Every book starts with people.
Some writers strictly use human characters, some create animal characters, some create inanimate characters, such as HAL the computer in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. For the purposes of this book, people means any kind of characters, real or fictitious.
Your people can and will drive your book, whether fact or fiction.
Somebody does something. Somebody wants something he doesn’t or can’t have. Somebody loves somebody.
And every compelling book has a hero. You know them:
Odysseus, Don Quixote, Gulliver, and Nathan Hale.
David Copperfield, T.E. Lawrence, and Scarlett O’Hara.
Ma Joad, Dorothy Gale, James Bond, and Atticus Finch.
Rosa Parks, Nancy Drew, Yuri Zhivago, and Harry Potter.
Forgettable books have weak heroes or no heroes.
Your book needs a strong hero. Who is your hero? Explore this. Your hero might be your main character. If your book is a memoir, you might be the hero. If your book is nonfiction, there is probably one figure who stands above the rest.
In fact, if you’re writing a nonfiction book, I encourage you to read the whole of this chapter, even though much of it seems aimed at fiction writers, because this chapter is about making the people in your book vibrant and fully realized. The best nonfiction reads like great fiction, and much of its appeal comes from the personalities that populate it. I’m just in love with the biographer Robert Caro, whose books on the life of President Lyndon B. Johnson read like the most gripping fiction.
Heroes are the ones we all remember and look up to. People read books because they want to be inspired. We all want to be brave in the face of danger. We like to believe we’ll be brave in the face of danger. We want instruction on how to be brave in the face of danger. We want to be smart, and we want instruction on how to be smart. We want to be independent. Sassy. Irreverent. Original. Loved. Loving. Sexy. We want to learn how to do and how to be.
We read books because, in a way, every book is a guide to life. The people in books, specifically the heroes, give us examples of how to act—and how not to act. The hero speaks to our deepest self, the thing-that-aspires-to-greatness that we all carry deep within: the Heroic Kernel.
Take a few minutes to visit your Heroic Kernel. Get in touch with it. Like this:
Now how do you feel?
Especially good! In fact, I feel the way that, as a child, I thought I would feel when I grew up. But I hardly ever feel that way.
You’ve got it. Why not feel this way all the time? Just choose it. Instead of betraying insecurity by being slumped or unhappy or too quick or loud or proud, become your Heroic Kernel.
Be inspired by the greatness you see in this world, whether manifested by a sports star or a spiritual teacher or a beautiful machine or the little kid down the block who, no matter what he’s doing, gives it everything he’s got. Be inspired by the romance of the world, whether a night-blooming jasmine or a mountain peak or two people dancing slow near the jukebox.
All right, now that you have heroes and their mind-set in place, it’s time to put them into motion.
Heroes have adventures; they go on journeys.
Let’s do some writing.
Your People: Breathing Life Into Your Book
Do a general stormwrite on the people who will be/are in your book.
This general stormwrite will prime you for upcoming stormwrites about your people.
You’ve probably heard the word protagonist. It’s from the Greek word protagonistes, which means primary actor. Your hero is your protagonist. Now a hero doesn’t necessarily equal ‘good person’. Or ‘thoroughly principled, flawless character.’
You understand. Nobody’s perfect. Only in cartoons do we find perfectly heroic heroes—and perfectly villainous villains. Real heroes, male and female, are flawed. A realistic hero might be narcissistic, afraid of someone or something, might have an inferiority complex, might be a liar or a criminal.
We pull for Michael Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather because we identify with him. He doesn’t want the criminal life of the mob, the life that promises worldly gain at the cost of souls, but after enemies try to assassinate his father, he feels he has no choice but to become a criminal and murderer.
Puzo does such a great job of making Michael real and human that even when Michael draws the revolver and kills Captain McCluskey and the crime boss Solozzo in cold blood, we’re stirred with excitement and admiration—not revulsion. We feel the tension before he shoots and we wonder what we would do in that situation. And we go along for the ride, and we feel the release when he does shoot.
In being loyal to his family’s code, Michael betrays the codes of his society and his religion. The story is compelling because we know life isn’t simple. We all have to make tough choices: whether to fudge facts on a job application, whether to stay faithful to a suboptimal spouse, whether to leave the last piece of pizza for someone else, whether, when our brakes give out, to crash into the red car or the blue car.
What distinguishes a hero from everybody else?
