Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (23 page)

Arbitrarily, we’ll pick one of Sam’s problems to spotlight: the fact that he’s just discovered his son is heavy into drugs.

But selecting one of Sam’s problems on which to focus is only your first step. Now you must decide how to present him.

Since this is to be a short story, you’re again space limited.
Odds are you’ll have to hold your handling down to the dominant impression, dominant attitude, and goal or purpose level. Perhaps we’ll see Sam as an uptight, security-oriented, middle-bracket executive whose dominant attitude is caution, not rocking the boat. Though he’s largely preoccupied with business, he has a compulsive love of family and aches because his duty-born determination to get his son off drugs makes them antagonists too often. His goal at the moment is to force his already hostile wife to recognize that their son has a drug problem and agree to place the boy in a treatment center.

This goal, note, is one that can be brought into focus quickly, then carried through to a climax and conclusion in two or three scenes. While it
could
be developed to novel length, it also can be held down to short story level.

At this point, however, Sam remains physically nebulous. You’re going to have to provide him with a body, tags, traits—specific items to give him color and make him recognizable, likable.

Let’s say he’s cast in a nondescript corporate mold. His only distinguishing characteristics are his increasingly bald head, the fact that he ponders a lot—considering whatever problem is at hand through narrowed eyes, and that he habitually wears a scarab stickpin he inherited from his father. It’s out of style, of course, and his insolent son taunts him with the nickname “Bug” in moments of irritation. Sam doesn’t like that, but tells himself that Son will outgrow such nonsense. Meanwhile, to make an issue of it will only escalate their conflict. The drug thing is what’s crucial.

Do you see how this works? We’ve given Sam the potential to be a full-blown, complex character. But because this is a short story we’ve held him within narrow limits, selecting a single specific emotional danger for him to deal with (though others may of course be mentioned in order to give an illusion of depth), plus labels and a goal.

And of course the picture we’ve drawn here is sketchy indeed. If you were actually writing the story, you’d need to think it through in a lot more detail.

What about characterization in the long story—the novelette, the novella, the novel?

The key fact here is that you have extra wordage available, more room to move around where both the situation and your story people are concerned.

That means you may describe said people in more detail . . . explore their thoughts and feelings and relationships in greater depth. They may grow and take on new dimensions.

On the other hand—and this is a point too often forgotten in college literature classes—you don’t
have
to make them more complex if you don’t want to. Any number of long stories have been written in which the characters—and that includes the protagonist—remain simple and static. You can hardly class James Bond or Mike Hammer or Tarzan or Superman as failures.

But let’s say you do want to delve more deeply into your people. What are the factors to consider?

Time, space, number of characters, and viewpoint, it seems to me, are the salient issues.

Where timespan ordinarily is held to a minimum in the typical genre novel, it may expand to cover generations in other types. This means that structure often will, of necessity, be episodic. In order to move through a long span of years, you’ll be forced to focus on chosen key moments or periods. In each, you’ll probably develop the episode as if it were a separate story, building in the familiar scene/sequel pattern. The days or months or years between segments will be bridged with narration,
telling
what happened (in emotionalized terms, most likely), as contrasted with dramatization, the
showing
of what happens that you offer within episodes.

A word of narration. A valuable tool indeed, you can use it to expand or contract presentation as desired, leaping across centuries in a sentence or drawing a picture of a time or place that goes on for pages. Well handled, it enables you to slant a portrayal so readers love or hate a person or a situation.

Because narration summarizes, however, it lacks the excitement dramatization brings. And since it represents the author telling, it may or may not be believable.

Back to the matter of extended timespan. Ordinarily, such brings with it a need for more characters than in the simple, single-problem-oriented genre novel. Which means that you’ll have to conceive, conceptualize, and create said people, balancing them against those already in the story framework.

Further, these characters must reflect their place and period.
Attitudes of English Roundheads clashed with those of the Cavaliers. Chinese in the California goldfields mirrored one state of mind; those who made the Long March with Mao, another. The Irish immigrant, in his day, was disdained, and so was the Jew and the Italian, and the Appalachian poor white in Chicago in the sixties. The coal fields and the vineyards breed different attitudes. Anachronisms must be checked out, and so must speech patterns and dress and religious beliefs and racial prejudices and women’s place in the family constellation.

Which means that you, author of a novel with breadth and sweep, have your research cut out for you, and it won’t necessarily be quick or easy. Invariably, some key background detail can’t be uncovered, and work is stymied. I’ve known any number of writers who spent a year or more just digging, before they ever sat down at the typewriter or word processor.

Unless you’re determined to be truly scholarly, a rather obvious trick often will speed up research, however. Simply take a solid volume or two related to your subject and, when you need color detail, draw it from this source, rather than spend endless hours searching out a particular fragment. Thus, if you write mysteries, you may place great reliance on such books as LeMoyne Snyder’s old but still valuable
Homicide Investigation
, Charles Swanson’s
Criminal Investigation
, Phil and Karen McArdle’s
Fatal Fascination
, or Stanton Samenow’s
Inside the Criminal Mind
. Down the line you’re likely to accumulate a fairly extensive shelf on murder and related subjects. But for practical working purposes, picking items from two or three books can stand you in very good stead.

Remember, too, that in any story, short or long, we’re dealing with emotion as the key dynamic. So for each of the characters you bring to life in new episodes, you must devise emotional involvements in keeping with time/place/situation that build/contrast/clash with those of your other people, just as if you were constructing a new story.

There’ll also be the issue of viewpoint to complicate things. Through whose eyes will each episode be seen? Believe me, it can be a headache. But in a long book, some change is well-nigh essential. To make it more complicated, each viewpoint character calls for different handling. Certainly there must be contrast between them, and that means more digging, more research.

