So characterization is important in fiction, and especially so in the novel. The argument is hardly a controversial one. With that much established, how does one go about creating characters with whom the reader can identify, characters he’ll want to spend time with, characters whose fate will be a matter of concern to him?
A first principle of characterization may seem fairly obvious, but I think it’s worth stating. Characters are most effective when they are so drawn that the author can identify with them, sympathize with them, care about them, and enjoy their company.
At the risk of sounding like an armchair psychoanalyst, I would suggest that all characters are to a greater or lesser extent a projection of the author’s own personality. I know this is true in my own writing. While all my characters are not like me by any means, they are each and every one the people I would be were I clothed in their particular skins. In other words, when I create a character I work very much in the manner of an actor playing a role. I play that character’s part, improvising his dialogue on the page, slipping into his role as I go along.
This is most obviously the case with viewpoint characters; indeed, it’s commonplace for readers to make the mistake of too closely identifying an author with the attitudes and opinions of his novel’s narrator. But I know that in my own writing, this identification is true too for the subordinate characters, the villains, the bit players, for everyone who puts in an appearance. I do most of the work of characterization from the inside out, playing all the parts myself, writing all the dialogue, and walking all the characters through their paces. Naturally, in any given novel there will be some characters with whom I can more readily identify than others; it’s generally true those are the characters I do a better job with.
It’s important, I think, to play around with the idea of a character before plunging into a book. Occasionally in the past I’ve rushed to get a first chapter written without taking the time to figure out who the people were, letting the characters define themselves on the page. This was the case with Deadly Honeymoon; I was concerned with a plot and incident and dramatic effect, and so I began writing the book with no clear picture of the bridal couple who served as the book’s joint leads. I think the book might have been a good deal better had I known more about my characters before I began.
With Tanner, I had an abundance of time. After I’d first been taken with the notion of writing about a permanent insomniac, as I explained in the preceding chapter, I read something in an encyclopedia indicating that the British royal house of Stuart survived to the present time, with the current pretender some sort of Bavarian princeling. I thought this was splendid, and decided my insomniac could be plotting the restoration of the House of Stuart to the British throne.
That didn’t go anywhere, but it gave me this image of Tanner as a devotee of political lost causes. I thought of him from time to time and figured out other things about his character. I decided he’d have lots of time on his hands, not having to spend eight hours a day sleeping, and I thought he could put that time to use by compulsively learning one language after another. This sort of scholarly devotion seemed to fit the occupation I decided to give him—I had him write theses and examination papers to order for students with more money than industry.
Tanner’s gradual evolution over a period of a couple of years was such that, when Providence provided me with a plot, my character was all set to go. It was easy to plot the book to suit the particular character I had already created in my mind. And that character, quirky and highly individualistic, was one with whom I could identify profoundly, because for all our differences Tanner was very clearly a projection of the author. He was precisely the person I would have been had I been wearing his skin and living his life.
Another series character of mine illustrates the manner in which one can adapt and define a character to suit the requirement of author-identification.
Two things inspired the creation of Matt Scudder. First, it was an opportune time for me to do a detective series for Dell Books. Second, I’d just read On the Pad, Leonard Shecter’s excellent book with and about Bill Phillips, the New York City cop, admittedly corrupt, who’d collected evidence for an investigative commission and who had been tried and found guilty of the murder of a call girl and her pimp. What struck me was the notion of a corrupt cop, living with and on corruption, running his own hustles, and functioning all the while as a very effective policeman, breaking cases and putting criminals in jail.
As I began working on the character, I realized that the cop I had in mind might make an absorbing character, that I might very well enjoy reading someone else’s interpretation of such a character, but that he was not a character with whom I could identify sufficiently in order to write books about him myself. I’m not comfortable using viewpoint characters who function within a bureaucracy. For one reason or another, I’ve always felt more comfortable from the point of view of an outsider. I didn’t feel at all sanguine about my ability to render a crooked cop believable, let alone sympathetic.
So I let my imagination play around with Scudder, and then I sat down at a typewriter and began writing a long memo to myself about the man. I decided he was something of a burnt-out case; he had been a cop, had lived with wife and children in the suburbs, and had been both a proficient detective and a man to whom small-scale corruption was a way of life. Then, while thwarting a tavern holdup while off-duty, his ricocheting bullet killed a small child. This led poor Scudder to an agonizing reappraisal of his own life and enough existential angst to drown a litter of kittens. He left his wife and kids, moved into a monastic hotel room in Manhattan, quit the police force, picked up the habit of visiting churches and lighting candles, and became a serious drinker. Occasionally he would earn money as an unofficial and unlicensed private detective, using his contacts in the NYPD and investigating cases with the special sensibilities of a hip and hard-nosed cop.
