How to create credible characters in fiction
August 22nd 2008 00:02
1. INTRODUCTION
My son is at that age where he is interested in how babies are made. Have you noticed how kids believe adults are lying to them when we try to answer this question truthfully. You put what where? Why? Do you have to? Gross! With all the talk of seeds and eggs and fallopian tubes and let’s not even discuss how the baby actually gets out, kids assume this is the adult equivalent of bum humour.
Creating characters in fiction, I think has a lot in common with making conventional babies. Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008 for her astonishing novel The Gathering writes in Making Babies, ‘a baby first and foremost is an act of the imagination.’ What does she mean by this? Procreation is a work of manifestation - it is a psychological pirouette into what is possible, a projection into the unknown – this impulse to create something from nothing.
But of course, that in itself is a fiction. We never create something from nothing. We create from an invisible abundance – though we might be oblivious to it, women carry hundreds of eggs inside our bodies all present and fully accounted for at birth, as well as the perfect gestation environment for a human life. We may not know how it works – but it does. I promise you, every woman who sees those two little pink lines on a pregnancy test, has a moment of radical self-disbelief. Me? Pregnant? How did I do that?
This business of creation is grander than us in the most ordinary of ways. Anne Enright writes of breastfeeding, ‘the milk surprises me… but what fun! To be granted a new bodily function so late in life. As if you woke up one morning and could play the piano.’
Similarly my husband has been known to comment on a single male ejaculation – that’s a hell of a lot of child support right there.
Each of us is, unconsciously, involuntarily even, a repository of an infinite potential for creation. Writers work in this space all the time.
2. THE BEGINNING
All creation begins with a seed.
When he delivered his Nobel Lecture in 2005, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, the playwright Harold Pinter said the following:
‘I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word, or an image that came out of the blue.
The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’
Other than that, I had no further information.
Someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either for that matter.’
That line metastasized into an entire play.
3. SCISSORS
Strangely, I had a very similar experience involving a pair of scissors.
My book Things Without A Name began with a single very clear sentence.
If I had to trace the trajectory of this sentence in my deep subconscious I would have to take you back to 1994 when I working as a counselor for raped and battered women in an organization called POWA – People Opposing Women Abuse in Johannesburg. One day I was sitting opposite a woman who had come in with her sister a few days earlier. We hadn’t been able to get her sister into a shelter because they were all full. Her name was on a waiting list. On this particular day she had come to inform me that her sister had been stabbed to death the night before by her boyfriend with a pair of scissors.
Thank God for Repression. Where would we be without it? We’d all be psychotically well-adjusted. And how dull that would make us. Repression is a terrific survival tool. I tucked this encounter away inside me and I thought – more like hoped - I had forgotten all about it.
But the psyche is unforgiving. It does not discard horror, as much as it locks it away. Fourteen years later, I was sitting at my computer and I typed the sentence, ‘There are not many useful things you can say to someone whose sister has been stabbed to death with a pair of scissors.’ That was all I had. I knew nothing more about this character other than that she was in trouble emotionally, weary and spiritually emaciated. That word ‘useful’ was a key. I knew she needed to be useful but she had run out things to say. She had lost faith. So of course, I called her Faith.
4. INTIMACY
Characters, like babies, don’t arrive fully formed in the writer’s subconscious.
Creating a character is a process of getting to know someone except that that someone is a figment of your imagination. It is an unfolding relationship of intimacy and the revelations are incremental.
5. IMAGINATION
Recently JK Rowling gave the Harvard commencement address in which she spoke about the value of imagination.
Imagination … is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.
Writers occupy that sphere of identity theft encapsulated in the Native American saying ‘Do not judge a man until you have walked a day in his shoes.’ One cannot create a character without walking in their shoes.
6. DETAIL
But more than just walking in their shoes, you need to know what kind of shoes they wear. Size, colour, make. Flatfooted? Collapsed arches? Bunions. You need to know the way your character walks – a swagger, a shuffle, do they drag their feet- in the kind of excruciating detail that in another context would seem creepy.
You have to ask all the questions a neurotic mother would ask if you were dating them:
So what does he do?
Has been married?
Any children?
What’s the family like?
Is he religious?
How does he treat his mother?
7. 100 VIEWS
The Japanese artist Hokusai believed that you only understood the ‘inner meaning’ of something when you saw it from 100 different views. His major work One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji was published in Japan in 1830’s. Also the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote 100 love poems for his beloved as a comprehensive tribute to her.
