Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  How do you do this?

  You downplay generalities and, instead, concentrate on the tell ing detail. You walk wide around words that apply to anyone: man, woman, boy, girl, fat, thin, tall, short, pretty, and the like, save as a launching pad.

  Beyond that launching pad you start, of course, with the Big Picture, the dominant impression: adjective of manner, vocational noun. Then you incorporate additional tags and traits that modify it, flesh it out, as described in Chapter 4.

  As you write, however, you get down to cases. Specifics.

  That is, if you’re talking about a man with a limp, don’t let it be just any limp. Make it individual, distinctive. Perhaps the man lurches along, or drags his foot, or humps his shoulders as if each step were painful. Does he walk with a rigid, erect stance, in a manner that says he doesn’t want to acknowledge his handicap? Or is his progression more that of a person who’s undergone a Provo kneecap job? Or the tentative, unsteady totter in the manner often found in someone eighty years of age?

  Is Character a woman—a less than fragile flower, to say the least? If so, don’t be content just to call her tough, or to go through the hackneyed cigarette-tapping/lighting/snuffing out routine. Let her, instead, retrieve a can of Copenhagen from her purse and tuck a pinch of snuff beneath her upper lip. Or perhaps she wears black lipstick, or has a scorpion tattooed on her inner thigh.

  These are factual details that make the person described ever so much an individual. At the same time, they draw forth a reaction, a feeling, from the reader. Yet they do so without using judgmental words, without injecting the writer’s opinion into the picture in subjective phrasing. When you say, “She was a tough-looking broad,” you’re passing judgment on her. You’re assessing her in terms of your personal prejudices. And Reader may or may not agree.

  If, on the other hand, you report that “She wore a smudged T-shirt at the moment, torn to the point that her bra-less left breast was almost falling out. The shirt blazoned the slogan, ‘Death from Below!’ and the image of a blood-dripping knife,” your reader is in a position to draw his own conclusions. If he wants to label her a tough-looking broad, that’s an acceptable expression of his attitude. Same for “She crossed her legs. The split skirt fell away, revealing a scorpion tattooed high on the inside of her right thigh.” The onus of judgment isn’t on you.

  Working from this principle, shall we postulate another rule of sorts, then? In description, your goal should be to provide your readers with the raw material to enable them to draw their own conclusions.

  Reader may or may not agree with you when you say Character looks hung over. But he’ll decide for himself if you say that your man looks up at you out of “bleary, bloodshot eyes” while he “scrubs shaking fingers along his stubbled jaw.”

  In the same way, your female lead will come through more sharply if she “runs slender fingers along the laddering in her stocking, scowling and muttering, ‘Oh, shit!’ as a nail snags a loose thread,” rather than merely “exclaiming petulantly.”

  How do you find such details, such specifics to describe?

  The trick here is to draw upon the images that already exist within your brain, born of your own experience. Conjure up a picture of precisely what you saw—or heard or touched or smelled or tasted. Then, link it to the feelings, good or bad, that it stimulated. Is the issue woodsmoke? Fond memories of romance around the campfire may be the concept that you’re seeking. Or the image it brings may be the shock and pain of a forest fire that destroyed your mountain cabin. Is this a moment when you can’t escape the driving strains and discords of Kurt Weill’s Three-Penny Opera? What are the feelings that go with it? Search out words to describe it, capture it on paper, on a level where your reader shares the experience with you. Or, work the process in reverse. Whatever feeling you’re trying to evoke, try to pin down stimuli that might tie to it.

  Do you get the idea? First, in your own mind, settle on the feeling you want. But then, instead of telling Reader what that feeling is, walk wide around the temptation to hand him your interpretation on a platter. Instead, draw the picture in a way as to let him decide what it means. It’s one thing to say, “He was a real con man,” another to draw a picture for your reader with, “I listened. Tears glistened in Horst’s eyes as he told me how the police were trying to frame him. The only trouble was, the property clerk already was sorting through old Mrs. Taggart’s jewelry, reclaimed from the spare tire of Horst’s car.”

