Building a Character from the Ground UpIntroduction
Without character there is no story. Characters are often the reason we read. As well as what the story is about, we want to know who the story is about. A reader needs a protagonist to empathize with, someone to identify with for the duration of the story or novel. The best characters become part of our shared cultural experience: how many of us have discussed the characters from our favourite books or TV shows as if they were real people? But where does a writer start? How can character become convincing on the page?
A good character always has some kind of internal conflict. A character who has no problems becomes unbelievable and boring very quickly. Chances are, if your character suffers no conflict you will be finding her hard to write. Dialogue, for example, is almost impossible to write without a really clear sense of how your character views the world and her place in it. How can a character with nothing to struggle with have a perspective on the world? How can they speak? Without conflict a story will have no shape. These conflicts might be heightened, more dramatic than real life, but they are what give your character a perspective on the world. Where would Lady Macbeth be without her guilt? Hamlet without his desire for revenge?
Development of character relies on consequence, on the way in which the world creates and shapes us. Before you even start to write a word of your story, write some character sketches. Write an imagined history for your characters. Always ask, Why? Why is my character like this? Why do they feel this way? Characters, like real people, have histories: places they came from, ideas about the world, families. Ask your character thirty questions about themselves, from ‘What is your favourite colour?’ to ‘How do you feel about your parents?’ It may take a while for them to take shape, you may write plenty that is irrelevant or unnecessary, but this kind of imaginative sketching is vital to the development of a convincing character. It’s your job to know your characters inside out, to have their psyche at your fingertips.
Take this opening sentence from Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth:
She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of my school I seemed to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.
The narrator starts the story with a conflict. The novel, which is all about men escaping from women – and more specifically, a domineering Jewish mother – begins as it means to go on. It lays down a gauntlet, it starts with a character in conflict with themselves and the world around them.
What makes a character interesting is not the way that the world impacts upon the character, but the way in which the character impacts upon the world. If all you are doing is describing things that happen to your character, the likelihood is that you haven’t thought them through properly. They will remain passive, have no impetus, no reason to act. To get your character doing and saying things in an active, engaging way they need to be vital, visceral. They need to have reasons, motivations, conflicts.
Characters evolve through being tested by the events of a story. Often writers will say things such as ‘The characters started to run away with me,’ or, ‘They surprised me, I didn’t know they were going to do that.’ Writing character sketches is only half the task. Once you start putting your character into an environment and writing her through scenes and dialogue, she will start to have life on the page, she will start to do things, say things of her own accord.
Characters don’t have to jump out of cupboards and say ‘boo’ to be surprising, they need to reveal themselves to the reader in an interesting way. Consider this character sketch:
A young man in his early twenties, works in a crisp factory, shovelling heaps of potato chips out of vats of boiling fat. Makes his skin greasy; he’s underconfident with girls. On Saturday nights he gets drunk with the boys but doesn’t feel as if he can really talk to women. Still has a strange obsession with Airfix kits. Lives with his mum who’s sick; she’s got lots of animals, fourteen cats, two dogs, rabbits and a parakeet. His wages have to go towards keeping the animals, which he is beginning to really hate.
The character already has plenty of potential conflict there. Put him in a few scenes to see how he’ll react. Imagine him at work in the crisp factory: What does he think of the people he works with? What does he think of his job?
Surprise has much to do with expectation. It’s only when you know how a character is expected to behave that you can make them defy their own conventions. Perhaps the young man could really enjoy his job, or find some kind of solace in being out of the house away from the animals. It would be too easy to make him hate everything; it would make him quite passive. What if his mother died, leaving him with a house full of animals? How would he cope? What if he found a girlfriend, a boyfriend? All these scenarios allow for the possibility of surprise.
Characters who are not surprising can become stereotyped. They behave in a way which is all too familiar to us already. Do drug addicts always have to be poor? Working mothers always have to feel guilty? Boys into football and cars?
A good exercise is to give your character several different settings and try to write them in each one. Iceland, Ibiza, Iowa, Indonesia, for example, or, less exotic, at work, at home, in the pub, in the supermarket. How does your character react and adapt to new environments? How do they feel about their home town? A really good character should be able to go anywhere and still have something interesting to say about it.
Voice creates character on the page. It is the way they talk and think, or the implied way in which they talk and think, that gives your characters life. We all use language differently, we all have a voice that is unique to us, even fictional characters. To have some idea of how your characters think and speak you need to think about where they come from. What figures of speech are natural to their environment? Do they have an accent? Do they have verbal tics unique to them?
To be convincing, you need to think about how your characters talk. Not just in dialogue but also in the narrative. In a first-person narrative, a story is all character, but in a third-person narrative, character is revealed through description, dialogue and implied speech. Writing from a child’s perspective, for example, limits the kinds of words and ideas you can express. The child character shouldn’t sound too ‘adult’, and yet she mustn’t be so childish as to render the story incomprehensible.
Even in third-person narratives you need to have a clear sense of how a character talks; the narrative needs to be soaked in the character’s voice. Consider this example from Jane Austen’s Emma:
The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable. – It was a wretched business indeed! – Such an overthrow of every thing she had been wishing for! – Such a development of every thing most unwelcome! – Such a blow for Harriet! – That was the worst of all. Every part of it brought pain and humiliation, of some sort or other; but, compared with the evil to Harriet, all was light; and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken – more in error – more disgraced by mis-judgement than she actually was, could the effects of her blunders have been confined to herself.
Though ostensibly in the third person, this passage is a reported version of Emma’s real speech. Austen reveals Emma’s character by reporting to the reader what she is thinking. The sentences with exclamation marks show the progression of Emma’s feelings of mortification. She has just been proposed to by Mr Elton, the bumptious local vicar, whom she has been grooming as a match for her friend Harriet. Having raised Harriet’s expectations, she now has to face an unwanted suitor as well as the social humiliation of explaining to Harriet what has happened. Austen is so close to her character at this point that narrator and character are almost of the same voice.
Finally, good characterization relies on detail. Well-placed details give a sense of authenticity and help the reader to build a mental picture of your character in their mind. Much of this depends on visualization, on the writer being able to see their characters as physical beings.
What kinds of clothes do they wear? How do they look? What kind of expressions do they pull?
Look at this passage from Hemingway:
Robert Jordan looked at the man’s heavy, beard-stubbled face . . . his head was round and set close on his shoulders. His eyes were small and set too wide apart and his ears were small and set close to his head. He was a heavy man about five feet ten inches tall and his hands and feet were large. His nose had been broken and his mouth was cut at one corner and the line of the scar across the upper lip and lower jaw showed through the growth of beard over his face.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
Against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, the protagonist, Robert Jordan, has just met Pablo, the leader of the guerrilla group that he is keen to join. The description of Pablo’s imposing physical presence adds weight to the muscular, masculine tone of the novel. This is a story about war, about hardened, physical characters.
