Authors: Sol Stein
I made the Browns just different enough to interest the reader, but it was important that they not seem “special.” Therefore, when calamity hits the Browns, readers from any walk of life can identify with their plight, which is critical for the story. Stephen King usually has quite ordinary-seeming characters get involved in extraordinary circumstances. In most instances, however, you’ll want to make your characters as distinctive as possible rather than “ordinary.”
The extraordinary quality of a character should usually be made evident almost immediately after he or she appears in the story, unless the
thrust of a story is to have the gradual unveiling of a character’s unusual habits or ambition.
Beware of characters who are so extreme as to seem like cartoon characters. Some characters in Charles Dickens’s novels seem wildly exaggerated. Such characters are difficult to make credible to readers of mainstream fiction today.
Most authors seek high ground between the character who seems “perfectly ordinary”—and therefore uninteresting—and the wildly exaggerated cartoonlike character. Let’s get a fix on the most fertile areas of characterization.
What makes a character extraordinary? Personality? Disposition? Temperament? Individuality? Eccentricity? How much overlap is there?
Let’s explore each of those terms in as much depth as we can. My students find that their work in characterization improves markedly after they’ve considered the full span of meaning of those terms.
First,
personality.
We know that people at a party will cluster around people with personality. Personality refers to the distinctive traits of an individual, a set of behaviors, attitudes, manners, and mannerisms that identify a person. Personality speaks of an individual’s makeup, nature, and combined traits, his essence. It means the specialness of a person, which in some may involve likability, power, charm, magnetism, and charisma. The constituent parts of personality are disposition, temperament, individuality, and eccentricity.
I’m not pushing these definitions as definitive. I’m trying to suggest that exploring an important term in depth can produce a stimulating variety of definitions that are valuable tools for thinking about a character.
The
disposition
of a person is her attitude toward the people and places of the world, her customary response, particularly her emotional response. Disposition can involve a person’s qualities, outlook, mood, frame of mind, inclination, bent, bias, tendency, and direction, her proclivity, predilection, penchant, and propensity. Today, disposition is sometimes thought of as a predisposition, a mind-set. As you can now see, there are inspiring convolutions of meaning for these words that together define what a writer is trying to achieve in characterization.
Temperament
is a person’s manner of behaving, thinking, and particularly reacting to people and circumstances, his characteristic way of confronting a new day or a new development. Temperament can also be seen as a person’s mettle, spirit, leaning, or inclination. Temperament often connotes a negative tendency toward anger or irritability, though the term “even temperament,” of course, means the opposite.
Individuality
is the aggregate of qualities that distinguish one individual from others. It connotes that person’s distinctiveness, difference, and, most important, her originality and uniqueness. A writer describes a character’s singularity with the particulars of concrete detail. These are the characteristics by which an individual is recognized by others. Her differentness is her identity. It can be said that the individuality of a person marks her off, singles her out, sets her apart, and ultimately defines her.
I’ve left for last a definition that speaks most to the point of giving your characters special and unusual characteristics.
Eccentricity
is an offbeat manner of behavior, dress, or speech that is peculiar to a person and greatly dissimilar to the same characteristics of most other people. We think of the eccentric person as odd, a card, perhaps somewhat kinky, a queer fish, a quirky individual different from the other people we know. When we speak of an eccentric person, don’t we refer to him or her as a “character”?
The idiosyncrasies of a person are, of course, as seen by others rather than that person, who often believes his or her idiosyncrasies to be “perfectly normal.”
Eccentricity is at the heart of strong characterization.
The most effective characters have profound roots in human behavior. Their richest feelings may be similar to those held by many others. However, as characters their eccentricities dominate the reader’s first vision of them.
If you were to examine the surviving novels of this century, you would find that a majority of the most memorable characters in fiction are to some degree eccentric. Eccentricity has frequently been at the heart of strong characterization for good reason. Ordinariness, as I’ve said, is what readers have enough of in life.
When a great number of young men take to wearing an earring, that is not eccentricity. When young women iron their hair as many did in the sixties, that is not eccentricity. They are conforming to a widespread group mode.
Eccentric behavior is sometimes said to be nutty behavior, implying strange behavior, which is perfectly suitable for fiction. But “nutty” can also mean crazy, which is not intended here for an important reason. There are two types seldom seen in fiction: people who are psychotic and habitual drunks. Readers find it difficult to identify with their behavior. There are exceptions, of course, as in horror stories. In Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho,
the leading character is crazy, though we don’t know it for certain until quite near the end. Alcoholics sometimes play
secondary roles in novels, and there have been several novels featuring alcoholic individuals or couples. But the most memorable alcoholic, who saw a giant rabbit called Harvey, involved a playful use of alcoholism that would probably not be attempted today with the recognition of the severity of the illness.
Dostoevsky’s opening
of
Notes from Underground
has a character explaining himself. He is so self-contradictory that when I read this opening aloud to students, they invariably laugh:
I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts. But actually, I don’t know a damn thing about my illness. I am not even sure what it is that hurts. I am not in treatment and never have been, although I respect both medicine and doctors. Besides, I am superstitious in the extreme; well, at least to the extent of respecting medicine. (I am sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, sir, I refuse to see a doctor simply out of spite. Now that is something that you probably will fail to understand.
