IF YOU WANT TO LEARN how to make characters move around and do things, open up Huckleberry Finn to any page and start reading. No one does it better than the old master, Mark Twain. One night I was driving to Nebraska in a rainstorm and turned on the radio to keep me company as I drove through the wheat fields of Kansas. I tuned into a station that was playing a recording of Huckleberry Finn. I started listening at the point where most readers stop paying attention in the book, the part where Huck and Tom have Jim hidden out in a shed although they know he has already been freed by Tom’s aunt.
It was fascinating. I forgot that I was all alone on a highway in a storm and had no place to stay for the night. I forgot I didn’t have a map and wasn’t even sure I was on the right road. I was cheering for Huck to get up the courage to tell Tom they had to tell Jim the truth and let him go home.
First you have to create characters that are more real than real people. Then you have to let them talk like real people, even if you have to face down the language police to do it. Then you have to think up things for them to do that are the sort of stories that would make you buy the morning paper to find out what happened in the end. A great writer like Mark Twain will give you so much information that anyone with brains could figure out what will happen eventually but still keep you spellbound as you wait to find out how and when it will happen.
You write your way into a character or characters. You cannot think up characters or outline them. You have to write them in action with other characters. William Shakespeare knew Hamlet for a long time before he brought him full-blown into his own play. The first we hear of Hamlet is through the conversation of two of his friends, Marcellus and Horatio. “Let us impart what we have seen tonight/Unto young Hamlet, for upon my life,/This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him,” the good Horatio says. The playwright knows his central character so well that even this first mention is charged with meaning and with power.
In the next scene we are in the crowded court and after hearing requests from other characters the king turns to a black-suited Hamlet standing apart and speaks to him. “But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son—”
Hamlet answers in an aside to the audience. “A little more than kin, and less than kind.” Already, in his first speech he has distanced himself from the court and made the audience his friend. Later, when he speaks his great monologues we will not be surprised.
Shakespeare had written the play once before. He knew his character well.
I tell my students that one story does not exhaust a character’s possibilities for a writer. I discovered this by doing it. It seemed natural to me. When I was a child I had loved series of books having the same main character and I still do love them. Sometime last year I discovered John le Carré and devoured all his books. I especially loved the ones about the master spy, George Smiley
The year before that I discovered Tony Hillerman and read the books until three in the morning for a month. I sent them by Federal Express to a lawyer friend who is part Chickasaw Indian and he was reading them as fast as I was. I was spending the night at his house recently and we began talking about that wonderful six weeks when we read Tony Hillerman instead of sleeping. “It was so good,” I said.
“I wish we could find some more books that good,” he answered, and we sighed, as though in memory of a great, lost love.
“Let’s read them again,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s start right now.”
I took his copy of Coyote Waits and went up to the guest room and got in bed and started reading. A reader doesn’t ask much of the writer but the one thing all readers want is more of a good character. The books don’t all have to live up to the standard of the first one. We just want to know more, as much as the writer will give us. When Larry McMurtry wrote Duane’s Depressed a few years ago, catching us up on the hero of The Last Picture Show and Texasville, I almost sent him flowers. Thank you, thank you, generous writer.
You create characters by writing about them until you know them. Write down who their great-grandparents were and where they lived and what they did for a living. Tell me what the hero’s mother cooked for dinner and how long she lived and if she yelled at him or indulged him. How many siblings did he have? Where are they now? What did he think about when he was seven, eight, nine, ten? Did he play sports? Did he go to church? What was his favorite food? What did he get for Christmas when he was ten?
You have to know all of that and so much more. You don’t have to use it, but you have to know it.
Create characters. Think up something for them to do. Start writing. Tell the story and be sure to make it ring true. Believe in the story your imagination gives you. Stick to it. Don’t worry about what anyone is going to think when they read it. They will never read it unless you want them to.