Even if you don’t use them verbatim, it is useful to write a couple of paragraphs of physical description for your characters. If you can’t visualize them, chances are your reader won’t be able to either.
Arguments over the nature of character in fiction were the topic and focus of much twentieth-century literary debate and writing. The modernist movement was obsessed with it, bent on resisting a Victorian notion of character that believed in a tightly constructed, preordained ‘human nature’. Virginia Woolf’s later novels, for example, are meditations on the construction of character, a question that pushes beyond the pages of her books into life, asking what it means to have identity. In these texts, character is fluid, represented through streams of consciousness; a fictional trick that attempts to mirror the minute-by-minute thought processes of a human being. In other writers, Italo Calvino, for example, in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, character is acknowledged from the start as a construction, a product of the writer, whom we are kind enough to read. Or, as in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, character is an archetype, written in capital letters – Princess, Mother, Wolf, Witch, Queen, Beast – which traps the protagonist into a string of set responses that they must struggle to escape.
Whichever side of the critical fence you choose to sit, a writer at the beginning of their writing life has to learn the art of characterization before they can attempt to break the mould. Picasso learnt to create perfect life-drawings before he dared to fracture the human image with his cubist paintings. Many students, enthralled by theoretical ideas of character, try to write experimental or stream-of-consciousness narratives without having first tried to create character on the page in a realist way. Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, is a homage to the Victorian novel. There are hints of the stream-of-consciousness style she would later go on to adopt, but this novel is an example of a writer finding her feet by working through the confines of convention first.
People are immensely complicated. The best fiction recognizes this, creating characters so utterly convincing that we fully expect to bump into them at the bus stop. Developing characters with this depth of being and richness of spirit is difficult. Too often we have a sketch of a character in mind when beginning a story and we never allow that character to grow beyond his or her initial sketch. Why is this? It is because we have not successfully fooled ourselves into believing that our characters are real people. We know we’re making them up, right? We’re caught up in the exhilarating process of lying, of playing God. We know our characters will do what we want them to do, say what we want them to say. But – if we hope to write a successful story – we must believe in our characters as living breathing humans. If we don’t, then how can we possibly expect our readers to?
Tim O’Brien’s story ‘The Things They Carried’ (a section in the novel of the same name) is an extraordinary example of how a multitude of characters can be defined with minimal exposition. The story, about a platoon in Vietnam, develops the characters – both major and minor – by telling the reader what each carries with him through the terrain of war. Each man carries something related to his role in the platoon: the radio, the M-60 machine gun, the maps, the code book, etc. In addition, each carries a little part of the self he has left behind: a comic book, letters from a girlfriend, an illustrated Bible. Finally, each character carries a memento of the self he has become: pot, earplugs, the blackened thumb off a VC corpse. We know almost nothing of these characters except for what they carry, and yet as the story develops each man comes alive as a unique individual.
Another effective, if less literary, use of the same technique can be found in the American movie The Breakfast Club. In one scene, a young woman who finds it impossible to connect with her peers dumps out the contents of her purse in front of a young man in an attempt to share herself with him. With little dialogue, the young man – and the viewer – is able to gain insight into this woman simply by taking note of the contents of her purse.
Try it yourself, with those around you. Imagine you are at a family gathering and your mother asks you to retrieve something from her purse. Problem is, you don’t know what her purse looks like, and there are a dozen purses to choose from. And yet, quickly, you are able to determine which purse is hers. Why is this? What items make it uniquely hers? Is it the flavour of chewing gum? The colour of lipstick? The selection of credit cards? The pencil with the end chewed off? The lucky coin?
The way to apply this technique to your fiction – obviously – is to discover what it is that each of your characters carries. The ‘vehicle’ for the carried items can be anything: a backpack, a suitcase, a lunch box, a handbag, a briefcase, etc.
This technique can be quite useful at two points of the writing process: in the initial creation of a character and in the task of revision.
Building a Character from the Ground Up
In this method, you start with a literal and figurative blank slate. With a clean sheet of paper and a clear mind, simply start listing items off the top of your head. List the first ten things you think of, no matter how random or dissimilar they may seem. When you have finished, look over your list and create a character based on those items. Say your list looks like this:
Now, what observations can we make about this character? The Zippo lighter might indicate that the character smokes, yet there are no cigarettes. Perhaps the lighter is of sentimental value? Perhaps the character does not smoke himself but has friends who do? Or perhaps the character cannot afford cigarettes – after all, he/she only has three pounds. Now, what of the whistle key chain? Does that suggest that your character is anticipating danger? Does he/she have reason to suspect a threat is imminent? And what about the small china dog? Surely this has no practical value. Was it a gift? A remnant from childhood? Did it once belong to the man in the wrinkled photo?
This list – which I came up with in less than five minutes – offers me innumerable possibilities; it gives me a place to begin, a foundation to build upon. Once I have unravelled the mysteries behind these ten items, my character will come to life.
Understanding Your Characters
This exercise is also extremely helpful when revising a story that has already been drafted. If you feel your characters are underdeveloped, lacking humanity, make a list of the things each of them carries. The things on your list may never show up in the actual story – certainly not all of them will. But the better you know your character, the better realized he will be. Making the list for a character who already exists will offer you new insights into his personality. These insights, in turn, will enrich your understanding of the character as you revise the story, helping you to create a convincingly complex human being.
If you want to write fiction it’s often because you are nosy.
You want to know about people. You want to know what makes them tick. You’ve spent most of your life listening to the way people talk, watching how they behave. They intrigue you, they madden you, they fascinate you.
Perhaps you grew up like this: a little apart from the rest of the crowd. Hanging on to the sidelines. Feeling rather awkward and too thoughtful while everyone else was charging around. You were astonished by the way they seemed to know, without apparent effort, the way they needed to behave.
You were watching as the class got rowdy while the teacher was out of the room. Knowing she was going to come back any minute and catch the rowdiest as they were drawing filthy pictures on the blackboard. You knew that the teacher was going to walk in just then; you knew she would look flustered and annoyed in just that way.
When you got older, still watching other people, talking to them, you realized that they weren’t as straightforward as that. They felt awkward, too. They were just getting on with it. They were extemporizing and feeling perhaps as alienated as you were.
But the obsession stays with you: Why does everyone else seem to feel so at home in themselves, when so much of your own time is given over to not being you? When you spend so long imagining what it must be like to be them instead?
