by Linda Seger
Such touches, though broad, add both humor and dimensionality to characters who may take focus for only a few moments.
There is a danger, however, in creating these character shticks. We've all seen characters with a limp, or a facial tic, or a scar—details that were created in an attempt to add interest but do nothing to dimensionalize the character or help round out the story. Rather than adding new information, they become confusing and limiting and result in a caricature.
Character shticks work best when they pay off in the story, and when there is a compelling reason for them to exist. In A Fish Called Wanda, Otto reads Nietzsche to prove that he's not dumb. In Airplane, the jeopardy of the situation caused confusion and panic. The jive-talking woman and the punching nun functioned by solving the problem.
Occasionally, the color or background of the character creates a character type.
Character types are not meant to be stereotypes. They aren't defined by their role, gender, or ethnic background (as in the "dumb secretary" or the "cool black") but are defined by their action. They are meant to be so broadly drawn that they are instantly recognizable to audiences.
Throughout the history of fiction writing, writers have relied on types. In Roman plays, types included the braggadocio soldier, the pedantic scholar, the parasite, the foolish father, the shrew, the fop, the tricky slave, the scheming valet, the buffoon, the trickster, the rustic. In later plays, we have seen the scheming maid, the lovestruck lad, the fool. And melodrama took the type as far as it could go, giving us such cardboard figures as the villain twirling his mustache, the handsome hero, and the sweet young thing.
In the above cases, the defining characteristic—foolish or pedantic, etc.—never says that "all fathers are fools" or "all scholars are pedantic, " but that within the larger classification of fathers or scholars, there's a certain type that's a fool or a pedant. Whereas a character type can be an important element in many stories, a stereotype only limits the story. (Stereotyping will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9.)
Sometimes it is important to use a type. "When you're creating minor characters for a TV series, " says James Burrows, "you try to make them on the nose. If you've got a bully, you try to cast a bully. If you cast a guy who's a bully, but doesn't look like one, it will take the audience too much time to figure out that character. Whereas if you cast a bully everybody can identify, you can then work on working him off the other characters, and making him funny."
Character types can be broadly drawn, or they can be drawn with great attention to detail. Tartuffe (from Moliere's play) is a character type, a hypochondriac; Polonius from Hamlet is a doddering father; but both contain considerable detailing.
When the acting teacher and director, Constantin Stan-islavski, worked with actors, he encouraged them to continually add great detail to their portrayals. His description of the process can be of help to writers creating a character type.
"It is possible to portray on the stage a character in general terms—such as a soldier. For instance, a professional soldier as a general rule holds himself stiffly erect, marches around instead of walking like a normal person, clicks his heels together to make his spurs ring, speaks in a loud, barking tone out of habit. . . . But this is oversimplified . . . and passes for a portrait but not the character. . . . These characters are traditional, lifeless, hackneyed portrayals . . . not live people but figures in a ritual. Other actors, who possess more acute powers of observation, are able to choose subdivisions in the general categories of stock figures. They can make distinctions among military men, between a member of an ordinary and a guard's regiment, between infantry and cavalry, they know soldiers, officers, generals. . . . Other actors add a still more heightened, detailed sense of observation. We now have a soldier with a name, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, and with features not duplicated in any other soldier. "2
Although it is not the job of the writer to put the pauses, the gestures, the exchanged looks into the script (this is the work of the actor), there still needs to be some sharp definition of the essence of the character that goes beyond broad generalities.
Actors cannot act generalities—and a general character will not attract an actor to the role, or a reader to the book.
FILLING IN THE CHARACTER
By understanding the function, and adding color and texture, you will come close to creating a fully realized character. But it may also be necessary to add details that come from your own observation, and through your own experience.
Sometimes this means putting yourself into the character. Seth Werner, creator of the California Raisins commercial, comments, "A lot of people have said that the people that I put into commercials have a little bit of me in them. Somebody said you could pick me out in the line of dancing raisins. It's the way I walk and the way I would dance. The commercial is a little off the norm. And that's what gives it a little personality and magic. Even when our animators were actually making the raisins out of clay, you would see them look in a mirror and make an expression and copy it on the face of the raisin. I think work should come from your heart, and when it does, other people feel it. It reaches. It's hard to say what it is exactly, but it is these small touches and subtleties that make it special."
Robert Benton created a number of his characters for Places in the Heart by remembering and observing people he had known. "I had a great-uncle who was blind. I was sitting with my relatives talking about the script when one of them reminded me of my Uncle Bud. We started telling stories about him and he became the basis of Mr. Will. With Will I wanted to show a man who is very smart, who had lost his eyesight, who had cut himself off from life and through the course of the movie is reintroduced back to his life. I wanted a kind of intelligence and kind of an anger about his life. Now my uncle had the intelligence, but not the anger. I wanted to get a sense that Will was out of keeping with the rest of the people, that he was a little more sophisticated, a little more neurotic than anyone else. Will gives contrast and a varied texture to the story. Everybody in that town can't be nice small-town people. Somebody has to be different from that.
