Table Of ContentCHAPTER ONE:
Types of Characters—Assembling Your Cast
CHAPTER TWO:
Introducing Characters—First Impressions Count
CHAPTER THREE:
The Genuine Self—What Is She Really Like?
CHAPTER FOUR:
The Motivationally Complicated Character—But I'm a Mess Inside!
CHAPTER FIVE:
WShhoawt inI gK nCohwan gNeo win Your Characters—If I Knew Then
CHAPTER SIX:
Protagonists in Genre Fiction—From Lovers to Starship Captains
CHAPTER SEVEN:
The Humorous Character—All Bets Are Off
CHAPTER EIGHT:
Talking About Emotion—Dialogue and Thoughts
CHAPTER NINE:
Emotion Suggested—Using Metaphor, Symbol, and
Sensory Details to Convey Feeling
CHAPTER TEN:
Special Cases of Emotion—Loving, Fighting, and Dying
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Frustration—The Most Useful Emotion in Fiction
CHAPTER TWELVE:
Point of View—Whose Emotions Are We Sharing?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
First Person—I Saw It With My Own Eyes
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
Third Person—See Dick Run
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
Omniscient Point of View—Playing God
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
Putting It All Together—The Fourth Persona
APPENDIX:
Checklist—Critical Points
Every drama—and fiction is always a kind of drama—requires a cast. The
cast may be so huge, as in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, that the author or
editor provides a list of characters to keep everybody straight. Or it may be
an intimate cast of two. (In "To Build a Fire," Jack London managed with
one person and a dog.) Whatever the size of your cast, you have to assemble
it from somewhere.
Where do you get these people? And how do you know they'll make good
characters?
You have four sources: yourself, real people you know, real people you
hear about, and pure imagination.
In one sense, every character you create will be yourself. You've never mur-
dered, but your murderer's rage will be drawn from memories of your own
most extreme anger. Your love scenes will use your own past kisses, caresses,
and sweet moments. That scene in which your octogenarian feels humiliated
will draw on your experience of humiliation in the eighth grade, even though
the circumstances are totally different and you're not even consciously think-
ing about your middle-school years. Our characters' emotions draw on our
own emotions. Until telepathy is common, our own emotions are the only
ones we've intimately experienced. They're our default setting.
Sometimes, however, you will want to use your life more directly in your
fiction, dramatizing actual incidents. This has both strengths and pitfalls.
The strength is that you were there. You know the concrete details and
can get them right: the way the light slants through a church window at noon,
the smell of cooking fat in a diner, the dialogue of cops in the precinct house.
These things are invaluable in creating believable fiction.
Even more important, you were there emotionally. You felt whatever
exaltation, fear, panic, tenderness, or despair the situation evoked. A well-
done biographical incident can therefore have tremendous fictional power.
That's why so many successful writers have drawn directly on their own lives
for their work.
Charles Dickens used his desperate stint as a child laborer in Victorian
England to write David Copperfield. John Galsworthy, like his character Jolyon
Forsyte of The Forsyte Saga, had an affair with and later married the wife of
his abusive cousin. Nora Ephron, best-selling author of Heartburn, was frank
about basing her story of adultery and desertion on her own desertion by
husband Carl Bernstein (fiction as public revenge).
Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem
with this—and it is a very large problem—is that almost no one can view
himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you're too close to your own
complicated makeup. This makes it very difficult to use that third mind-set
(see the introduction) and become the reader, who doesn't know that the
character's nastiness in the first scene is actually balanced by your admirable
sense of fair play. You know it, and you'll bring it out later in the story . . .
but by that time it may be too late. The reader only knows what's on the
page, not what's in your mind and heart.
It can thus be easier and more effective to use the situation or incident
from your life but make it happen to a character who is not you. In fact,
that's what the authors cited above have largely done. Rachel Samstat, Nora
Ephron's heroine, is sassier and funnier when left by her husband than any
real person would be. You can still, of course, incorporate aspects of yourself:
your love of Beethoven, your quick temper, your soccer injuries. But by using
your own experience with a different protagonist, you can take advantage of
your insider knowledge of the situation, and yet gain an objectivity and con-
trol that the original intense situation, by definition, did not have.
So where do you get this other protagonist?
Many, many famous characters are based, in part, on real people. The key
words here are "in part."
Question:
If I base a fictional character on the life of my crazy sister, can she sue me?