Finally, what about space, geography? A panoramic war novel
or a rich, far-ranging life story like Robert L. Duncan’s
China Dawn
will call for time-and-place research to fit your actors for their roles. When Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote their famous
The Mote in God’s Eye
, they created not only an imaginary world, but an entire universe.

Even when you’re dealing with a shorter timespan—a cradle-to-grave biography, for instance—be prepared for emotional complexities. In any life, you’re confronted with the fact that a life moves through a series of emotional strata.

Thus, a child’s focus may be on tensions growing from the demands of a father, a mother, or a sibling. And although conscious memory of these may pass, their emotional residue remains for years to influence Character’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.

The early teens quite possibly brings a zeroing in on adventure, whether it be via sports or street gangs or school rivalries. Late teens see sex take the spotlight. Young adulthood brings concentration on career or marriage. And so on.

In other words, such a novel is episodic, but on a different level than the generational.

In all the long, passage-of-time/display-of-character books, you work in episodic units, jumping from episode to episode or linking episodes with narration. But within each episode, you still build with scene and sequel. They remain your foundation stones.

Since you have more space to fill in the long story, more words to play with, you can have more characters, make them more complex, perhaps even change viewpoint. But you still start from the fundamentals of dominant impression, dominant attitude, and purpose.

Don’t feel obliged to lengthen your cast or complicate your people, however. Many of the most memorable characters in fiction are the next thing to stick figures. Consider Cinderella, Romeo, Tom Sawyer or, for that matter, Frankenstein. Their creators did very nicely, if you please.

The category or genre book is a novel aimed at readers with particular tastes, particular interests. They know what they enjoy reading and they buy it. Publishers, in turn, being sales and profit oriented, are more than happy to supply the desired volumes.

The so-called categories range from romance and mystery to science fiction, western, horror, and adventure. Each of these major categories breaks down into sub-clusters. Harlequin romance groupings in one set of recent guidelines included “Harlequin Presents,” “Harlequin Temptation,” “Harlequin American Romance,” “Harlequin Romantic Intrigue,” and several others, each aimed at a particular reader public. In science fiction, one covey of fans insists on so-called “hard” science fiction—that is, fiction based on extrapolation from known physical science. Others like their stories social science-oriented, or prefer fantasy, “sword and sorcery,” etc. Mystery readers may demand straight detective, “hard-boiled,” “police procedural,” “private eye,” “cozy,” or espionage. And so it goes, category by category.

Since a prime characteristic of all these genres is that their readers know what they want, you need to know too if you plan to write in the field. Indeed, your best bet is to pick an area in which you yourself are a fan and have read widely, so the implicit rules and assumptions, the things fans take for granted, are already built into your head.

That this will influence your choice and development of characters goes without saying, especially if you write romance. Thus, Silhouette’s guidelines described the heroine of its “Intimate Moments” series as “a sympathetic character. Independent, intelligent and strongwilled, she should also be emotionally vulnerable. Though she may find herself in circumstances unfamiliar to most readers, she reacts to them in a familiar and believable way.” Candlelight Romances says its heroine “should have been born in the United States and preferably raised there. Between twenty-two and twenty-eight years old, she has
at least
a high school education and preferably college. She should have a job which she enjoys with aspirations toward a high position or level of achievement . . .”

One word of warning: Category book requirements are continually changing. Picking up a stack of old paperbacks to study can give you a dangerously wrong impression of where the market stands today. If you want to write for a category market, study only current guidelines or the most recent releases.

And beyond this? The secret is to create good characters, likable characters, self-consistent/predictable characters, believable characters. By and large they’ll be interesting, colorful people who don’t
take trouble lying down. Or, as one of my favorite editors once told me, “I want heroines, not victims!”

Although radio no longer offers much of a market, that may not be the case for long. Taped fiction is coming up fast, with adaptations from both novels and short stories now being readied. A growing enclave of commuters, joggers, and just passive “readers” is opening to them.

From the writer’s standpoint, a character on radio—or tape—remains a character. Dynamically he or she is the same as in print, even though most of the time in all likelihood you’re going to have to simplify the character to fit the medium. To that end, concentrate on dominant impression (noun of vocation, adjective of manner), dominant attitude, and goal/purpose. Where presentation is concerned, only technical details change.

Specifically:

1. Your audience can’t see your people, only hear them.

2. Getting inside a character on tape is going to be more difficult than it is in print.

Let’s begin with Roadblock No. 1. Since you’re denied the visual element by the medium, you have to draw pictures of your people in
sound
.

How do you do this?

To begin with, the announcer is a great help. He can fill the listener in on time, place, and situation.

ANNOUNCER:

It’s a quiet evening in Rockville . . . especially quiet in the alley behind the real estate office. Ed and Olly are waiting in the shadows for the beat cop to check the door.

Identity is something else again. You may designate one line for Ed, another for Olly, but how is Listener to know which is which? The answer is, he won’t—not unless early on you have one refer to the other by name:

ED:

Get back here, Olly! You want that cop to see you?

OLLY:

Aw, cool it, Ed. We’ll hear him before he turns in.

And of course it wouldn’t hurt to give each character a verbal tag or two:

ED:

What I’m doing in this hick burg is more than I can figure. New York, New York—that’s my town!

OLLY:

(mimicking) New York, New York. That’s all you talk about. Me, I’ll take Kansas.

Beyond obvious things like this, the trick is to create images—sound supplemented, where possible—with the things your people say. It’s not enough to have Ed cross to the desk where the manager keeps the safe combination, because radio listeners can’t see the action. Rather, you’ve got to translate it into audible words.