It might seem excessive to see our character from 100 views, but you get the idea. As a writer you have to know a lot more about your characters than your readers. I do a lot of background writing in my different characters voices – material that may never make it into the book but it helps me to understand who they are and how they think.
I think I rewrote the first chapter to TWAN a hundred times.
You build story through character and you build character through detail. As much detail as you can wring out. Broad brush strokes are too vague and don’t help readers to see your character clearly.
Here’s an example from my favourite Coen Brothers movie, The Big Lebowski. Instead of saying ‘he was unemployed’ or ‘broke,’ you show your character writing a cheque for 69 cents for a carton of milk.
That tells us not only that he is broke, but something much deeper about his character. The detail is also where characters give themselves away by revealing things about themselves inadvertently.
Faith, my character, came to me through a series of details. I set myself the challenge of writing about someone I couldn’t imagine being – a skinny flat-chested vegetarian who loves spiders. Faith bites her nails. She is bewildered by her younger sister’s obsession with clothes and jewelry and handsome men. She simply can’t understand the appeal.
I made her brave – much braver than I am - she gave her virginity to her friend Josh who dies of cystic fibrosis because she knows he will never get another chance to have sex.
Her mother is a New Age spiritual writer, which I personally would love. But Faith finds that anything touchy feely gives her the most terrible stomach cramps.
She is closest to her blind Nonna who shares her gift of prescience – being able to see things that have not yet happened. But Faith regards this as a curse. She feels that always being right about how things are going to turn out robs life of surprise and serendipity.
And yet with all these details, I knew that she was still keeping something from me.
8. FIND YOUR CHARACTER’S SECRET
In the movie The Big Lebowski, Jeff Lebowski is the victim of mistaken identity. He gets beaten up by some thugs who urinate on his carpet. Though he is down and out, and has very few possessions, his bowling companion, and Vietnam vet sidekick, Walter, says to him: ‘That rug really tied the room together, did it not?’
This becomes the refrain which moves the drama in the movie forward.
Every character has a metaphoric ‘rug’ that ties them together, something that holds all the pieces in place. As writers we have to find out what that is.
Something haunts us all. There’s nothing terribly interesting about a well-rounded, beautiful, well-adjusted character with a great job. If your mother would approve of you dating them, don’t write about them. Happiness, despite how we all strive for it, makes for boring characters – unless of course they are psychotically happy. A character is only as interesting as his most disgusting habit, her deepest regret, his most neurotic phobia, her cruelest remark. Give them some problems, throw in some hang-ups.
Tolstoys’ opening line to Anna Karenina reminds us: Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
9. POSTSECRET
There are a few things I do compulsively – one of which is that I check the website postsecret every Monday morning. Postsecret – huge project started by an American Frank Warren in which he invited people to post him their secrets anonymously. Hundreds of thousands of people have done so over the past couple of years.
This website is a fabulous harvesting ground for character ideas.
I have this nagging suspicion that everyone else in the world is keeping something from me that they all know and I don’t
Sometimes I think that if I just got really sick, I’d find out who my true friends are.
My dog winks at me sometimes. I always wink back in case it’s some sort of code.
Every Superman has his kryptonite.
10. THE BEAUTY IN THE UGLY
The other day I received an email from a woman who is a survivor of domestic violence. She wrote ‘I saw so much of myself in Faith – she gave me hope…’
When characters reveal their raw, wounded, broken imperfections, we give readers permission to raw and wounded. This is how trust is forged. When our characters show their vulnerability, their fractures, their brokenness, a reader reaches out emotionally into our story and wraps her arms around our character. Because it is the ugliness, really, that is beautiful. It is the brokenness that creates a whole character.
As the Sufi poet Rumi writes – look at your wounds, that’s where the light enters.
It took me about six months of writing to get to Faith’s secret – to find the ‘rug’ of her personality that ties her together - why she had started doing this work, the history that had shaped her, the family relationships that had wounded her, the terrible secret that had scarred her and the hopes she carried buried somewhere low down inside her. But when I found her secret, I wrote a sentence that gave me gooseflesh. My publisher told me when she read it, she went cold. I think perhaps it is the most powerful moment in the book.
