used relatively stereotyped people as examples in this book, but don’t let that make you think
all
characters should be this broadly drawn. Competing in the market, you can’t afford that kind of thing. Your characters
must
appear to be individuals if you’re to succeed.

What we’re concerned with here is how to build a character from scratch, not story construction and dynamics. So though there’s no such thing as a standard operating procedure or one right way where creating story people is concerned, it’s time we explored Chapter 2, “Searching Out Your Characters,” which gives a tentative mode of attack on the problem of creation that many writers have found useful.

Building a character begins with deciding which character to build.

Or, to put it on the practical level, if you need a plumber, you hire a plumber. Maybe you check the classifieds or call the union or look in the yellow pages.

Unfortunately or otherwise, there are no yellow pages in the writing business. Which is the trouble with analogies. They so seldom fit exactly.

So, in practice, how do you create characters?

You start from a foundation of your own fantasies and feelings. Because the character you can’t fantasize and feel with will fail.

Back to our plumber analogy. When at last he shows up on your doorstep, you look him over and decide whether you like his looks—whether he impresses you favorably or not. And you probably don’t go with the filthy one or the one with booze on his breath or the one that flicks cigar ash all over your prized oriental rug.

In other words, you hunt till you find one whose looks you like . . . one who fits your private standards.

You do just that. You find them. And no, I’m not joking.

Perhaps another analogy will make the point clearer—one that will ring bells of memory with virtually all of us, a practically universal experience, at least for males.

Picture yourself, if you will, as male, aged sixteen or eighteen or twenty, and as lonely for female companionship as only a sixteen- or eighteen- or twenty-year-old man can be.

Now, here comes a girl. Maybe you know her; maybe you
don’t. Maybe she’s pretty; maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s black, maybe she’s white, maybe she’s Oriental or Hispanic or Amerind or Hottentot. It doesn’t matter. Because win, lose, or draw, she simply doesn’t turn you on. You couldn’t care less if she had a full beard or three heads.

Exit Girl No. 1. Enter Girl No. 2. A blonde, this time, complete with Dolly Parton cleavage, swivel hips, and a sidewise glance that makes words strictly superfluous.

The eyes of the boy next to you go wide. “Hey, will you look at that!”

“
You
look,” you shrug. Because Little Miss Swivel-Hips, like Girl No. 1, leaves you cold.

A third girl passes. A fourth. A fifth. And still your pulse stays steady; your temperature just won’t soar.

Only then, along about Girl
n
, something happens. Why, you don’t know. Maybe you never will. But all at once there’s a quickening of the blood, a feeling you haven’t felt before. And it doesn’t matter that Buddy makes moaning sounds and mutters, “What a dog!” or calls attention to the pustulant acne or the horn-rimmed glasses or the Hindu caste mark or the wrestling champ escort. Because this time, all that matters is that, somehow, a psychobiological spark has been struck and you know that win, lose, or draw, you want to know Girl
n
better.

In a word, she plugs into your unconscious fantasies, the images and empathies that swirl through the nether reaches of your mind.

The same principle applies where fictional characters, story people, are concerned. One after another, you sort through their assorted possibilities hunting for one who turns you on—which is to say, fits your private quirks and standards—where the particular role you’re casting is concerned.

This business of finding characters who turn you on is important on a variety of levels. Not the least of these, often overlooked, is the fact that when you begin any fiction project, you’re committing yourself to living with the story people involved for what may develop into a considerable period of time. The classic example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Doyle eventually became so weary of writing about Holmes that he killed him off in the famous scene at the Reichenbach Falls—and then, to placate outraged readers, was forced to bring him back to life again for endless further stories.

With that in mind, you can see how vital it is not to trap yourself into working with a character you find drab or boring or tiresome. Even a short story can drag on interminably if your protagonist—or any other major player, for that matter—puts you to sleep. So keep on with your searching and shuffling until you spotlight someone who both fits your story’s requirements and excites you.

You may be surprised at that person. Once, for me, it was a dragon-riding warrior with blue skin. On another occasion a Cretan princess, Ariadne, caught my private spotlight. Same for a crippled World War II veteran named Tomczik; and an Indonesian Dutch girl, Anita Van Pelt of Djaimaling; and Mr. Devereaux, a footloose gambler in the pioneer West. For mystery writer Lawrence Block there was a man who couldn’t sleep; for Tony Hillerman, his Navajo neighbors in New Mexico. John D. MacDonald came up with a “knight in slightly tarnished armor” named Travis McGee who lived aboard a Florida houseboat called the
Busted Flush
. Victor Hugo found fascination in a hunchback, Quasimodo. Shakespeare won immortality with such diverse figures as Hamlet, Juliet, Falstaff, and Lady Macbeth—she of the bloodstained hands.

Now the point of all this is that, actually, “finding” a character means personifying—that is, giving human form to—aspects of yourself that you like, or dislike, or wish you had. For at root we’re all writing about ourselves. Or, to put it even more pointedly, all your characters are you.

