How many times have you “met” someone face-to-face after the initial meeting on the phone or through a text/email and thought, hmmm, didn’t expect him/her to be so short/tall, confident/shy, intense/sexy? We invent personalities and create expectations for those we are meeting for the first time. Sometimes those impressions are based on what that person has said or how they have presented themselves. Sometimes our opinion of a person is determined by what others have said about him/her.
As writers we invent the characters who populate the stories we tell. Those characters often embody bits of our own personalities (a lot of writers will tell you that’s not true, but don’t believe them), our fears, our philosophies, our personal likes and dislikes. But then the characters have to take on a life of their own, and we writers simply follow along with that Frankenstein’s monster we’ve created, curious about where it’ll go and what s/he will do.
When I teach writing classes, I bring along my 40 questions, and when I introduce that rather long list to would-be-writers, they groan. “Do we really need to know all these details?” Yes, I’ll tell them, but the truth is that the writer might only use four or five of the personality traits or peccadilloes they discover while answering questions about the character’s home and family, what they like to eat, what illnesses they’ve had, and what their dreams are.
One of the ironies of teaching a class how to create characters is that once the students get through that list of 40 questions, the story comes alive, and all of a sudden, they’re not telling me why the woman wears red shoes all the time but that her name came from her father’s pride in his ancestry and that the heart attack she had at age 40 gave her permission to travel the world. That woman is now Daphne St. Jacques (who used to be Daisy Jamison from Atlanta) who lives in a quiet neighborhood in Paris where she designs websites for French jazz bands and hides from her abusive uncle, the wealthy Arthur Jamison, owner of Java Attack, an international chain of coffee houses.
Her life is complicated, don’t you think? The student who created this character has a story to tell, right?
My answer, short and sweet, would be no. That story would be over in a couple of pages. What we need to know is not only what’s going to happen this character, but also how she’ll handle the situation. I would tell the writer to complicate that character even more. I would ask questions like where is that character now in her life and how does she feel about it? What’s the problem she has at this very moment and how is she going to resolve it? (You’d better make it a good one!) Even better, how is that problem going to get worse? What will push her to the edge, and how will she respond when she’s out of options?
Okay, now we have the thrust of the main plot of the story, right? Is that enough to keep a reader interested? Nope. We need to complicate things even more. How about if we don’t find out until midway through the story that she changed her name because she doesn’t want to be associated with her family? Do we need to know why right away? Depends on whether we’re in her point of view or in a narrator’s perspective. If we’re in her point of view, she’s not going to hide anything from herself (a good first person perspective digs deep into the character, hiding nothing), but if we’re being told the story by something else, there will be secrets withheld.
At this point, the reader probably thinks that the cruel and abusive uncle is the reason why Daphne changed her name. Complicate that! How about if she acted out because of the abuse and did some shoplifting, and instead of facing jail time, she let her uncle help her change her name and make the move to France?
The story takes another twist because of the character’s history and background. And it can take several more due to the decisions she’s made in her life, upping the ante for her and making the story more interesting.
My advice? When you think the story is complete and complicated enough, ask the character another question. Push the plot line just a little more. Only when the writer acquiesces and “asks” the character for the answers does the story actually blossom. If the writer has done his/her work, that character will take over the story, driving it to places where we can only follow, wondering where we’ll go next. When that moment happens, those of us who live behind the keyboard can triumphantly cry, “It is alive!”
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