Storytelling
and Fiction Writing
Clare Dunkle’s ideas about
creating characters
Even if you are interested in learning new ways to think about
your fiction writing, you probably hate to be ordered around. Because
of that, I have avoided stating any rules or using “you” language
in the following sections. You may find it tiresome to read so much about
what I do—but I think that’s better than telling
you what to do.
THERE IS NO NEED TO STEAL CHARACTERS FROM REAL LIFE
OBSERVATION IS THE KEY
KNOWING CHARACTERS INSIDE AND OUT
WE ALL HAVE OUR QUIRKS
CHARACTERS HAVE TO HAVE FREE WILL
FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE
EVEN MINOR CHARACTERS HAVE TO BE PEOPLE
THERE IS NO NEED TO STEAL CHARACTERS
FROM REAL LIFE
Friends of mine sometimes worry that I will put them in a book as a character.
For some reason, no one seems look forward to this! But they needn’t
worry. I always invent my characters. I don’t copy characters straight
from real life.
After an artist has drawn subjects from
life for many years, he or she can doubtless make a sketch drawn from
a blend of the subjects already in his or her head. And I am sure that
an architect who has spent a career designing hotels would be able to
draw up a blueprint putting together the best features he or she has encountered.
I build up my characters from elements rather than slavishly copying a
model. Not only does this allow me to keep my friends, but it gives my
imagination more room to play, and that means I have more fun at my writing.
BACK TO TOP
OBSERVATION IS THE KEY
People who live in the real world may falsify it in their own perceptions,
but those of us who deal with false worlds cannot afford to do so. Our
characters need to behave like real human beings, so we have to know as
much as we can about how human beings really behave. Novelists should
be the most sympathetic listeners and the most kindhearted observers of
our race because we cannot afford any illusions or blindness about what
makes people tick.
When we study the people around us closely, we learn how strengths and
weaknesses, taken together, make up a living, breathing person. We understand
that a great love of detail, for example, will result in a person who
is both precise and picky. We know better than to wish aloud,
as others do, that a strong-willed and action-oriented person would be
more sensitive to peoples’ feelings. Novelists realize that the
good won’t exist without at least some of the bad being present
as well.
Everything that we notice about the people around us can help us later
in our writing. The outfits that people wear, their favorite jokes, their
nervous habits, their family histories, and their ways of handling their
spouses and children can all improve our ability to create a good character.
As we observe, we learn that the characteristics, likings, pet peeves,
virtues, vices, and educational background of any one person make up a
set so complex and extensive that we would not want to be constrained
to use the whole thing at once. Instead, we wind up taking a habit from
here and a petty dislike from there to build up an entirely new character.
The variety is so great: we are spoiled for choice, and the world gives
us more raw material each day.
I almost never meet people that I truly dislike: there is something interesting
about all of us. A lifetime of examining real-world people has given me
a wealth of details to draw from as I assemble my characters. Even when
I am selecting reading material, I like to find nonfiction items that
will add to this stockpile of specialized knowledge. Memoirs and autobiographies
make particularly fascinating reading matter because I can observe the
rationalizations people develop to explain their own lives to themselves.
BACK TO TOP
KNOWING CHARACTERS INSIDE AND OUT
As soon as a new character appears in my mind, the first thing
I ask myself is “Where did he come from?” I want to know all
about my new character’s background. Researching a character’s
cultural norms, parents, and childhood reveals many things about how that
character will act and speak. Did my character have a happy time growing
up, with lots of friends to play with? Then he may have an easy time getting
to know others, and he is likely to speak with confidence. Was my character’s
father domineering and cruel? Then he may turn to harsh criticism himself
as a way to express love and concern.
I generally know many things about even my minor characters that the reader
never learns. The reader doesn’t need to be burdened with these
details—she’s trying to enjoy a story! But I am my characters’
only chance at life. What I don’t know about them will hurt them.
