Writing Post: Some Help for the Newbies

Making Characters Come to Life

Charlotte is a retired veterinarian and vegetarian. Charlotte’s husband died in the war. Charlotte’s house is cream colored, and sits in a very nice neighborhood. She likes knitting and bingo and her two grown sons.

So what?

What makes Charlotte so interesting that we would want to read about her? What are her motivations, what makes the reader love (or hate) her enough to keep reading? Why would you or anyone else have written about this woman?

The most important part of fiction is to make us as readers fall in love with characters, whether we love them or love to hate them. Characters drive the storyline through their motivations, flaws, and histories.

First things first: what is a character anyway? Dictionary.com reads that a character is “the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing.” A person and his or her personality, not just physical features.

Over the past decade of writing, I’ve come up with several exercises to help myself to create and expand personalities to create fantastic, character-driven plots. These will help first-time and even experienced writers to get those creative juices flowing in the right direction.

Exercise #1: What’s in a name?

One of the hardest things for most writers is to create a great character name. In fiction, a name can tell us a lot about the character, such as origin, gender, and even something of his personality. For example, Neal Stephenson’s lead in “Snow Crash” was named Hiro Protagonist, a mockery of our hero’s place in the novel. Also the names “Darth Vader,” “Boo Radley,” and “Rocky Balboa” all have an innate connotation, born from the sounds or the literal meaning of pieces of their names. If your goal is to pull a Flannery O’Connor and have every character’s name mean something, you must first develop his or her characteristics; you’ll have to skip this step and move on, coming back to this point when you have something more to work with.

I prefer to start with a name. It’s a good a point as any to start with, and gets the hardest part over with first. Some great places to search for names are online baby name archives, online databases for translations and meanings of names, magazines, news articles, and even the dictionary. Websites can allow you to explore the most popular names for every country, decade, and species.

Exercise #2: So, just who are we dealing with?

Imagine you are on a blind date. You know nothing about this guy or girl, but you are interested. What questions do you ask? The same sort of questions should be put to your characters. Getting to know them is essential, because if you don’t know them well, how will the reader?

Make a list of characteristics and tidbits of information. Start with what he looks like. Is he dark or light complected? Does he have straight teeth? Long hair? Piercings? How does he dress? What kind of accent does he have? Then move on to deeper, emotional and mental characteristics. Is he optimistic? Does he like kids? Dogs? Cats? Is he usually angry at the world? Is he Catholic? Religious at all? What are his dreams?

In this list you also want to include anything that could be (or might not be) important to the story. Maybe your character likes chocolate, and goes to his mother’s house every Sunday after dinner for chocolate dessert night. Tell us about his childhood, and what brought him to the situation his is at the beginning of the story. Perhaps he was bit by a dog when he was a child, and hates them now. Such phobias and fears can be fantastic fodder for plot devices and motivations.

Having a hard time thinking of interesting characteristics? Try this: keep a close friend or family member in your head as you write. Many characters from famous novels and stories are based loosely on a real person! Willa Cather was famous for this, writing stories around each of her best friends’ personalities.

Still having troubles? The best thing you can do next is research. Go to your local library and read about some famous and unforgettable characters in novels and critical essays. Make a list of characteristics of these people and see how the author slips the details of their lives into the story.

Exercise #3: What’s he up to?

Write about a typical day in your character’s life. Show him doing something in character, write what he is thinking, saying. How does he react to people, his surroundings, and is it different from how people perceive him? It’s best to write this exercise in third person, so you can also include the other characters thoughts around him.

Exercise #4: What did he do that for?

Now write about him doing something totally out of character. If he’s a goody-two-shoes, write about how he decides to steal some money from his mother’s wallet. This is also a great exploration of your character; it gives an outlet for allowing the writer to show the difference between how we act in front of others and what is really going on inside our heads.

Exercise #5: So now what?

Now that we have characters, what’s next? Interaction.

This step is very vital in the process of character creation, and can contribute volumes to the motion of your plot. How characters interact with one another can be intense, cohesive, argumentative, and even hilarious. One character can grate against the other’s nerves, creating a whole new plot device you hadn’t planned for. To do this properly, trying writing a dialogue between each of your characters. Have them come into a situation together, and see how they interact, being careful to keep everyone in character. Keep the plot simple; perhaps they are arguing over the last orange in the refrigerator. Don’t let the plot get in the way of the characters’ personalities.

Once you have started on this step, you should know almost immediately if two or more of your characters are too similar (or too different) to “get along” well in you story. Modifications to characters at this stage are easy, much easier then halfway into your stories!

Good luck and good characterization!

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Last Writing Post: May 11, 2008

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