Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Meanwhile, it’s time to move on to another vital matter: How to label each story person so he or she strikes a clear and distinctive note and makes the right first impression on your readers.

  We’ll take it up in the next chapter.

  3

  LABELS, LABELS

  Why do you label a character?

  Your reader needs some clue or two to help him recognize each of your story people.

  So there’s this woman. You were introduced to her at a party a week ago. Now you can’t place her.

  “Oh, you know!” your wife reminds you. “She was the loud, pushy one. The one who used to be a travel agent.”

  Indeed, now, you do remember. Because your wife has given Woman labels. She has defined Woman as loud, pushy, and travel agent.

  An important step, that, for we live in a world of labels, of identifying designations. One way or another, each of us makes an impression on those around us. Our friends and associates think of us as bumbling or belligerent, active or anemic, crude or crabby. Justly or otherwise, we go through life cataloged as sinner or saint, extrovert or egghead, nice or nasty. Doctors diagnose us as “Type One diabetic” or “Cushingoid” or “hypertensive.” Police classify criminals in terms of verbal description (“portrait parle“), fingerprints, DNA, modus operandi (method of operation in committing crimes). Teachers describe our children as cooperative or withdrawn or disruptive.

  Thus it is that Wife has brought Woman into focus for you. Specifically, she has captured and verbalized Woman’s dominant impression . . . the amalgam of qualities that makes Woman memorable to others.

  That matter of dominant impression—few tools are more useful to a writer who seeks to characterize his story people. Four basic elements go into it: sex, age, vocation, and manner.

  The first two of these components might be termed implicit, the second two, explicit.

  Item one, sex, is simple enough. Describing anyone, we almost automatically zero in on gender: “this man,” “that woman,” “he,” “she.”

  Item two, age, gets attention primarily in terms of deviations from an assumed norm of adulthood, as in “little girl,” “boy,” “old man,” “young woman,” “teenager,” and so on.

  The other two constituents, those which I term explicit, operate on a considerably different level.

  Item three, vocation, is a noun, a special noun. I call it a noun of vocation, because it states the person’s occupation—his role in society, what he does for a living. Here we encounter not only the usual range of doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, and the familiar trades, but also some we may not normally think of in occupational terms—housewife, bum, invalid, bag lady, “significant other.” Yet each defines a group and gives dimension to its individual members and so should be thought through and included.

  Finally, item four brings us to what I designate as an adjective of manner—an element which I firmly believe to be the most important factor in creating a dominant impression.

  Manner is, of course, an individual’s personal bearing; his or her habitual stance and style. When your wife says a woman is “loud and pushy,” she defines her far more sharply for story purposes than any description of blue eyes, blonde hair, or pug nose.

  Why? First, because manner is what impresses those who meet Character. More than appearance, ordinarily, you notice that a boy is timid, a girl shy, a woman whiny, a man grouchy.

  Second, manner indicates to a considerable degree what’s going on inside Character. Irascibility of manner is a red flag warning of a potential punch in the nose. The bold-eyed girl isn’t likely to be taken aback by a boy’s brash come-on. A prospect’s air of cringing humility tends to bring gladness to the aggressive salesman’s heart.

  Test this against your own experience. Isn’t Old Max frequently identified as “that clumsy mechanic”? Edna is “the nosy clerk at the Welfare.” Lorraine? “Our sympathetic schoolteacher.” Tom? “The driver with all the jokes.” And Mr. Sloan, the office manager, will live forever as “his moronic majesty.”

  For the writer, the dominant impression offers yet a third bonus: A character’s manner gives you something predictable to write to. You know in advance how he’ll tend to behave, so you know the kind of words he’s likely to speak and the things he’s likely to do.

  Note how nicely the noun of vocation fits in with this. Just as situation provides a context for character, occupation gives you a context for manner. Combine the two—sloppy waitress, surly cop, forthright mill hand, friendly druggist, worried nurse—and your people begin to take on at least a semblance of life.

