Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  “The true eccentric,” says Carl Sifakis in his American Eccentrics, “follows his own rules of behavior twenty-four hours a day—because he knows his code is the right one and everyone else is wrong; because he does not want to compete by conventional standards; or because eccentricity seems the only way to gain recognition as an individual. Even among the super-rich, there are those who turn to the outrageous in their desire not to be considered just another millionaire.”

  It’s a definition that covers a lot of ground. It has to, if it’s to include Hetty Green, the miserly “Witch of Wall Street,” a millionairess who saved soap by washing only the bottom inches of her long black skirts . . . John Symmes, a retired infantry captain who spent years trying to persuade Congress that Earth was a hollow ball, which could be entered via a hole at the North Pole . . . James Eads, the “millionaire hobo” who nearly starved to death when he refused to spend inherited money because he hadn’t earned it . . . Ferdinand Demara, the “Great Imposter,” a high school dropout who passed himself off as a Canadian naval surgeon, a Trappist monk, a college teacher, and a prison guidance counselor . . . and Lillie Coit (for whom San Francisco’s Coit Tower is named), socialite beauty and the Knickerbocker Engine Company’s fire buff supreme.

  Eccentrics and eccentricity are valuable to a writer because, being out of skew from the accepted pattern of behavior, by their difference and uniqueness, frequently they create reader interest beyond that generated by the ordinary run of characters.

  Such deviations from the norm are, obviously, a matter of degree. They can range from your friend who’s bothered if he steps on a crack in the sidewalk, to the individual who wears a top hat and scarlet-lined opera cape every day, to the monomaniac who tries to strike up a conversation on the evils of water fluoridation with anyone he meets. Agatha Christie’s books are full of them, and so are those of Martha Grimes, Gary Jennings, and Stephen King.

  And that’s not even to mention Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, or Stevenson.

  What makes an eccentric? A variety of factors, of course. Ordinarily, it seems to me, he’s someone who, consciously or unconsciously, feels a tremendous need to maintain his individuality. To that end, he has selected some limited aspect of life and living in which he holds unbendingly to his private standards. His whim is the Gibraltar to which he clings and on which he has erected his entire personality structure. In some respects, in all likelihood, he’s obsessive-compulsive, as in the case of our sidewalk crack-avoider. In others, he quite possibly is schizoid—a loner, shy and unsociable, who has focused on some narrow vein of interest well-nigh to the point of paranoia.

  In any event, ordinarily he’s looked upon as an oddball—“different.” His preoccupation with his warp or obsession, the tenacity with which he clings to it, at once sets him apart and calls attention to him. You can see the result portrayed in Rex Stout’s obese, orchid-loving detective, Nero Wolfe. Sherlock Holmes, too, qualifies. So does Auntie Mame. And Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz is a gold mine of the eccentric’s characteristic narrow focus: the Scarecrow, searching for a brain; the Cowardly Lion, seeking courage; the Tin Woodman, wanting a heart; and the Wizard himself, maintaining ego by perpetuation of a fraud.

  As a first step in developing such a character, you need to ask yourself three questions:

  1. What form does Eccentric’s eccentricity take?

  2. What purpose does it serve for him?

  3. How do you want readers to feel about him?

  Let’s consider these points one at a time, even though they clearly are interpendent in most cases.

  Where Question 1 is concerned, the issue is what Eccentric says or does that shows that he’s eccentric. Simply labeling him a queer duck isn’t enough. You need to let him arrange his currency by serial number in his wallet, or always speak in verse, or wear earmuffs in August if he’s to convince your audience he really is peculiar. (Yes, I know I’m exaggerating, but bear with me.) Indeed, it might even be to your advantage to keep an eye out for usable quirks and twists as you go about your daily routine. A list of such may later come in handy.

  On to Question 2: What purpose does Eccentric’s behavior serve for him? Or, to phrase it another way, what does Eccentric hope to gain by his peculiarities, his offbeat lifestyle?

