THE BEST FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ARE CREATED
BY THE CHARACTERS THEMSELVES.
December 1989
Back in the mid ’70s I had written three books about an ex-cop named Matthew Scudder and made several attempts at a fourth book. This was during a period of a couple of years when I had more trouble than usual finishing what I started, and indeed it wasn’t until 1980 that the fourth Scudder book actually did get written.
One of these false starts, however, was by no means a complete waste of time. It opened with Scudder contacted by a fellow he’d known during his years as a policeman. The chap was a professional criminal, a burglar, and Scudder had arrested him once or twice in years past. The big oaf had spent more years behind bars than in front of them, and in the ordinary course of things he didn’t much mind getting arrested, considering it one of the inescapable risks of his profession. He didn’t mind prison that much, either.
But in a burglary, he had broken into an apartment in which someone had been recently murdered, and he’d panicked and fled when the police came to arrest him for burglary and homicide, and now he wanted Scudder to get him off the hook. He didn’t mind going to prison for the burglaries he committed, but he drew the line at getting sent away for a murder he’d had nothing to do with.
Well, it was a nice enough premise for a detective novel, but unfortunately I didn’t have a plot to go with it, nor did one evolve as I labored at the thing. I pressed onward for 40 or 50 pages, then gave up and put them in a drawer. (In a briefcase, actually. I was traveling at the time.)
Some months later I was in Los Angeles, still trying to find something to write. My agent suggested that a non-series mystery might be a good thing for me to write, and I thought of what I’d written and realized that the basic situation would work just as well without Scudder, that the burglar could save himself by turning detective and solving the murder on his own. I still didn’t have a plot, but I decided to sit down at the typewriter and see what would happen.
On the first page, my burglar, wearing a stylish topcoat and carrying a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag for camouflage, breezed past a doorman at a fancy Manhattan apartment building. In a few sentences, Bernie Rhodenbarr was born as a witty, urbane, button-down burglar. I still had my problems with the book—I had to work out the plot as I went along, and I didn’t know who did it until I got to the end and had to solve it myself—but I never did have a problem with the character. Somehow or other I knew exactly who he was. He came to life right there on the page, and all I had to do was let him talk.
And I still can’t tell you how this came about. Because the Bernie Rhodenbarr who emerged in Burglars Can’t Be Choosers (and whom I managed to write about in four subsequent volumes as well) was nothing like the lumpen dolt who’d hired Scudder in that earlier fragment. The earlier Bernie had been large and heavyset and plodding and dumb. The new Bernie was quick and clever and lithe. And I hadn’t had any of his new character consciously in mind until his lines started appearing on the page before me.
It’s an exciting thing when a character comes to life, and the experience is one with which most writers are at least occasionally familiar. We often say that the characters take over, that they write their own dialogue, that they do things we hadn’t consciously devised for them. Sometimes we sound too cute by half, talking about our characters the way other people talk about their pets. (“He doesn’t think he’s a doggie. He thinks he’s a people!”)
What we’re describing, albeit imperfectly, is real enough. I think the same thing happens to actors. The actor becomes a character and the character seems to exist autonomously. Onstage or at the typewriter, it’s a wonderful feeling, and that feeling is the least of it. It is the characters who take over, the characters who come to life, who are most likely to be real and compelling for the reader as well as the writer.
How do you make this happen?
It seems to me that it’s difficult to make it happen, and it may indeed be counterproductive to try. The process would appear to involve channeling a subconscious portion of the mind in some way, so that rather than making a character come to life, what we’re really doing is stepping aside and letting the character emerge. Still, that leaves us in pretty much the same place, doesn’t it? How do we do this? How do we get out of our own way, and how do we tap into whatever it is inside ourselves that permits the magic to happen?
There are a number of exercises designed to help in the fashioning of a character. You can jot down random facts about a character, compose a biography for him, write out a scene extraneous to your story in which he plays a key role, or otherwise try to pile up data or impressions of him. These are interesting exercises, and sometimes they may enable you to generate an original character and one with dimension, but that’s no guarantee that the character will come to life in the way we’ve been talking about.
Sometimes, as with Bernie Rhodenbarr, all you really have to do is type. The character is simply there—you open the door for him and he goes into his act. But I’ve had other characters come to life in a more gradual fashion, and what seems to work best for me is making myself receptive to them, and tuning in to my own inner senses.
