Begin with an individual and you find
that you have created a type; begin with a type
and you find that you have created—nothing.— F. Scott Fitzgerald
If you want interesting fictional characters, give them personal contradictions. The most interesting people you know have internal contradictions, so why shouldn't your characters? It's easy enough to get stuck creating characters who are perfect, but in fiction, as in life, perfection is boring. A character who never falters, who never contradicts herself, who is just too nice, leaves the reader cold. Conversely, characters at odds with themselves or their surroundings, who are fraught by internal contradictions, create conflict, and conflict is what drives a page-turner.
It's the characters who have bad hair days, who've lost a parent or a child, who struggle to pay bills, who need to lose a few pounds, who love humanity but can't stand people, that intrigue us and keep us reading.
Where do complex, contradictory, believable characters come from? Your own life and the people you've known, for one.
Elizabeth George says that every one of her chance encounters and relationships provides the seed for the characters in her novels. "Not that I put the people I've known in novels," she says, "but I use aspects of them a lot. A man's fear of commitment, a woman's need for external perfection, a mother/daughter dispute. I never plan to use them, but when I'm sitting at my computer doing stream of consciousness writing, a character evolves. I've only had one person recognize himself."
Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon mingle family life and fiction freely. Waldman says, "I take little bits of all sorts of people—myself, my family, people on the street. It's how I try to make sure my characters are real, by basing them in different ways on different real people. And as of yet, neither Michael nor I have discovered a dead body, but other parts of the Juliet books are pretty true to our lives together."
Chabon also borrows from actual experience, but he is not above playing with the reader's propensity to blur the line between the author and the narrator: "I frequently will draw on a lot of different things, as I need them, bits and pieces of stuff I've experienced, people that I've known. As actual details of my life have become more known to more people, I've explored that relationship between my life and my fiction. The last story I wrote is about a father and a son, and I have a son—plenty of people know my son is the same age as the character I'm writing about—and I very deliberately played with the fact that readers wouldn't be sure whether they were reading about me or something I was making up. I tried to write this short story in a very matter-of-fact tone, as if I were reporting an incident from my life and yet, really the incident and events were almost entirely invented."
"Everybody assumes it's all your life, anyway," says Waldman. "That makes it extra fun to make stuff up."
But characters do come from the imagination; by combining characteristics that interest you or that contrast with one another, you'll come up with a character unique unto herself. Regarding characters, T. Jefferson Parker says, "I just make them up. Typically, they represent or embody some fairly simple combinations of human characteristics."
Regardless of where they come from, you must know your characters. 'You have to know who they really are," says Iris Rainer Dart, author of Beaches. 'You have to be able to get inside their brains."
One caveat: Don't fall so in love with your characters that you protect them. You must have compassion for them, yet the most compelling characters experience danger of some sort—emotional, physical, or financial.
"You have to create characters you like and then beat them up," says Janet Fitch.
The most interesting people and characters are not two-dimensional, but multidimensional. Nice, magnanimous people are great to have as friends, but in fiction, they make for flat characters.
Think of the fictional characters that stay with you; often they're memorable because of their conflicting purposes or the way they play against the stereotype. Some characters that come to mind include a Japanese businessman passionate for opera (Bel Canto); a logical, science-minded lawyer who seeks a homeopathist for treatment (The Law of Similars); a compelling TV talk-show host who falls in love with a facially deformed police detective (Silent Joe). The best characters do the unexpected or embody unpredictable traits. It's their internal contradictions that make them fascinating and keep a reader's interest.
One way to create characters is to do their "bone structure," as Lagos Egri described in his classic, The Art of Dramatic Writing. Take your notebook and sit somewhere comfy to brainstorm. Write your character's name at the top of the page and write the words (so you remember): physical, psychological, and sociological. For fifteen minutes, write about your character.
Under the heading "Physical," write about what your character looks like, childhood diseases, current medical conditions, and anything else that physically describes her.
Under "Psychological," write about your character's psychological and emotional makeup: how she feels about relationships, her approach to life, what she dreams, how she treats herself and others.
Under "Sociological," write about your character's upbringing, what school she went to, what she majored in at college (if she went to college), where she works, what sort of music she listens to, her favorite movies, her best friends.
By the time you're done with this, you should know all you need to know to get started. When you reach an impasse in a work of fiction, you can go back to your character's bone structure, and know what she'd do.
You can also get close to a character by having your character write a letter to someone in her own voice. For fifteen minutes, have your character talk about things that only the recipient of the letter would know about. Have it be a long letter—long enough to allow you to get to know your character's concerns.
And when a person's quirky quality strikes you, be sure to jot it down in your notebook. You never know when that personality trait is just what you'll need to flesh out a character.