The writer Tony Warren has said that as a child he would sit under the kitchen table, hiding there and listening as the adults talked. He would listen to the way women talked and the way men talked, and he would appreciate and catalogue the differences. He did a lot of research under that table before he even knew that it was research at all.
If you are going to write fiction, chances are that you’ve been collecting up just that sort of research all of your life. We all have stories we like to tell: outrageous ones about the doings of various aunts and acquaintances; sad ones about neighbours and friends. These stories always congregate around characters we already know and have observed. We have taken down their particulars in the most avid fashion; we just haven’t written them down yet.
The best storyteller I know is my mother. She can spin them out for hours on end and range over a huge cast of characters; the full gamut of human emotion within the space of a single phone call. She also has amazing recall; far better than me. She says she could never write any of it down; she’s not sure she has the grammar or the correct form of expression. I try to tell her there is no correct form; there’s just technique.
The real business is the story in the first place; the story that is set into motion by the characters inside it – behaving in all the random, selfish, adventurous, brave, ludicrous ways that people behave.
When you write fiction you have to remind yourself that fiction doesn’t have to be grandiose and stuffed to the gills with profundity. What’s the most memorable bit of Ulysses? Someone cooking kidneys, someone else rolling about on a bed. What’s the most memorable episode in A Room with a View? Lucy gets her first snog in a field of wild flowers. All of these things are based in everyday behaviour; they’re all things we’ve seen or experienced.
It doesn’t have to be massive, profound or outrageous to catch our eye. To stay with us. To make us think: What’s really going on in that person’s head?
I was walking to catch the bus to work one day and I saw this old man bent double in the street. He was stuck still, as if his back had locked, but it turned out he always walked that way. He was in an old mac and he had a rather smug-looking cat sitting on his back. He looked at me imploringly and asked if I would scoop the creature off.
‘It’s a very nice pussy, but it always does this.’ Up the street, high on scaffolding, builders were laughing, as I knocked the cat off and shooed it away.
Two weeks later I saw him there again, with the cat sitting on top of him again. He didn’t recognize me, but he asked if I’d mind coming to the rescue.
The poor old bloke walked that way every day, bent double with rheumatism. Each time he passed that particular wall the cat would be there waiting for him, ready to stride blithely out and stop him in his tracks.
What I couldn’t help thinking about afterwards was what was going on in the old fella’s mind. Did he think the cat was persecuting him? Did he think this happened to everyone? He wouldn’t walk for fear of hurting the cat, of dislodging him and knocking him to the ground. His behaviour was bound up with a curious kind of complicity with and tenderness towards a cat who, as far as I could see, was just having a laugh.
Then I started to wonder about the cat’s motives in all of this.
This is, it has to be said, though true, a somewhat outré story. I’d think twice about writing a story about a man with a cat on his back. It’s useful as an example, though, of the kinds of things you see that you aren’t expecting to; the odd bits of surprising behaviour you see in people that lodge in your head and won’t let you go until you do something with them. You either have to tell someone else about them or you have to write them down. You have to find some way of seeing that behaviour from the inside. ‘What makes someone act like that?’ you end up asking yourself all the time.
A friend of mine went to Sunday lunch with people he hardly knew. The husband was affable and nervous; a computer programmer who filled the awkward silences with talk of nothing else. His teenaged kids were subdued and his wife was strangely distracted as she gulped her way through a bottle of Chardonnay. My friend said that they’d all held it together pretty well for a while, until the tipsy woman suddenly burst out: ‘I saw that Lulu on the television last night. She’s sorted out her life. She’s got rid of her partner and a life that wasn’t working. She’s got her independence back. That’s what I want to be! Just like Lulu!’
‘Mam, don’t,’ said the eldest daughter, and suddenly the whole family started talking to cover up the mother’s sobs.
My friend told me he didn’t know where to put himself.
So here’s a scene less outrageous, more everyday than that with the man and the cat on his back. It still gets your mind going. How many Sunday lunches go on like that all over the country, all over the world, every week? We’ve all been sat there when someone suddenly erupts into an epiphany about what they want their life to be like. We find the revelation and the pathos endlessly fascinating. However embarrassed we are at the time, afterwards we still want to know what it was all about; how it was that tensions like that happened to come to such an abrupt and compelling head.
As a writer what I want to be doing at that point is coming at the scene from a number of different angles. I want to know what her husband is feeling, as he tries to keep the lunch party together, pretending nothing is going on. I want to know how he squirms as his wife gives the lie to their happy gathering. I want to be the children; one of them, the youngest, delighted at the spectacle of the adults behaving like kids and shouting out the first thing on their minds. I want to know about the older child, shushing her mother, trying not to let the strangers hear, being embarrassed and flinching at everything her parents say and do.
And I want to be in the mother’s shoes as she looks up and down the immaculate dining table; at these children, this husband and these friends she doesn’t even know. How did she end up here, eating with all of these people? Will she be here Sunday after Sunday, for ever, until the end of her life? When the kids go to college will it just be him and her and other strangers? Will they be talking about new computer systems for ever, each of them giving her odd worried looks now and then as the conversation so obviously passes her by? What exactly is it that goes through her head in the seconds before her outburst? What is it that makes her seize on Lulu as the image, the icon, the emblem of her possible escape? Does she really mean to hurt everyone’s feelings? Make them feel uncomfortable? Is she completely unaware of the effect her words can have? What is the secret story that drives her to this?
That scene seems to me to be behaviour in its purest form. It’s a scene we can turn over and over in the light, seeing it from all angles. It’s the kind of scene you mull over for ages, even when you are not writing. It’s the kind of thing you thought about even before you called yourself a writer of fiction.
One of the best responses I ever got about a piece of writing of mine was when a friend read a scene in which a woman spends a whole day obsessed with getting all her washing done, out of guilt, in order to have earned the previous night out and the hangover she now has. She makes her hangover worse by watching the suds slosh round. ‘How do you know that?’ my friend asked. I didn’t really have an answer. It just seemed like the way people carried on.
I tend to believe in what the American writer Charles Bukowski said: that even the time we don’t spend actually writing words on pages, we are writing all of the time. I really think that we spend hours drinking in, observing, miring ourselves in what’s going on. I think Bukowski was saying something slightly different to me. I think he also meant something about spending time completely drunk and cogitating Profound Themes. Here I’m more concerned about the way we become intrigued by other people and their specific behaviours and details, and the way we move through sympathy, empathy, towards putting ourselves in their shoes.
