How to Create a Character
© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
No matter what sort of fiction you're writing, you're going
to have to populate your story with characters, and a lot of them, if
not all of them, you're going to have to create from scratch. Unfortunately
-- or maybe fortunately -- there is no Betty Crocker Instant Character-In-A-Can
that you can mix with water and pop into the oven for twenty minutes.
There aren't any quick and easy recipes, and I don't have one either,
but I do have some things that have worked for me when creating my characters,
and some things that haven't. You may find my experiences useful. For
what they're worth, here are my Do's and Don'ts.
-
Don't start your character off with a name or a
physical description.
I know this doesn't seem logical at first glance -- after
all, you name a baby before you get to know him very well. Why wouldn't
you give your character a name and blue eyes before you find out anything
else about him?
There are a couple of reasons. The first is that you have
a lot of preconceived ideas about names and body types. Perhaps every
Charlie you ever knew was a great guy, while every Barry you knew was
an idiot. So when you decide to name your protagonist Charlie before you
really get to meet him, he is automatically going to carry along a lot
of baggage that you probably aren't even going to be aware of -- but that
baggage will subtly influence the direction of your story, and perhaps
its outcome. And that influence won't necessarily be a benefit to your
story. In the same way, maybe your heart has been broken twice by redheads,
or the gorgeous surfer you dated briefly stole your credit card, did drugs
in the back seat of your car and got your twin sister pregnant before
dumping you and vanishing from your life forever. So you might be carrying
a grudge against redheads or good-looking men, and you might have a tendency
to make every redhead in your books a bitch, or every hunk a creep in
disguise.
Second, if you have a name and a physical description right
away -- Jane Meslie, 37, blonde with bright blue eyes and great legs and
a habit of flipping her hair out of her face when she's frustrated --
you're going to be tempted to look no deeper that her appearance. When
she gets into trouble, you're going to fall back on that hair-flipping
thing, and she's going to do it so often she'll be bald by the end of
the book.
-
Do start developing your character by giving him a problem, a
dramatic need, a compulsion.
Even if you don't have the foggiest idea what your story
is going to be about yet, you don't know where it's going to take place,
and you haven't found anything compelling that you'd like to say to an
audience of more than one, you can do this. Say "My main character wants
_____ more than anything else in the world."
What does the character want? Love, respect, courage, revenge,
a kidney for his kid sister, to find the son she gave up for adoption
when she was sixteen? Throw something down on the paper. It won't be written
in stone and you can always go back later and change it. Or you can, when
you create the character, bank him for a later book if he doesn't fit
your needs once you get rolling. In writing as in life, nothing you do
is ever wasted. So go ahead and jump in. Your character wants something.
If he's like most people, he wants several somethings, and about the time
you allow yourself to start discovering them, you'll begin to find out
where your story is going, and what it will be about.
He also wants to avoid something -- and these things the
character wants to avoid can be more compelling by far that the things
he hopes to gain. What scares him to death? Humiliation, disfigurement,
pain, terminal illness, poverty? What will he do anything to avoid? What
has he already done to avoid his greatest fears? Give him something that
will wake him up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, hands clutching
his covers, body rigid with terror. If you want to really make your character
come to life, choose something that terrifies you -- you'll find that
when you write something that makes you shake, you'll make your reader
shake, too.
A rule of good storytelling is that the protagonist will
confront the thing he fears the most and overcome it in order to win the
thing he desires the most. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, and for every
book where the writer followed it, you'll find at least one where the
writer ignored it completely. But overall, the most satisfying stories
will at least approach this rule.
I've read a number of otherwise-decent writing books that
have you start out creating your character by giving him a hook -- some
little device that characterizes the person. Nervous whistling, jangling
car keys kept in the right front pocket, a complete wardrobe of blue shirts,
the anxious stroking of a rabbit's foot in moments of deep stress.
It doesn't hurt to do this, but I recommend that you do
it later rather than sooner -- perhaps at about the same time that you
name your character. Maybe even later -- say when you're in the middle
of chapter three and you need your character to do something while talking
to the bank teller that will make her wary.
