FUNDAMENTALS OF CHARACTER CREATION - or THE FIVE INVINCIBLE CHANNELS

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Quality), 1982

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For many of us creating characters comes naturally.  We ourselves might not always be the Most Interesting People Alive but we’ve encountered enough interesting people in our lives, in our popular entertainments, and in our reading that we often have an intuitive sense of how to write them.  And yet, despite all our intuitive gifts, characters don’t always come together on a first pass.  Sometimes we got to labor over them before they come true.  For all those times, rehearsing the fundamentals of character craft can be useful.

Consider, for a moment, characters who I've mentioned before as examples of wonderful, dynamic creation:

Sethe from Beloved with her dread ghosts and her chokecherry tree back and her infernal memories of Sweet Home and her too-thick motherlove;  Katniss with her survival tunnel-vision and her fierce family protectiveness and her non-conforming sexuality and her unsentimental blend of rebelliousness and authenticity; practical Frodo from LOTR who as a Hobbit is both childlike and domestic and yet fantastically durable, who is a not a member of any of the Races of Power in Middle-Earth and yet withstands the seductions of the Great Ring for precisely that reason; Lilith from Dawn with her stubborn humanity, with her vast tolerance of contradiction, with her willingness (and talent) to choose the best of bad choices; patient long-suffering diligent humble Stoner from Stoner; Gandalf and Batman, whose builds inspired legions of imitators (though they themselves are imitation, but imitations that perfected the mold).

All are winningly designed (and in my book perfectly designed):  

— because the characters are suitably conflicted, both internally and via the story’s larger conflict (this is where Wants tend to come to grief). 

— because the characters are dynamic. They do shit.  (You can have characters who are contemplative only — but again, you really got to know what you’re doing to pull this off).  Samuel R. Delany’s advice is worth recalling here: “There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous.  Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.”

— because the characters make meaningful choices.

— because the characters are expressed on the page through the main five channels of character communication:

Dialogue

Thought

Memory

Action

Body 

And it's on this point that I'd like to pause and drill down into these five.

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Characters do not need to be expressed through all these channels, but it sure is easier when they are. 

DIALOGUE, for example, helps to define characters, but dialogue also gives the writer a chance to introduce voices that contrast / contradict the authorial register.  Check out the Orc dialogue in LOTR, for example.  Dialogue gives minor characters a chance to speak out against the writer, to tack against the story itself.  How often does my narrative argue for one thing, only to have certain bits of dialogue thumb its nose at the whole argument? 

THOUGHT refers to your character’s interiority -- which is literature’s most unbeatable, singular gift (or affordance).  Film has the moving image, an unmatched ability to capture movement, scenes, visually simulate the whole wide world in, well, a glance — and capture the sound of the world on its soundtrack.  Literature can’t do any of that — try to write a dance scene that can match a film kinetically and musically— but what we can do is even more incredible and invaluable: we can connect a reader directly into another person’s innermost thoughts and feelings. 

But it is DIALOGUE and THOUGHT working in tandem that create the truest interiorities.  After all, how often do we say one thing while our minds think something else?  The dialectic or disjunction between public speech and private thought is what makes people people — and what allows writers to mirror that people-ness and build strong characters.  This is also why trying to define characters in fiction strictly through dialogue always ends up being weak sauce (unless you really know what you’re doing).  You only get the externalities which is a strange way not to avail yourself of fiction’s gift for interiority.     

MEMORY is a part of THOUGHT, as well — and deepens our representation of interiority — but I wanted to give it some separate shine here.  Memory, after all, is the classic four-fer: helps give your character character; helps give your character depth (memory lets a reader know that said character had a life before the story); helps gives the tale and character dynamism (the world and the memorialist have moved on since the memory); helps give the tale temporality (to quote William Gibson, Time moves in one direction, memory in another).  All these with one simple memory!

By BODY I’m not talking about ACTION.  I am describing how a character’s body or corporeality performs their body-ness or said simply: reacts to the fictional world, and in doing so grounds the reader in both the character and the world in very important ways.  Body, like Mind, is what we are — but sometimes in capturing the interiority of subjectivity we lose track of the body that houses that interiority, something that almost no one loses track of in real life.  The body, after all, is always present and anchors us inextricably in the world, in the real. 

As in life, so in fiction.

A character decides to visit his evil twin on a hot day.  That’s the character’s ACTION.  On the walk over our out-of-shape character pants and sweats profusely. That’s the character’s BODY performing in the fiction.

I promise you, if the body is not performing in the world of the text the reader will become abstracted from both the character and the world they inhabit. 

When I say the body needs to perform in the fiction what do I mean?  Simple, really: readers just need periodic reminders that our characters are embodied and that their bodies react to the world (they live in it realistically).  You can spend a dozen single-spaced pages describing a deathly cold day in Greenland, but if the character’s body doesn’t perform that arctic-ness, then what’s the use?  The description will reside only in the reader’s mind, but that’s not what we want.  We want our fiction to reside in our reader’s body as well.  In other words, describe a cold Greenland day and have your character’s body model what that would feel like, and now the description will live in your reader’s body.

Body allows fiction to cross the mind-body barrier. 

The best of these Body reminders will give us both physicality and character.  Continuing the arctic example: one person will react to cold weather in their own way, another person entirely different.  I, for example, am a Dominican-raised brother who loathes winter, and yet is powerfully resistant to the cold.  My mind will revile the cold — but my body endures it easily. 

Please remember: we don’t need a ton of Body (unless the Body is a huge part of the story, like in the novel MISERY).  You’d be amazed how a little Body can go a long way when done right.  I don’t mention Stephen King by accident: King is a genius at Body.  He never loses track of his characters’ bodies, of the body’s weight, what it demands, and what it costs.  Stephen King understand that the body is ever-clamoring and to render that clamor with efficiency and plangency is the cornerstone of good storytelling.  The more intense the moment, the more Body.  The more threat, the more Body.  One is reminded of Fran in The Stand biting her tongue nearly through when she confronts her lover on an Ogunquit pier over their unplanned pregnancy.

She took a step backward to compensate, tripped over a rock, and sat down hard. Her jaws clicked together hard with her tongue between them —exquisite pain!—and she stopped giggling as if the sound had been cut off with a knife. The very fact of her sudden silence — you turn me off, I'm a radio — seemed funniest of all and she began to giggle…

…They were walking back along the pier now, hand in hand. She paused every now and then to spit over the side. Bright red. She wasn't going to swallow any of that stuff, uh-uh, no way.

"Nope."

Most human beings have proprioception, the “sixth sense” that allow us to track our body parts in space. Well, fiction needs its own form of proprioception that keeps track of bodies inside the narrative.

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Trust me: when you avail yourself of these channels, your characters will be, in their own way, invincible.  

That’s it for now, friends. Talk to you soon.