A good hero will have doubts, will suffer for their weakness, then come to grips with it, then prevail over that weakness. Sometimes a hero will be a criminal who goes straight in the end, or vice versa, like Michael Corleone, or perhaps your hero is a criminal who conquers a problem but remains a criminal, like Dexter Morgan in Jeff Lindsay’s novels (the first being Darkly Dreaming Dexter). Dexter’s a fellow who feels compelled to murder and who solves the compulsion by adopting a code of ethics: He will only kill people who are themselves killers of innocents.
You’ve also possibly heard the term antihero. An antihero is not the villain in the story.
An antihero is a heroic character who doesn’t have typically heroic attributes or one who operates as a force for good outside the common moral code.
Robin Hood was a prototypical antihero: He robbed from the rich (stealing is wrong) but he gave the booty to the poor (charity is good). Today’s outlaw bikers might consider themselves antiheroes, living outside society’s common codes but adhering strictly to their own codes of fair play, however unconventional.
Scarlett O’Hara, the protagonist of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, could be called an antihero. She behaves abominably at times, she lies and manipulates, but instinctively she knows the painful truth that many a leader has learned: In times of strife, real gains require ruthlessness and sacrifice. In the end, Scarlett’s actions save her family and their land. Meanwhile, she recognizes true love and lives to pursue it.
Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is an antihero. He’s basically a Midwestern college boy who wants a much more privileged and romantic life than he’s got. He gives in to strong temptation to turn into a murderer. Yet we pull for him because we sympathize with his desires, and we live his exciting transgressions vicariously.
As you can see, your hero might have a quite complicated code of ethics.
Keep in mind that the most compelling heroes take an inward journey as well as an outward one. Sal Paradise, the narrator of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, leaves home to seek adventure, freedom, and the great truths of life. That is the outer journey. Sal’s inner journey develops when he becomes disillusioned with the immature, hectic life he’s pursuing with his buddies and he becomes more introspective. He realizes that the ‘road-as-religion’ has severe limitations, and he begins to quiet his mind and listen more deeply to the wisdom that’s already inside him.
I want you to think a lot about heroes. A good believable hero will drive any book, fact or fiction.
Your hero must be brave, but all of your people must be strong, in one way or another. Here strong doesn’t necessarily mean physically strong, or even morally good.
Daisy Buchanan, the object of Jay Gatsby’s love in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a physically slight woman who once made a dreadful mistake (she married the wrong guy); she’s careless, older now, morally weak and dissipated, yet she is a strong character. She’s memorable because she causes things to happen in the story, she’s conflicted, and she understands true love. She is believable. She is genuine.
CHISEL IT IN STONE:
WHEN IT COMES TO PEOPLE, GENUINE = STRONG.
Stormwrite specifically on your hero. This will get you SO GOING. Remember to use Yes, and— and What if?
You’re not going to know the answers to all of these questions at first. Not all of the questions will even be relevant. One question might prompt a different, better one. Invent your own questions as you go, and that will help you write your way into the character.
Can I write more than one hero in my story?
You can, but having one main one is important to cement reader loyalty. Readers don’t like to be confused; they want and expect one main hero. While Dr. Watson shares Sherlock Holmes’s values and even behaves heroically at times, he’s still a sidekick to Holmes, the boss hero dude.
The same goes for Dorothy Gale and her friends, Harry Potter and his friends, and countless other heroes and heroines and their friends. The friends are great, the friends are helpers, but the hero is the hero.
Every book needs conflict. Every good story from Genesis to today’s psycho-thrillers puts its characters in conflict. Every gripping memoir begins with conflict. Something must be overcome!
What’s a great way to create conflict for a character?
Other characters!
Stormwrite about a few of your other characters, just get to know them.
A stormwrite for a less important character might go like this:
In fiction it’s useful for every significant character to have a special ability. You can draw on that ability later. For instance, a child is little and can wriggle into tight spaces where grown-ups can’t go; someone with musical ability can identify voices particularly well; a home-brewing fanatic might know some chemistry…
CHISEL IT IN STONE:
LET YOUR PEOPLE TELL YOU WHAT THEY WANT.
Get to know your people on paper as intimately as you can.
Conjecture! Let ’em loose to tell you what they’re about! Feel free to ask them things:
What are you doing?
Tell me about your childhood.
What’s your favorite drink/car/TV show/book?
If you’re uncomfortable with a character, what do you not know about him that you wish you did? What do you think he would do in a life-and-death emergency? How would he react to a surprise birthday party?
If there was a government coup, what kind of role would he take in it? Profiteer, idealist, doomed loyalist?
Readers get hooked on a book when they meet a character they enjoy spending time with. Characters we love—or love to hate. Here’s how:
Whether your project is fiction or nonfiction, a fun and productive thing is to make dossiers as soon as you’ve done some stormwrites on your people. When writing a major project, I make up a file folder for each main character or person. You can do this with real manila folders and throw all your stormwrites and notes for each person into them, or you can make the files on your computer (or both, for belt-and-suspenders thoroughness).
SKETCH HIM. Get to writing about what he’s like via your stormwrites. Where is he from, what are his strengths as a person, what are his weaknesses? What does he look like, is he big or little or medium? This is called a character sketch because you draw the character with words. Take down as few as a hundred, as many as a thousand, or more, if you feel like it.
Which character would you rather write about:
My point is, don’t get caught up telling the obvious. I’m not saying don’t tell us what color hair your hero has. I’m just saying it might not matter. It might be more fun to describe him in a different way. Nobody knows the shape of David Copperfield’s mouth or how tall he was. It didn’t matter.
Write down and add to the folder anything else about that person that comes up.
FOR FICTION, for example, you can clip pictures from magazines or print out shots from your camera that evoke the character.
I keep books on hand that have lots of face shots and pictures of people. You can find good people shots by browsing through photography monographs.
Looking at pictures of faces helps me imagine characters for my fiction. In describing a character, I can borrow an anonymous face from a picture. Or I can borrow a famous face. If I decide that my main character has a high forehead, a direct, burning gaze, and a reddish beard, no one need know that I’m basing his appearance on Vincent van Gogh.
FOR NONFICTION, invest some time in remembering and writing about what your people look like. It’s surprising how we can know somebody well and yet have a hard time painting them in words. Relax and take your time about it, and it’ll come. (The banker that turned down the businesswoman squints habitually and wears an expensive suit, while her brother-in-law wears a trucker cap but lends her $5,000…) You can keep any information about that person in their dossier, including a list of questions you want to ask that person (if living), notes from interviews, impressions and remembrances other people told you, family information, anything. If you make a dossier, you can keep all this material nicely organized.
I highly recommend that you take up drawing. As a writer, sketching a person or an object—even crudely, with no training or innate skill—opens your heartbrain and makes you more tuned in to your subject. It makes the world seem fresh.
In a person’s dossier you can put a list of idiosyncrasies of how they talk. Like this guy habitually uses the word dashed instead of damned; this gal talks with a Tennessee twang; and so on.
A fun way to make a person come alive is by attributing animal traits to him or her:
Or even inanimate ones:
Just go off on any tangents that pique your interest.
Sometimes a real person, whether famous or not, is the keystone for a book you want to write. Maybe you don’t know him or her personally, maybe you do. People you’ve known can be terrific templates for characters. Whatever the case, go with it. Do a stormwrite on that person. Write everything that comes to mind. Is this person admirable or despicable? Why has this person become lodged within you? What is remarkable about him or her? Why do you want to write about them? What is the story you want to tell? Or, what is the story you wish you knew?
If a real person compels you to write, pay attention and go deep. Explore. Sometimes the person’s extraordinariness is obvious: This woman saved my life by pulling me out of a burning car. Sometimes the person’s extraordinariness is obvious but complex: This woman saved my life by pulling me out of drug addiction. Sometimes the person’s extraordinariness isn’t obvious at all: I’ve seen this woman every year for five years in a row at the bluegrass festival, playing her fiddle, jamming with whoever comes by. One year, so many things had gone wrong in my life I was practically suicidal. But just being around this musician lifted me up. Somehow, everyone who jams with her walks away a better player (as far as I can tell). It makes me wonder: What does she give away so easily, invisibly, and mysteriously?
Stormwriting about somebody you know can help you get at that person’s essence. If you feel there’s something special about someone, do yourself a favor and make a character out of that person. It’s worth exploring because people like that usually lead to intriguing, deep places in your thinking and your writing.
Maybe this person really needs a nonfiction portrayal. Maybe your book should be a memoir about your years-long experiences at the bluegrass festival, and maybe this year you should talk with that fiddle player and make a special effort to get to know her.
Imagine somebody you know, or somebody you knew a long time ago, and then put him or her into difficulty. She just got laid off. He just found a cache of stolen treasure. She just accidentally broke a valued heirloom belonging to her significant other, and the significant other doesn’t know yet.
Difficulty, by the way, doesn’t have to be relentlessly negative. You could bestow upon your hero a stroke of good fortune—an important award, a reprieve from illness, an unexpected inheritance—which is inherently good, yet might pose interesting problems.
Another way to form a character is to steal from somebody else’s work. Before you shout in protest, let me just say that I am not suggesting you plagiarize. Read on.
Here’s how you ‘steal’ from someone else’s work: Pull out your Chaucer, for instance, and canter through a few tales, get reacquainted with somebody like the Canon’s Yeoman or the Wife of Bath. Or pull out your Shakespeare, or your Brontë, or even your Old Testament, anything that’s at least a century old. Pick out a personality. Now place that personality into your contemporary story. What if you made King Lear the president of his condominium homeowners’ association, and he had to deal with dog litter enforcement? What if Samson ran a gay bar? What if Jane Eyre married somebody like Captain Ahab? How would Coach Solomon deal with a horde of Little League dads who all think their kid is the next Hank Aaron?
Your life is richer than you think, and you can ‘steal’ from your past as well. Mine through your memories and dig up unique people that you can spin off into new characters, such as: Your neighborhood delinquent, grown up. The first person you deeply admired or feared or loved. The last person you’d want to be stuck on a desert island with. The smartest person you know. The dumbest. The vainest. The most confident.
Relax repeatedly. It’s so important to eliminate tension. It’s such a pleasure, such a relief to do it. Last night as I practiced my mandolin, I had trouble playing a fast tune I know well. What was the matter? Without noticing, I’d gotten tense. The first flubbed note led to another, then another, and another. I stopped, relaxed my hands and arms, let a big breath out, and played the tune again—fast and easily, with enjoyment. Being relaxed and ready helps you do everything better.
Allow yourself to relax. Shut off your inner editor and refuse to second-guess anything that comes out of you. Just throw it down on the paper. You can go back and make things read better later. Just plain refuse to jabber at yourself while you’re writing. (I’ve been heard to mutter, “Shut up! Shut up!” to myself while writing first drafts.) For more, see The Little Bitch or Bastard on Your Shoulder in Chapter Twenty-Three.
As I suggested above, if you’re writing a memoir or other nonfiction, your main character might be you. Do a stormwrite on yourself. In fact, no matter what your book is about, I think doing a stormwrite on yourself as the hero of your own life is a great idea.
Give it a go.
Because you must feel comfortable with yourself, you must make peace with your weaknesses and acknowledge your strengths. You have to be OK with exposing yourself, because that’s the way we best relate to real stories. Your story, any story. We feel the most deeply when we see gut-level honesty in another.
When hunting for characters, explore your own dark side. Think about something you did that was really rather horrible, and that you’re not sorry for. That’s some powerful stuff there. Now think about something you did that was horrible, and that you’re ashamed of. There’s power there, too. Think about writing a story about that shameful thing from a sympathetic point of view.
The how-to books that readers relate to best have a human element. Funny or serious, hard-assed or warm, let your personality come through.
Say you’re writing a book on how to grow roses. You’d naturally put in the basic facts of what kind of soil, sun, water, and nutrients roses require, grafting techniques, and so on. But you can bet that lots of people who want to grow roses would benefit from knowing how you, personally, solved particular problems or figured out new methods or arranged your plants for best effect in your unique backyard or made a beginner’s mistake and learned from it.
People love to read tips from other enthusiasts like themselves.
In the case of rose growing, they’ll love to read about gophers overcome, frost damage averted, a catastrophe of flood or fire and the rebuilding afterward. You can include these things from your own experience—your readers will want to know about the best rose gardener you met when you took that trip to England!—and you can beef things up by talking to other growers and asking them about their experiences. Then add what they say to your book. Give credit where credit is due
Writers sometimes forget to bring the reader in via sensations, because we’re so intent on showing action. As you’re motoring along in a scene, take a moment to clue the reader into what that rose bed or that Italian kitchen smells like, or how the mountain air tastes or how those heels clicking along the wet pavement sound. Mention the infrared warmth from the end of a lit cigarette, the strips of light and shadow cast by a venetian blind.
Just for fun, do a Writing Blast on sensations. Explain to a space alien what an ice cream cone is, how you eat it, what it’s like to eat it, and three reasons why all space aliens should eat ice cream every day.
I once heard a successful radio reporter tell the secret of how he got people to tell him such good stuff. He said, “After they finish talking, I just keep holding the microphone right where it is. When they finally say something else, it’s always good.”
If he had tried to cajole or force sources to talk more, they wouldn’t have.
CHISEL IT IN STONE:
RECEPTIVE PERSISTENCE CREATES BREAKTHROUGHS.
This holds true in all things.