In real life, of course, wearing someone else’s shoes isn’t a good idea at all. Once I was on an Outward Bound course (not willingly, and not something I would ever do again) and we were forced to wear other people’s fell-walking boots. I wanted to wear my trainers but we weren’t allowed; we had to be properly equipped.
My feet ballooned. After a day’s walking I could barely stand up. Within a week I had blood blisters the size of saucers on both heels.
In writing, of course, trying on other shoes is far less perilous.
It is a cliché about acting that you can feel your way into a part by getting the footwear right. For writing I would say don’t wear anything on your feet at all. You’ve got to put yourself, at a moment’s notice, into somebody else’s shoes and you need to feel free enough to do that.
Try this exercise in order to get your character to come to life.
Imagine them in conversation with someone. They are describing the plot of a film they have seen on TV the night before. They can’t remember the name of the film and they talk their friend through the whole plot. The point of the exercise is to discover how your character would tell a story differently to you or anyone else. What would they find interesting or important? What fascinates them or offends them? Here’s your chance to find out things about your invented character that you don’t know yet.
Keep this character in your head. As you read, talk with people, go shopping, eat dinner, watch TV, keep asking yourself: What would they think of this? How would they respond differently to me?
Some years ago I came across a newspaper cutting I’d kept: ‘Jilted Woman, 70, Found Dead in Nest of Leaves’. The article concerned the sad and bizarre circumstances of the ‘bird woman’s’ life and death. Jilted at the altar some thirty-five years earlier, she had never returned to her work as a pharmacist or to living in her mother’s bungalow. Instead she made a home in the garden, a giant nest-like construction of twigs, leaves and rotting cloth. The article included one or two quotes from neighbours, their descriptions of her regular appearances at the library and in the fields (her face daubed with flour), the police discovery of her body and the overgrown garden, plates of food for the birds, pink ribbons hanging from the trees.
An extraordinary story, tantalizing, too, in its details and omissions. I decided to try to write a poem in the woman’s voice, and to find a vocabulary and state of mind for her, to understand her reasoning at the turning point where she decides to set up home outside. A line came to me quite immediately: ‘I’m setting up home in the garden / unpacking my trousseau in a room of leaves.’ I called the poem ‘Nest’ and it was my first attempt to create character in a poem.
Nest
I’m building a nest in the garden
and watching my breath disappear
into splintered trees.
The sky is scratched and freezing;
birds are trapped in it.
I finger veins on damaged leaves
and put my ear to the cracked soil
but there’s no pulse.
My nest will be of dead and aching things,
lined with my wedding dress,
decorated with our broken flowers.
I’ll sing a marriage song behind my throat
where everything is cold and trapped.
Save me from losing my breath in the hard air.
Save me from screaming like birds
and wondering how things disappear.
I’m setting up home without you,
unpacking my trousseau in a room of leaves,
singing.
FROM HOW TO DISAPPEAR
I found the experience absorbing and challenging in quite different ways from my previous attempts at writing poems. It was also oddly freeing – perhaps not unlike a performer working with a mask. Although I’d tried writing in first, second and third person, present and past tense, and in voices where ‘I’ was quite certainly not ‘I’, this was the first time I had consciously ‘constructed’ a person and ‘her’ voice. What I liked about working in this way was how the distance allowed me, paradoxically, to write directly and personally and to explore intense emotion, without falling into the trap – as I perceived it – of writing private, hideously untransformed, ‘spill your guts’ stuff.
I called the woman Grace, and her circumstances gave me an almost ready-made pattern of images (leaves, nest, room, cage, shelter, wedding, birds) through which to build an evocation of her immense loss, sense of ‘outsider’ status and of what I wanted to portray as her oddly calm and brave state of mind.
After I’d written ‘Nest’ I knew I’d only just started with Grace and her story. I guessed I should be writing a novel or a play, but I wanted to write poems and I wanted to see if I could create an entire story as a narrative sequence in verse. For a few weeks I set myself writing exercises and made copious notes about the, by now, imaginary Grace and, later, Frank – the man who jilted her at the altar. I worked, as I suppose some novelists work, creating a life for Grace and Frank: What do they wear? What do they love? What do they want? What frightens them? What do they own? And why? Why does Frank jilt Grace at the altar? Why does she never return to her mother’s home? I was, by now, quite unconcerned with the literal facts of the story, fascinated instead by the puzzle of creating an internal logic for Grace’s apparently very odd behaviour and the challenge of understanding, if not empathizing with, Frank’s betrayal.
I played a version of the Furniture Game that I’d first come across in a writing workshop, and then in a book by Peter Sansom. You write a list of categories: furniture, weather, car, drink, animal, room, flower, etc. Then you say: ‘If Frank was a piece of furniture, what piece of furniture would he be?’ I decided Frank was a fantasist and that I needed two replies for him. Frank would want to be a chaise longue but he would actually be an inexpensive, slightly fragile kitchen chair. And so on . . .
Grace, I decided, was a hippopotamus but, in part because of this, she was obsessed with birds. More than obsessed, she comes to believe she is one – the logic for much of her behaviour. So I read up on garden birds and collected words for the things birds do. (Take a look at Selima Hill’s ‘Maisie’ for an interesting treatment of the usually insulting cliché of woman as cow.)
There’s a Maura Dooley poem that delves into the contents of someone’s bag. She transforms what is found there into a wonderful piece of writing. I didn’t do this, but I did, in note form, decide what Grace might carry with her and what was in the pockets of Frank’s coat.
Another idea I tried was to write the five senses down the side of a sheet of paper and some key moments from the ‘story’ along the top. I didn’t fill it in with examples of what Grace or Frank were seeing, touching, hearing at this moment, but with examples of the senses as metaphors for their states of mind. For example, the day after jilting Grace at the altar, the taste of being Frank is cold metal on your tongue and fish in your windpipe. In the months before she dies, the sound of being Grace is of echoing in hollow bones and a flapping loud enough to fill the fields.
And I did some very simple research on the late fifties and early sixties. Once I came to know, for example, that Frank loved the movies – old movies – I needed to find out a bit more about screen goddesses and popular films of the time. If Grace was a pharmacist, I might want to name a few popular 1950s remedies, so I talked to a retired pharmacist, and a doctor gave me some medical terms for her likely condition at the time of death.
I remember gathering all of these fragments in a notebook, which I’ve still got, but then realizing one day that I had more than enough material and that I was in danger of using the research as a fine old excuse for not writing the actual poems. For me, poems don’t come from ideas; they come, usually, from a single image or from a phrase that lodges itself in my brain. Most usually they begin visually, and from this visual moment comes a word image or metaphor and so on. What the ‘research’ and the writing exercises had given me was both a strong sense of Grace and Frank as people, and a series of images and metaphors, details from which to select and through which to construct their stories and their inner lives. (I could see Grace in her size 9 shoes, accidentally breaking a blown egg; Frank on the edge of a cliff, feeling like a hooked fish dangling from a rod.) However, what I felt I now had to do was forget everything, pack away the notebooks at the back of my brain, and try to return to ‘real’, authentic writing, trusting that the important fragments would present themselves when and if I needed them.
