Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (24 page)

ED:

The combination, Olly! Get the combination!

OLLY:

Which desk?

ED:

The big one, dummy, the boss’s.

Sound now takes over—the sound of Olly’s footsteps, then the scrape of a drawer opening, then the rattle of shuffling papers.

OLLY:

What’s it look like? This is just a bunch of papers.

Well, this is supposed to be a text on character, not radio writing. But you get the idea.

In developing your characters, beyond the things they themselves say, the things other characters say about them will help you
give them added dimension. To this end, however, you need to give your primary people something to do for their fellows to talk about. What a character does defines him, so you devise bits, incidents, and situations that give him an opportunity to behave in character on a level that your audience can hear.

Furthermore, “what he does” should have its origins in emotion, since that’s the bedrock on which your story rests.

ED:

You think I’m going to buy that? Booze is no excuse.

SOUND: Bottle smashing.

ED:

To hell with you!

SOUND: Door slamming.

Yes, radio can capture emotion. A sob, a snarl, a laugh, a whisper will translate emotion into sound.

What about the second roadblock we mentioned above: the problem of getting inside a character?

Individual thoughts, stream of consciousness or the like can be achieved by a variety of technical tricks. One of the most common tricks is the use of an echo or filter microphone, both of which distort sound to create special effects in radio drama.

ED:

Get back here, Olly!

(ECHO MIKE) My god, how did I ever get hooked up with this dodo? But I’ve got to get into that safe!

Similarly, a narrator may be used to reveal information not normally put in actual dialogue. It also saves time.

NARRATOR:

Lord knows Ed didn’t want to crack that safe, but it was Julie’s neck for sure if he didn’t. Only he couldn’t let Oily know that. Oily had to think he was just after the dough.

The point I hope I’m making here is that radio has its limitations
where character presentation is concerned. But given a bit of imagination and persistence, you probably can work out a satisfactory handling.

What about characterization in the theatre?

A stage play gives you both sight and sound to work with where your people are concerned. But this doesn’t free you quite as much as you might imagine.

To begin with, you have to use dialogue to provide information on anything that happens offstage. And it’s every bit as hard—maybe more so—to get inside the head of a character in a stage play as it is to invade the thoughts and feelings of one designed for radio. Narrators, Greek choruses, and asides to the audience are out of style and blackouts in the “Waiting for Lefty” mode tend to seem artificial—as they are. So most often you’re left with the task of revealing everything in action and dialogue (primarily dialogue), or else devising tricks to surmount the limitations.

In addition, you face the problem that presentation will be “broad”—that is, action must be exaggerated enough to reach a relatively distant audience.

Also, the proscenium arch holds the scene of action to a relatively small area and limits the action itself. And arena staging has its own problems.

Nor are actors and directors always an unadulterated joy to work with. Both tend to change your lines to suit their own ideas, even though the Dramatists Guild says you call the shots. In consequence, you have no choice but to attempt to design a so-called “actor-proof” play—one that will bring down the house no matter how clumsily presented.

Yes, it can be done, but it isn’t easy. The answer, insofar as there is one, is to create characters the audience can believe in and cheer for, caught up in a situation that freezes said audience in its seats.

In other words, create men and women who care desperately about something that’s threatened and will fight to get or keep it. In comedy as well as drama? Yes, and maybe even more so.

This book gives the fundamentals of how to create such people. To adapt them to the stage is a matter of understanding the theatre as well as writing, however. To that end, immerse yourself in the
atre as fan, actor, stagehand—watching plays, reading plays, writing plays without number until one hits.

Where characterization for film and television is concerned, the big plus is that it isn’t limited by the proscenium arch, as is the stage. There is no “offstage,” since the camera can jump anywhere, whether it’s next door or to Kenya or on the moon.

In addition, clothes and sets help to characterize your people.

Film also has the tremendous advantage of the closeup. That is, the camera can fill the screen with any fragment of action or expression desired, whether it be a postage stamp upside down on a letter, a shot of eyes going wide with panic, or a breath sucked in in a manner that leaves no doubt of the character’s passion. Attention can be focused on a watchface or a ring or a pistol in a hip pocket without need of action or dialogue. There is the problem of revealing thoughts or bringing the past into the present, but flashbacks and other similar devices can take at least acceptable care of that.

Remember John Wayne’s insightful comment that in film, actors react rather than act. And study of a few movies or TV episodes will show you that by the very nature of the medium actors perform actions more than they seem to think. This performance is a reaction resulting from a thought, and it interests audiences more than does the thought itself.

Indeed, the worst aspect of film/TV may be that its great strength lies in its very capacity for showing action. In consequence, it tends to concentrate on fights, cataclysms, and car chases. The quiet and the thoughtful too often are ignored or relegated to talking heads.

For the writer, this means that he ordinarily has little future in the field unless he turns out strongly plotted “action stuff.” If that’s to his taste, he may have a career. If it isn’t, perhaps he’s better off with print.

Be that as it may, a writer still wants to write, which makes characters his business.

Sometimes those characters may be in the past or future, or aspects of present society with which the writer is unfamiliar.

That poses problems, but they can be solved. So, let’s take a look at them in the next chapter, “The Character Out of Time.”

This chapter concerns characters who live in worlds separate from our own, milieus that each have their own peculiarities and uniquenesses.

As mentioned briefly in
Chapter 14
, those separate worlds, those milieus, shape the characters who live in them. If you don’t have a grasp of the world you focus on, it means that you may—probably will—fail to understand the characters also, for often they play by rules different than those we ordinarily assume.