  Such objective presentations are most effective when they concentrate on the particular, the definite, and the concrete, rather than the general, the vague, and the abstract.

  Why? Because when you speak of the particular, it means that you’re dealing with a single person, unique and special, rather than people in general. “Definite” says exact, specific—in grammar, the is the definite article; a, the indefinite. “Concrete” equals real, material—not vague or abstract.

  Particular, definite, concrete formulations draw pictures in your readers’ heads. Vivid pictures, especially if you bear down on things you can see and hear and smell and taste and touch. And seeing is believing, as the saying goes, for in the last analysis all our feelings spring from sensory perceptions. Tomatoes are one red, the setting sun another, blood a third; and each conjures up its own special feeling. Remember the smell of lilacs, or bacon frying, or day-old sweat, or ether? The smoothness of mink, the graininess of sand (and, in contrast, that of scouring powder), the roughness of a rasp or splintered wood? The taste of ripe Camembert cheese, and that of sharp cheddar; of chocolate and peppermint and licorice.

  It will help, too, in your descriptions, if you make use as much as possible of active verbs as differentiated from passive.

  What’s an active verb? It’s one that shows Character taking action, doing something, rather than merely existing. As in “He sat down heavily,” instead of “He was sitting.” (Even better, get rid of the adverb, the “heavily.” Make it, for instance, “With a grunt, he sat down, clutching the old chair’s arms and letting his weight go before his rump hit, so that the old chair squeaked in protest.”) It just may make a more vivid picture.

  (Simplicity and brevity are important in writing, but not as important as vividness.)

  Beyond this, never forget that things don’t have feelings; an individual person does.

  A feeling is a private interpretation of data. If a thing is important, it’s important to somebody.

  Bear in mind, also, who it is who’s experiencing any event you report on, the differences in what they react to. If a character describing another character weighs in at 125 pounds dripping wet, he or she will see a 250-pound woman as monstrous . . . whereas if Narrator is 400, the 250-pounder may come through as positively sylph-like. An old woman will focus on stimuli that a child or her daughter-in-law or a policeman quite possibly may ignore in favor of more personal reactions.

  The old woman: “She saw the way his biceps bulged out the rolled-up sleeves. It brought back the ache to her forearm, where he’d dug in his fingers. Involuntarily, ever so slightly, she shivered.”

  The child: “The man’s face got red and and sort of mean and he sat down on his heels. He looked blobbish that way, like one of the big clown toys that was round on the bottom and you couldn’t knock it over. ‘Hey, kid,’ he said. His breath smelled bad.”

  The daughter-in-law: “Her mind kept coming back to the stubble, how it had scratched her face, her breasts. And his hands, his fingers. The way they always poked and prodded and gouged.”

  The veteran cop: “Automatically, he noted the way the squat stranger’s left eyelid drooped till the eye was almost closed, like he was sighting a gun. The chin drew in against the chest and the shoulders hunched in a way that said he’d maybe fought pro some time or other.”

  Four different people, four different reactions.

  Note, however, that each reaction focuses on a stimulus—in other words, there’s something for the character to react to; and each
gives heed to something different.

  Where do you acquire all these details?

  You collect them, of course. Primarily by your own, personal observation as you ask yourself what fragments of appearance and behavior indicate that a character is a wimp, or a braggart, or a bully, or a fuss-budget, or an egghead, or a slattern.

  This is to say, you watch people—probably on a level you’ve never watched before.

  In a restaurant, for example, it might be to your advantage to focus on as simple an act as coffee-drinking. Entirely apart from sugar/cream/black divisions, does everyone follow the same pattern? Who stirs and who doesn’t? Who spoons the coffee and who sips—or slurps, or gulps—from the cup? Does anyone stir with a finger in the absence of a spoon, or run his tongue along the cup rim after every swallow? What happens when coffee slops into a saucer? Does the subject of your attention pour it back into the cup? Or slip a paper napkin into the saucer? Or call a waitress? Or get red-faced with irritation? And so on, ad infinitum.