Answer:
In the United States, anyone can file a lawsuit against anyone else. Whether
your sister could win a lawsuit against you for using her in your fiction is
another story. Some things to consider:
• Is your sister a public figure? If so, she has little protection. Courts have
ruled that public figures may be satirized without penalty. In his novel
Libra, for instance, Don DeLillo made mincemeat of Richard M. Nixon.
• Is your sister extremely famous? If so, courts may consider that she
has "rights of publicity" to her own life, meaning that she, not you,
owns the right to gain the publicity from publishing her story. This has
been a court ruling mainly in California.
• Have you invaded your sister's privacy? If all you've done is create a
character who, like your sister, has three shoplifting convictions and
four marriages, these things are matters of public record. She has no
case based on invasion of privacy.
• Is what you wrote true? If so, you are safe from defamation and libel.
Both must contain untrue allegations to be proved.
• And, finally—how much do you care if your sister never speaks to you
again?
Like characters based on yourself, fictional creations based on others
seem to be most effective when they're cannibalized. Using people straight
can, as in the case of using yourself, limit both imagination and objectivity.
So instead of using your Uncle Jerome exactly as he is, consider combining
his salient traits with those of other acquaintances or with purely made-up
qualities. This has several advantages.
First, you can craft exactly the character you need for your plot. Sup-
pose, for instance, that your actual Uncle Jerome is quick-tempered and
cuttingly witty when angered and remorseful later about the terrible (but
very funny) things he said while mad. But your character would work better
if he were a stranger to remorse, staying angry in a cool, unrepentant way.
Combine Uncle Jerome with your friend Don, who can hold a grudge until
the heat death of the universe. Combining characters gives you greater
flexibility.
This is how Virginia Woolf created Clarissa Dalloway (Mrs. Dalloway).
Her primary source, according to Woolf s biographer Quentin Bell, was fam-
ily friend Kitty Maxse. But Woolf also wrote in her diary that she drew on
Lady Ottoline Morrell for Clarissa: "I want to bring in the despicableness of
people like Ott." Similarly, Emma Bovary (Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bo-
vary) and spymaster George Smiley (John le Carre's series) are composites of
people their creators knew.
A second, lesser advantage of cannibalizing traits from people, instead of
just dumping your friends on the page in their entirety, is that your family
and friends are less likely to recognize themselves and become upset with
you. It also avoids potential lawsuits.
In addition to composites of people you know, you can also base characters
on people you don't know personally but have only heard or read about. This
can work very well because you're not bound by many facts. You're actually
making up the character, with the real person providing no more than a
stimulus for inspiration.
Say, for example, that you read about a woman whose will leaves six
million dollars to a veterinary hospital she visited only once, forty years earlier,
with her dying cat. You never met this woman. All you have is the newspaper
story and a blurry picture. But something about the situation has caught your
attention. What kind of person would do that? You begin to imagine this
woman: her personality and history, what that cat must have meant to her,
why there were no other people important enough to her to leave them any
inheritance.
Before long, you've created a full, interesting, and poignant character,
someone you might want to write about. Yes, you started with secondhand
information—but now the character is fully yours.
Sometimes the original spark can be very small indeed. I once based a
character on a photo of a new bride in the newspaper. I have no idea what
the actual woman was like, but her polished, blonde radiance somehow struck
my imagination, suggesting a pampered joyfulness that grew in my mind into
a complete personality.
As Charlotte Bronte famously remarked, reality should "suggest" rather
than "dictate" characters.
Creating purely invented characters is actually very similar to basing charac-
ters on strangers. With strangers, a small glimpse into another life sparks the
writer's imagination. Made-up characters, too, usually begin with the spark
of an idea popping into the writer's mind. The writer then fans the spark
into a full-blown person.
William Faulkner, for example, had a sudden mental image of a little girl
with muddy drawers up in a tree. That image became Caddy in The Sound
and the Fury, which Faulkner considered his best novel.
No matter what your initial source—reality or imagination—characters
usually present themselves encased in at least the rudiments of a fictional
situation. Caddy is up in a tree (why?). The deceased lady has left six million
dollars to an animal hospital. You have something here to work with. Your
next task is to look hard at this character/situation in order to decide if the
character is strong enough to sustain a story. In part, of course, that depends
on how well you write about her and whether you want to write about this
person. Some guidelines exist for making that decision.