I wrote three novels and two novelettes about Scudder and took enormous satisfaction in them: I like the books as well as anything I’ve written. They worked, and Scudder worked, because I was able to take a generally sound character idea and transform it into a character who came to life as a projection of the author. I identified strongly with Scudder. For all the apparent difference of our lives and our selves, he and I had any number of underlying aspects in common.
All characters in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
The earth is flat.
The above disclaimer notice, which appeared in the front of Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, brought me an invitation—eagerly accepted, I might add—to join the Flat Earth Society of Canada. My purpose in including the notice was not to proselytize against the globularist heresy, as we Flat Earthers are wont to call it, but to make a point about the disclaimer notices that appear so routinely in so many novels. The statements are generally palpable nonsense; resemblance to persons living or dead is often quite intentional.
Many of the characters with whom we people our fiction are drawn from life, and how could it be otherwise? One way or another, all our writing comes from experience, and it is our experience of our fellow human beings that enables us to create characters that look and act and sound like human beings.
The average reader often seems to think that writers go about snatching people off the streets and bundling them into books with the rapacious fervor of an old-fashioned white slaver. It is as if the characters were stolen from the real world and transplanted bodily into a novel.
Once in a while it very nearly amounts to that. In the genuine roman à clef, where the author presumes to render real events in the guise of fiction, the characters are portrayed as much like their real life prototypes as the author can manage. Thomas Wolfe wrote in this fashion, telling his own story in Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, casting himself as Eugene Gant and his own family as the Gant family. Even so, the Gants inevitably became fictional characters; Wolfe h
ad to invent, to devise. Even a character like Eliza Gant, modeled so faithfully upon his own mother, emerges finally as Wolfe’s interpretation of the woman, as the person he would have been had he been her.
Furthermore, the novelist’s imagination and the novelist’s sense of order work changes upon characters drawn from life. In his autobiographical work, Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood tells of various persons with whom he was acquainted over the years, some of whom appeared previously as characters in his largely autobiographical novels. Here’s how he discusses a friend and the way the man appeared in a novel:
In Down There on a Visit, Francis appears as a character called Ambrose and is described as follows:
“His figure was slim and erect and there was a boyishness in his quick movements. But his darkskinned face was quite shockingly lined, as if Life had mauled him with its claws. His hair fell picturesquely about his face in wavy black locks which were already streaked with grey. There was a gentle surprise in the expression of his dark brown eyes. He could become frantically nervous at an instant’s notice—I saw that; with his sensitive nostrils and fine-drawn cheekbones, he had the look of a horse which may bolt without warning. And yet there was a kind of inner contemplative response in the midst of him. It made him touchingly beautiful. He could have posed for the portrait of a saint.”
This is true to life, more or less, except for the last three sentences, which relate only to the fictitious part of Ambrose. Photographs of Francis at that time show that he was beautiful, certainly, but that he had the face of a self-indulgent aristocrat, not a contemplative ascetic. I can’t detect the inner response….
Isherwood goes on to recount several other aspects of Francis’s character which he did not incorporate in the fictional Ambrose. However unmistakably the one may have been modeled upon the other, the writing process has clearly made them different personalities.
Another popular sort of novel specializes in holding up a fun-house mirror to life. This is the generally tacky type of book in which the story line is largely a matter of sheer invention, occasionally incorporating bits of rumor and scandal, and with several of the characters so obviously based on prominent persons as to make the reader regard the book almost as an unauthorized biography. Someone remarked not long ago that Frank Sinatra, for one, has been pressed into service in so many novels over the years, whether as the lead or in a cameo role, that he really deserves to collect a royalty. And any number of novels have similarly “starred” Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Onassis, and more other celebrities than I would care to name or number.
More often, the characters we create are drawn in part from people we have known or observed, without our in any sense attempting to recreate the person on the page. I may borrow a bit of physical description, for example, or a mannerism, or an oddity of speech. I may take an incident in the life of someone I know and use it as an item of background data in the life of one of my characters. Little touches of this sort from my own life experience get threaded into my characters much as bits of ribbon and cloth are woven into a songbird’s nest—for color, to tighten things up, and because they caught my eye and seemed to belong there.
The first time I consciously transferred an aspect of a real person into a novel was when I wrote a book called After the First Death, a murder mystery set in the half-world of Times Square streetwalkers. I had at the time a nodding acquaintance with one such woman—and on one occasion she told me about a relationship she’d had of some duration with a married man from Scarsdale. She’d evidently been off drugs at the time, and seeing him exclusively, but after he’d cancelled a planned European trip with her and took his wife to the Caribbean instead, she ended the relationship and returned to prostitution and heroin addiction.
I don’t know that the character of Jackie in my novel had much in common with the woman who told me this story. Jackie was certainly a romanticized character; if she didn’t have a heart of gold, she had at the very least a soft spot in her heart of brass. Nor did I know the real-life hooker well enough to haul her off the streets and plunk her down on the printed page. But certainly the portrayal of Jackie owed a lot to my impression of her, and the story about her Scarsdale Galahad found its way almost word for word into print.