  This is a matter of major consequence, believe me. A potentially disastrous fault of unthinking writers is their tendency simply to saddle an eccentric character with far-out nuttiness, with no consid eration for logic or whether or not his behavior adds up to anything meaningful within the story framework or anywhere else. Since the casual observer can detect no perceptible pattern in Eccentric’s actions, he assumes none exists.

  Actually, of course, eccentrics do have reasons for doing the things they do, even though they may have forgotten them years ago. And once you decide on a reason for the behavior of your particular eccentric, your character—for your own private use in planning, if nothing else—your story will make a great deal more sense, as well as ease your task as a writer.

  But if an eccentric doesn’t know why he acts as he does, how can you expect to?

  The answer, naturally enough, is that you can’t. But your tool for coping with the situation is close at hand and, by this time, should be ever so familiar.

  That is, you rationalize an appropriate reason for whatever happens. Putting the serial numbers on dollar bills in order becomes the hallmark of a personality distorted by super-caution, twisted residue of a mother’s tears on rent day when her purse was pilfered. Earmuffs in August may represent an effort to shut out inner voices that berate him.

  Why bother with such backing and filling? Because it helps you to keep Eccentric’s conduct consistent. Awareness that this story person is a bit off center where money matters are concerned, and why, will open all sorts of possibilities for you as the pages pile up. Whereas only confusion will result if, on one page, he’s driving his friends and neighbors up the wall with diatribes on the metric system as a communist plot, while the next page sees him racked by a deep-seated fear that his brother will loose mind-things from another world to plague him.

  Question 3: How do you want readers to feel about Eccentric? Is your goal for them to like him? Dislike him? Accept him? Reject him? React to him with amusement? Scorn? Disgust? Pity?

  The importance of these questions should be on the obvious side. They make the difference between thrifty and stingy, considerate and weak, firm and brutal. The answers you decide upon will determine the kind of incidents in which you involve your particular eccentric—the specific bits of action and business and color you devise to show him to best advantage to get the audience reaction you desire. It will be difficult for readers to feel much kinship for the woman who pulses rank body odors because she feels that bathing reduces her resistance to disease, or to listen with much patience to the man who monopolizes conversation with dire warnings of an impending invasion by earthworms. And, on the flip side, who can grow too upset with the elderly lady who talks to her cats or insists on dressing in the styles of 1925?

  It’s an area in which the catch-as-catch-can approach is a frail reed indeed to rely upon. Thought and pre-planning will serve you better.

  THE PSYCHOS

  In its most common usage, the term psycho means any person suffering from a psychosis or major neurosis—that is to say, a more or less severe emotional illness.

  The fiction writer, however, seldom is dealing with precise clinical categories. His concern is with the practical problems of how his “wild cards” may best be played in his stories.

  It’s also a fact that the line between the eccentric and the psycho can be thin to the point of nonexistence, the degree of deviance from the norm ranging from minor peculiarities of behavior to disruptions of personality so severe as to require continuing medication or confinement on the back ward of a mental hospital. Cases in point extend from Colin Wilson’s Ritual in the Dark and Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest to the low IQ of
Lenny in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and the fragile psyche of Blanche in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

  In practical terms, one of the most useful approaches may be to say that the eccentric tends to be open in his aberration and viewed as harmless, while the psycho masks his or is mistrusted or feared.

  The basis for this distinction lies in the fact that, by and large for most people, eccentric equates with harmless, psycho with menace. Ashley “Ash the Flash” Cripps, an eccentric in Martha Grimes’s The Anodyne Necklace, is openly following his own road in terms of exhibitionism in womens restrooms. In Psycho, however, Norman Bates keeps his murderous impulses hidden, even though his quarters indicate that he’s hardly the usual motel owner.

  A few cameos may help to sharpen the picture.

  Our character, Elaine, is an upwardly mobile woman. Young, good looking, highly competent in her field, she’s clearly cut out for success.