  Coffee-drinking isn’t the issue, of course. Awareness is. For unless you acquire the habit of paying attention to the things people do, commonplace or funny or far out, you’ll lack a vital tool for writing. What counts is development of your mind’s eye, so that when you need action or bits of business you can recall some frag ment you can use or distort or combine with others without making a major issue of it.

  Collect incidents in the same way. The reaction of a boy in tennis shoes who kicks a prickly pear. The expression of outraged frustration on the face of a man who finds his fresh-slaughtered side of beef has been wrapped in a kerosene-soaked tarp. The revulsion and horror that goes with the discovery on entering an apartment that the friend you came to visit is three days dead and stenching.

  You may even want to take advantage of the approach used by cartoonists. The trick is to mount a mirror conveniently close at hand so you can mime in it, registering whatever emotion you feel to be appropriate for the character about whom you’re writing at the moment.

  In so doing, remember to stay objective, factual, nonjudgmental. Show how the character looks and acts, and then let your readers extract whatever feelings they wish from it. Or, if you need subjective insights, let another character voice them as representing his own viewpoint: “Joe scowled. ‘He’s a mean-looking mother,’ he grunted.”

  Whatever your approach, never forget that reader response will depend to a large degree on your providing Character with the right stimuli. If you want him to register anger, give him something to be angry about. Same for passion, pity, or pain.

  By all means, too, be sure to relate Character to story. Never let him be like the person who insists on telling you about someone you have no involvement with and don’t care about. “So what?” isn’t a reaction you want to evoke.

  It goes without saying, too, that your own personality and tastes will play a major role in this matter of how you write about your characters. Purple prose was a thing beloved of Poe and Lovecraft, and the sparse objective style that marked Hemingway and Hammett drew imitators not as single spies but in battalions. Trollope, in his own time, was as much a master on his front as Elmore Leonard today is on his. And I gurgle with delight at the hilarious distortions twisted on language by Robert Bloch’s Lefty Feep, even though I could never so warp it myself in a thousand years.

  Styles in character description change, also. When Dostoyevsky describes a character as “a diminutive, withered up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen’s leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag, and in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her shoulders, a mangy fur cape, yellow with age,” he’s writing for an 1860’s reader, not today’s. And Horatio Alger’s handling of Ragged Dick and Tattered Tom is unlikely to capture a mass audience in these closing years of the twentieth century.

  Figures of speech—comparison, metaphor, simile, personification, and the like—are useful tools in adding color, provided they’re handled with some sense of proportion. Run into the ground, on the other hand, they can render your best efforts ridiculous, as witness some of the examples cited in Bill Pronzini’s mirth-provoking Gun in Cheek.

  Words’ connotations, their emotional overtones, complicate the problem. Honky is no more complimentary than nigger, and both mirror bitter feelings. Is gay pejorative on the same level as queer or fairy? What kind of feelings are aroused by freak or freedom fighter? Is bad a plaudit or an insult? How about sharp versus stylish, cool versus hip? Do make it your business to become ever so much aware of such, for both characters and adjectives frequently become dated.

  It also will be to your advantage to listen—specifically, to listen to how characters speak, how they say the things they say, as well as to other aspects of the spoken language.

  We’ll take such up in “The Things They Say,” our next chapter.

  13

  THE THINGS THEY SAY

  How do you write good dialogue?

  You pay as much attention to feelings as to words.

  The things a person says reflect and reveal his character. Couple his speech with that of other story people and you have dialogue, one of a writer’s most useful tools for creating unique individuals, revealing relationships, building conflict, and advancing a story.

  There are a variety of other reasons for a writer to use dialogue, of course. One is that, well done, it makes reading easier. It isn’t as silly as it sounds. Watch the browsers at any bookstore if you don’t believe me. Thumbing through the opening pages of a book, more often than not they’ll pause at a broken page, one with lots of white space.