11. LOVE YOUR CHARACTERS
We have to love our characters – even the terrible ones. Even the ones who do unforgivable things. We have to come from a place of empathy for our characters, otherwise they remain clichés, stereotypes and one-dimensional.
As writers we live with our characters all the time – we should at least get to see them from 100 views. We ask: can I love something imperfect, can I live with ambivalence, can I hold the contradictions?
And from this place of DOUBT, CURIOSITY, COMPASSION, DISDAIN, ANTIPATHY emerges something infinitely loveable because it is infinitely human.
When we have successfully created a character that comes to life on the page, we love them like a child. I wanted readers to love Faith because she did not love herself. But in writing her, I think I helped Faith to love herself better.
12. NAMES
TWAN is a book that is concerned about names. The things we name, the things we cannot name. I made the decision early on to name all my characters after real people who have lost their lives in gender violence. Right at the back there is section detailing in one or two sentences, the circumstances of each person’s death. Despite my publisher’s concerns about this inclusion because it might make readers ‘uncomfortable’ and is somewhat voyeuristic, it has thankfully survived, a signpost for those who choose to know the path I traveled through this book. Though this is a novel, I don’t want people to forget that Faith’s story took root in a place of real pain and human faces across the table from someone whose sister was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors. While I scrounged for something useful to say.
One last word about the book’s title: Things Without A Name. I wanted it to render the vascular silence of withheld emotion and unspoken loss through which Faith moves towards the hopeful whispered exclamation at the end‘…There is a name for this, what I’m feeling…. I just know there is a name for this.’
Creating characters in fiction is a process of birthing someone to this place – where they can claim who they are and what they know.
[This is a copy of a talk I gave this past weekend at the SJWF on creating characters. I shared a panel with the wonderful children's author Moya Simons and the fabulous David Kowalski, author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning debut novel The Company of the Dead. To read more about David go to www.djkowalski.com]
www.joannefedler.com
My son is at that age where he is interested in how babies are made. Have you noticed how kids believe adults are lying to them when we try to answer this question truthfully. You put what where? Why? Do you have to? Gross! With all the talk of seeds and eggs and fallopian tubes and let’s not even discuss how the baby actually gets out, kids assume this is the adult equivalent of bum humour.
Creating characters in fiction, I think has a lot in common with making conventional babies. Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008 for her astonishing novel The Gathering writes in Making Babies, ‘a baby first and foremost is an act of the imagination.’ What does she mean by this? Procreation is a work of manifestation - it is a psychological pirouette into what is possible, a projection into the unknown – this impulse to create something from nothing.
But of course, that in itself is a fiction. We never create something from nothing. We create from an invisible abundance – though we might be oblivious to it, women carry hundreds of eggs inside our bodies all present and fully accounted for at birth, as well as the perfect gestation environment for a human life. We may not know how it works – but it does. I promise you, every woman who sees those two little pink lines on a pregnancy test, has a moment of radical self-disbelief. Me? Pregnant? How did I do that?
This business of creation is grander than us in the most ordinary of ways. Anne Enright writes of breastfeeding, ‘the milk surprises me… but what fun! To be granted a new bodily function so late in life. As if you woke up one morning and could play the piano.’
Similarly my husband has been known to comment on a single male ejaculation – that’s a hell of a lot of child support right there.
Each of us is, unconsciously, involuntarily even, a repository of an infinite potential for creation. Writers work in this space all the time.
2. THE BEGINNING
All creation begins with a seed.
When he delivered his Nobel Lecture in 2005, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, the playwright Harold Pinter said the following:
‘I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word, or an image that came out of the blue.
The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’
Other than that, I had no further information.
Someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either for that matter.’
That line metastasized into an entire play.
3. SCISSORS
Strangely, I had a very similar experience involving a pair of scissors.
My book Things Without A Name began with a single very clear sentence.
If I had to trace the trajectory of this sentence in my deep subconscious I would have to take you back to 1994 when I working as a counselor for raped and battered women in an organization called POWA – People Opposing Women Abuse in Johannesburg. One day I was sitting opposite a woman who had come in with her sister a few days earlier. We hadn’t been able to get her sister into a shelter because they were all full. Her name was on a waiting list. On this particular day she had come to inform me that her sister had been stabbed to death the night before by her boyfriend with a pair of scissors.
