Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (28 page)

This in no way means that I’m suggesting you self-censor your work. But you should at least be aware that some characters and actions can be distasteful to some readers. These individuals show their displeasure by walking wide around or refusing to read your epics, as is their right. So consider it a possible factor where disbelief is concerned.

7. Non-likable characters

Readers and editors can reject—refuse to believe—your story if they don’t find at least one of your characters likable.

To put it another way, readers and editors are strong for stories with a positive emotional orientation.

Such an orientation means that, in the old Hollywood phrase, readers have “someone to cheer for.”

“Who do we cheer for?” really means, “What character do we want to see win?”

The character readers want to see win has three basic traits.

1.
The character is striving to attain something.

That is, he or she is goal-oriented, purpose-oriented. So, in striving, the character can win or lose. This gives you, in story terms, suspense.

2.
The character is today-slanted.

That is, he fits in with current reality as your readers know it.

We’ve already talked about the importance of zeroing in on the standards and behavior patterns of your readers. Here I’ll only add that it can be difficult to keep on top of things in a society whose mores and standards are continually in a state of flux. Mass audiences today may not accept a woman who sacrifices a blossoming career in order to stroke her husband’s ego by staying home and canning food “just like Mother used to make”—because that’s not society as they know it. And I doubt that a pro-drug epic like
Easy Rider
would find financial backing today. In a phrase, times have changed.

3.
The character does
not
contradict readers’ feelings or their basic beliefs.

In other words, despite all changes, the right and wrong issue remains important. Most readers, most of the time, prefer to stand on the side of the angels rather than of Satan. It’s difficult for them to cheer for someone who outrages their sense of what’s good and what’s bad, or whose behavior and beliefs are on a different track from theirs.

Thus, by and large, it upsets most readers to be asked to cheer for—that is, identify positively with—rapists or serial killers, or abusive husbands or spendthrift wives or belligerently nasty children.

This means that ordinarily the character they
do
cheer for, male or female, will be one who thinks and acts in a manner that reflects the standards and mores of that group of readers for whom your work is destined.

Not that this is likely to be easy to determine in a society as complex and ever-shifting as ours. Nor will the character you develop necessarily be admirable or even likable in the accepted sense. But he
will
be a person readers can understand and empathize with in his striving, and he’ll fit into the world they know, and in the
final clutch at least he’ll stand for the right thing as he sees it . . . show the “climax potential” we talked about in
Chapter 10
.

Which will make him a likable character indeed in the broadest, most meaningful sense. I urge you to search him out and build him. Believe me, it will pay off.

So much for at least seven of the reasons why readers may fail to believe your stories. But be that as it may, and whatever the incidental hazards, a writer by his nature wants to write. That makes characters ever so much his business—and his salvation. We’ll talk about it in our final chapter, “The Search for Zest.”

A friend who’s a highly successful author of historical novels tells me that the actual writing of his books leaves him cold. What locks him to the craft is that it gives him an excuse to do research—to explore new areas of knowledge for intriguing facts and twists.

I suggest that you apply a variation of the same principle to your work in building characters. That is, that you scan and explore and analyze people every chance you get. Where you used simply to dismiss some people as not worth getting to know, now you observe and probe and try to understand. Instead of avoiding an obnoxious man or woman, ask yourself, “What makes a person act this way?” Look for details—how a person continually rubs fingers together, bares teeth, tries to glower into your eyes, whatever. Every encounter is grist for your character mill if you see it as, one way or another, fascinating.

Why? Because character study very probably is your best way to escape the fatigue and boredom that endless hours of writing often bring.

Thing is, there’s an infinity of people to draw on for your stories. Each one is different. Don’t hesitate to study them. Take it upon yourself to find something fresh and new in each and every person. Rationalize to the farthest limits of your imagination.

Believe me, the process will excite you. And out of that excitement will come production.

People read fiction for feeling. Whether they know it or not, they grope for stimuli that move them.

The thing in fiction that gives them this stimulation is emotion projected through characters—story people.

Characters become readers’ friends. Looking back over the infinity of memorable stories I’ve read, I can remember the people, but seldom the adventures. Sherlock Holmes and Travis McGee both have stayed with me. So have Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, Sam Spade, Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill, D’Artagnan and Oliver Twist, Ivanhoe, Fagan, Shylock, Destry, Shane, Blind Pew, Long John Silver, Perry Mason, Tarzan, and Don Camillo.

For you as a writer, concentrating on routine cardboard characters is the kiss of death. Why? Because you get tired of stereotyped story people, people with reactions so predictable that they put you to sleep before you even set them down.

You can’t afford that. The secret to avoiding it is to deal with each member of your cast as a unique and special individual who intrigues you. Only thus can you maintain your own interest and enthusiasm.

This is true even when you’re writing of series characters, so common in the mystery field. There you may grow weary of the continuing protagonist, so you gain your zest from the subsidiary figures introduced in each new story. These people are individual and unique. They have new, fresh problems. The central character, the continuing protagonist with whom you’re bored, in effect serves as a hired gun who fights the others’ battles for them. While we thrill to the way he handles it, the new individual, the new threat or puzzle, provides a focus for our interest.

(To see this technique handled by a master, read back over any of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee stories.)

How have I come to all these conclusions about maintaining interest? Well, back in the ’50s, I was assigned to script two films on boredom for a mental health group. It was an enlightening experience. In essence, boredom, I discovered (though it’s hardly a tremendous or unique insight), is a conflict state, in which duty, conditioning, or some other element demands you do one thing, when consciously or otherwise, you want to be doing something else.