  Flexibility in planning comes too. Make the surly cop a sloppy cop or a forthright cop or friendly cop or worried cop, and he becomes a totally new person. Frequently such switches can even be parlayed into intriguing, character-defining, contradictory touches that add extra interest. Let happenstance throw the wise-cracking secretary into contiguity with the long-faced undertaker, and you may find yourself contemplating a twist that gives you a long-faced secretary and a wise-cracking undertaker; and yes, I’ve known a couple of the latter, even though they generally succeeded in restraining themselves when solacing the bereaved cash customers. The stupid professor, the pompous doctor, the hypocritical clergyman (remember Elmer Gantry?), the pious prostitute—the list could go on and on, and all offer possibilities.

  This probably is a good time to bring up a related issue: Is the dominant impression a character gives right or wrong, accurate or inaccurate? If you meet a man dressed in neo-Nazi regalia and with a skinhead shaved scalp, you automatically assume that his beliefs, thinking, and behavior patterns reflect the image. Clerical dress and a Roman collar registers something else again.

  The point is that, rightly or wrongly, we do judge by first impressions, and those first impressions are hard to overcome. Present a boy stealing a purse the first time he appears in your story, and your readers will respond, “Of course. He’s a thief,” when he later is shown burglarizing a gas station. But if the first time you bring him on stage he returns a dropped wad of bills to an elderly woman who doesn’t know she’s lost it, then later is caught in a robbery, Audience will think, “Hey, that kid’s honest. What’s happened to make him switch?”

  The point is, if you strike one note at the start of a book, changing the picture in your readers’ minds so they’ll accept that Character was playing a role and had reason for doing so will take careful planning and planting as the story develops.

  There are two more questions to consider when creating a character’s manner:

  Question 1: How do you find the right adjective?

  Observation is the answer, of course. For while you’ve grown up aware of mood and manner, odds are you’ve never paid them proper heed.

  Now’s the time to remedy that deficiency. To that end, make it your business to pay attention to the behavior of the people you meet, on every level. Focus on it, labeling manner. Is this man blank-faced or bored or blasé? Is the one next to him uncertain or scared or nervous? Is the woman suspicious or sick or tired? What image is her friend trying to project? Disdain? Superiority? Hauteur?

  Question 2: How do you capture manner?

  While finding adjectives, putting labels to manners, you also gather incidents that convey impressions—even if later you don’t use them. Collect or devise bits which will reveal precisely why people think of this person or that as roughneck/roué/saint/sad sack or what have you. What does he do that leads others to think of him in such terms? Does he blow his nose on a linen napkin at a formal dinner? Suffer agonies rather than use a public restroom? (Remember Mark Twain’s famous comment that modesty had ruined more kidneys than bad liquor?) Push little old ladies aside in order to get a better seat in a theater or bus?

  Do I hear cries of outrage? Angry voices protesting that few of us fit into such simplistic packaging? Said voices are right, of course. Simplistic labeling often gives a false impression. I admit it frankly.

  What to d
o about it? The answer, of course, is to modify the label—insert ifs, ands, and buts into the character as needed to flesh him out. But that’s a subject calling for attention on a different level. We’ll take it up in a later chapter.

  Does this mean you introduce each character with his dominant impression? Not necessarily, though it’s certainly not the worst way to go.

  Indeed, on occasion, you may set down pages without stating the dominant impression a character makes in the specific terms of the vocation/manner pattern I’ve described. You may, instead, bring him or her on with a memorable or colorful tag—a toupee that’s forever slipping down, false teeth that keep getting in the way of speech, or the like. Or use minor action: “A girl opened the door. ‘This way, sir,’ she said.” Or, “The man wriggled through the mud to the fence.” That kind of thing. After all, there are all kinds of situations in this life where a person remains virtually faceless and so doesn’t make a real impression, plus or minus. What counts is that you get him on stage. Defining him can come later—though not too much later.