People are very complicated: they operate on many levels at once, and
some of these levels are so deep that the characters themselves don’t
know about them. I have to understand my characters’ motivations,
the things that they don’t want to know about themselves. Only then
will these motivations show through in their words and actions.
As I learn about my characters, I put them through parallel universe experiences.
I create crisis moments for them that are not within the scope of my plot,
just to see how they will behave. Maybe my character doesn’t experience
a death in the family within my plot, but if she did, how would she handle
it? The things I learn from these “out-of-plot” experiences
clarify my characters for me, and that extra information comes in handy
as I monitor their ideas and feelings.
BACK TO TOP
WE ALL HAVE OUR QUIRKS
Everyone has certain nervous habits, certain daily routines. Fiction
characters need these, too; they help readers to visualize the characters
and relate to them. But it is important that these quirks and habits have
some internal consistency, some reasonable origin. If I understand where
my characters’ favorite little tricks and habits come from, I am
more likely to be realistic in my treatment of them. But, once again,
this is something that doesn’t need to concern the reader directly.
For instance, in The Hollow Kingdom, my goblin King, Marak, has
a habit of fooling with his long hair. He wears it loose and refuses to
keep it in any sort of order except when he is conducting his most important
business, holding court. This annoys my tidy heroine to no end, who cannot
understand why a grown man would want hair hanging in his face.
Now, as his creator, I know that Marak has always been quite pleased about
his full head of hair (horse-tail hair, actually) because hair on the
head is not that common among goblins, and his own father was entirely
bald. Growing up around this bald authority figure, Marak was very aware
of his own hair, and his habit of playing with it goes back to very early
childhood. A mother like Kate would have discouraged this, but Marak’s
mother Adele, herself flamboyant and unconventional, never minded it,
and Marak’s father, very reasonable and patient, would never have
seen any reason to forbid it. That’s why Marak is so unselfconscious
about it in maturity and why Kate’s disapproval doesn’t deter
him in the least.
BACK TO TOP
CHARACTERS HAVE TO HAVE FREE WILL
The one feature that really distinguishes
the human race is our ability to choose our words and actions. The future
is unwritten; we can decide what to do. Even when we are severely constrained—in
chains, perhaps—we still have a certain amount of choice. We may
refuse to work with a captor: we may fall to the floor and force him to
drag us. Or we may try to charm him into liking us with jokes and stories.
Many people have remained free even under the harshest threats. They have
chosen death rather than cooperation.
Our characters have to have this same freedom. They must be able to work
within their own fictional brains and hearts to decide their courses of
action. I may have a fairly clear idea where my plot is headed, but I
can only get there with my characters’ help. I have to provide them
the means to decide on their own to take the story where I want it to
go.
My attitude as I write reflects my respect for my characters’ independence.
I never say to myself, “Now, I need her to do this.” Instead,
I say, “What will she do now? Among the possible choices, I need
to work toward this direction.” The actions of the character need
to make sense. Even if they are irrational actions, they need to be “in
character”—consistent with how that character is put together
psychologically.
Occasionally, I have thought out the broad plot of a manuscript before
I have gotten to know my characters that well, and I have found a character
unable to accept the course of action that my plot demands. In Close
Kin, for example, one character is assigned to marry another, and
it is important for my plot that he do so. It never occurred to me that
the character might not want to do this because he is ordinarily obedient
to commands, and he knows that such a marriage is very prestigious. But
I also made this character very nice: he has a hard time distressing people.
When he finds out that his partner deeply deplores the marriage, he is
thrown into real turmoil. I was writing this section one morning and thinking,
“What will my character say in response to that?” And I was
quite disturbed when he blurted out, “I can’t marry you!”
I sat there and thought about it for a few minutes. There was no question
that this is what my character would say, and making him say something
else in order to save the plot would break his free will. So I modified
the plot instead to work around my character’s decision. That’s
what my creativity is there for, after all: there are many ways to reach
the same end.