  A page with dialogue, specifically.

  The solid, blocky pages, heavy with copy? They’ll tend to pass those by.

  There are more reasons for using dialogue than easy reading, of course. A major one is drama.

  Ray Palmer, my old pulp editor and mentor, put this in the simplest possible form.

  “Always open with dialogue,” he told me. “Why? Because when two people are talking, they have to be talking about something—something your readers can understand without a lot of explanation. Like for instance a fight.”

  Well, that may be overstating it a little, but the principle’s sound. Dialogue equals people, and people talking equals some sort of interchange of information or ideas or feelings. Chitchat isn’t enough. Even two lovers exchanging sweet nothings in bed is a prelude to something about to happen.

  In addition, the tone of that dialogue sets a mood for the scene, establishes a feeling. Witness our two lovers with their verbal foreplay.

  Note, too, that one wrong word or phrase can change that mood and lead to someone getting up and going home or to the guest room.

  So. Dialogue provides both mood and information.

  Often, also, it can be used to contrast the difference between what a viewpoint character thinks and what he says. Again, consider two lovers—apparent lovers, that is:

  “I adore you, Carolyn,” he said, stroking her hand gently.

  A nicely calculated move, it bared his wristwatch: 7:30. Desperately, he searched for some acceptable excuse to leave. He had to get to Deirdre’s by eight. Yet he couldn’t make it obvious. Not with Carolyn’s inheritance in the balance.

  An additional dialogue value is the way it lends an air of reality to a story. The things a person says, the way he speaks, are major factors in bringing him alive on the page. It’s one thing to say your heroine’s rival is amoral and less than literate, another to quote a line like “So he’s on the take. Who cares? A buck is a buck. He can snag my nylons anytime.”

  What about dialogue’s individualizing function?

  The words you speak, what you say and how you say it, reveal you as a particular person. If you’re bookish, you talk one way; if a sports fan, another. Intelligence comes through, and so does slow-wittedness
or illiteracy. The cautious person speaks with restraint, the reticent as little as possible—perhaps to the point of limiting himself to monosyllables to a great degree. Garrulousness may indicate a pulsing ego. But then again, it may not; the rush and gush of words sometimes reflect embarrassment, and any police interrogator knows the value of silence at the right moment in pushing a suspect to confess. Most bartenders and airline hostesses have been conditioned to make conversation with anyone and on any subject.

  These are things a writer must think about, be aware of. If the words he puts in his story people’s mouths are out of character, he’ll be hard put to rise above them.

  Those words should reflect such factors as sex, age, occupation, status, and background.

  A grandmother speaks: “I keep everything tidy.”

  Her housewife daughter: “I like a neat house. But quality time together beats spick and span.”

  Housewife’s teenage girl: “So the joint is a mess. Who cares?”

  Housewife’s clerk-typist friend: “I try to straighten the place up, but it gets to be a shambles.”

  The manager’s wife: “I have this wonderful Puerto Rican woman. She keeps our house spotless.”

  The Puerto Rican: “All the time clean, clean. I get so—how you say?—cansada. Sometimes I wish I go back to San Juan.”

  If housewife’s husband is middle management, he’ll probably speak reasonably literate standard English. His mechanic may not. And his doctor quite possibly will salt his lines with medical terms totally out of range of his patients’ experience. A solder has his own vocabulary, and so does a sailor, and so does a miner and a carpenter and a farmer. It also goes without saying that Maine and Mississippi and California and Colorado and the Carolinas have their private speech patterns.

  (It should be noted, though, that regional differences and area dialects are fading, thanks to television, education, and military service. Outside of an occasional phrase added for color, beware of throwing in chunks of Ozark or Cajun folk speech or the like. To have one Black character describe another as a “bad dude” makes your point. To inflict a page of “Like I mean ya know I doin’ skag like I ain’t not ready to wig out on no crystal” on your readers is something else.)