Often in my case the trigger is auditory. I hear the character talking, I know how he uses words, what kind of an edge his voice has. There are times when I will find myself copying down a character’s dialogue almost as effortlessly as Mozart is said to have transcribed the music he heard in his head, but it is not always thus. Often my own craft has a role to play; I’ll hear a line of dialogue, or an exchange, and if it’s not right, if it fails to fit the scene or advance the story in the way I want, I’ll hear alternatives until I hear the one I want. The character, you might say, is writing his own dialogue, but he’s obligingly providing me with choices.
When I can hear a character clearly, when I know (not so much intellectually as intuitively) how he sounds and what sort of things he says, I’m not likely to have much trouble with the character. That auditory point of entry gives me access to the character and lets me know whatever else I need to know about him. If I need to know his past history, I’ll let myself hear him running it down to someone else. If I need to know how he thinks or feels about something, I’ll tune into a monologue he’ll offer on the subject.
Occasionally the trigger is visual. A principal character in the latest Scudder novel, Out on the Cutting Edge, is one Mick Ballou, a saloon keeper and professional criminal with whom Scudder develops a curious friendship. I knew things about Ballou—that he was the child of an Irish mother and a French father, that his capacity for violence was legendary, that he had once gone from bar to bar in Hell’s Kitchen carrying an enemy’s head in a bowling bag, hauling it out by the hair and showing it to people. I knew enough about Ballou so that he probably would have been a very successful character for me even if he hadn’t come to life.
But he did. When Scudder walked into his place of business and met him for the first time, I not only got Ballou’s voice right away, but I also could see him. Later on I realized that I’d unconsciously chosen a specific physical model for Ballou, that he looked exactly like a fellow who used to own a couple of bars in Greenwich Village. I had never known this particular man. I saw him two or three times, and I’m not sure that I ever heard him speak. I guess he made an impression on me without my realizing it, and his physical appearance was what my subconscious conjured up for Mick Ballou.
One time Pablo Picasso and a friend walked through a gallery with a large show of Picasso’s paintings. Now and again Picasso would point to a canvas and quietly denounce the painting as a fake. At one point the friend demurred. “Pablo,” he said, “I saw you paint that one. How can you say it’s a fake?”
Picasso shrugged. “Sometimes I paint fakes,” he said.
I think I know what he meant. Sometimes I write fakes, in that sometimes I create characters who are largely or entirely the product of conscious craft, and who have never come to life for me. This does not necessarily mean that there’s anything wrong with them as characters. One that has received considerable critical approval and has been a big hit with readers is one I’ll always regard as a fake, because I see him as no more than the sum of a whole body of conscious decisions I made about him. His voice did not speak unbidden into my inner ear, nor did his face spontaneously take form behind my closed eyelids. I still don’t really know what he looks like, although I may very well have described him.
It may not be right to call him a complete fake, because there are things I’ve known intuitively about him, but he still feels like a fake to me. As a result, although I know he’s an effective character, I’m not as confident of him as I am of those characters who have taken over, who have come fully to life.
A character can be a fake in this sense without being full or predictable or clichéd or ordinary. Conversely, a character can be quite ordinary and unremarkable in his externals while being a real character, a character who has come to life.
Sometimes, especially with minor characters, it’s simpler and easier to go for the fake. If you’ve got a bit player who’s onstage for just a couple of minutes, just long enough to say a few words on his way out the door, why bother breathing real air into his lungs? Why not just give him a limp or a loud sports jacket or a habit of sucking his teeth? Have him call the person he’s talking to hoss or chum or friend, or let him whip out a comb and run it through his hair in times of stress.
You can do that, certainly, and the resulting character may well appear more like an individualized character than the bit player you take time to discover within your unconscious mind. When you do this, though, you run the risk of selling the character (and yourself) short. Because the real character, the character who comes to life on the page, will resonate for you and for your readers in the way an exclusively conscious creation cannot. Because you don’t control him, he may surprise you, and he may give the most trivial scene a dimension it would otherwise lack.
There are, it should be noted, shades of gray throughout this continuum. Our Pinocchios are never entirely puppets or entirely real boys. Every fake character has a little life to him, and no character, no matter how completely he takes over, is entirely unformed by craft.
That said, I think there’s value in always reaching for the real before the fake, the unconscious creation before the crafted specimen. If you can convince readers that your characters are real, not that they are modeled on real people but that they are themselves real people in their own right, you will probably never have to go out and get a job delivering pizzas. Because real living characters are damn near irresistible. There aren’t that many of them around.