Whenever I have truly disliked a book or movie, I have found that my dissatisfaction
lay with the characters. I have said to myself, “Oh, come on! There’s
no way she would ever do that!” And every time I have given a writing
class, I’ve asked how many people have stopped reading a book because
the characters’ behavior wasn’t making sense. Invariably,
the whole class raises hands at this question, and they generally become
quite vehement about it, too: “Such-and-such-book! The characters
are so stupid! No one acts that way!”
We value our freedom of choice, and we refuse to identify with characters
who aren’t equally free. No amount of clever plot-building can overcome
characters who have been turned into puppets. Given the choice between
breaking a plot or breaking a character, I always break the plot. Plots
can be fixed, but a broken character is not real anymore, and nothing
can bring that character back to life.
BACK TO TOP
FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE
A very good man was unhappy with me because
of Marak, my goblin King: “He’s brutal and vengeful. He teaches
the world all the wrong things.” But a young woman felt quite differently
about him: “I just love Marak! He’s so kind and sweet!”
To tell the truth, I am uncomfortable with both reactions. They are too
simplistic and extreme. Marak isn’t actually brutal, but he isn’t
sweet, either. He’s insensitive, quick-tempered, and inclined to
recklessness, but he is also well-disciplined, orderly, intelligent, and
tolerant of others. His personality holds a mixture of virtues and vices,
a situation which is true of all of us.
No hero should be without failings, and no villain should be without virtues.
Every person alive is endowed with natural strengths and weaknesses of
character. The real question is not which of us has the greatest natural
gifts but what we do with the gifts we have. Those who struggle to overcome
their moral weaknesses may wind up being heroes if they struggle long
and hard enough. Those who give in to their own worst inclinations are
villains, no matter how gifted they may otherwise be. Our characters should
reflect this reality.
No evil person thinks he is evil. He will make clear to you, if you let
him, just why he has behaved the way he has. I like to give my villains
a chance to explain themselves because readers should learn to weigh for
themselves the complexities of human behavior. Readers who want easy choices,
the white hats against the black hats, are developing a habit that will
serve them poorly later when they start looking for emotional simplicity
in everyday life.
I once attended a meeting of some target
readers who were discussing a manuscript of mine. They were talking about
one of the least likable characters in the manuscript—something
of a villain—and several of the girls were passionate about their
dislike of him. But one eleven-year-old disagreed. “I liked him,”
she explained seriously. “I just didn’t like it when he did
what he did.”
This girl had seen the good in
my character and had realized the degree to which he had let himself down
with his own bad behavior. Because she saw him as a person, not a black-hat
villain, she realized that he was capable of better things. I’m
proud that a character of mine was complex enough to produce such a mature
and well-reasoned response.
BACK TO TOP
EVEN MINOR CHARACTERS HAVE TO BE PEOPLE
It is a sad thing for a character when even
her own author isn’t interested in her, but that does sometimes
happen. I know of a book by a brilliant author who has written classics
of children’s literature. Generally, this author is known for her
colorful and lively characters, but there is one poor little girl in this
book who is nothing but a paper doll. She exists only to be a foil for
her mischievous twin brother, and she has absolutely no personality of
her own. I can tell that her own author didn’t give her more than
a minute’s thought.
I think that characters who are in the book
for a page or two still need to live real lives. They need occupations,
places to go, and families to return to in the evening. They need their
own favorite words and habits, something to call their own. In short,
we can’t let them realize that they have a walk-on part in a book:
they, too, have to think like real people.
If we succeed in giving our minor characters
lives, our readers won’t realize that these characters are minor,
either. They will feel that they could follow these characters home and
have an interesting new story. And when that happens, our readers will
forget for a little while that they are reading a book. They will be living
inside the world we have created.
BACK TO TOP
Webpage text copyright 2004 by Clare B. Dunkle. Permission is given to
print this page for educational or private use, provided the author is
acknowledged on the printed copy. It is forbidden to copy, distribute,
or use this text in electronic form. This text may not be emailed or used
on another website.
|
