Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  It’s a topic we’ll begin exploring in the next chapter, “The World Within: 1.”

  5

  THE WORLD WITHIN: 1

  How do you motivate a character?

  You devise something that he or she must change in order to win happiness.

  When we talk about the world within a character, at root we’re discussing motive: “A mental force that induces an act; a determining impulse. Intention; purpose; design,” as one dictionary puts it. It is the spine of any story.

  Motive, in fiction, is another name for a desire for change on the part of some character or other.

  It works this way:

  Happiness is the universal human goal.

  Unhappiness, regrettably, is all too often the human state.

  For an individual to move from unhappiness to happiness ordinarily means that some aspect of his or her situation—state of affairs or state of mind—must be changed.

  Change may be anything from getting a raise to humiliating an enemy to experiencing the feeling of youth again.

  If the desire for change is so strong as to impel an individual to do something about it, take action to achieve it, it constitutes a motive.

  Stated thus bluntly and simplistically, the picture is obvious. Give a character so compulsive a desire to make a given change that he can’t let it be, and you have the basis for a story.

  In life, the issues may come through as a bit less easily understood.

  Why? Because in life we can’t see inside other peoples’ heads.

  Back when I was a boy, a young man of perhaps eighteen or twenty lived down the block from us. Though he bothered no one, he perpetually wandered about at loose ends, jobless and clearly a bit strange. People felt sorry for his decent, hardworking parents.

  Then one day, abruptly, the situation changed. Police appeared with the young man in tow—first questioning his family, then searching a shed behind the house.

  Their findings chilled the neighborhood. Unsuspected by anyone, the young man apparently lived a macabre inner life that saw him secretly prowling local cemeteries while his parents assumed him to be asleep. A couple of nights before, he had reopened a grave and mutilated the corpse of a young woman buried that afternoon, removing selected organs in the manner of an inept Jack the Ripper. These he took home and stored in Mason jars in the shed.

  It was a situation fit for Robert Bloch or Stephen King, but that’s not the point. The issue is that no one suspected that our addled young man, in some private world, was motivated to set to digging in the night-darkened graveyard. His secrets remained secrets until, returning to the cemetery, he was caught in the act of further desecrating the girl’s body . . . because none of us could see inside his head.

  Another case in point—less gruesome, even if for me almost as disturbing. The incident concerns a man with whom I worked many years ago while editing labor papers. He was president of the union at a local factory. I think I can safely say that we rated as close friends—working together, drinking together, vacationing together, sharing a wide range of interests.

  And then, one day, almost by accident, it was discovered that my friend held down a second job, one about which he hadn’t shared confidence with me. For he wasn’t just a worker or a union president. First and foremost, he was a labor spy, on the payroll of one of the nation’s major industrial security agencies. And all those weeks and months I’d thought I’d known him so well, I’d been deceived. Because try as I might, I couldn’t get inside his head.

  I can’t tell you what a cataclysmic shock that was, back in those days when the struggling union movement was fighting to survive. I seldom—maybe not ever—have suffered such a blow. The very fact that it still stands out so sharply in my mind after half a century tells the story.

  Nor is my experience unique. Every wife or husband betrayed, every employer who finds that a trusted employee has tapped the till, every parent shattered by the discovery that a son or daughter is doing drugs goes through the same bitter trauma. And “He was always such a good boy,” said in regard to assorted serial killers, is a line so familiar it has become almost a litany.

  Not that we’re talking only of unhappiness or disillusion, you understand. Revelations may be positive as well as negative. Witness the notorious tightwad who, after death, is found to have sponsored dozens of poor students who needed help in financing their educations. The quiet man who’s never mentioned military service, but who has the Congressional Medal of Honor tucked in the back of a dresser drawer. The woman with crippling arthritis who conceals her youthful fame as a nationally acclaimed dancer.

  (Indeed, my friend Phyllis Whitney, suspense novelist supreme, has projected this to a highly effective plot device. Every major character, she says, should have a secret: some hidden something that he or she doesn’t want exposed to the world. She’s got a point. But more of that later, in Chapter 6.)

  For now, though, the thing to bear in mind is that no matter what you may suspect, you can’t really read another person’s thoughts or get inside his head.

  As a matter of fact, a character either in life or in fiction, may, for his own personal reasons, intentionally convey a false impression.

  Item: The girl with the hideously bad disposition who’s doing her best to project an aura of sweetness and light until she can land the man she wants.

  Item: The man who oozes perfect poise until you discover him weeping in the company restroom.

  Item: The woman who wallows in piety for the benefit of her church friends, while on the job she embezzles bank funds.

  Item: The friendly retiree whose young manhood included years working in the gas chamber in a Nazi death camp in Poland.

  So much subterfuge, so much deceit, so many false impressions.

  Yet you, as a writer, can’t afford to be taken in by such deceptive masks. Remember, always, that you are the creator; first and last, you are in control. Deceit and subterfuge are merely tools you use to give your story people depth and interest. Understanding their dynamics, you bring them on as needed, neatly packaged and inserted into characters’ heads.