Thank God for Repression. Where would we be without it? We’d all be psychotically well-adjusted. And how dull that would make us. Repression is a terrific survival tool. I tucked this encounter away inside me and I thought – more like hoped - I had forgotten all about it.
But the psyche is unforgiving. It does not discard horror, as much as it locks it away. Fourteen years later, I was sitting at my computer and I typed the sentence, ‘There are not many useful things you can say to someone whose sister has been stabbed to death with a pair of scissors.’ That was all I had. I knew nothing more about this character other than that she was in trouble emotionally, weary and spiritually emaciated. That word ‘useful’ was a key. I knew she needed to be useful but she had run out things to say. She had lost faith. So of course, I called her Faith.
4. INTIMACY
Characters, like babies, don’t arrive fully formed in the writer’s subconscious.
Creating a character is a process of getting to know someone except that that someone is a figment of your imagination. It is an unfolding relationship of intimacy and the revelations are incremental.
5. IMAGINATION
Recently JK Rowling gave the Harvard commencement address in which she spoke about the value of imagination.
Imagination … is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.
Writers occupy that sphere of identity theft encapsulated in the Native American saying ‘Do not judge a man until you have walked a day in his shoes.’ One cannot create a character without walking in their shoes.
6. DETAIL
But more than just walking in their shoes, you need to know what kind of shoes they wear. Size, colour, make. Flatfooted? Collapsed arches? Bunions. You need to know the way your character walks – a swagger, a shuffle, do they drag their feet- in the kind of excruciating detail that in another context would seem creepy.
You have to ask all the questions a neurotic mother would ask if you were dating them:
So what does he do?
Has been married?
Any children?
What’s the family like?
Is he religious?
How does he treat his mother?
7. 100 VIEWS
The Japanese artist Hokusai believed that you only understood the ‘inner meaning’ of something when you saw it from 100 different views. His major work One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji was published in Japan in 1830’s. Also the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote 100 love poems for his beloved as a comprehensive tribute to her.
It might seem excessive to see our character from 100 views, but you get the idea. As a writer you have to know a lot more about your characters than your readers. I do a lot of background writing in my different characters voices – material that may never make it into the book but it helps me to understand who they are and how they think.
I think I rewrote the first chapter to TWAN a hundred times.
You build story through character and you build character through detail. As much detail as you can wring out. Broad brush strokes are too vague and don’t help readers to see your character clearly.
Here’s an example from my favourite Coen Brothers movie, The Big Lebowski. Instead of saying ‘he was unemployed’ or ‘broke,’ you show your character writing a cheque for 69 cents for a carton of milk.
The Big Lebowski
That tells us not only that he is broke, but something much deeper about his character. The detail is also where characters give themselves away by revealing things about themselves inadvertently.
Faith, my character, came to me through a series of details. I set myself the challenge of writing about someone I couldn’t imagine being – a skinny flat-chested vegetarian who loves spiders. Faith bites her nails. She is bewildered by her younger sister’s obsession with clothes and jewelry and handsome men. She simply can’t understand the appeal.
I made her brave – much braver than I am - she gave her virginity to her friend Josh who dies of cystic fibrosis because she knows he will never get another chance to have sex.
Her mother is a New Age spiritual writer, which I personally would love. But Faith finds that anything touchy feely gives her the most terrible stomach cramps.
She is closest to her blind Nonna who shares her gift of prescience – being able to see things that have not yet happened. But Faith regards this as a curse. She feels that always being right about how things are going to turn out robs life of surprise and serendipity.
And yet with all these details, I knew that she was still keeping something from me.
8. FIND YOUR CHARACTER’S SECRET
In the movie The Big Lebowski, Jeff Lebowski is the victim of mistaken identity. He gets beaten up by some thugs who urinate on his carpet. Though he is down and out, and has very few possessions, his bowling companion, and Vietnam vet sidekick, Walter, says to him: ‘That rug really tied the room together, did it not?’
Jeff Lebowski
This becomes the refrain which moves the drama in the movie forward.
Every character has a metaphoric ‘rug’ that ties them together, something that holds all the pieces in place. As writers we have to find out what that is.
Something haunts us all. There’s nothing terribly interesting about a well-rounded, beautiful, well-adjusted character with a great job. If your mother would approve of you dating them, don’t write about them. Happiness, despite how we all strive for it, makes for boring characters – unless of course they are psychotically happy. A character is only as interesting as his most disgusting habit, her deepest regret, his most neurotic phobia, her cruelest remark. Give them some problems, throw in some hang-ups.