This worked for Grace, but I found Frank difficult. I had decided he was an immature and emotionally inarticulate man and that his speech would be cliché-ridden and often stilted. But how to find a voice for him that articulated this without being simply ‘dull’?
In the end I found something, through playing around with draft after draft of Frank’s proposal to Grace. I abandoned any attempt to construct something that sounded like what Frank might actually have said – that wasn’t even interesting. But Frank’s inner, imaginary world is anything but dull. So instead I saw the marriage proposal in terms of the emotion driving the moment as Frank’s childlike stuttering to himself; a naive, urgently gushing plea to be rescued, not from his dream, but from the harshness of the real world. I started to find a voice that juxtaposed repetition and colloquial speech patterns with the imagery of Frank’s obsessions (in this case, the movies), and combined the mundane with the heightened. Just as important, I tried to find a rhythm and a pattern of words on the page (especially line breaks) that echoed his state of mind: breathless and quick in his excitement, anxious, self-doubting and full of dreams.
Frank’s Proposal
I want to start again.
I want to start again
against a New York sky.
Tyrone Power on the thirteenth floor
breathing silk. Will you do it?
I want to board a liner to the USA.
I want to go there.
An Affair to Remember on the open deck,
sky full of stars and Vic Damone.
Remember?
When I become The Man with the Golden Arm
will you save me?
Will you be Kim Novak in a haze of smoke?
Will you help me break the habit of a lifetime?
Will You?
FROM HOW TO DISAPPEAR
I’m not sure if it entirely works or even if it’s a poem! If it is, it comes from the collision of two ‘languages’, which is what I think any voice in creative writing, essentially, must be. There’s the voice of the ‘person’ who’s apparently speaking, then there’s the voice of the writer. In overtly personal or confessional writing, I guess the two are almost one and the same thing, in that the reader can’t separate the voices – that which comes out of trawling for very personal, subjective, maybe formless, raw material. And the cool, crafting, editorial voice that the writer often only allows in later. However, in a poem that’s concerned with constructing a sense of character through voice, the distinction between ‘character’ and ‘writer’ is usually more clear. In a later ‘Frank’ poem, for example, I wanted to suggest his crass lack of awareness and inadequacy, revealed in the inappropriate tone and content of a letter he writes to Grace. So he speaks almost entirely in film titles and the letter has a strong rhythm as well as a formal rhyme scheme, used in this case to suggest Frank’s unwitting trivialization of Grace’s situation as well as his own need for formal politeness and constraint. I think it is a poem entirely in his voice – but, of course, he wouldn’t really write like that.
Not all of the poems in the sequence that became Room of Leaves are written in the first person. As poem after poem began to collage into a jigsaw kind of narrative, I felt the need for a kind of balance, a move away from the intense, personal, and often rather desperate registers of Frank and Grace, towards a flatter, more objective note. I could only see this being achieved through a third-person narrative, but I didn’t want to move right away from my exploration of characters and voice.
In the end, I came up with some notes from the autopsy report – almost a ‘found poem’ from the real notes given to me by a doctor. And in the poem that ends the sequence, with the discovery of Grace’s body, I deliberately used direct and reported speech in amongst barely altered references from the original news report. This, I hoped, was in keeping with the italicized interjections from Grace’s mother that appear throughout Grace’s poems: ‘stupid girl’, ‘clumsy ox’, ‘Breathe in, Gracie’.
In giving the reader suggestions of ‘other’ voices, I wanted to evoke fragments of character that were never fully explored or developed and, in the case of PC Ainsley, the voice of a kind of Joe Public or Everyman. He has the final word:
Half a battered suitcase in the undergrowth,
a screwtop jar with nothing in it but a ring,
a tarnished ring, set with a clear blue stone.
Ainsley held it to the light. Poor bitch.
The power to create and develop character is at the heart of all fictional writing. The other essential motor of narrative is plot. But plot is itself often the product of a character or characters in their processes of development, growing self-knowledge or interaction with others. So plot itself is the product of human actions or adventures. And it is frequently from the idea of a key character, the emergence of a central figure, that the whole notion of a story starts.
So Henry James, describing in one of his late-life prefaces the creative process that brought what is perhaps his finest novel The Portrait of a Lady (1882) into being, emphasizes that the book came out of a character, Isabel Archer – the young American girl affronting her destiny. But how, he asks, does a character become a subject? ‘Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of its very nature “ado,” an ado about something . . .’ So the problem of writing the book is to make an ‘ado’ about Isabel Archer.
James splendidly describes how he goes about the problem: how to build ‘a square and spacious house around her’. He observes that a whole gallery of other characters begins to take shape around her, once you ask the questions: What does she want? And what will she do? Some of these characters will be central to the form; others will be secondary characters. Out of them all, but above all out of the wants and needs of the central character, Isabel, the story will take shape. James emphasizes that, in the case of this novel at least, he did not know, when he started to create Isabel and set her life and actions moving, what was finally going to happen to Isabel Archer.
Yet even when we do know – when we have a story worked out and seek characters to take us through it – we still depend fundamentally on the power of creating, developing, motivating and illuminating character. In some forms of writing this is obvious. We cannot write a play without characters: drama is a developing interaction of characters performed by actors and developed scene by scene.
But the novel, the short story, and many forms of poetry, as well as the modern media – film, television drama, interactive TV – are just as dependent on character. And the power to understand the potential of character, the elements that compose a significant representation, is central to writing and the human sympathy and recognition on which literature depends.
In drama the centrality of character is always apparent. A playscript is not really a text but a set of instructions for performance. It opens with a list of characters, or dramatis personae: the impersonation of character, the power to be another is at the centre of an actor’s skills. Writing for actors is one of the great tests of writing, and the ability to create a powerful part and keep it alive and in motion and development through the course of a dramatic narrative is one of the key literary skills. Drama provides us with many of our key notions of character and psychology. Some of the key terms of characters in interaction in the interests of drama and discovery come from the stage: the hero and the anti-hero, the protagonist and the antagonist, the tragic hero, the comic clown, the villain, the confidant, the pantaloon. We similarly recognize in some of the great theatrical heroes and heroines – Oedipus, Antigone, Clytemnestra, Hamlet, Faust, Don Juan – the deeper and more mythic aspects of character, and the fact that great characters generally have profound psychological and indeed mythological roots.