A conscious process? Seldom. Most of us don’t know ourselves that well. But we do, in the phrase, “know what I like.” When, for whatever reason, a flash of excitement strikes us as we grope for a character on which to hang our current project, we recognize it—which is to say, it stirs and rouses us to some degree or other, thus encouraging us to explore it further and, if that stimulates us even more, to develop it in greater depth. Tarzan was born this way, I have a feeling. So were Moll Flanders, and Oliver Twist, and D’Artagnan, and James Bond, and Scarlett O’Hara, and Dr. Fu Manchu. Such story people come into being only if they fascinate Writer as well as Reader.

Can you improve your performance in this area—increase your flash-of-excitement ratio?

Indeed you can. The trick is to explore your own reactions until
you find what stimulates them most. Music often proves effective—I created any number of science fiction people to the dark strains of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.

The company of particular people can help, too. So can the right—for you—reading matter. I have a horror-
aficionado
friend who finds endless inspiration in an old Charles Addams book,
Dear Dead Days
. A woman romance specialist of my acquaintance wouldn’t miss the lonely hearts columns for the world. The photos in the movie magazines and the
Academy Players Directory
are cherished by many a writer, and there are clinical psychologists who swear by the much-debated Szondi Test, with its pictures of European psychiatric patients, as a means of probing their clients’ psyches.

Whatever your approach, the important thing is to let yourself go, via free association and sans self-censorship. For as the late Howard Rodman, a superior TV writer, once commented, “A writer must not be judgmental. Look at people and love them, good and bad, interesting and dull. Cherish them, for they are the stuff of which your writing will be made.”

How do you adapt the characters you zero in on to your story?

Alfred Hitchcock put it well: “First you decide what the characters are going to do, and then you provide them with enough characteristics to make it seem plausible that they should do it.”

In a word, you
rationalize
their presence and behavior.

Regrettably—and, too often, disastrously—many beginning writers fail to realize this. Shaped by the pseudo-profundities of academics, analysts, and critics, they have been conditioned to believe that characters are, in effect, real people, who exist independently of the situation.

Of course, story people
aren’t
real. They exist only in the writer’s head. (Which isn’t to say that they may not become so real to him, in the course of his imaginings, that he tends to think of them as actual living, breathing human beings.)

This being the case, the writer’s job where characters are concerned is to create (spell that “dream up”) story people whom he can comfortably make behave in an interesting manner and do interesting things in situations, circumstances, or contexts readers find interesting—yet at the same time keep the story credible and the story people believable.

Part of this is pretty much mechanical, of course. We’ll take it
up in detail later. But the heart of character building is a good deal more involved and subtle. It centers on the writer’s ability to figure out
why
the character thinks and does the things he does.

To attach a previously mentioned word to this ability, the writer
rationalizes
the character’s behavior.

What is rationalization?

Rationalize:
to provide plausible (but not necessarily true) reasons for conduct. To attribute (one’s actions) to rational and creditable motives without analysis of the true and especially unconscious motives
.

You’ll probably understand this better if you know how I came to my present way of thinking.

My professional involvement with writing began as a young reporter, covering everything from police to garden parties, city hall to civic clubs.

After a few years, that palled. I began to write fiction, and characters came to be an issue. Where did they come from? What shaped their fantasies, their foibles, their thinking? How did you motivate them believably? And so on.

Well, finding them was no problem. My years as a reporter had taken care of that . . .

Item:
The aging, small-time storekeeper whose illegitimate son was a world-famous surgeon.

Item:
The allegedly happy, married man in his early thirties whom the police knew as a peeping Tom.

Item:
The dowdy housewife who had been a gangster’s moll.

. . . not to mention the fashionable kleptomaniac, the drunken banker, the transvestite executive, and all the rest.

I knew better than to use any of these estimable ladies and gentlemen
in toto,
you understand. That way lies disaster, in terms of legal action for everything from libel to invasion of privacy to advanced mopery.

Besides, real people will never meet all your story needs. You must adapt them to fit the picture you’re trying to create. But it’s no chore to combine them in bits and pieces—the hair from one, another’s waistline, an eye-cast or lisp or pride or prejudice or sniffle from a third.

The problem is, what made these real people tick? Certainly
you couldn’t tell by looking, because each and every one of them wore a mask. Often, it was questionable if even they themselves knew. And when I asked three respected psychotherapists what motivated these people, I got three different answers.

At that point, a fascinating fact dawned on me: As regards what made my people tick,
no one knew
. No one could say for even halfway sure what went on behind those masks—not even the people wearing the masks. When Joe attributed his sticky fingers to childhood poverty, or Hannah said her promiscuity dated back to seduction by an uncle at age eight, or Dr. Carlson argued that Sam exposed himself to little girls because of deep-seated feelings of insecurity where adult women were concerned, each was simply rationalizing—making up a plausible, semi-logical, but not necessarily true explanation for aberrant behavior.