writing the heart of your story (9 page)

Take the Time—A Lot of Time

I talked in earlier chapters how to get your reader to care about your protagonist right away by showing a glimpse of greatness and by revealing their visible goal. That’s all well and good (and needed). But a first scene does not a whole novel make. Before you even start that first scene, I would suggest—no, urge—you to spend some lengthy time working on your characters. Readers want to love (and hate) the characters in your novel, so it is vital you take the time in advance to bring them to life. If you’ve already written your novel and your test readers are telling you your characters are flat, stereotyped, or don’t interest them, then maybe some of these techniques and approaches I’m going to present shortly will help.

Think about
. . . a few great characters in novels you’ve read lately. Think about why you think they’re great. If you want to do some hard work that you'll benefit from, go through a novel that has great characters and either underline (if you don’t mind desecrating books—I do it all the time) or jot down on paper or in your notebook lines that reveal a character’s different qualities, beliefs, feelings, traits. Study how these descriptions have formed a rich picture of who this person is and why they seem so real to you. The more real a character is to the reader, the more emotion that character can evoke.

Chapter 12: Getting to the Core of Your Characters

“All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.”

~Ben Kingsley

Leon Surmelian in his book (written forty years ago)
Techniques of Fiction Writing
has this to say about creating characters in fiction: “Characterization is a complex and elusive art and cannot be reduced to exact rules or to a comprehensive statement. The more we talk about it, the more we feel has been left out, and this is necessarily so because the human personality remains a mystery, subject to obscure forces; it is a universe it itself, and we are strangers even to ourselves. . . . Characterization requires self-knowledge, insight into human nature . . . it is more than impersonation.”

Getting Real Doesn’t Happen on Its Own

That quote contains some terrific stuff. Too many characters are just that—impersonations of real people. In order to create really real characters, you have to be somewhat of a psychologist and learn about human nature. Suffice it to say, many of the novels I read fall short on creating real characters. And I don’t think it’s only due to not spending enough time working on them. I sense that some authors spend a whole lot of time thinking about their characters, but their creations still come across flat and stereotyped. It may have something to do with laziness and not wanting to work too hard to create each character. It may be that the writer doesn’t think characters have to be all that developed—that as the plot unfolds, the character will just “come into his own” and become real. I’m thinking, though, the real reason is the writer hasn’t gone deep into herself and examined why she is who she is.

I’m not suggesting we all go into therapy for a while or spend years psychoanalyzing ourselves (although some of us writers might benefit from that). But if we do some digging inside, we’ll find there are certain truths about why we are the way we are. And the first idea I’d like to throw out at you is tied in with what I wrote earlier about persona and true essence.

Remember, we all present a face to the world—a face we feel will help us survive—which is not wholly who we are. Some people may really live in that place of “true essence,” and that’s great. But populating a novel with characters like that only gives us “happy people in happy land” (as author James Scott Bell likes to say). Readers are more interested in flawed characters, and I bet, if you’re like me, there are some serious flaws lingering under the surface.

Getting to Know You

So, I’m going to share one technique I use when I sit down to create my characters for a novel. I already at this point have my characters in mind. I know my plot and premise, and I either may already have a lot of the story worked out, or I might have only a germ of an idea. It doesn’t matter. But at some point I will sit down (for numerous days) and spend time creating the characters that are going to be the heart and blood of my novel. This time spent is crucial to me, and I never begin writing a novel until my characters are so well fleshed out that I know pretty much everything I need to know about them. And I’m not talking about what they like to eat or what movies they watch. That stuff is inconsequential—trust me. Those little bits about character that come out in your novel are only coloring, not meat.

Most of my novels have up to a dozen main POV characters, so every one of them must be totally real—to me. I don’t let them run off and start behaving without getting to that place first. I can’t stress enough how vital it is you do this in advance of writing your book. Some writers think it’s fine to just start writing and let the characters run amok to see what they’ll do. That’s all well and good if writing to you is mostly an expression of spontaneity and creativity.

However, if you want to write a very specific story and convey very specific themes, this isn’t going to work. Some writers are truly brilliant and can pull this off. Maybe you can, but I can’t. So I have to do a bit of work to make my characters really come alive.

The Three Most Important Things!

I write down my list of main characters on a page. Or sometimes I’ll do this on the first page of my character sketches (not actual drawings but thoughts and ideas on them). Then I spend some time thinking about these things:

* Their core need (and what they would do if they couldn’t get that need met)

* Their greatest fear

* The incident(s) that wounded them early in life that got them believing a lie about themselves (and/or the world).

These three points are so helpful and powerful that it’s just possible they are all you need to create each character. If you learn only one thing from this book on writing the heart of your story, then make it this tip. Tape these three points to your wall if you need to remember them! The last point is the most crucial and the one I spend the most time with.

Each of us has been hurt in the past. Because of that hurt, two things resulted:

* We created a false front to protect our heart. Like the girl who was abandoned by her father when she was young and now can’t get close to men or stay in a relationship long. If you look at yourself, you will find something in there like this. Somewhere in your past you got hurt, and so you’ve formed a persona to survive in the world.