Consider also Captain Ahab in Melville’s
Moby Dick,
certainly an eccentric. In Mark Twain’s celebrated novels, what captures our attention is not the ordinariness of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but their eccentricity. Think of the twentieth-century novels of Hemingway, Faulkner, Graham Greene, Kafka, Garcia Marquez, Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger. Or the short stories of John Cheever. Their most memorable work springs from eccentric characters.
Think of the most eccentric person you know. What makes him (or her) eccentric? What is the most eccentric thing they have ever done? What might they do that would seem even more eccentric? Then think of your character doing that very thing! Unlikely? Unreasonable? Surprising? All of the above? If such behavior would be out of character for your protagonist, then what variation of it would be in character?
If your character isn’t capable of any important eccentricity, you may have picked a character who will not be greatly interesting to readers. People notice the eccentricity of others. They talk about it with their friends. It becomes the subject of gossip and rumination. When people do only what they are expected to do, they don’t make us eager to spend a dozen hours in their company.
You may be wondering if I am suggesting too much complexity in characterization. I don’t expect you to use it all, but your explorations
will stimulate thoughts that add to the potential richness of the characterization. To the extent that the complexity reflects the intricacy of human nature, the characters will come alive to the reader and remain alive in the reader’s memory.
One reason characters in transient fiction don’t linger in the reader’s memory is the shallowness of the characterization. If Ian Fleming’s James Bond is remembered, it is as a kind of cartoon character. The reader doesn’t concern himself whether James Bond lives or dies except when he is in the middle of reading a James Bond story, and even then he doesn’t worry much because the cartoon character has to live another day—for another book!
Sherlock Holmes is a wonderful character. But we don’t think about him as we would about a member of our family or a close friend, living or dead. We think of him as a character in a book or film. In the best of mainstream fiction, and in literary fiction, the most complex characters seem to graduate to a permanent place in our memory, as good friends do.
The same is true of villains. Professor Moriarty doesn’t occupy our lives except when we are reading about him. But the reader carries the memory of Iago and Lady Macbeth for a lifetime.
Contrast is a useful technique for characterization. It sometimes has the extra virtue of surprise. I recall attending a convention once where I sat in back of a large room. Several rows ahead of me sat a woman dressed in an immaculately tailored gray suit, her hair kempt, her posture markedly straight, and she was picking her nose. What helped characterize her for me was the contrast between her appearance and her nose-picking.
Characterizing through unusual clothing or the manner of wearing clothing is another often neglected possibility. What it requires is to avoid the easy description that first comes to mind. “Jerry always wore his cap backwards” isn’t writerly. It can be improved:
His cap worn backwards was a message to the world: Jerry did things differently.
A layman might say, “Ellen looked terrific in her gown.” That’s top-of-the-head writing, which can be improved:
In her gown, Ellen looked like the stamen of a flower made of silk.
The first description doesn’t say anything particular about either Ellen or the gown. The second is visual and tells us how Ellen and the gown came across in a way that made them both look good.
One of my students took the easy way out in describing his character Martin. “Martin was an informal dresser who didn’t like other men getting all dressed up.” I persuaded him to rethink the sentence:
Martin referred to men who wore shirts and ties all day not as people but as “suits.”
An important technique that is used too seldom by novelists is to give a character life by introducing attributes that go against the character’s dominant behavior in the scene to come. Early in
The Best Revenge
there is a scene in which the hero, the Broadway producer Ben Riller, whose current play is in severe financial difficulty, goes to see Aldo Manucci, the moneylender Ben’s father used to go to many years earlier. In the scene, done from Ben’s point of view, Ben is in the position of pleading for money, and Aldo presumably has the power to save him. Therefore, in characterizing Aldo on his first appearance, I gave him a variety of weaknesses:
At last she wheeled him in, a shrunken human stuffed by a careless taxidermist. He was trying to hold his head up to see me, an eye clouded by cataract. He took an unblinking look, then let a rich smile lift the ends of his mouth as his voice, still bass though tremulous, said, “Ben-neh!” which made my name sound like the word “good” in Italian.
A common fault in fiction is the portrayal of characters as all good or all bad. Therefore, when introducing a character who will be in a position of power in a scene, suggest that character’s vulnerability before the character exercises power. Conversely, when introducing a character who will be hurt emotionally or physically in the scene to come, show the character’s strength at the outset.
In a short story there is usually time for only one event or episode. A character comes to life, the event takes place, the story’s over. There is room for a change of attitude toward something specific. Most often there isn’t room in a short story for a character to experience enough to cause a profound change.
In a novel it is common and desirable for the principal character to change by the end of the book. If the protagonist is a risk taker, he may step into adulthood by learning that some kinds of risks are foolhardy. If the protagonist accepts certain conditions as a part of life, he may have learned that some of those conditions can change. And the protagonist who at the start is a pessimist about human nature may discover that a single human being can make a difference for a large number of fellow humans.
These are just a few examples of how a character might change in the course of a novel. The writer has to ask, is the change consistent with the character as portrayed? A change can be surprising, but it should not seem out of sync with what we know about the character.
Somerset Maugham said, “You can never know enough about your characters.” When you have trouble improving a particular characterization, you need to know more. The remedy may lie in viewing your character from a different perspective.