{"id":5695,"date":"2016-05-25T08:07:19","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T12:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5695"},"modified":"2016-05-25T09:01:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T13:01:00","slug":"what-a-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5695","title":{"rendered":"What a Character!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"typewriter,

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)<\/p><\/div>\n

This guest post by writer Robert Hebditch is excerpted from a workshop he recently conducted on developing characters for fiction. I\u2019ve added a few examples in italics.<\/em><\/p>\n

My way of creating character is pretty wasteful and I don\u2019t recommend it to anyone, particularly beginners. My method leads to a lot of re-writes, restarts and a lot of cut and pasting. I often end up throwing it all away. But maybe some pieces of it will work for you!<\/p>\n

Following Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s famous dictum that you\u2019ve gotta \u201cWrite it down, then see what you\u2019ve got,\u201d I tend to write my ideas for the story first, maybe including vaguely defined characters. Then I start writing, fleshing out the characters as each new situation demands.<\/p>\n

I draw on my own experience more than any other source. In a lifetime we are exposed to an awful lot of people\u2014friends, lovers, neighbors, people on the street, at the club, at social gatherings, and yes, even in libraries. Most of us already know many more character types than we can invent. I take bits and pieces from these different sources and lace them together with a strong dose of imagination.<\/p>\n

Experienced writer or not, asking yourself questions about your characters is certainly necessary, but there\u2019s no need to have all the answers before you start. For me, the old journalistic maxim \u201cWho, what, when, where, how and why\u201d works well. You can selectively apply this where the situation dictates until you\u2019ve filled out your character sufficiently to fulfill the demands of the story.<\/p>\n

Ten Basic Points in Developing Characters in Fiction
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  1. A character, especially a main character, should be \u201cbelievably real,\u201d so that the reader will suspend disbelief (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817).<\/li>\n
  2. Some information about how characters look, and not just significant physical attributes, like body type and face, scars, tattoos, but also how they walk, dance, run or scratch their face.<\/li>\n
  3. Robert pointed out that a great many contemporary writers prefer not to provide much physical description, following Stephen King\u2019s advice to let the readers supply it. \u201cIf I describe mine, it freezes out yours,\u201d King says.<\/em><\/li>\n
  4. Similarly, Ian Rankin, in Knots and Crosses,<\/em> also prefers to leave the physical appearance of his main character to the reader’s imagination. Detective John Rebus is described as having \u201cbrown hair and green eyes, like his brother.\u201d And that\u2019s it.<\/li>\n
  5. What characters say, how they say it, how their speech differs from other characters, and whom they talk to. Also, what other characters say about them\u2014a device that works best when it reveals as much about the observer as the observed. <\/em>Because Robert\u2019s insight about observer and observed\u00a0 prepared me to appreciate it, I found this perfect example, in which a son is talking about his tyrannical father: \u201cMy mom had to lay [my homework] out for him next to his breakfast plate, to the left of the juice but not touching the fork, so he could scan through it with those gray eyes of his, searching for mistakes, tapping his long finger against the papers like a clock-tick.\u201d From those few lines, you know the father\u2019s horrible and mom and son are terrified. (from <\/em>The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott). \u201cTo the left of the juice but not touching the fork\u201d\u2014brilliant!<\/em><\/li>\n
  6. What characters do (their actions.) This is the key element, of course, because this is how they move through the plot.<\/li>\n
  7. How characters act, which can be at odds with what they do, sometimes helping to create mystery or tension. For example, a man whose appearance is quiet and calm may suddenly reveal his true self by a violent action, such as knocking someone\u2019s teeth out or kicking a cat.<\/li>\n
  8. How character live\u2014where they live, where they go, their history and habits, friends, relatives, work associates, hangouts and whom they hang out with.<\/li>\n
  9. How and what they feel\u2014emotions, moods and perceptions. At the extreme, writers have shown the emotions and perceptions of people who are insane\u2014think of Chief Bromden\u2019s belief in the black machinery behind the walls in Ken Kesey\u2019s One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em>. Or cognitively impaired Benjy Compson\u2019s stream of consciousness in Faulkner\u2019s The Sound and the Fury. Or Dr. Jennifer White, narrator of Alice LaPlante\u2019s masterful murder mystery <\/em>Turn of Mind, who suffers from progressive dementia.<\/em><\/li>\n
  10. Minor characters are not unimportant characters. They should always serve the story by helping the protagonist move through the plot in some way, no matter how small. In Dashiell Hammett\u2019s The Maltese Falcon, <\/em>the little we know about the man Thursby is from the established liar Brigid O\u2019Shaughnessy. He makes no real appearance in the novel, yet without his death early on, the whole mystery of the black bird could not unfold.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    A final thought. There are so many ways to create character and no one way is the right way. What works for us is what we must go with, with the proviso that there is always something new to learn. What matters most is how our characters make a good story better.<\/p>\n

    Guest poster Robert Hebditch is a writer of short stories, a local author and is published in <\/em>US 1, The Kelsey Review and<\/em> Genesis. He is a member of Princeton Public Library Writers Room and Room at the Table writing groups and a retired staff member of Princeton University.<\/em><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This guest post by writer Robert Hebditch is excerpted from a workshop he recently conducted on developing characters for fiction. I\u2019ve added a few examples in italics. My way of creating character is pretty wasteful and I don\u2019t recommend it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"What a Character! - 10 basic points in developing characters for fiction","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[61,40,174,29],"tags":[30,421],"class_list":["post-5695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-character","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing","tag-novel","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1tR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5695"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5701,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5695\/revisions\/5701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}