  How do you gain the necessary insight into the human reaction process? Specifically, what principles undergird people’s—which is to say, characters’—thinking and behavior?

  WHAT MAKES PEOPLE TICK?

  Shall we start with a basic premise—the one set forth in the summarizing capsule on which we opened? The thing all of us seek, at root, is what we call happiness.

  What constitutes happiness? Call it a state of mind that exists in a person when, his bodily needs satisfied, he also feels a sense of self-importance, self-worth.

  That sense of self-worth takes all sorts of forms. You find it in an illiterate, immigrant Vietnamese mother who sees her only surviving child graduate from high school. It sparks again when a doctor saves a life . . . a lawyer wins a case . . . a farmer banks the check for a bumper crop . . . a housewife wins a garden show . . . a teenage swinger beds a rock star. It glows in the sense of superiority a carny feels as he short-changes a mark or a vacationing couple boards a plane for Acapulco under the envious eyes of friends who must stay behind. Each finds what, for the moment, he or she calls happiness—“fulfillment of function,” in academic gobbledegook. One way or another, each can approve of himself, however briefly. And if others see fit to approve also, so much the better.

  Such a state may prove murderously difficult to achieve, however. Why? Because the world and life keep throwing trouble at us—circumstances that block our efforts to attain our goals, shatter our dreams, make us feel helpless and ridiculous and unimportant. Yet in spite of everything, most of us keep striving.

  Also, happiness is different things to different people. Inheriting a fortune may, to me, bring only panic at the thought of the responsibilities that will ensue. Or I may so thrill to the excitement of battle that I forget the fear of death.

  Too, it may operate on a variety of levels. Witness what’s come to be kn
own as the “generation gap.” In large measure it sprang from a clash between the traditional concept of “earned happiness” that dominated an earlier period and the “instant happiness” of an affluent society, in which credit cards and bankruptcy filings and singles bars took over. In the past a couple may have attained feelings of self-worth by caring for their elderly parents. Today, some couples seeking instant happiness may consign their parents to a nursing home and get their ego boosts from driving two cars and living in a bigger house. (Which isn’t to say, of course, that a nursing home may not be the only answer in many cases.)

  Whether these changes in society are good or bad is subject to debate. But the sun has set on the era when women found pride solely in managing a home. Men today are no longer ashamed to be seen changing the baby’s diapers or cooking a meal. Some, by choice, stay home as house-spouses, while their wives work outside the home for financial support of the family. And often both spouses must work, just to make ends meet.

  Fact is, contemporary marriage no longer follows traditional male/female sexual stereotypes, and your characters had better reflect those changes if you hope to appeal to modern readers.

  Unhappiness? That’s the other side of the coin, something we all strive to avoid. Call it the loss of self-esteem as a result of disapproval by self or others. Perhaps it springs from a harsh word from the boss, a sidewise glance from a supercilious clerk, the sense of helplessness one feels when a loved one dies, the rage and frustration that comes of a picked pocket, a broken date, a crumpled fender.

  But again, each of us is different. The prospect of a visit to the hospital may chill your blood, while I look forward to making such a visit because the anticipated pain will assuage a secret sense of guilt, or give me an excuse to wallow delightedly in self-indulgence, self-pity, or friends’ attention. My son-in-law’s insults may cut me to the quick, yet bring a certain grim pleasure as I gloat over the shock he’s going to get when my will is read.

  Now these are things we all experience. Yet in the words of Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal Sherlock Holmes, we see but we do not observe.

  This is a luxury which we as writers can’t afford. We must learn to pay attention to human behavior in all its varied shades and nuances. Most especially, we need to become reflex-familiar with those twists and turns that influence the manner in which people’s lives develop. Why? Because they’ll provide insight into possible paths our characters may follow and actions they may take.

  Is it possible to attack the issue of character dynamics from a different angle? Yes, of course it is. You very well may begin from the assumption that fear is the underlying factor. In which case, the question to ask yourself is: What’s Character scared of?

  Because all of us are scared. When the feudist in pioneer Texas cried, “I’ll die before I run!” what he really was saying was, “I’m less afraid of death than losing face.” And how many times, covering triangle murders, did I hear the line, “We couldn’t stand the shame of a divorce” as motive? It’s the same peer pressure thing that’s sent so many teenagers to death mainlining heroin with their friends.

  The person—or the character—may not know he’s scared, of course, or if he does, he may not know just what he’s scared of. Fear of responsibility may lie at the heart of his secret inner dread, as witness many an educated, once-cultured bum along skid row, many a remittance man in Mexico or Monaco or Marrakesh. I have hypochondriac friends whose blind panic at the thought of disease has immobilized them for life. The fear of failure has locked hundreds, thousands, millions into private cells of never trying. A woman I know was so devastated by Depression poverty that today she lives the life of a virtual indigent though her net worth is more than half a million dollars. And Alfred Hitchcock so feared the possibility of a traffic arrest and jail that he never learned to drive a car.