* That hurt makes us believe a lie about ourselves and the world. In this example, the lie this girl believes is that all men walk out and always will. That she can’t trust men or give her heart to them. And that’s why her whole life she’s kept her distance. That’s the outward lie. The other side to that lie turns inward (and you need to look at both parts—they are two sides of the same coin). That part says something about yourself. With this example, the girl believes a lie about herself—that she’s not worthy of being loved.

Need = Fear = Lie (Repeat)

Ah, do you see that? That’s rich, deep, powerful. Okay, that character type is used a lot, especially in chick flicks, but I hope you can see here how we’re getting to the heart of motivation. Think: when you put this girl in various scenes, she is going to react certain ways based on the lies she’s been telling herself her whole life and the lies she believes about other people. This then ties in with her greatest fear (fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment) and her core need, which is . . . have you guessed it?

See the connection? Her core need is to get the very thing she believes is impossible because of the lies she believes. She wants more than anything to be loved, but she can’t get there. She’s blocking her own way. Your character’s greatest need should be intrinsically tied in with the lie she believes and her greatest fear (which is not getting that need met). If it sounds simple, it really is. It’s our human condition.

The core need generates the fear (of not getting that need met). And at the heart of that fear is the ingrained lie. The journey to the heart of your character is the process of her coming to understand and overcome the lie that has held her in fear.

Think about
. . . looking at your protagonist and examining those three core points. Write a page or two exploring his or her needs, fears, and the lies believed. If you’re on a roll, go at it with all your main and even secondary characters.

Chapter 13: Ordinary Characters Can Be Extraordinary

“I think it’s just that when characters are given enough texture and backbone, then lo and behold, they stand on their own.”

~Anne Tyler

We’ve been going deep into character these last chapters, and I want to offer you some more ideas for developing complex, riveting characters. We hear things like “Your characters need to be larger than life,” meaning they should be extraordinary (extra ordinary? A whole lot more ordinary than the next guy? Sorry, that word got me thinking about how counterintuitive the word is). Okay, I get that to a point. To me, that means they need to be complex, unique, passionate about something.

But I would like to say you can have ordinary characters that are ordinary people, but what makes them engaging and believable is their complex issues that drive them. For we all have them. You could say we are all both ordinary and extraordinary people. If I’m presented one way, I can seem very dull, boring, average. But if I’m presented another way, I can become compelling, fascinating, deep. It’s all in the presentation. And in tightly developing and understanding those three essential aspects I spoke of in the last chapter: knowing the character’s core need, their deepest fear, and the lie they tell themselves because of the wound they suffered early on. I like the way actor Edward Norton puts it: “All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity.”

The Superficial Stuff is Superficial

If you start with those elements and get them richly drawn, you can then move on to other aspects of your character. The problem I see is most writers think the way you identify and distinguish one character from another is by outward things: appearance, hairstyle, dress, manner of talking, etc., so they put these characters in their story and what readers encounter is a lot of description about them that only pertains to outward things. There’s a paragraph on how they look, the color of their eyes and hair, what they’re eating, and the things they talk about—which are shallow. Well, for good reason. These are the only things the author has spent time developing. And frankly, when I read a novel, the last thing I care about is the protagonist’s hairstyle. Now, with a book like
The Devil Wears Prada
, you have to be all about appearances. But even so, to have a great story and engaging characters, you would need to get under all that hair and makeup to find the not-so-beautiful person beneath who has needs and fears, and believes lies.

Before I go on to some other techniques and suggestions on how to create great characters, let me give you a few examples of how I thought up these things for my main characters in one of my novels in relation to the needs of the plot. Also, having a little understanding of psychology helps, and if you don’t know much about—for example—family dynamics, you can read up on it.

In the family saga novel I wrote titled
Intended for Harm
, I had nine family members I tracked over a forty-year period. My novel is a modern retelling of the Bible story of Jacob and his son Joseph, and it has many themes. The main theme revolves around the protagonist, Jacob, which is all about his bad relationship with his father and the type of father he becomes to his own sons. You could say, in general, my theme is about fathers and sons, and how sons repeat the “sins” of their fathers.

So I knew Jacob’s big lie stemmed from the hurt meted out by an unloving father who favored Jacob’s twin over him (you might remember the story of Isaac loving Esau more than Jacob). His inward lie is he believes he is not worthy of love (of course). His outward lie is that he believes there can’t be a God who is a loving father type because fathers suck. His greatest fear is that he’ll be a terrible father and end up just like his father (which happens, of course). His core need is to have his father’s love, but he never gets it (makes me think of Robin Williams’s great performance in
Seize the Day
). And deep inside, what he really wants and needs is God’s love, and that he does realize he has, in the end (of course).

Of Course, Of Course

Now, no doubt you noticed I put “of course” after everything up there. Why would I do that? Don’t I want to sound innovative and original? I’m giving away the fact that I wrote something predictable! Of course I did!