Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (20 page)

In other words, if it’s amusing, present it in amusing terms. Like everything else in humor, this means to work with the assumption/alternative pattern, in terms of both a character’s thinking and speech. In each of the cited examples, you tend to expect one thing, but you get another.

(What if your handling is third-person objective, not entering Character’s mind? Then you describe what goes on in objective terms, of course, setting forth what happens as if you were a camera that focuses on details that you feel likely to prove amusing to your readers.)

If a scene or incident in a serious story is supposed to be humorous, set the tone at once, the same way you’d prepare your readers for a change in time or place or circumstance or viewpoint.

If the issue is a comic relief character, paint her in amusing terms from the moment of her introduction. And it won’t hurt a bit if, in that introduction, she is caught up in an amusing situation or behaves in an amusing manner.

Finally,

3. Don’t play gag-writer.

Gags tend to dominate a story. They’re great for stand-up comics, but there’s little place for them in fiction.

Humor is, instead, a tone, a mood. It should be indigenous to a story or scene or character—not something extraneous, stuck on after the fact like a corn-plaster.

And beyond this?

You can plough through Bergson, Eastman, and Freud, of course . . . master long lists of sure-fire humor formulae and topics . . . argue at length as to whether drive to superiority ranks higher than embarrassment as a source of mirth.

But in all honesty, intellectualization is not the answer. No approach, no system, no formulation can claim to stand as definitive; and that includes the things I’ve said here. Ever and always, humor is subjective. The secret in coaxing smiles lies less in study and methodology than it does in avoiding them. Once you understand the basic laugh mechanism, the principle of the unanticipated alternative, be content to let your subconscious do the work. Believe me, it may surprise you.

Stay aware, always, that a story is the record of how somebody deals with danger. In humor, the danger is primarily a threat to vanity, an assault on man’s conviction that he knows all the answers.

Your problems, if any, will tend to revolve around your search for apt alternatives—unanticipated deviations from the norm that you can shape into smiles.

Your starting point in attacking this problem quite possibly will be a list of the assumptions your readers normally would make about your subject—the
shoulds
from which you propose to deviate, whether your topic be horseflies or society matrons or bowling alleys or ways to describe a ball-point pen.

There follows focused free association. If your subject is a person, then you know that he or she may be considered in terms of appearance, speech, behavior, and habit of thought, multiplied by past and future and then extended a dozen steps beyond infinity via similarity, contrast, and contiguity. Exaggeration enters, and so does incongruity. Soon you find yourself with a retired speech professor who stutters or a millionaire given to haggling over a penny sales tax.

And if your hero glances apprehensively at the huge armchair
to which he’s been directed, because “It had a hungry look about it,” some unwary reader just may break down enough to smile.

All this is extraneous to another issue, however—one that calls for immediate attention. It’s the vital importance of the words with which you portray your characters as they move through your story.

We’ll take it up in the next chapter.

The thing I remember about the old woman is the big, hairy mole that grew on her right cheek midway between nose and chin. Her name, her face, her body—those are details long forgotten. I have a vague residual impression that she was one of my mother’s friends; that’s all. But I still remember the mole.

Then there was Gwen, younger sister of one of my boyhood buddies. She was pale and blonde and slender, I recall. But what really struck you about her was the fact that her lips were a vivid blue, consequence of some sort of heart ailment that, in those days, was beyond treatment.

Or consider Sam, who stuttered, or Mack, who drank, or Enos, the little banty rooster of a man who fought and refought the World War II battle for Leyte till friends would walk around the block to avoid another repetition of the story.

Why do I open this chapter on words and character description with such recollections? For one simple reason: Your goal, when you write a story, is to create or evoke
feeling
in your reader, because he reads in order to experience feeling. If you don’t touch him on the feeling level, sooner or later—sooner, in all likelihood—he’ll stop reading.

Further, feelings about virtually everything already exist within your reader. Your task is merely to devise ways to bring them forth. Therefore, most often, you write about characters, because as people ourselves we’re naturally curious and interested in the human animal and how it functions. Reading about them, your reader
shares the feelings one or more of them feel. If you could achieve the same results with algebraic formulae, we’d all be mathematicians.

The principle involved here is simple enough. You want your reader to draw his own conclusions as to what’s going on, how the characters feel. You do this by giving him appropriate stimuli to react to . . . in terms of sensory perceptions, not prepackaged emotions which he may or may not accept. You don’t just tell him “This person is nice.” The trick is to show Character doing nice things. Whereupon, Reader will form an opinion of his own, rather than having to rely upon another person’s judgment.

Why? Because we always trust our own experience more than what someone else tells us.

Your most effective stimuli for getting through to readers thus are what are termed “significant details”: details that both individualize the character and evoke the desired feelings about him.

A character notices things according to what’s important to him at the moment. If you’re an alcoholic desperate for a drink, the clink of glassware may loom large for you. As a burglar on a midnight foray, you quite possibly magnify every sound that hints at a door opening. Light is the enemy in a photographer’s darkroom.

You, as author, must decide what’s significant. What feelings, what effect, do you want? It’s only common sense to select material that you think will evoke it . . . arrange it in an effective order . . . describe it to fit Character’s personality and tension level. The external stimuli and sensory details which will best bring the chosen feelings forth are the significant ones.

To this end, often, the key issue is what to leave out.

Which is?

Deadwood. Generalities. Empty words—words that apply to anyone, words that tell the reader nothing meaningful and so don’t develop the characters or advance the plot by changing the situation in terms of someone’s state of affairs or state of mind. Details about the character that confuse the reader, as when a smart person does a dumb thing. Or a description of Character’s ingrown toenail when it has no bearing on the action.

More specifically, you need to pick out and zero in on the salient/significant/symbolic features that distinguish Character as an individual and make him or her memorable, while at the same
time evoking feelings in him and in the reader. All else is secondary and to be subordinated.

In brief, you select, arrange, and describe your material in such a way as to achieve a predetermined effect.

Take Stevenson’s Long John Silver as a case in point. What image flashes into your mind’s eye when you think of him? And any of you who fail to answer, “His peg leg, of course,” may consider yourselves slapped on the wrist in spirit. By introducing a significant detail, Stevenson has both individualized him and raised intriguing questions that evoke curiosity—a feeling to keep readers reading.

Similarly, Sherlock Holmes bears labels and tags recognized in every country, and so does Tarzan and Mister Macawber and Fanny Hill and Philip Marlowe. So, too, do your own friends and enemies and family members—not to mention the men and women whose faces grace the wanted posters in the post office.

Now step even further into your own experience. Close your eyes. Think of how a friend appears to you. How would you describe that person to the police? In all likelihood, your friend would come through as a “big guy,” “little woman,” “pretty girl,” “smartass kid,” “shabby old man,” or the like.

Vague, right? Blurry. Indefinite. Less than sparkling.

Does this come through as distressingly close to some of my comments earlier on tags and labels? It should, for I confess shamelessly that elements of repetition are involved.

This time, however, our emphasis will be not on the labeling or tagging process as such, but on how best to describe such tags and labels.

What we’re after is an approach—a technique, a tool—for using language, words, to make each character individual and unique and evocative of feeling.

That tool, that technique, is
specificity
.

Rule of thumb: The more specific you get, the more vivid you get.

Thus, it’s not enough to speak merely of a man or a woman. What’s essential is to make that man or woman different from any other; to individualize him or her to the point that he stands out unmistakably from the crowd.

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.”