  Except for one thing.

  She drinks.

  Other people in her circle have noticed it, of course. She knows it. It terrifies her, for she’s sharply, bitterly aware that the next step will make it apparent in the workplace too. Once that happens, the road she’s traveling will lead down, not up.

  Why doesn’t she stop? She doesn’t know, can’t figure it out. Or, to put it another way, her behavior is irrational.

  Consider another character—a man, this time: Ralph Jastrow.

  Shyness is Ralph’s problem. Drop him into any kind of social situation, any circumstance that involves interacting with people, and he freezes. This is bad enough where social affairs are concerned. At business conferences it becomes disastrous. Yet though it makes Ralph miserable, there seems to be nothing he can do about it. Sometimes he’s thought of seeking professional help. But he finds he’s too shy to make the appointment—and that’s irrational, to say the least.

  Yet Ralph’s dilemma is trivial compared with that of one of his acquaintances, Stanley Horton.

  Stanley has a thing about little boys. He’s drawn to them so strongly that his life has come to revolve around them. He teaches a Sunday School class, leads a Boy Scout troop, serves as buddy and confidante to every kid on the block. Indeed, it amuses (and upon occasion irritates) his wife; she says he’s closer to the youngsters than he is to her.

  Unfortunately, that’s only the beginning. Because the secret games Stanley plays with the boys he knows best involve penitentiary offenses. If his wife were aware of them—well, that would be even worse than prison; Stanley already has made up his mind to kill himself at the first hint that the horrifying skeleton in his closet has been discovered. If he could bring himself to talk about his situation, he’d be the first to agree that the whole weird phantasmagoria of his world is, to say the least, irrational.

  Then there’s Anna, who can’t stop talking. Gretchen, who always takes a small “gift” or two with her when she leaves a store. Dave, at the bank, with the tic that makes him grimace and blink as he works. Dr. Morris, the psychiatrist who’s compulsive to the point that he scrambles to retrieve any paper that falls to the floor during a therapy session. Cora, so grossly fat her husband swears he’s going to leave her. Austin, the hermit of Maple Street, hiding in his crumbling Victorian home like one of the Collyer brothers, New York’s famed recluse of another day.

  Wild cards, all of them. Men and women who somehow walk a different road than their fellows as they move through life, trapped in a maze of irrational behavior despite all their efforts to escape it.

  As with the eccentric, three questions will help to guide you through the labyrinth that is the psycho:

  1. What does Psycho do that reveals his deviance?

  2. How does he mask it from his fellows?

  3. What logic lies behind his madness?

  Which brings up a related question only you can answer: Do you limit yourself to objective reporting in dealing with the psycho, or is it to your advantage to enter his mind?

  A case can be made for either side. On the one hand, the more you can wrap your deviant in a mantle of mystery, the better your chance of bringing him off. On the other hand, tell the story—or part of it—from his viewpoint so we know what he’s thinking, and your readers may end up understanding and sympathizing with him. For as the old adage has it, “To know all is to forgive all.”

  I can recall an old story of my own that drew much of its strength, I was told, from the fact that alternate chapters were written in the viewpoint of the villain—he was known only as “The Murderer” until the very last scene—and revealed his thoughts and feelings as well as his actions.

  Perhaps the best way out is to experiment, trying both techniques and then selecting the one that seems most effective for that particular story.

  You also need at least a bit of insight into why the psycho behaves as he does. What turns him to irrational action?

  As a starting point, we must put irrationality itself under the microscope . . . ask ourselves just what constitutes such behavior.

  For our purposes here, let’s define it as action that sees a character doing something he knows better than.

  “Knows better than” means “would know better than, if Character were normal.”

  This perhaps will come through more clearly if I remind you that most of the characters we write about conform to society’s standards, by and large . . . adapt themselves to the demands that group life places on them. The viewpoint character, in particular, is almost always rational. Stupidity of consequence on his part tends to be limited to comedic situations. Or at least he can always make excuses for himself and his behavior.