The essence of a dramatic character seems to lie in playability: the character is interesting and engaging, fascinating from the outside, clearly motivated within. An actor or actress playing the part finds in it a coherence of motivation, the basis of a performance; the spectator in the theatre finds developing interest in the actions and evolutions of the actor in the part. Characters illuminate themselves by tiny detail – habits of behaviour, types of speech. But the dramatic and narrative essence lies in those larger questions that Henry James raises about Isabel Archer: What does she want? And what will she do? A character is not complete until we perceive the drama that goes with it, and the relationships, antagonisms and developments that now come into play.
In classical drama, ‘character’ was consistent with ideas of grandeur and heroism: the figures represented centre stage were often gods, kings, queens or historical heroes. Modern drama, like modern fiction, has complicated such notions. Modern naturalism, from Ibsen on, introduced characters from ordinary life. New forms of theatricality – expressionism, surrealism – opened the stage to new fantasy, and therefore to realms of dream, desire and inward life. The absurdist theatre of Samuel Beckett challenged many of the key notions of character in dramatic action (the tramps of Waiting for Godot hardly move; the central figure of Not I is simply an illuminated mouth). The modern stage is a highly mobile and perspectivized space.
Yet the actor, and the character he or she plays, still stands at the centre: a human figure, a mobile performance, a bundle of motivations, a life in motion. Since drama does depend on actors, clearly a playscript itself is a process of interaction of characters, essentially developed through interactive dialogue, exits and entrances, time shifts and mood breaks. These are the main ways of developing characters, showing their histories, backgrounds, backstories; their social and sexual roles, their hopes, doubts, conflicts and fates.
In a playscript we hear characters speak about themselves, disclose their viewpoints, develop their interaction; so we understand their roles in the drama. In film we go further. With modern filming the camera is essentially a character and a mode of characterization. It can stand in for an angle on things, a point of view. A reaction shot can turn our attention from a speaker to a listener or an observer; perspective and distance are completely transformed. The sheer mobility and fluidity of film narrative, the power of editing, means that, in ways quite different from theatre, character can be revealed as movement and action.
Modern film-making and TV scriptwriting is highly generic, as happens in highly collaborative media, and writers and audiences have grown familiar with multiple codes of perspective: the flashback or flash-forward, the substitution of visual symbols or icons for speech, the use of location for drama, and so on. But again character is at the centre of narrative.
Screenwriting handbooks emphasize the centrality of character and some of the conventional devices by which, in film terms, character is analysed. Thus, says one useful handbook, consider screen characters (essentially central characters, protagonists) as having three dimensions: action (physical and psychological; external and internal); emotion (temperamental characteristics and reactions); and personality (integrated interior attributes, life-history, purposes and life-intentions).
A character needs growth and motivation; he or she also needs obstruction and conflict. Other characters will generally provide these things in development. From these things come the essentials and primary structures of the story. Mechanical as such story analyses are, they generally touch on a good number of the truths of writing, showing us what is dynamic and vital in a story, what gives it its structure (growth, self-discovery, revelation, etc.) and what keeps it in motion as a human fable.
Fiction – meaning the novel and short story – is as dependent as drama or film on character, but the tasks and problems are different. The novel is a form highly dependent from its beginnings on character. This is what the titles of some of the great books tell us: Don Quixote and Tom Jones, Emma and Jane Eyre, Nicholas Nickleby and Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Mrs Dalloway. Yet unlike drama the character is not represented by an actor, and is imagined in the author’s and the reader’s mind. Character exists as text: all of it is made of words.
The many languages of fiction mean there are many ways of presenting a character, besides dialogue, the key instrument in drama and screenwriting. And though in some fiction dialogue is a central means – as in the brilliant early short stories of Ernest Hemingway, which are largely dialogue-based – in other novels character is established by other means, not least power of description.
In drama we see the actor; in fiction we are encouraged to imagine the person. In drama we are engaged by the interaction of the characters; in fiction we have another layer of interaction, between character or characters and their author or creator. New perspectives then open. In drama or film, characters mostly play face to face. Their emotions are uttered and their intentions are made reasonably explicit. In fiction we can live in the mind, the consciousness or the unconscious of a character, according to the relation established between human figure and author.
The novel has a wider variety of angles and standpoints, because it can exploit many angles and employ many different types of discourse. Thus a book can be told in the first person, as a confession, or perhaps as a diary, or a memoir, or a set of stream-of-consciousness impressions associated with one individual, like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. It can be told more objectively, in the third person, either at a distance, so the characters are seen objectively, and mostly from outside, or close to the standpoint of one character, or as a mixture of several sets of close or distanced relationships. It can also be told in the second person, or in a complex mixture of persons and viewpoints.
In modern fiction there has been a strong tendency for fiction to move ‘inward’, to concern itself with inner sensations and psychology. Some of the great works of modernism – the novels of Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner – emphasize the impressionistic nature of the mind, the free-flowing of consciousness, and the complexity of observation and intuition. But the novel can be a large and epic spectacle, crowded with vast numbers of characters. Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and James Joyce’s Ulysses, two of the great modern works, are a fascinating mixture of the two: the panoramic epic and the novel of inner consciousness.
What the history of the novel seems to teach us is how much depends on the writer’s human power of sympathy, the capacity to value and observe human beings, to reproduce them in all their texture, to imitate speech, to understand instincts and motives, to appreciate the nature of psychological reactions and mental processes, to note oddities and quirks, to bring out what is strange, fascinating, revealing, unusual and also representative in human figures to full life.
Where do writers get their characters from? Life, certainly. The innocent notion is that they meet them, on the street or at work: note their mannerisms, write them down, turn them into literary property. Observation has rightly been emphasized as one source of literary character, and many a literary character has been traced back to an original. No doubt a good many fictional characters do have real-life counterparts. After all, this is one thing that helps make a character convincing, and many novels have a large autobiographical element in them; they are a slice of the author’s own life.
Yet characters, of course, are also made of writing. They are fictions, made for a purpose. It is our capacity to turn words into people, give them a life, a density, a past, a setting, a meaning, a psychology, to place them in a perspective, to sharpen their quirks and characteristics, that will make them memorable. Our characters must exist not just for the reader but for us, as authors. They must matter; they must become familiar. They must attract our interest, sympathy, attention, annoyance, even our aversion. We must know what we feel about them, how we place them in the culture. We must have a sense of what they are feeling, what they are wishing and desiring, what they might do next.