  So much for fear as a dynamic, a source of human conduct. But whether you choose to work from it or from man’s never-ending search for fulfillment and happiness, ultimately you’ll need to give special consideration to four other concepts: direction, goal, drive, and attitude.

  We’ll take them up in the second part of this appraisal of the world within in the next chapter.

  6

  THE WORLD WITHIN: 2

  How do you keep a character moving?

  You point that character towards his or her private future.

  Each character about whom you write, whether you’re aware of it or not, must have a private future. That is, to go back to what we said in Chapter 1, he must care about something, feel that some aspect of his world is important—important enough to fight for.

  To that end, and though they can hardly be separated in practice, you need to give him an appropriate direction, goal, drive, and attitude.

  Let’s consider each of these separately.

  1. DIRECTION: THE ROAD TO HAPPINESS

  A character’s direction may be defined as his tendency to lead the kind of life he enjoys. In effect, it’s a sort of unstated search that causes him to seek out experience he finds pleasurable and to act in a manner that fulfills a quite possibly unverbalized “dream of happiness” for him. That this dream may be vague—even nebulous or totally unformulated—is of no consequence. Nor does it matter whether it makes sense to anyone, including the character himself. It still shapes his behavior, just as the alcoholic continues to get drunk despite certain knowledge of the hangover to follow.

  Thus, any character, any person—and that includes you, and me, and the woman next door, and the man down the street—lives from infancy to a greater or lesser degree in the grip of an indefinable inner hunger, a gnawing sense that something is missing from his life.

  Actually, it may be that what’s missing is in the person himself. It’s rooted in the sense of inadequacy born of childhood helpless ness. What he wants, realize it or not, is to control his life, his destiny.

  Not grasping this fact, however, Person—or Character, where fiction is concerned—attempts to fill the void with ego-inflating exploits in the world outside him—his own private combination of what W. I. Thomas, respected sociologist of another day, termed the “four wishes”: the human animal’s desire for adventure, security, recognition, response. (Personally, I’m inclined to add a fifth item, power, to the list.) And the way you combine these, the ratio between the elements you zero in on, establishes the direction that you go.

  When you translate this into more concrete form, adventure comes out as a yearning for new experience, as exemplified in activities ranging from climbing Mount Everest to throwing a brick through a neighbor’s window . . . joining the Marines or Peace Corps to signing up for a night course in computer graphics. Security? A job with the Postal Service, a bulging bank account, a well-tuned car engine, you name it. Spell recognition as fame via election as selectman, winning a breakdance contest, being awarded a scholarship, making headlines with a jailbreak. And response, for most of us, equals love on any one of its multitudinous levels: warming to the feeling that someone that counts cares about us. If you want to include power, obviously it’s exemplified in the authority to hire and fire, the officer’s command over his troops, and the woman who includes a potential palimony suit in her armorarium.

  So much for the generalities of happiness. More to the point is the way that each of us, consciously or otherwise, selects a certain state or situation as, for us and for the moment, constituting bliss. Call it a symbol, if you will. It’s a condition which we subjectively visualize as creating the paradisiacal sense of self-worth/self-importance/self-esteem that we all yearn for.

  (Assume that you win such happiness. Is it likely to prove enduring? Not necessarily; indeed, not even likely. The “perfect husband” turns out to be a penny-pincher. The “dream house” floods every time it rains. A failed bank swallows up your nest-egg savings. The town forgets football fame the day you graduate. And that’s life, as they say.)

  Remember, too, that both in life and in fiction characters o
perate on separate wavelengths, different levels of intensity. Consider two women, for example. Slender equals happy where both are concerned. But for whatever reason, slender is a compulsion for Woman A. Woman B, on the other hand, finds slender in competition with a growling stomach. Result: Woman A stays svelte. Woman B? Fat.

  The same principle applies to men, of course. Staying thin is often important in terms of appearance, job promotion, and health. Yet loud are the wails that rise from many as they have to buy new wardrobes because their weight has gone up or down.

  Or observe three churchmen—all thoughtful, all dedicated. Religion is important to each—a vital element of their happiness, you might say.

  Thus, Bill is not only a believer, but a regular member and attendee.

  So is Bob. But in addition to belonging and attending, he sits on the church board.

  Bert? A member and attendee too, he has his own private ideas about religion.

  Each pays tribute to his faith in a characteristic manner. Bill, for example, follows the rules and is present whenever he’s supposed to be.

  Bob carries his devotion a step further. Sitting on the board, he plays a definite role in church politics.

  Which puts him in direct conflict with Bert, for Bert believes that the church’s trend toward modernization and the contemporary is part of the devil’s plot to corrupt both the Word of God and the congregation, especially the young.

  The result, frequently, is a fine Donnybrook that nearly comes to fisticuffs in the nave. Hot tempers, hot words spill over the sanctuary like blazing oil.

  Yet each of these men and women operates from the same basic principle: a yearning for fulfillment, for happiness.