  You yourself should surely know the dominant impression behind such a mask, simply because you’ll need it in order to write about the person effectively later on. Maybe, at the moment, the girl who opens the door above doesn’t register. But if she’s going to play a part of any consequence later on, it will help if she’s a slattern or a flirt, young and timid, or old and perpetually disgruntled.

  How do you bring in a character? Here are four possible approaches—not the only four, certainly, but they’ll do for starters till you devise techniques of your own you like better:

  1. Description, appearance.

  “The hair was what you noticed. It was bright orange and stacked on top of her head in what they used to call a beehive.”

  2. Action.

  “The man ducked back into the shadows, one foot scraping on the pavement as if he couldn’t lift his leg.”

  3. Dialogue.

  “‘Lookin’ for someone?’

  “Eleana turned. A woman was standing in the doorway, an old woman a head shorter than she, with pinched features and squinty eyes. ‘Who are you?’ she gulped. “‘Me? Depends on who you are, what you want.’”

  4. Thoughts, introspection.

  “Edwards pondered, scanning the passersby and trying to define the person called X. A man, surely—or was it? The note really hadn’t given any hint.”

  Meanwhile, the principle for simplistic labeling remains both sound and important. For ease of recognition it can’t be beat. Far too many writers create characters who are, at best, gray-neutral confusing, when it’s totally unnecessary. In life and in fiction alike, unfairly or not, we do identify people by labels aptly slapped on them by their fellows.

  That such labels may be wrong, of course, goes almost without saying. Externals are handy indeed, but they may distort or contradict what’s going on inside a person . . . Not too often, though, or you’ll confuse your readers.

  That’s an aspect of character that’s absolutely essential for any writer to understand. We’ll explore it in the next chapter, “Fleshing Out.”

  4

  FLESHING OUT

  How do you make a character real?

  You provide him or her with appropriate tags, traits, and relationships.

  Labeling—assigning a story person a dominant impression—is a primary step in character creation.

  But a dominant impression alone doesn’t go far enough. Leave it at that and Character will end up a stick figure at best—a caricature, not a person. If he’s to be of any real use to you, you need to flesh him out, develop the picture of him in more detail, internally and externally, inside and out.

  Specifically, you need to give him tags, traits, and relationships.

  Before we go further, however, let’s emphasize one point too often forgotten, especially by beginners: People are like tapestries; that is, each is woven of many threads. But some threads are more vivid and visible than others, like strands of red through a gray fabric.

  It’s also important to remember that making a character too complex will kill him. A good character is a simulation of complexity, not the real thing. Fairly clear and simple traits work best. Otherwise the effect will be that given by a “busy” painting, one too cluttered with detail. So while ordinarily you’ll want to go beyond the cartoon/caricature level, try not to carry development so far in depth that your people fall over the edge into total confusion. The meaningful character in fiction is the one with a salient feature, or two or three, like the real-life Ayatollah Khomeini, Richard Nixon, or Elvis Presley, with individuality and color added via modifying touches.

  Thus, in life, we don’t know most of our friends and neighbors in depth. They exist for us mainly in terms of dominant impression plus externals—appearance, speech, mannerisms, attitudes, abili ties—plus how we get along with them. (Goals? We’ll take that up later.)

  With that caveat out of the way, let’s get on to consideration of the tools you’ll use in fleshing out story people: tags, traits, and relationships.

  Tags come first.

  A tag is a label, but a limited, specialized label. It identifies a character and helps your readers to distinguish one story person from another. Thus, a name is a tag, and it’s important. It should identify him, characterize him, give your reader an idea of the kind of person he is and his role. (Witness the skinny black detective nicknamed “Biafra Baby” in William Caunitz’s Suspects; the “Biafra” and the starvation in that area ties to his being black and gaunt. Or Inspector Herman Schmidt, known to all as “Herman the German”—the stereotype “German” draws an immediate image in colleagues’ and readers’ minds.)