For that reason creating convincing and interesting characters has often been compared with getting married or acquiring a new family. We become engaged with the reality of the lives of others, to whom we give flesh, meaning and emotional time; in the writing of fiction, imaginary lives become as real as our own. We need to know far more about our characters than we will ever tell: their history, emotions, backgrounds, appearances, and choices. Good characters often overlap the book and outlast it. Henry James again, on his character Christine Light, the Princess Casamassima, who first appears in Roderick Hudson: ‘I remembered at all events feeling, toward the end of Roderick, that the Princess Casamassima had been launched, that, wound-up with the right silver key, she would go on a certain time by the motion communicated,’ he writes. What he means is that Christine has, unusually in James, simply become so powerful he feels the need to bring her back. And so he does, in the novel The Princess Casamassima, written ten years later, where she gets an even larger role.
And what is true for the author is often true for the reader. We often remember a character even when we cannot remember what their story is or what happens to them. We can see them in our friends or imagine them as part of our own lives. It is often those books where the focus is on the telling of the story of a life or an individual’s adventures that last longest in memory. Which means that the realistic observation of characters – human figures in their livingness – and our fascination with their development is fundamental to story.
Leo Tolstoy once defined the elements of ‘the novelist’s poetry’ like this: it consisted, he said, of ‘(a) in the interest of the arrangement of occurrences, (b) in the presentation of manners on an historic background, (c) in the beauty and gaiety of a situation, and (d) in people’s characters . . .’ which involves a sense of the complexity of human motives, which precipitates action and unifies the other elements. This is as good an account of the making of a novel as I know.
‘Character’ clearly has a central position in fiction. The novel has been very open to the idea of character as its primary subject, and its origins are associated with modern ideas of individualism, selfhood, consciousness and conscience. It has also been extremely concerned with the idea of character in society, and the sense of society as a rich and varied accumulation of characters, types and communities, as in the novels of Charles Dickens.
Characters have a variety of possible roles in fiction. They can be the central observers and interpreters of the story or simply key agents in it. We may learn of their ‘adventures’, their ‘opinions’, see their comedies or tragedies. We may be very close to the most intimate details of their lives and thoughts; or we may follow them to make our way through huge communities (Dickens, Balzac) or great journeys.
In modern times, the idea of character has altered greatly. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, at the dawn of a new era of psychology, Henry James was very aware of this (his brother William was professor of psychology at Harvard, and inventor of the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’). Modern literature has made much of the nature of consciousness. As the critic Erich Auerbach once put it, in modern fiction exterior events have lost their power, and now chiefly serve to release and interpret inner events.
But this is not inevitably so. Though the subjective and impressionistic central character (the Marcel of Proust, the Mrs Dalloway of Woolf) have become important representatives of modern fiction, so has ‘exterior’ characterization, characteristic, for instance, of comedy, satire and grotesque fiction. The fundamental fact remains that without characters literature would be uninteresting; and without the permutations that surround the strange and obscure notion of character many of the greatest devices of theatre and fictional storytelling would not exist.
The story that I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create have never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in . . . a convention universally accepted at the time of my story [the Victorian age]; that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.
I believe that all novels . . . deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose and undramatic, so rich, elastic and alive, has been evolved. To express character, I have said, but you will at once reflect that the very widest interpretation can be put upon those words . . . You see one thing in a character, and I another. You say it means this, and I that. And when it comes to writing, each makes a further selection on principles of his own.
Here is Tolstoy introducing us to Anna, the central character of his novel Anna Karenina. We see her on a train at Moscow station, through the eyes of the young soldier Vronsky, who will become her lover, and who is there to meet his mother off the train:
Vronsky followed the guard to the carriage and had to stop to let a lady pass out.
The trained insight of a Society man enabled Vronsky with a single glance to decide that she belonged to the best Society. He apologized for being in her way and was about to enter the carriage, but felt compelled to have another look at her, not because she was very beautiful or because of the elegance and modest grace of her whole figure, but he saw in her sweet face as she passed him something specially tender and kind. When he looked round she too turned her head. Her bright grey eyes which seemed dark because of their black lashes rested for a moment on his face as if recognizing him, and then turned to the passing crowd evidently in search of someone. In that short look Vronsky had time to notice the subdued animation that enlivened her face and seemed to flutter between her bright eyes and a scarcely perceptible smile which curved her rosy lips. It was as if an excess of vitality so filled her whole being that it betrayed itself against her will, now in her smile, now in the light of her eyes. She deliberately tried to extinguish that light in her eyes, but it shone despite of her in her faint smile.
A meeting takes place; nothing is spoken. One character is established through the observation of another. What is chiefly observed is a face and an expression. But it is in the words chosen to define Vronsky’s impressions that Tolstoy establishes the woman who is to be his central character, and much of her temperament and her function. Vronsky perceives, and we are given, a serious and dutiful woman, but one with a vital animation which is part of a vigorous sexuality. The encounter and the impression of personality that is conveyed in it, without a word spoken, is the motor of the entire story, and the basis of what will eventually prove first a profound and then a tragic relationship.
Nobody ever thought harder about the business of fiction, or wrote with more passion, analytical cunning or at times obscurity about its tricky arts than Henry James. The prefaces he added to the New York edition of his novels (1905–9), at the end of his life, when it was possible to look back over a career that had taken him on from the Victorian to the modern novel, are some of the greatest observations ever made about the art of fiction. ‘I sat for a long while with the closed volume in my hand,’ wrote Joseph Conrad, ‘going over the preface in my mind and thinking – that is how it began, that’s how it was done.’
James makes it clear his novels have not all started in the same way. Some have begun with what he called a donnée – an idea, an anecdote, sometimes an entire storyline, which emerged, perhaps, from a dinner-table conversation or hearing some striking story. Often James would write a complete plan of the book, not least in order to sell it as a serial to the magazines (though he wouldn’t always stick precisely to it, for new inventions happen in the writing). The Portrait of a Lady – James wishes to emphasize in his preface – was somewhat different; it started with a freestanding character, Isabel Archer, the young American girl affronting her destiny. She was the subject, and the rest of the book would start from there.
By what process of logical accretion was this slight ‘personality,’ the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject? – and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of its very nature ‘ado,’ an ado about something, and the larger the form it takes the greater of course the ado. Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in for – for positively organizing an ado about Isabel Archer.
HENRY JAMES, PREFACE TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
And he explains, a whole new gallery of characters begins to emerge around her once you ask the questions, What does she want? What will she do? James adds, interestingly, that some of these characters will belong to the ‘form’ – that is, they will come independently and vigorously alive in the way that Isabel herself does, as Pansy, Madame Merle, Ralph Touchett and Gilbert Osmond do in the book, and be fundamental friends or adversaries to the central character. Others, he says, really belong, like Henrietta Stackpole, to the ‘treatment’ – they belong with the wheels of the coach, to make it work, rather than the body of the vehicle. Hence some characters are crucial, some incidental or illustrative. What about the ones at the centre?
