Writing fiction by Bill Eaton

Characters

Third in a series of articles by Bill Eaton.

Some writers start thinking about their story in terms of a plot; something to give them a map to write by. Others will not start writing until they have a setting for their piece established in great detail. Personally, I think the best starting place is in the characters you are going to write about.

According to the great American writer F Scott Fitzgerald, "Character is plot, plot is character." There is no fiction without characters, so this seems to me to be the ideal place to begin.

Stories do not exist in a vacuum. It is through the interaction of characters with a variety of needs, situations and personalities that stories emerge and develop. Get a few characters together, give them conflicting motivations, don’t give them a chance to escape and you will have a compelling tale in the making!

When we looked at coming up with ideas for fiction we identified sources from our own experience and from what we have set out to discover. When we create characters we follow a similar path.

Autobiographical method

While you are always likely to inject something of yourself into your characters without trying, many convincing characters can be created deliberately by basing them on yourself or particular aspects of your personality.

Like Mel Brooks said, "Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities, and have them relate to other characters living with him."

Exercise one

Pick one aspect of your personality, not necessarily the dominant one, and make this the main motive force for the character's feelings and thoughts (for example, shy, quick to anger, confident, busy etc.). Make the trait even more extreme in the character than in yourself.

Using this approach you will be able to create dozens of characters from your own personality.

Biographical method

In the same way that you can base characters upon yourself, you can use your observations and knowledge of others as starting points for your creations. People you know well or people who you know hardly at all. Perhaps as little as a snippet of overheard conversation, or bits of several people mixed together; a look from one, an obsession from another, a personality trait from another and so on. By fusing these traits together the sources of your character will be untraceable. This can be useful if you want to avoid upsetting your friends!

Exercise two

Choose three people you know and pick a physical trait from each of them and combine them together. Now describe this new character.

Don't worry if things seem like they are conflicting, this can make interesting characters even more interesting.

Inventing characters from scratch

It is difficult to imagine a convincing character created from nothing. Fortunately we always have the essence at hand from which we can summon up dramatic characters. You can start with a question (what if?), or a setting (what sort of person would live here?) or an object (what sort of person would own this?).

In his collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien creates vivid characterisation of the soldiers he was writing about by describing the contents of their backpacks.

Exercise three

Find a description of star sign attributes (easily available on the internet) and describe someone who has those features - don't choose your own star sign. Whatever your opinion of the truth of astrology, this is a fun way of fleshing out a character!

Here is a sample analysis of Gemini:

Gemini: Keyword: "I think". The Gemini person is versatile, inquisitive, whimsical, nimble, articulate, lively, active, curious, independent, talkative, sociable, mercurial, and feminine. They can also sometimes be restless, scattered, dual or two-faced, inconstant, rash, gullible, gossipy and superficial. Suitable occupations are where constant variety and/or travel are guaranteed; such as commercial traveller, writer, journalist, clerk, teacher, printing and publishing.

Plenty of material there!

After trying out these methods for a time, you will likely settle on a combination of all these methods as your method of choice. You will mix up aspects of yourself, people you know and invented details. This has the advantage of preventing characters from being too closely based on a single individual.

Once we have created our characters in our own minds, it is our job to reveal them to others through the stories we tell.

"Characters . . . reveal themselves slowly - as might fellow-travellers seated opposite one in a very dimly lit railway carriage." Elizabeth Bowen.

We learn about characters gradually through a story, just like we do with people. The rest of these topics will look at the variety of tools the writer uses to achieve this.

In short, there are five general techniques we use to describe our characters

• Summary
  We tell the reader about a character directly, or we let another character describe a character in this way. This is a useful technique for getting information across quickly, but is often the least effective at making a lasting impression on the reader.
• Appearance
  We describe what the character looks like, slowly parcelling out the details so the reader can build up the picture gradually.
• Action
  How a character acts in a scene can tell us a lot about him or her; from great dramatic acts to subtle physical tics.
• Thought
  A writer can get inside a character’s head, directly reporting their thoughts.
• Speech
  A reader will learn a lot about a character from what they say and how they say it. Dialogue can be used to reveal personality and opinion, attitudes, beliefs and background.

In later sessions we will pick up on these points in greater detail. To make our characters live for the reader is our core concern when writing fiction.

Next

4. Description and setting

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