  Names also characterize by telling of age. Relatively few girls today are “Agatha” or “Althea” or “Sophronia,” common enough seventy-five years ago. “Kim” and “Kelly” and “Jessica” appear more often. Men? How many Jedediahs or Ebenezers or Zebulons have you met lately?

  Naming a bruiser “Percival” or “Algernon” may be out of line, too. If a name isn’t appropriate—well, see what Johnny Cash did with “A Boy Named Sue.” The late John D. MacDonald had planned to call his McGee character Dallas, until President Kennedy’s assassination. Then, concerned that the city’s name would create bad connotations where the character was concerned, he rechristened McGee as Travis.

  Just how and when you decide on a name is another matter. You may choose it early in your story’s planning stages, or you may still be fussing over it until the final typing. One friend of mine even went so far as to set up interim names designed to keep him reminded of each character’s role and attributes—“Mr. Satan,” “Miss Tease,” “Mrs. Frump,” and so on. And Martha Kay Renfroe (M. K. Wren) reports that the name of her half-Nez Perce series detective character “actually is sort of an accident.”

  “I was choosing my detective’s name and got as far as Conan Flagg, but I wanted to give him a middle name. Joseph came to mind for some unknown reason. Probably I just liked the rhythm of Conan Joseph Flagg. Then it occurred to me that it might be interesting if the Joseph was in honor of Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader. And it was only then that Conan’s physical appearance and life history began to come into sharp focus for me. Call it a ‘tag,’ but his Nez Perce heritage is what gave him a past and even a face.”

  In any event, one way or another, Character acquires a name. Beyond this, what other tags does he need?

  Broken down into categories, ordinarily we speak of tags of appearance, ability, speech, mannerism, and attitude.

  Appearance means that it might be nice if your readers had at least some idea of what each character looks like. Kojak’s lollipop and shaved head are tags. So are Long John Silver’s wooden leg and Adolf Hitler’s mustache. Anarchist Johann Most’s bushy beard provided cartoonists with a tag that labeled radicals up to the present day. “Hulk” and “shrimp” differentiate two men. Any item that strikes a distinctive note will do—a habitual cigar betwee
n the teeth, a Fu Manchu mustache, green eyes that seem to glow in the dark, uniquely fine or coarse hair, markedly sloppy or fastidious dress, a missing ear lobe, a drooping eyelid, or whatever. Choose two or three items per major character, probably, since you’re going to have to use each several times in order to keep readers reminded that Character isn’t the albino, or the one with the limp, or the drooler with the false teeth that clatter.

  Here, for example, is a “tiny” grandmother in Dian Curtis Regan’s The Perfect Age, as she reaches up “one small hand to anchor her stylish hat, which perfectly matched her tailored burgundy suit.”

  Note, incidentally, that Regan doesn’t simply say, “Mrs. Jones had small hands.” She brings the tag on in action . . . has the character reach up the hand to anchor the hat.

  Further, the hat itself constitutes a tag, for it’s a “stylish” chapeau, which “perfectly matched her tailored burgundy suit.” The result is an image of a particular kind of grandmother: physically “tiny,” in all likelihood a woman of poise and good taste—a far cry from a frowsy grandmother, or a slatternly grandmother, or a gauche, ill-bred, vulgar grandmother, even though Regan hasn’t said so in so many words.

  Another older woman—this time, from Pat Murphy’s The Falling Woman: “I am an old woman. My hair is gray and brown—the color of the limestone monuments raised by the Mayas one thou sand years ago. My face has weathered through the years—the sun has carved wrinkles around the eyes, the wind has carved lines. At age fifty-one, I am a troublesome old woman.”

  A far different woman from the Regan grandmother, right? Here we see not only physical details, but a trait of candor: a character not afraid to report honestly on what she sees in the mirror. Also, she admits her age frankly and recognizes the way her associates often see her—“troublesome.” And in her analogy—“the color of the limestone monuments raised by the Mayas one thousand years ago”—establishes her intelligence and the focus of her interests.