Some years later I wrote a pseudonymous novel in the manner of Peyton Place—sensational doings in a small town, that sort of thing. I very deliberately set the book in a particular town with which I was personally familiar, and several of the characters owed something to real people who lived in the town. For one character, I borrowed the physical description of a local actor, not intending to ape him too closely; only to find that the character I’d created had a will of his own and insisted upon speaking and behaving precisely as his real-life prototype spoke and behaved. I couldn’t write the character’s dialogue without hearing my friend’s voice booming in my ears. Now I suppose it’s possible to fight that sort of thing, but what writer in his right mind would presume to do so? The best possible thing had happened. A character had come to life. I might be inviting a lawsuit or a public thrashing by allowing him to play out his part, but I’d have been false to my art to do otherwise.
For me, the most exhilarating moment at the typewriter is when a character takes on a life of his own. It’s not an easy thing to describe. But it happens. One can scarcely avoid playing God when writing a novel, creating one’s own imaginary universe and arranging the destinies of the characters as one sees fit. When the magic happens, however, and a character speaks and breathes and sweats and sighs apparently of his own accord, one feels for a moment that one has created life.
It’s a heady experience, and so satisfying that you’d want it to happen all the time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t—at least not for me. Some of my characters live for me as I’ve described. Others walk around like empty suits, doing what’s required of them but never coming to life. They may work well enough for the reader—craft can disguise the fact that certain characters are just walking through their roles—but not for me.
This was the case with the war novel I talked about in the last chapter. The lead character in my first draft had a lot of interesting things about him. He was a former stunt pilot, the survivor of an unhappy love affair, an American of Irish and Jewish heritage who had enlisted in the RAF. Who could fail to make such a man interesting?
Who indeed? I could, and did. I carried the poor clown through five hundred pages of tedious manuscript and never had the feeling that he could stand up without my support. He remained a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, mouthing the lines required to fit a situation, going places and doing things, acting and reacting and doing it all like a brainwashed zombie.
Why didn’t he come to life? I don’t know. It wasn’t because there was anything fundamentally unsympathetic about the sort of person he was or the acts he performed. A few minor characters in the same novel did verge on animation, including a few whom I found distinctly unpleasant, but my lead remained dead and hollow at the core. Perhaps my inability to breathe life into him owed something to my own negative feelings about the novel itself. Perhaps I couldn’t get past seeing him as an instrument rather than a person.
In contrast, Bernie Rhodenbarr came to life on the very first page of the first draft of the first novel in which he made an appearance.
Previously, I’d written a couple of chapters of a Scudder novel in which a burglar’s suspected of murder because he knocks off an apartment with a dead body in it. That particular burglar was a sort of gentle oaf, and Scudder was going to come to his rescue, but the book never got off the ground.
Later I decided to revive that plot notion, eliminate the detective, change the tone entirely from downbeat to sprightly, and let the burglar himself solve the crime and go on to tell the tale.
I decided to open with the initial burglary, so I sat down and typed out the following:
A handful of minutes after nine I hoisted my Bloomingdale’s shopping bag and moved out of a doorway an
d into step with a tall blond fellow with a faintly equine cast to his face. He was carrying an attaché case that looked too thin to be of much use. Like a high-fashion model, you might say. His topcoat was one of those new plaid ones and his hair, a little longer than my own, had been cut a strand at a time.
“We meet again,” I said, which was an out-and-out lie. “Turned out to be a pretty fair day after all.”
He smiled, perfectly willing to believe that we were neighbors who exchanged a friendly word now and then. “Little brisk this evening,” he said.
I agreed that it was brisk. There wasn’t much he might have said that I wouldn’t have gladly agreed with. He looked respectable and he was walking east on Sixty-seventh Street and that was all I required of him. I didn’t want to befriend him or play handball with him or learn the name of his barber or coax him into swapping shortbread recipes. I just wanted him to help me get past a doorman.
By the time I had that much written, I knew who Bernie Rhodenbarr was. More important, he’d already begun to take on a life of his own. I didn’t have to stop and think how he would phrase something; it was simply a matter of shifting gears and speaking in his voice—or, if you will, of letting go and allowing him to recite his own lines spontaneously.
I don’t want to make this sound too mystical. Books don’t write themselves and characters don’t relieve their creators of the necessity of getting the right words on the page. But when a character does come to life in this fashion, when you find yourself knowing him from the inside out, you are then able to bring to the process of literary creation the assurance of the natural athlete.
How does one manage to make characters distinct and memorable? Is it a matter of little traits—pet expressions, a perpetually untied shoelace, a drooping eyelid? These are the little tricks of caricature, to be sure, and they are more or less effective depending on the skill with which they are managed.
Writing the Novel Page 8