"Margaret and Vi are based on an amalgam of two or three people I had known. They were based on people I had gone to high school with.
"I particularly loved the character of Wayne. I grew up in the Southwest in the thirties and forties with hillbilly music, and hillbilly music was about grand passion. I wanted someone with a grand passion and a set of problems that weren't what you'd think of as being in a small, God-fearing town. Country-western music was about 'Don't rob another man's castle,' and about going out honky-tonkying, and it was about great passions in this most ordinary setting."
Supporting characters, like major characters, are created through small details. Even if they are less important characters, they still can be sharply drawn.
CREATING THE VILLAIN
There is one other character that must be discussed, who is sometimes a major character, sometimes a supporting character. That's the villain.
Everything mentioned up to this point will be useful for creating the villain. But the villain presents some unusual problems.
By definition, the villain is the evil character who opposes the protagonist. Villains are usually the antagonists, although not all antagonists are villains. Antagonists won't be villains, for example, if they oppose the protagonist not out of bad motives but because it's their function in the story. If the main character wants to go to Harvard but doesn't have the grades to get in, the representatives of the school will become the antagonists since they are opposing the protagonist, but they won't be villains. The role of the villain always connotes evil.
Whether villains wear black hats (as in the old Westerns), or fly fast jets and commit corporate crime, they place problems in the path of the "good guy," and generally wreak social and personal havoc.
On the simplest level, stories that contain villains are usually stories about good and evil. Usually the protagonist stands for the good, and
the villain opposes the good. Most villains are action-oriented. They steal, kill, betray, wound, and work against the good. Many of them begin to look alike. Often there's a tendency for them to be poorly motivated, and one-dimensional. The reasons for their evil actions are rarely explained, as if people do evil just because they feel like doing it.
It is possible, though, to create dimensional villains. Depending on the style of the story, and how much depth you want to bring into it, villains can be just as unforgettable as any other character. Certainly such characters as Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, Salieri in Amadeus, or the particularly dimensional villains in the miniseries "Holocaust" come to mind as well-drawn villains.
To understand the villain, it's helpful to understand the relationship between the good and evil that exists in most stories.
F. Scott Peck, in his book People of the Lie, defines evil as live spelled backward, i.e., as that which opposes life. Using this definition, the good character stands for an affirmation of life. He or she stands for saving the ranch for the sake of the family (Shane and Places in the Heart), for overcoming abuse (.Nobody's Child, The Burning Bed), for self-esteem (The Color Purple), for realizing one's potential (The Karate Kid, Heart Like a Wheel), for reaching out to others (Rain Man), for recognizing the humanity of those unlike ourselves (Bill, E.T.), for the promotion of growth and transformation (The Turning Point).
Evil then opposes good. It tyrannizes, restricts, represses, puts down, defies, and puts limits on others. Whether he employs obvious evil, such as murder and other forms of violence, or some of the more subtle forms of abuse, the villain has the same function in the story: to work against the good.
What are the different approaches to creating dimensional villains? First of all, it is necessary to ask why they act the way they do. Their motives can be explained through exploring the villain as victim, or the villain as self-serving agent. In the first case the villain is defined through reaction; in the second case, through action.
For many villains, the doing of evil comes as a result of negative influences in their own lives. As a writer creating this kind of a character, you might explore the backstory, looking at social and personal factors that might have created these negative characteristics. You would recognize that nobody is "purely bad," and round out the character by showing good points, complex psychology, and emotions such as fear, frustration, anger, rage, and/or envy. Most analyses of real-life violent crimes focus on the "villain as victim," searching out the reasons, perhaps, why a quiet, unassuming man murders someone. Emphasis is usually placed on a difficult and unstable family life, often poverty and abuse, repression of the person's feelings, and a solitary, nonrelational life-style.
If you choose to create an active, rather than a reactive, villain, you could dimensionalize the character through exploring the complex unconscious factors that motivate him or her. It has been said "No one is a villain in his own eyes." No one believes he is doing evil. Most villains justify their actions, thinking they are doing it for a greater good. These people usually have strong defense mechanisms. They're unaware of the unconscious forces driving them. Generally they are driven by their shadow side, and are continually justifying their actions.
Don Corleone in The Godfather is partially motivated by love of his family. Although Gordon Gekko in Wall Street admits to being motivated by greed, to him, "greed" is a good word, connoting accomplishment and success and ambition.
If you were creating villains, you would try to discover the greater good, or what they consider the greater good, that is driving them. Is it a desire for safety? Love of family? Security (for themselves or others close to them)? A better world (perhaps a world of one class and one color)? Although such a motivation might have positive aspects to it, it will take form in negative actions because of a desire to impose the villain's value system on others. Ultimately, it will result in some kind of repression.