Isabel, in the novel, is left a large legacy to see what she will do and is set ‘free’. James has awarded a similar freedom to her role in the novel. As other characters wait to see what she will make of her freedom, so, it seems, does the novelist, who has left open the plot. Isabel represents a modern notion of character as an independent figure, and the modern character demands a new role in fiction. In the end, though, Isabel is pushed towards conformity. Characters, in fiction, never have total freedom, since they are subject to their creators.
Which is why we, the creators, can become so fascinated by our characters. We will them to be free. As André Gide once put it: ‘The poor novelist constructs his characters, he controls them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them function; he eavesdrops on them even before he knows them. It is only according to what he heard them say that he begins to understand who they are.’
What I do to get into the heart of a situation and a group of characters engaged in a drama is this: I often take articles from confessional magazines. By these I mean those glossy mags that purport to tell the true and harrowing and sometimes heart-warming tales of ordinary folk’s trials and tribulations. In these short articles we often get a whole family’s history in just a page or two; ghostwritten immaculately in standard English and accompanied by photographs of the actual people.
There’s something very rewarding about poring through someone else’s photograph album: weddings, Christmases, holidays. The cliché is that other people’s photos are boring; but that’s only because everyone’s are the same, essentially. You should be alert to the small, vital differences that give the true story away. Didn’t Tolstoy say something about families being happy for the same reasons and their various unhappinesses being completely unique?
These are the small, specific differences that attract me to these trial-and-tribulation stories in trashy magazines.
So, say you have a glibly ghostwritten article that skims over a life story – one perhaps about a doomed love, a missing child, a fatal disease or a failed holiday romance. What you have is a drama with a cast of four or five characters, a set of locations and a particular story arc. The article gets you nowhere near the real drama of the events. In these magazines what we have is drama recalled at a safe distance, written by someone who wasn’t there. These articles aren’t meant to profoundly disturb or unsettle us; they are meant to assure us that everything turned out all right in the end. Often they are profoundly moralistic and cathartic.
In fiction it doesn’t have to be all right in the end. In fiction we want to recreate the heat of the moment; pitch our readers back into the heart of the drama, the crucial moments of crisis.
The first thing you need to settle on is one of the characters. Whose viewpoint appeals to you most? I have a great trust in instinct when it comes to these things. Do you sympathize most with the mother who puts on various forms of fancy dress to cheer up her invalid children and winds up becoming a local celebrity? Or do you feel for her long-suffering husband, who (judging by the photo) cringes with embarrassment when she dons her Tina Turner wig in public? Maybe you feel more at home imagining the inner life of the woman who shunned her mother for marrying a window-cleaning Lothario too soon after she was widowed?
It is important to let your instinct guide your first choice of viewpoint. Afterwards you can try the same set of exercises with another character.
In the first place I would try to put myself in my character’s shoes by asking myself the following questions:
What is my favourite room?
What is my favourite object?
Where would I like to travel to?
Is there something I have never done that I would love to?
For each of these questions I would write fifty words or so. With these answers I might surprise myself. I’m trying to insinuate myself, carefully, into the way my character thinks. The way to do that, for me, is by thinking about what is familiar to them, what is comforting, but also what are their deepest dreams and desires.
When putting together a character who I hope will convince my readers, it is important to me that I cover the extremes of their inner, private lives. I have to know what they dread and what they desire. I have to know how they behave when they are at their happiest and their most miserable; their most despairing and most hopeful. We have to see them at their best and at their worst.
For the next stage, I would take this character and make them confront another in their story. I would formulate three questions that one character will ask the other one. These would be the questions that would cut right to the core of the story, things like: How did you feel when your mother had you committed to the mental asylum?
We’re back on this issue of the writer of fiction being inherently nosy again. These are the questions you endlessly think of when you are reading these articles or meeting these people for real. In a way, it seems to me, fiction is the place where we can ask the questions that we would never dare to ask in real life.
And you can get answers. I would answer the three questions in the first-person voice. But I would have my chosen character reply to these searching enquiries in two forms. I would write fifty words of public response and then fifty words of private response. The second fifty words would be ones that the character would know no one else in their story would ever have to hear.
Try that and see what you get. Read the two paragraphs together: the public response and the private response. Do they contradict each other? What does it mean, that the second one is at odds with the first? What deep-rooted tensions are coming out here? When you read the two responses back to each of the searching questions you will have this distinct unnerving sense of sinking more deeply into the psychology of your chosen character.
Next, have your character look at another character in their story and have them describe this person physically. We’re moving out of the psychological and into the physical, the immediate. Write another hundred words like this.
Have you kept out the psychological dimension completely? What has your character given away about what they really think of this other person?
When we get into somebody else’s shoes we are trying hard to make their attitudes, outlook, opinions clear, but we are also always trying to ground these thoughts in the physical and everyday.
You need to set these characters in motion, basing their behaviour in everyday locations, full of smells and sounds and thoughts that ring true.
When my friend told me the story of the woman who declared over Sunday lunch that she really wanted to be like Lulu, what convinced me of the story’s truth was his description of what they were eating, the way the woman drank, her hair, the way she looked older than Lulu, even though she wasn’t, the specific nature of the conversation she interrupted. Bringing these dramas to life and making these shoes fit comfortably is a process of aligning the specific details of psychology, inner life and attitude with the precise indicators of physicality, immediacy, atmosphere.
The final stage in the exercise is to have two of the characters in this story talk to each other.
You have to set them in an immediate scene: a kitchen, in the park, driving down the motorway. Conjure that scene in all its particulars and render your characters in the precise manner in which they would inhabit such a place. In the car she takes off her shoes while her daughter drives. In the park the divorced father makes sure he always wins the game of football with his sons, impressing his new girlfriend.
Then you’ve got to get them talking. Make one of them come to a decision. Today’s the day they tell the other one what’s really on their mind. They rove back over past history. They decide to describe how past events have impacted on them individually. Is the other person shocked, surprised, bored or exasperated? This is how you find out. You have to tease out the eventualities. You have to force the moment to its crisis and show them interacting, letting them interrupt each other, argue, contradict, apologize and flare up.
By getting ourselves in both pairs of shoes in a scene like this, seeing it all from both sides, we are putting ourselves right back into the heart of the drama. And that’s how we find out – and prove – that Anna Karenina can happen here, now, down our street and anywhere.