Creating Characters: How to Build Story People
Page 11
Which doesn’t mean you have to introduce such people, you understand. In most stories you’ll neither need or want them. But when you encounter a situation in which you need a character whose behavior is incomprehensible or irrationally out of line with most people’s view of the world, an eccentric or psycho may be the answer. Just be careful that you know why you’ve chosen to use him or her, in terms of your plot, and that you’re fully aware of how to create and handle the individual.
It may help if you are aware of the things a psychiatrist looks for when he’s trying to decide whether or not a person is “sane” (whatever that means; it’s a subject on which there’s anything but total agreement, as witness the dissenting views of such insightful specialists as Thomas Szasz, E. Fuller Torrey, and R. D. Laing).
The first step, obviously, is observation. Check out the people with whom you come in contact who strike you as behaving irrationally—that is, acting in a manner they “know better than.” Note the things they do that set them aside and betray a warp in judgment.
Appearance will play a considerable role. A man who persists in wearing a woman’s bra over his shirt is likely to rouse speculation. So will a woman who shaves a broad strip the length of her head, or cuts away her dress so one breast hangs bare.
Indeed, changes in appearance will be remarked. If I have been known for neatness all my adult life, then start coming to social affairs and church unshaven and in dirty shirt and torn sweater, people will begin to look askance.
Behavior, too, will play a role. When, one night at choir practice, I suddenly lift my skirt crotch-high and sing and dance in a most unbecoming manner, it will attract attention. Same for wandering through backyards at night, becoming lost on my way to the grocery store, or making garbled phone calls to the police and FBI.
More subtle, less easily detected, are inner twists and changes. And indeed, for the writer, there’s little need to heed them until they manifest themselves outwardly. Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower killer, offers a case in point. He appeared perfectly normal, a model young man, until he gunned down sixteen innocent victims.
Finally, it’s important to probe self-insight. “Why are you here? What’s bothering you? What seems to be your problem?” are questions every therapist must ask, sooner or later.
An additional item to remember as you build your story people is a comment by Dr. John Duval Campbell in his Everyday Psychiatry:
. . . one personality type does not change into another personality type . . . If the patient has a psychoneurotic makeup today he will have a psychoneurotic constitution a year from now or even 20 years from now . . . A schizoid personality remains schizoid throughout life, and a psychopathic personality remains a psychopath. A schizoid does not become a psychoneurotic, and a psychoneurotic does not change, regardless of what the stress may be, into a hypo-manic or mental defective. This immutability of personality types is the most useful and dependable law the beginner can learn in psychiatry.
What is the significance of this observation for the writer?
First, it’s a warning against labeling any character of consequence as simply “crazy.” To do so is to expose your ignorance at an embarrassing level.
Second, it tells you how important it is that you do enough research on any “wild card” character so you can decide intelligently what kind of problem he has and provide him with appropriate symptoms to carry off the role.
Do understand, I’m not proposing that you earn your doctorate in clinical psychology before you start to write. Scanning a book or two probably will familiarize you with the field enough to prevent your going too far overboard. Indeed, beware of delving too deeply into research, for such can become a trap that has you forever studying instead of writing. Make your motto, “Write first; correct later.” It really does work better that way!
(Unless you’re proposing to write psychological or pseudo-psychological novels like Robert L. Duncan’s The Serpent’s Mark or Terry Cline’s Missing Persons or Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, that is. If that’s your yen you can hardly do too much digging.
One final question: what about using the eccentric or psycho as a viewpoint character?
Well, it can be done, certainly. Witness Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man and Fredric Brown’s Knock Three-One-Two and Robert Bloch’s The Scarf—not to mention various of Stephen King’s assorted strolls through nightmare. It’s not necessarily easy, though, and many readers find such tales distasteful.
Further, horror—that’s the category into which psycho-viewpoint novels tend to fall—has become pretty much a specialty, so you need to be thoroughly familiar with the genre if you’re to avoid the stereotypes that bring rejection.
But you’ll work that out on your own. Right now, it’s time to turn to another aspect of the fictioneer’s craft that of necessity is important to every writer: the task of dealing with special problems that revolve around building the different characters found in virtually every story.
You’ll find some ideas on the subject in the next chapter: “The Role of Roles.”
10
THE ROLE OF ROLES
How do you treat a hero?
You shape the hero to fit the job he or she has to do.
In each story you write there’ll be certain characters who, by virtue of special attributes they possess or the roles they play, warrant special attention.
We’ll consider some of those characters in this chapter. Specifically, let’s turn the spotlight on:
• The interesting character
• The memorable character
• The viewpoint character
• The protagonist
• The antagonist
• The love interest character
• The incidental character
• The non-human character
Let’s consider characters with special attributes first, bearing in mind always that said attributes are by no means limited to particular story people. To greater or less degree, the things I say about them will apply to every member of your cast. By isolating the discussion of each category here, the principles involved will stand out more sharply.
