Publishing Emerging Writers, May 2012

What about your stew of characters. How do you create them? How do you project them on your imaginary screen? How do you make them memorable?

Creating Characters. Do you think of somebody you know and make them into a character in your novel? This gives you a clear image of the character and may need to vivid, consistent description. But be careful. You can be found out!

I found myself in a novel once and wish I could talk to the author about his portrayal. Sadly, that author passed away. Think about it. Would you want to incorporate a living person in your novel and later be confronted by them? Once you have written the book it’s not like you can freely go back and revise the characters. If you did, the story would be destroyed.

I believe it’s best to just create your own character stew. Similarities with real people will prove unavoidable, but you can honestly deny any invasion of privacy. And, when dealing with fiction, you can avoid another common problem with writers – writing an autobiography of their life and calling it fiction. If it’s nonfiction, say so.

Portraying Characters. You can describe characters overtly, and indeed many “checklists” for evaluating fiction demand this. For example, “Burt was 38 years-old with long arms and a sloping head and his eyes were filled with tiny red veins. He belched.” Now, the first sentence is purely descriptive. It would clearly satisfy a fiction writing evaluation checklist. But the second sentence really tells us about Burt because it tells us what he does. So the challenge is to portray your characters through their actions and thoughts, and to concentrate less (sometimes not at all) on their physical attributes.

Here’s one example, using a description of a setting to portray a character.

Burt hesitated as he approached the shed where he and his teen-aged friends had spent many hours. The river still roared in the background, perhaps more dignified and slow than it had seemed years ago, but still with the strongest current in Wisconsin. He fumbled in his pocket for the rusty Schlage key, finally locating it among the wad of McDonalds and Burger King receipts and a few ATM printouts. A crinkled handkerchief clung to the key as he pulled it out and blew away in the wind. Burt stopped to scoop it up, never moving his eyes from the dilapidated structure.

Next we move into Burt’s recollections of pranks and serious moments in the shed where he and his friends had spent many summer afternoons smoking cigarettes, admiring boats and the young girls inside, planning adventures and fun for the year.

In this way, Burt is born. Our writer has created him, and if Burt comes to harm or heartache, the writer is the first person to weep. Such craziness - to create a character, make him do something, and then grieve for them. But, as writers, this is what we do.

I have no objection to the physical description of characters. But I’m the first to confess that I skip that part when I write my first draft and I slave over the characters’ thoughts, actions, and dialog. Later, when I’m done, I go back and plug in the details. It’s almost like I have to see inside the character before I can assign an appropriate description.

In a way, a novel can be seen as a Character Stew set in time, place and action. It’s the writer’s job to keep that stew cooking throughout the book. And, when the story is done, each character is fully developed and ready for long-term memory.

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