Your readers, in turn, must know and understand the world in which any given story takes place in order for that story to be effective. You the writer are the person who, with the images and insights you paint with words, helps them to attain that understanding. Failure to make the story world and its special rules clear to readers automatically limits you to the shoot-’em-up level of fiction.

Even an unfamiliar geography may change the rules, the circumstances. The adventure set in Timor or Patagonia calls for knowledge of those places. Too many service veterans and travelers have seen the landscape and the culture for you to get away with faking.

I term the people who populate special story worlds characters out of time. They fall into three categories: those from the past (that is, history); those from the future, as in science fiction; and those who fall into what I call the “not-you” contemporary, the groups whose lifestyles are outside your ken, even though you may see and work with them every day.

While the members of each of these groups certainly are as
human as any other story people, dealing with them frequently involves special problems, for to make past, future, or not-you contemporary characters effective, you must fit their attitudes and responses to their milieus, the world or society in which they live.

To create a solid character from the past, you first need to know the particular world through which Character moves, and the pluses and minuses that go with it.

To that end, you must find out what’s
different
about it, beyond the beards, the armament, the funny-looking clothes. It’s not necessarily necessary that you be aware of who was king or what wars were fought or won or lost. Buy you
must
have an awareness of Character’s goals, attitudes, and feelings and how they fit into the patterns, beliefs, and thinking of the society in which he’s going to play his role.

Thus, if your story is set in a society that thinks of women only as property, your approach and your handling of your heroine—and your hero too—will be different than it would be if the society were one that believes in romantic love. If your hero’s occupation is limited by guilds or class restrictions, his skills, status, and income won’t be the same as if his world were one in which he has the vocational freedom of the America’s nineteenth-century frontier. If his culture holds him down because he’s not of noble birth, he can’t function in the same way as if he were a pirate on the Spanish Main.

Similarly, attitudes in France will be different than those in Japan. Behavior will follow one pattern in Russia in the 1700s, another today. And so on.

The important thing to remember in any case is that while facts are ever so important, the feelings they engender are what make your story go. Your goal is to figure out how Character thinks, as a result of his situation. How does he see things? What are his feelings and ideas about the prevailing state of affairs? And how does he behave in view of said ideas, as contrasted with the action a man or woman of today might take?

Take a simple and obvious case in point, a xenophobic society where inordinate fear of or dislike for foreigners or strangers is the rule. We saw this in our own country, when each wave of
immigration brought a new crop of prejudices and hostilities. The Irish, for example, in their day were the victims of discrimination on every level. The Jews, the Italians, the East Europeans, each suffered in their turn. Today we still see more than vestiges of leftover antagonism focused on Blacks and Hispanics. Further, all through history xenophobia has played a major role in determining who’s permitted to marry whom, what jobs are available to what groups, and the pecking order that determines who’s to be at the top or bottom of the communal totem pole.

That this affects fiction goes without saying. From Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
to Sholem Asch’s
East River
to John Jake’s
North and South
to Janet Dailey’s
Calder
books, you’re dealing with cultural patterns with which many readers are unfamiliar. To reach them, you’re going to have to present these patterns, and the emotions and attitudes involved, in terms that “sell” them to your audience.

Even more disruptive to our conceptions is the cultural situation that condemns the individual who rises above the group, as in the case of Latin attitudes in some areas even today. There, adding a room to your home may arouse such antagonism that your neighbors will come in the night to burn it up or tear it down. Among some American Indian tribes, an honored person gives lavish gifts to guests at a celebration as a means of equalizing wealth.

Do you need to drag cultural patterns in by the heels? Not at all. What’s important is how your characters feel about them, how they react to them, and the kinships or conflicts that spring from them.

Indeed, you may need no more than a few lines that indicate a character’s awareness of our attitude on a matter. But those few lines can make a difference, insofar as they add to your story’s and your character’s dimension.

Is your story set in Victorian England? If the picture in your mind’s eye is limited to the popular image of the period as one of stiff-necked propriety, you open your range of character portrayal, potential conflicts, and story complications vastly when you broaden your vision to view a panorama that includes music halls, the secret vices of the rich, the thriving underworld, and its beggars and wanderers, cracksmen and footpads, whores and wastrels. Charles Dickens worked wonders with such.

But remember: Ever and always, you must fit your characters’
thinking and feelings into the panorama, while at the same time you create understanding of and empathy with it in your readers.

How do you uncover the information you need? You look it up. You dig it out.

Don’t let this scare you off. A book or two on sociology, cultural anthropology, and social history will give you a good start on the things you need to know. These will lead you to others that fit your special needs. In the course of your poking, you’ll also pick up data on everything from cabbages to kings. Take advantage of it to keep an eye out for details that provide you with sensory perceptions. The drafts that whip flames about in a castle fireplace and blow out candles are a good example. Same for the feel of a horsehair couch, the unfamiliar smoothness of silk to a traveler in the Orient, the smells of spices or woodsmoke, the distortion of balance that comes with riding on a donkey or camel, the torment of flea bites, the taste of haggis or squid or buffalo tongue. One and all, they give you bits to help bring your characters to life and to reveal traits that define them—we still remember the princess so sensitive that she couldn’t sleep because there was a pea under the mattress.

But such fragments are only a bonus. The feelings and attitudes that spring from environment are your primary target.