Tolstoys’ opening line to Anna Karenina reminds us: Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
9. POSTSECRET
There are a few things I do compulsively – one of which is that I check the website postsecret every Monday morning. Postsecret – huge project started by an American Frank Warren in which he invited people to post him their secrets anonymously. Hundreds of thousands of people have done so over the past couple of years.
This website is a fabulous harvesting ground for character ideas.
I have this nagging suspicion that everyone else in the world is keeping something from me that they all know and I don’t
Sometimes I think that if I just got really sick, I’d find out who my true friends are.
My dog winks at me sometimes. I always wink back in case it’s some sort of code.
Every Superman has his kryptonite.
10. THE BEAUTY IN THE UGLY
The other day I received an email from a woman who is a survivor of domestic violence. She wrote ‘I saw so much of myself in Faith – she gave me hope…’
When characters reveal their raw, wounded, broken imperfections, we give readers permission to raw and wounded. This is how trust is forged. When our characters show their vulnerability, their fractures, their brokenness, a reader reaches out emotionally into our story and wraps her arms around our character. Because it is the ugliness, really, that is beautiful. It is the brokenness that creates a whole character.
As the Sufi poet Rumi writes – look at your wounds, that’s where the light enters.
Rumi
It took me about six months of writing to get to Faith’s secret – to find the ‘rug’ of her personality that ties her together - why she had started doing this work, the history that had shaped her, the family relationships that had wounded her, the terrible secret that had scarred her and the hopes she carried buried somewhere low down inside her. But when I found her secret, I wrote a sentence that gave me gooseflesh. My publisher told me when she read it, she went cold. I think perhaps it is the most powerful moment in the book.
11. LOVE YOUR CHARACTERS
We have to love our characters – even the terrible ones. Even the ones who do unforgivable things. We have to come from a place of empathy for our characters, otherwise they remain clichés, stereotypes and one-dimensional.
As writers we live with our characters all the time – we should at least get to see them from 100 views. We ask: can I love something imperfect, can I live with ambivalence, can I hold the contradictions?
And from this place of DOUBT, CURIOSITY, COMPASSION, DISDAIN, ANTIPATHY emerges something infinitely loveable because it is infinitely human.
When we have successfully created a character that comes to life on the page, we love them like a child. I wanted readers to love Faith because she did not love herself. But in writing her, I think I helped Faith to love herself better.
12. NAMES
TWAN is a book that is concerned about names. The things we name, the things we cannot name. I made the decision early on to name all my characters after real people who have lost their lives in gender violence. Right at the back there is section detailing in one or two sentences, the circumstances of each person’s death. Despite my publisher’s concerns about this inclusion because it might make readers ‘uncomfortable’ and is somewhat voyeuristic, it has thankfully survived, a signpost for those who choose to know the path I traveled through this book. Though this is a novel, I don’t want people to forget that Faith’s story took root in a place of real pain and human faces across the table from someone whose sister was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors. While I scrounged for something useful to say.
One last word about the book’s title: Things Without A Name. I wanted it to render the vascular silence of withheld emotion and unspoken loss through which Faith moves towards the hopeful whispered exclamation at the end‘…There is a name for this, what I’m feeling…. I just know there is a name for this.’
Creating characters in fiction is a process of birthing someone to this place – where they can claim who they are and what they know.
[This is a copy of a talk I gave this past weekend at the SJWF on creating characters. I shared a panel with the wonderful children's author Moya Simons and the fabulous David Kowalski, author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning debut novel The Company of the Dead. To read more about David go to www.djkowalski.com]
www.joannefedler.com
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Comment by Dianna G
I Wish This Was 42
Fictional Worlds
The book sounds interesting too. Not sure if I'd read it-I'm not a big urban fantasy fan most of the time-but I did like the sound of it. Oh, and the giving her virginity to the dying guy is sweet.
*Liked the post, in short*
~Dianna
Comment by Chris Champion
moneywhither
Vyoos
Zoomies
Bloggercises
NewlyOld
The Blog of Lists
Regards,
Chris
Comment by Morgan Bell
Deep Pencil
Current Business News
Movie Train
Artist Quirk
i love the idea of "100 views"!
Comment by Kleonaptra
Kalikapsychosis