THE INTERESTING CHARACTER
Yes, every character you write about should be interesting, and in all likelihood will be. But if one or more seem to have the blahs, here are the tools you need to remedy the situation.
First off, the key fact to remember is that the dull character ordinarily is the predictable character—the one who always reacts in the same way, as when Hero is always noble and Heroine is always virtuous and Villain always fiendish.
How to overcome this? Provide the character with logical yet unanticipated aspects of personality, so that Reader can no longer take Character’s behavior and reactions for granted.
Thus, Hero may be noble. But perhaps he also holds opinions that take readers aback. Example: the downgrading of the importance of rape by series hero Matt Helm in one of Donald Hamilton’s novels. Or a straight arrow hero, believing the end justifies the means, may treat an opponent with brutal cruelty in order to get information.
Heroine, in turn, is the soul of honesty. Yet when she taps the till for a worthy cause, telling herself she’ll return the money when she draws her next pay, your audience will look at her with new eyes, wondering if perhaps she’ll dip in again the next time round. And fiendish Villain quite possibly has a thing about kittens that leads him to croon to and cuddle a stray as if it were a long-lost child.
Tony Hillerman’s Navajo policemen frequently draw reader attention by behaving in an unpredictable manner—unpredictable to a non-Navajo, that is. Hillerman always explains the Indian custom which renders such behavior believable. But in the meantime he’s captured audience attention.
Nan Hamilton deviated from the standard detective when she introduced Ohara, a Japanese officer who meditates as well as captures criminals.
Ethnic characters often are made interesting by vi
rtue of such handling. Their actions and attitudes vary from that expected by the public.
This kind of thing can operate on any level. Sherlock Holmes and his cocaine offer a prime example. And I recall one of my own stories in which I gave a cold-eyed gambler in the pioneer West a sentimental streak, quite in contrast to the other elements of his personality. It not only helped distinguish him from stereotypical gamblers featured in the western pulps; it made him more interesting and, in the resolution, was paid off when he spent his last twenty-dollar gold piece on a doll for a little girl.
THE MEMORABLE CHARACTER
It might be nice if one way or another you made your hero or heroine—and perhaps assorted other characters—unique, memora ble. For although this can be overdone, few things are more likely to prove fatal to a story than the passive character, the forgettable character, the character who fades into the woodwork.
On the other hand, readers are hardly likely to forget Jack Bickham’s Wildcat O’Shea, who rode the range through more than a dozen volumes in a, shall we say, colorful costume:
Coming up the road from the left, heading toward town, was a giant roan. Slouching in the saddle with a blue Stetson pulled brim-out around his head was a tall, wide-shouldered, long-legged gent. His saddle fenders were painted crimson and Mexican silver work glittered. He wore with the blue hat a green shirt and purple vest, a yellow belt, orange pants and boots that had been painted lavender. A huge Colt hung down his right hip, in a silvery holster. He had two shell belts crossed over his chest, and a carbine slung over his back, and out of the bedroll tied on the horse’s rump stuck two cylindrical objects, one of which had to be the neck of a bottle and the other of which looked chillingly like a stick of dynamite. The man was just riding along, bouncing with the horse, yet even in his careless slouch he managed to convey a sense of lazy grace over the distance.
The same holds true for the woman in Michael Avallone’s first Ed Noon novel, The Tall Dolores:
I’ll begin by telling you she was the tallest girl that ever came into my office. But tall isn’t the word for it. Not really. As spotty as my schooling was, I can do better than that.
Dolores was a hell of a lot more than tall. She was huge, statuesque. A Glamazon. A regular Empire State Building of female feminine dame. And all woman besides.
Six feet three in her stocking feet. Don’t scoff. Don’t laugh at the notion. Don’t even faint. Put black pumps with three-inch heels on those feet and you’ll get a rough sketch of the shadow she threw across my threshold the day she crossed it.
Not that such physical uniqueness is necessarily a requirement for a memorable character. Aaron Elkin’s Gideon Oliver is distin guished by his unusual occupation as a forensic anthropologist, dubbed the “skeleton detective.” Frank Gruber delighted an audience with his human encyclopedia, Oliver Quade. John Le Carré reverses the glamour image of secret agents to hook readers with the dull gray realism of George Smiley, antithesis of Ian Fleming’s flamboyant James Bond.
Even minor characters can be given color with minimal wordage. Witness Father Budreau, a priest in William X. Kienzle’s Assault with Intent, who carries a derringer along with his rosary. Or “Ash the Flash” in Martha Grimes’s The Anodyne Necklace, with his long track record of exposing himself in women’s restrooms.
For the ultimate memorable character, and a minor character at that, I nominate Checkers Chauncey, presented by Joe Lansdale in The Magic Wagon.
He was a nose picker, and about the best I’ve ever seen at it. He didn’t do it like a lady will do, like she ain’t really doing it, but just scratching, and her finger will shoot in and scoop out the prize and she’ll flick it away before you can say, “Hey, ain’t that a booger?”