  Or, look in a mirror. You can always justify your actions to yourself, can’t you? Even when you disapprove of said actions?

  In a wild card character’s viewpoint, however, the situation’s different. Because your story person is irrational in his thinking, which means you have to deal with someone who’s convinced that his sister is poisoning him, or that the man next door is projecting slanderous radio waves into his head, or that the world is coming to an end at 9:00 A.M. tomorrow.

  You must then devise ways to show that irrationality, through viewpoint insights—looking into Character’s head and revealing what he’s thinking—or objectively, via Character’s dialogue or behavior, as when the nephew in Arsenic and Old Lace, who has the delusion he’s Teddy Roosevelt, lunges up the stairs, shouting “Charge!”

  Bear in mind, too, that intellectually the wild card may be perfectly well aware that he’s acting in a socially unacceptable manner and against his own best interests.

  Or his behavior may seem entirely logical to him. Or, even if he recognizes that it makes no sense, he may be at a loss to control the impulse. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Dr. Jekyll loses control of himself to his drug-induced alter ego, Mr. Hyde, offers the classic example.

  In any case, he goes right on doing whatever it is he’s doing. Why? Call it, if you will, a situation in which tension has built up to a point where emotion so overloads intellect as to bring on a loss of rational control.

  How does such an emotional overload work? One way to explain it would be to say that in each of our lives various factors exist that create tension.

  We find these elements disturbing, upsetting. Inordinately so, in some of us. Yet because they’re so upsetting, we find it difficult to face them, meet them head on, deal with them in a rational—which is to say, intelligent, realistic—manner.

  Bottled up, carried to extremes, the tensions such elements create can be painful—emotionally distressing, the way a guilty conscience or an unrequited love or an undissipated grief or a dreadful disappointment would be distressing if projected to the nth degree.

  In an effort to evade this pain, this tension we somehow can’t release, we attempt on an unconscious level to dodge around the issue, whatever it is.

  We do this, the psychologists say, by means of various mental mechanisms, techniques of ev
asion. Displacement (an attack against a person or object less dangerous than the one that’s upsetting you—you don’t dare kick the boss, so you kick the dog or yell at your wife) probably is the most common, though there are a wide assortment of others: progression, fixation, conversion, regression, dissociation, and so on; see your library’s books on psychiatry or psychology for details.

  Thus, Elaine escapes from her “upwardly mobile” strains in a bottle. Ralph walks wide around his fear of people via shyness. Stanley becomes a child molester. Anna strives to lower her tension level with endless babblings. Gretchen turns to shoplifting, kleptomania. Dave develops a tic, an involuntary, nervous twitching. Dr. Morris succumbs to obsessive-compulsive tendencies to neatness. Cora calms uneasiness with food. Austin, as a recluse, shuts out the world.

  Such tendencies, to a degree, are present in all of us. I try to slough off confrontational phone calls. My wife is uneasy if dirty dishes stand on the sinkboard overnight. My neighbor detests dogs and children. So long as such quirks don’t get out of hand, who cares? It’s ordinarily a matter of little consequence whether we can figure out or otherwise unearth the origins of such feelings. Odds are our second-guessings would prove wrong in any case.

  (Unless we need an angle for story purposes, that is. In which circumstance, the answer of course is the one set forth in Chapter 8: Assign an appropriate cause arbitrarily, and then rationalize it.)

  What does matter is that you recognize that not every aspect of character in a story need be neatly wrapped and packaged. Better by far that you face up to the vagaries of human nature, the “wild card” aspects of character set forth in this chapter. Certainly it will add color, realism, and interest to your story people, and your readers will love you for it.

  A character with a “wild card” twist may of course pop up in a story whether you will it or no—a sudden flash of inspiration that solves a problem, or strikes a needed note of tension, or shows potentialities for developing a new plot thread. If that happens, I trust that this chapter will show you how to deal with him or her.