And don't mistake a few nervous tics and a jaunty saunter
for characterization. Your own character is what's inside of you -- what
you're made of when things get ugly and hard; whether you'll take something
that doesn't belong to you if no one is looking, whether you'll tell the
truth even if lying is easier, whether you'll be faithful to you wife
when presented with the perfect opportunity for a no-strings-attached
one-nighter. Your character has nothing to do with whether you wipe your
bangs out of your eyes with the back of your hand or always wear something
yellow, and the same is true of the people you'll be creating and writing.
-
Do empathize with your character.
This is sometimes easy. When you're writing your protagonist,
and he's in deep soup, and you're pouring your soul into his struggles
and his angst and spending plenty of words and sweat making making people
see that he's a great guy in a tough spot, the empathy will be there.
You'll know who he is and you'll care because you'll see yourself as him
in the same spot. In the dreams you've had since you were a little kid,
you've been the hero. You know how the routine is supposed to go.
Sometimes empathy comes a lot harder, though, and I think
it's most important when it's hard. Recently I had to write the toughest
scene in my life, a scene where a woman that I've gone to a great deal
of trouble to make sympathetic over the course of a book and a half does
something so utterly reprehensible, so unforgivable, that if I've done
it right the readers will be praying for her death from that moment on.
Given the choice between doing something right and doing something evil,
she chooses the path of evil, and in the moment of her choosing lies the
fate of her world and the rest of the story.
But her choice couldn't come out of the blue. I had to
build toward it. I had to make what she did understandable, and in order
to do that, I had to be able to understand it myself. It was a truly terrible
act, one of the most horrible things I am capable of imagining, and when
I wrote the scene, tears ran down my face and I got queasy and I got cold
and when I was through I went to bed and cried. I had to put myself in
the place where that character was, and she was in hell, and she did a
hellish thing -- but she did it with my hands, and my mind, and my eyes.
When you write, you can only write those things you know
(or the things you know will be the only things you write well, anyway.)
So when you write the villain, you have to be the villain. You have to
understand why the villain acts as he does, you have to know that if you
were him in that situation, you would do as he does -- because if you
can't do this, no one who reads what you have written will believe in
the characters you have created. Empathy in those moments is an agony.
You have to look into the darkest part of your soul and find the part
of yourself that could be a monster, and you have to put that on the page
for people to see. There's no easy way past this, because your hero can
only be as great as the evil he overcomes. If you can't face the evil
in yourself, you hero will only overcome straw villains, and your work
will lie flat and lifeless on the page.
-
Don't sympathize with your characters.
Empathy and sympathy are two sides of one coin -- empathy
is understanding, while sympathy is an affinity you share with your character
that creates change, allowing the character to affect you. You must feel
empathy for the characters you create, both the heroes and the villains,
but you can never feel sympathy. In other words, you have to understand
why your characters do what they do, but you can't let that understanding
tempt you to ease their suffering, or let them take the easy way out of
situations, or experience sudden miracles that remove their obstacles.
-
Finally, do write from your own life.
This is no picnic, either, but it's the single technique
that has brought my best characters to life. I've found that when I take
my worst moments, the painful, humiliating, disastrous, or simply dreadful
ones that still make me cringe inside, and I change them enough to keep
from getting sued, they make good fiction. And my responses, translated
to the character, seem to live.
You can only write what you know, but you can take the
fears and hopes and feelings you've experienced in a relatively mundane
existence and translate them to a broader canvas with imagination and
persistence. The fear you felt the moment your car almost slid over a
guard rail or the elation you felt when you won first place on your 4-H
project at the county fair translate very well into the fear your character
feels on finding himself at the edge of a cliff with a sword-wielding
army at his back, or the elation she feels on discovering the secret code
that gives her access to the hidden passageway.
All paintings are done from the same basic set of colors,
and all characters are built from the same basic set of responses and
emotions. How you use these elements -- how you mix them and apply them
-- determines whether you'll end up with a masterpiece or something not
even your grandma would hang on her wall.
I hope this list helps you get started and stay headed
in the right direction while you're developing your characters. If you'd
like to do more with this, this link will take you to my Character
Creation Workshop; you'll have a new character when you're done.
How to Finish A Novel>>
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