Not all your characters will matter equally to the story. One is the star—your
protagonist. (There may be more in a long novel.) This is the person whom
the story is mostly about: Anna Karenina in her eponymous novel, Stephanie
Plum in Janet Evanovich's mysteries, Harry Potter in J.K. Rowling's fantasies.
Your star gets the most attention from both the reader and writer, the most
word count expended on him or her, and the climactic scene.
Other characters are necessary to the story and interesting in their own
right; these are the featured players of your cast. The rest have bit parts. They
aren't well developed and are, essentially, slightly animated furniture in your
setting. Who should be which?
Before we answer that, I want to make clear that there are no simple
rules for choosing who should become your star and who should remain
featured players. Choosing a given character as protagonist will result in one
novel; choosing someone else will result in a different novel, which may or
may not be better than the first. Our goal here is merely to analyze each
important member of your cast in order to identify the character you can
become excited about writing.
One aspect of this selection process is to look at each character to decide
if she would be better as a changer or a stayer. The distinction is critical to
both characterization and plot.
Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the
events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse
people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they
were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story's
emotional arc.
Let's look at an example. In John Grisham's The Street Lawyer, protago-
nist Michael Brock starts out as an ambitious, married lawyer, piling up hours
and salary raises at a prestigious Washington law firm. By the end of the
novel, Brock is separated from his wife, relatively poor, and working happily
as a legal advocate for the homeless. These external changes have come about
because Brock has changed internally. His world has been widened and his
compassion deepened as a result of some very dramatic events: being taken
hostage by a desperate homeless man, a shoot-out, and the death of a child.
Michael Brock, as protagonist, is a changer. His emotional arc is a large one.
Other equally successful protagonists are stayers. This tends to be espe-
cially true in series books. Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum is a brash, foul-
mouthed, fashion-impaired, hilarious bounty hunter in her first book, One
for the Money. Nine books later, she hasn't changed. Nor do her readers want
her to. Stephanie is too much fun just as she is.
Other characters are stayers because the point of the book is that they
come to grief because of their blindness. These books present the idea that
people cannot change but instead are locked into destructive patterns, either
personal or societal. In such fiction, the protagonists defiantly, destructively
go on being as they start out. An example is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby. Jay Gatsby cannot become other than he is: idealistic, unrealistic, and
enthralled by love. His obstinacy kills him. Likewise, Daisy and Tom Bu-
chanan are stayers who will, we are explicitly told, go on being "careless,"
messing up other people's lives and then retreating into the safety of their
vast fortune. Only the narrator, Nick Carraway, is a changer—which is one
reason he's the narrator. Fitzgerald wanted someone in his novel to change
because he had some points he wanted to make about Jazz Age society, and
a changer who became disgusted with the entire social scene was the best way
to make them.
Does that mean that changers are always better than stayers as protago-
nists? No. It all depends on the particular story you want to tell. Nick Carraway
is right for The Great Gatsby; Stephanie Plum is right for One for the Money.
Now, the big question: What does all this have to do with your protagonist?
It gives you flexibility to make choices before you begin writing. Playing
mentally with these choices can help you assemble the right characters for your
cast. There are a hundred ways to tell any story, and the more of them you
consider before you begin, the greater the odds of finding just the combination
that will most fire your imagination and lead to the best fiction you can write.
Start by asking a few preliminary questions. You already have some idea
of the situation you want to write about, since characters seldom appear in
a vacuum. That old woman isn't just any old woman—she's leaving six mil-
lion dollars to a veterinary hospital. That man isn't just any man—he's a
detective with the NYPD who has a murder to solve, a drinking problem,
and his dead sister's kid to raise. You've got a little information you can use
as a springboard for evaluating your character. So, to choose your stars, ask
yourself:
• Am I genuinely interested in this character? Do I find myself thinking
about him in odd moments, imagining his previous life, inventing bits
of dialogue? If not, you won't write him very well.
• Is this character or situation fresh and interesting in some new way?
We've seen a lot of NYPD cops with murders to solve and drinking
problems. Maybe the orphaned nephew will be enough of a new twist.
Do you care about the cop? The nephew? Is the murder significant in
some way?
• Can I maintain enough objectivity about this character, combined with
enough identification, to practice the triple mind-set—becoming au-
thor, character, and reader as I write?
• Do I want this character to be a stayer or a changer? If she's going to
be a changer, does it feel as if she has the capacity to change through
the emotional arc I plan for her?