He didn’t even do it like some men do, which is honest, but not unpolite. They’ll turn sort of to the side and get in there after it in a businesslike manner, but you didn’t actually have to witness the work or what come of it.
No. Checkers Chauncey, who I think of as Nose Picker Chauncey, must have once been a miner or a mule whacker, as they’re the nastiest, and most mannerless creatures on earth. There ain’t a thing they won’t do in front of man, child, or lady. They just don’t give a damn. Chauncey went about his digging front-on and open, using his finger so hard it rose a mound on his nostrils, like a busy groundhog throwing up dirt. And when he got what he was looking for, he always held it in front of him just to see, I guess, if he’d accidentally found something other than what he’d expected, and when he thumped it away you had to be kind of fast on your feet, because he didn’t care who or what it stuck to.
So much for Chauncey. Even if you find him disgusting or dis tasteful, one thing’s for certain, I guarantee you. You won’t forget him!
How do you create a memorable character? Focus, it seems to me, is the key factor. Your focus.
That is, you select some unique aspect of body, mind, background, or personality in your story person, then emphasize it. Build it up. Exaggerate it. Make it striking and colorful enough that you remember it, the way you remember Nero Wolfe’s weight or Quasimodo’s hump or Auntie Mame’s wild spontaneity or Mr. Spock’s lack of emotion or Pollyanna’s optimism and tendency to find good in everything.
Then, in the words of Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage, wave those tags! Bring them in over and over again, so that your readers have no opportunity to forget them and the character they represent. Whereupon, before you know it, you just may have created a striking, memorable story person.
One final item: The examples I’ve chosen above are super-broadbrush, wildly exaggerated where many markets are concerned. I’ve picked them intentionally in order to make my point. I assume, however, that you have judgment enough to temper the concept to fit your own tastes and story.
THE VIEWPOINT CHARACTER
Whatever your story, your readers will need some kind of orientation point, some place from which to watch the action. In other words, a point of view.
Ordinarily that “point” is in a character—a viewpoint character. Or, as I used to put it, “Whose skin are we in?” Through whose eyes are we seeing or experiencing the story?
In choosing this character, you limit yourself to presenting your story as he experiences it. That is to say, he can watch what other story people do, but he can’t see himself.
He will, however, know anything you want your readers to know about his own state of mind:
“Damn you, Jack Dalton!” he choked. But that was as far as he dared go. Dalton’s hand already was on the gun. One wrong move on his own part and he’d be dead.
You want to show Character in action from the outside? Then switch to another viewpoint character—an observer, like Doctor Watson worshipfully watching Sherlock Holmes perform his miracles of deduction. Here’s what Dalton sees:
Slade’s face turned scarlet. His nostrils flared. He bared his teeth in a savage, death’s-head grin.
Only from the outside can we see the color of Slade’s face, or the flaring of his nostrils, or the death’s-head grin.
This can be very effective, but by and large it’s limited in emotional intensity. And the interpretation of what’s happening is strictly Observer’s, and not necessarily correct. Looking at Character from the outside, readers won’t know what he thinks or feels or sees save as it’s translated into appearance or action. Is he angry? You can’t say so, because you’re outside him and therefore don’t know what he’s feeling or thinking unless he turns red in the face, clenches his fists, and cries, “Damn you, Jack Dalton!” or equivalent. And even then you can’t be sure the feeling he exhibits isn’t faked.
A third alternative is to jump around in the story like a frog on a hot griddle. One moment, the presentation may be objective, with the author reporting, interpreting, explaining. The next, quite possibly, it hops in and out of the hearts and minds of an assortment of characters when it suits the author’s whim.
This is what’s known as author omniscient viewpoint.
They were the girls of Texas, Mary Jane—twenty, Bitsy, nineteen, leggy and brown and arrogant and derisive of everything in the world including themselves. They wore very short shorts and very narrow halters and, at stops during the trip down, had come dangerously close to causing a civil riot and insurrection.
This, of course, is reporting that is objective in form, but that is actually ever so subjective because it involves selection and interpretation of details to the author’s taste.
There’s more of this alleged objective approach, a great deal more, in which MacDonald explains and the book’s other characters on a variety of levels. But eventually he goes inside—that is, into the viewpoint of—a character, Miles Drummond.
Miles trotted out to the dining room after it was dark to look at the tables and worry about the seating.
I emphasize the worry because it’s a feeling and only Miles can know that it exists. Which means that, temporarily at least, we’re in Miles’s viewpoint.
Later,
. . . The light filled the room with eerie shadows and left the high ceiling in darkness. He got a chair and removed the shades and then stepped back to look it over. It was worse without the shades. He replaced them. The place settings distressed him. He liked things to be very nice. He hoped that the light was so dim that they would not notice the dozen breeds and brands of glasses, silver and china, or the dim stains and mends and worn spots in the tableclothes . . .
And so on. Further, this is more than just description. The things Miles notices and the way he reacts to them characterize him, make him very much an individual human being with tastes and standards and feelings.
As the story progresses, we move into other viewpoints: