CHAPTER 13

CHARACTER STUDY

BY ALICE HOFFMAN

It’s often said that all characters in a dream are pieces of the dreamer’s consciousness; the dreamer is every character in her own dreams, including the cat and the dog. It’s also true that every character in a writer’s fiction is a piece of that writer’s consciousness. Fully imagined characters—that is to say, characters that aren’t based on real people—are drawn from our own subconscious. We should know these people deeply because in some way, whether a character is a mass murderer or a nun, we are them.

In concentrating on what’s inside a character at the deepest level, there’s often a story within the story about the character—one the reader may never know, but one that the writer must always know. A character’s interior trauma or past experience is the core around which everything else is built. By writing so closely to a character’s spirit, the process of writing needs to be free enough to allow the writer to enter into another person’s consciousness. In a way, this is the greatest accomplishment for a writer in building character: When it’s possible to “think inside someone else’s head,” we know we’ve succeeded in breathing life into a fictional person. Once this happens, we can stand back. The character can control his fate.

There are teachers who may tell you to write about what you know and to write about people you’ve seen, met, eavesdropped on, or sat down at a table with for a family dinner. But if a writer knows the inner truth of an emotional experience, he can write about it in every setting. As fiction writers, we can be inside the experience of every situation and every character. A woman doesn’t have to be a man to write about one, even in the first person, and vice versa. The art of being a writer of fiction, as opposed to nonfiction or memoir, is to be yourself and yet have the ability to “imagine” yourself in another’s circumstances. My mentor, Albert Guerard, always told his students that a writer didn’t have to experience something to write about it; he only had to be able to imagine it. And I’d add that we also have to be able to feel it.

My method of character building is from the inside out—not necessarily the color of eyes and hair, the height and weight, but rather, how does a person sleep at night? What does he fear? Does he run from lightning or rush toward it?

One of the best devices in terms of imagining characters in an ongoing project such as a novel, which can take months or years to write, is to live inside the characters—to take them with you into the outside world, to experience real life in, say, a Starbucks or an airport, both as yourself and as your character. This means thinking about your character’s reactions while you react as yourself. As fiction writers we split ourselves into parts: The self and the characters we write about all abide within us. At times, during the process of writing, it’s possible to experience the disintegration of the self. This is the ecstasy of writing and of art, of losing oneself in the process of creating.

The moment when you know that your characters are fully alive is when they begin to make their own choices; this happened to me with my novel Seventh Heaven. In outline after outline, list after list, my character Nora Silk was planning to get involved with a police officer. But one day she did the oddest thing—she fell in love with someone completely unexpected. I tried to rewrite her into doing what I willed, what I wanted, but Nora Silk now had a mind of her own. I should have known she’d do as she pleased from the moment she entered my novel, driving fast and taking directions from no one.

Nora Silk was trying to keep up with the moving van, but every time she stepped down hard on the gas and hit sixty-five miles an hour the Volkswagen shimmied for no reason at all. Nora had to hold tight to the steering wheel whenever the tires edged into the fast lane. She looked past the heat waves and concentrated on driving until she heard the pop of the cigarette lighter.

My first experience with the intensity of writing characters that seemed real was when I finished my first novel, Property Of. Fittingly, I dreamed about a ceremony in which my characters were leaving me, and I awoke in tears. It’s a loss to finish with a character you’ve put so much time and energy into, and, of course, so much of yourself. But like dreams, there’s an endless supply of characters waiting to be created and named.

  ALICE HOFFMAN has published eighteen novels, two books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel Here on Earth was an Oprah Book Club pick in 1998. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People.