Apply this to your situation as a writer. In essence, when you grow bored, you’re tired of whatever it is you’re writing. You’d much rather be partying or fishing or playing poker or lolling on
the beach. But conscience or economic necessity say you should be hammering out words.

But why are you bored? The answer is that your story no longer stimulates you, excites you.

Why doesn’t it stimulate you?

There can be all sorts of reasons. But one of the most common is that you’ve drawn too much from the well without refilling.

The well, of course, is your own head. Your brain. Your consciousness. Your imagination. You’ve drained it of things that interest and intrigue you.

Or, to put it another way, you’ve used the same story elements too often: the same ideas, the same settings, the same twists and complications, the same characters.

Especially the same characters.

Has this necessarily been a conscious process? No, of course not. It’s just that, reaching out for the next phrase, the next sentence, the next development, your tired gray cells (to steal a term from Agatha Christie’s famed Hercule Poirot) came up with familiar fragments, bits and pieces you’d used or at least mulled over before.

That brought little excitement to you or your copy, any more than scrubbing the floor for the thousandth time turns on a housewife. The difference is that scrubbing or dishwashing is mechanical. It doesn’t demand new, fresh patterns or procedures.

Writing’s something else again. After awhile and a hundred or a thousand reworkings of essentially the same pattern, you found your mind wandering and, quite possibly without even being aware of it, you wished you were doing something else.

Indeed, were I to face you in person at that moment and accuse you of such feelings, you might very well be outraged. “That’s just not true!” you very well might protest. “I’m working, working hard. But the words just won’t come right.”

So far as your own awareness was concerned, you’d be right. But your enthusiasm would still be gone.

How, then, do you maintain your enthusiasm, your zest for work?

The answer is, refill the well! Search out new experiences. Give the mind-pool that is your imagination, your subconscious, a chance to accumulate new stimuli.

That means, work with more and different raw material—fresh
settings, fresh plot concepts, fresh story people.

Especially fresh story people.

The reason for this is that plots and settings are by their very nature more or less limited. (Remember George Polti’s
The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations
? Other analysts claim to have stripped the total down to three, or four, or a dozen.) But characters are not. Infinite in variety, beyond measurement in numbers, they strike sparks in your imagination without conscious effort on your part. For example:

• the young woman, tired of mowing her lawn, who outraged her neighbors by replacing grass with gravel.

• the old man who had his tombstone carved with a date of death while he was still alive.

• the attorney who infuriated a judge by wearing a turban and see-through shirt in court.

These are only springboards, of course—jumping-off places from which a character or story may develop. You have dozens more as enlivening in your own head. But explored more deeply, amplified in terms of a thousand “what ifs” and permutations, it’s just possible that they or others like them will excite you—rouse you to enthusiasm, or even zest.

What is zest?

“Hearty enjoyment,” the dictionary says. “Gusto.”

In your case, a sudden, surging desire to make something out of nothing.

A story.

If you can capture that feeling, that pulsing excitement of snaring and twisting and molding and expanding new ideas, you’ll never stop writing. Though you may slow down or, like Somerset Maugham in his last years, officially retire, the pictures of unique people in tension-creating situations will still rouse you, the way they say the firebell used to rouse the old firehorse.

Listen to Martha Kay Renfroe, mystery author, referring to one of her series characters: “. . . I like Conan [Flagg]. I plan to stick with him for a long time to come.”

With that cornerstone around which to build your life, what more can any writer want?

To all of you, then, may each character you create prove a new thrill. And may those story people delight you and your readers!

APPENDIX: FOR FURTHER READING

Let’s face it, I’m a book freak. Consequently, the temptation to load you down with an endless bibliography is strong upon me, but I’m going to do my best to hold it within reasonable bounds.

With a few exceptions, the works included in this list deal with either (a.) writing or (b.) human psychology or sociology. In most instances, they’re down to earth. They offer practical information and ideas which, with luck, you may be able actually to apply to your own work.

One word of warning: Please don’t let poking around in these books or any others come to serve as a substitute for putting words of your own on paper. A writer’s job, ever and always, is to write, remember, so the basic issue is—Write On!

Adler, Alfred.
Understanding Other People
. Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1941.

Aronson, Eliot.
The Social Animal
. 5th ed. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co., 1988.

Bedford-Jones, H.
This Fiction Business
. New York: Covici-Friede, 1929.

       
.
The Graduate Fictioneer
. Denver: Author & Journalist Publishing Co., 1932.

Bickham, Jack M.
Writing Novels That Sell
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Blinder, Martin.
Lovers, Killers, Husbands and Wives
. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

Campbell, Walter S.
Writing Magazine Fiction
. Chapter 2, “Characterization.” New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940.

Card, Orson Scott.
Characters & Viewpoint
. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1988.

Cleckley, Hervey.
The Mask of Sanity
. New York: New American Library, 1982.

Cohen, Betsy.
The Snow White Syndrome
. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1986.

Davis, Flora.
Inside Intuition: What We Know about Nonverbal Communication
. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972.

Egri, Lajos.
The Art of Creative Writing
. New York: The Citadel Press, 1965.

Glasser, William.
The Identity Society
. New York: Harper & Row (Colophon Books), 1975.

Goldberg, Herb.
The New Male-Female Relationship
. New York: New American Library, 1984.

Harral, Stewart.
Keys to Successful Interviewing
. Chapter 3, “Are People Predictable?” Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954.