Villains may be unaware of what they do. Rather than justifying their actions, their evil actions are the result of unconscious forces that they don't understand. The violence and repression that come from these characters tend to be more subtle, but they are still effective. These villains deny their actions and their motivations, a form of denial that can be found in compulsive behaviors, addictions, and abuse. These are the characters who say, "It was only a spanking; it didn't hurt my child, " or "I only had a couple of drinks, not enough to get me drunk and violent," or "I love my wife, certainly she's not afraid of me!" The villains in The Burning Bed and Nobody's Child are unaware of the negative effects of their actions.
Villains of any type suffer from a kind of narcissism, an inability to see, and respect, others' reality. It's an inability to recognize the humanity of other people, or to affirm their right to be who they are.
EXERCISE: Have you ever felt oppressed? What did your oppressor do to make you feel that way? Were covert or overt methods used? Imagine the response your persecutor might give to justify his or her actions. Could you create a villain in a story using this person as a model?
A CASE STUDY: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest began as a novel by Ken Kesey, was developed as a play by Dale Wasserman, and then
became a film in 1975, with writing credit going to Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben.
When Dale Wasserman wrote the play, he had to re-create the supporting characters. The characters are memorable for their broad strokes, their thematic function, and their relationship to the main character, McMurphy.
Dale Wasserman sees each character as working off of the theme. "Ken Kesey's novel deals with the philosophy of the meaning of the rebel in society. It is the prototypical idea of the rebel against authority and what happens to him. Curiously, Man of La Mancha [also written by Wasserman] and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which seems so terribly dissimilar, are regarded as almost the same play because each of them deals with a rebel, an outcast of society, a man who won't conform. And in both cases, society is dedicated to the suppression or extermination of that man.
"The argument which I made in the play was about the standardization of society and the suppression of individuality. The whole argument is that we live in a society which must repress and discipline the individual for its own protection. It is protecting itself from the aberrations of the individuals. It's protecting its power, and unruly people threaten power.
"To make this point, I had to show the relationship between the suppression and the victims of the suppression. So all the supporting characters are victims in some way. It was necessary to differentiate each character very sharply, because victims en masse as in a concentration camp are really not very interesting. They might represent something, but they won't be well-drawn characters. I realized that it was very important that they not be a uniformed troop of some kind; so I went to great trouble to individualize them as sharply as possible.
"Each of the victims is a victim in a slightly different way. The Indian is a victim because Indians in the United States are victims. The man with homosexual tendencies [Harding] is a victim because society laughs at and scorns such people, so he voluntarily withdrew from society. The stuttering boy was a victim of a monster mother. The man who Sits around making bombs all day is a victim of the U. S. Army, which destroyed his ability to function in society. The man who seems crucified on the wall is a victim of medical society, which experiments with people by performing lobotomies to bring people into a mode of acceptable behavior. And even Nurse Ratched is a victim of a standardized and disciplinarian society that has made her into a monster."
To begin filling out the characters, Dale spent ten days in a mental institution.
"One of the elements I was looking for was the level of intelligence and education of these people, and their level of articulation. I wanted to look at the particular patterns of behavior that get these people designated as insane. There's a big variation in that. In some, you see almost nothing that would disti
nguish them from normalcy. But because they take drugs every day, their behavior is modified, held down.
"By watching them before they were medicated and after, I could see a whole range of behavior. After taking drugs, there is very little color in their speech. It's what you call utility speech. Before drugs it reveals itself in very wild, sometimes fascinating patterns. They have a mad logic of their own. And sometimes I was very impressed by the beauty of articulation of these people. It was not conventional, coherent, or grammatical."
Dale creates interest by working against the logic of the characters.
"Perfect logic in the way characters speak and act is dull. It's generally a lie. So I look for the illogical, the inconsistent, the out of place in a character, because those things are more revelatory than the straight line of the character. For instance, if there's somebody of a brutal nature, I also watch them very carefully because they will reveal completely inconsistent attributes; and sometimes the inconsistent attributes are the ones that truly reveal the character.
"McMurphy, who seems to be a rough and brutal man, teaches inmates to dance and does it with delicacy. He also, surprisingly, quotes poetry. He sometimes misquotes it, but somewhere inside of him he had a love of it. When I look at characters, I look at them with the supposition that perfect logic is dull."
Dale also analyzes the hidden aspects of the character: "I look for underlying drive and then find ways to let the audience see things that the character doesn't know about himself. This is true of people who seem to be acting from a professed set of motives and actually are acting out of another set of impulses entirely.
"Billy Bibbit doesn't understand what his mother has done to him. He protects his mother, who is really the destructive influence in his life. Harding blames himself for what is really not a matter of his own blame—his sexual nature. Nurse Ratched is really a powerfully and artificially repressed woman who is a perfect army model. The repression has caused her to become a man hater. Curiously, she has warmth and decency. These are the interesting contradictions. She does what she does for very good reasons, which does not alter the fact that what she does is very bad.