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odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Character
The creation of character presents special problems for writers of fiction. The playwright or screenwriter can hope for arresting actors whose appearance, presence, mannerisms, and delivery will help create memorable characters. As a writer you have only your words on the page. You cannot even rely on illustration, as nineteenth-century writers often did. At the same time, there's nothing more important to your fiction than your characters.
So with only the words on the page, what must you do to create character?
First you need to understand that your mind might visualize Bella came into the living room, but your readers know only that an unknown entity, presumably female, whose name is Bella, has been put in a certain situation. There is a predisposition to be interested in her because you have focused on her. Your readers await more information.
That information can come in many ways. You might tell your readers about Bella, as people tell about friends or relatives whose lives and histories they know well:
Or you could describe what Bella does upon entering the living room. If she starts cleaning up imaginary lint from the sofa, one sort of person is suggested. If she spills her scotch and lets it sink into her skirt without seeming to care, that suggests another. Something prosaic like sitting down and reading the newspaper does not tell readers much. But if she turns at once to the medical column, that might tell us something. The actions you give your characters should be densely informative. If her actions are rendered vividly, we know Bella without entering her mind in great depth.
A character is also directly created by what she says. Simply calling a character boring or witty doesn't engage or convince readers. They aren't experiencing the character -- they're just being told about her. But if readers hear the character speak, they can make up their own minds:
The most intimate way of knowing a character is through her mind, her ideas and memories, her fears and hopes. She may speak little and do less, but her thoughts can give readers the feeling that they understand her:
An absent character can also be a powerful figure in a story. She'd be created by the effects she's had on others. The other characters seem to be under her influence -- their conversation keeps returning to her, and their mosaic of impressions makes her present though she never appears. In novels, talk about a character is often used to pique our interest and to heighten the arrival of the character. But with such an extended fanfare, the character had better live up to the advance publicity.
Physical description is useful in making your readers see the character, not merely to describe what the character looks like in the ordinary sense of the information that appears on driver's licenses, but in order to give the character corporeal life. Flesh ahs heft, takes up space, feels through its skin. A fat thigh or bony arm makes a person more vivid than height and eye color. A spectacularly running nose is worth a paragraph of prosaic physical description.
Minor characters are extraordinarily important. Goofs, worms, and slugs are vividly remembered. Creeps, twerps, and bruisers are filled with life. Neurasthenics and parvenus enrich the texture of narratives and become memorable figures in their own right. Since they tend to appear briefly, they must be established strongly and clearly, and they must be invested with traits that are both distinctive and recognizable.
Minor characters are often given a distinguishing feature, and every time they appear we are reminded of that peculiarity. If the trait is simple, like a character who hiccups whenever he appears, or says "Whops, golly me" in every scene, the character is called flat. That isn't necessarily a negative term. It means that the character is functioning more like a prop than a person. If he has a few more features with some emotional resonance (maybe he's a vivid whiner), the character becomes round, or half-round perhaps. So a comic doorman who always drops luggage becomes a more developed figure if he shows a picture of his family who admire him a great deal because of his smart uniform and important responsibilities. E. M. Forster's classic Aspects of the Novel (1927) talks about this dimensional declension of characters from flat to round.
What happens to main characters is intimately involved with the definition of the short story. Some people feel a short story is a narrative that shows a change in a character. Without that change, the story is merely an incident or an anecdote. Change usually means psychological change -- realization, revelation, revision, epiphany, understanding, decision. Whether that is the only way of defining a story is open to question, but it does remain the ultimate criterion for significant numbers of writers, editors, critics, and ordinary readers.
See Anti-hero, Archetype, Façade, Flashback, Hero, Juggling, Motif, Names, Position, Stereotype, Suspense.
Character
The creation of character presents special problems for writers of fiction. The playwright or screenwriter can hope for arresting actors whose appearance, presence, mannerisms, and delivery will help create memorable characters. As a writer you have only your words on the page. You cannot even rely on illustration, as nineteenth-century writers often did. At the same time, there's nothing more important to your fiction than your characters.
So with only the words on the page, what must you do to create character?
First you need to understand that your mind might visualize Bella came into the living room, but your readers know only that an unknown entity, presumably female, whose name is Bella, has been put in a certain situation. There is a predisposition to be interested in her because you have focused on her. Your readers await more information.
That information can come in many ways. You might tell your readers about Bella, as people tell about friends or relatives whose lives and histories they know well:
Bella was a handsome brunette in her mid-thirties. Handsome was the word people used, probably because men found her attractive but intimidating.That information, as in real life, is selective and interpretive. After reading the description we are inclined to view Bella in a certain way.
Or you could describe what Bella does upon entering the living room. If she starts cleaning up imaginary lint from the sofa, one sort of person is suggested. If she spills her scotch and lets it sink into her skirt without seeming to care, that suggests another. Something prosaic like sitting down and reading the newspaper does not tell readers much. But if she turns at once to the medical column, that might tell us something. The actions you give your characters should be densely informative. If her actions are rendered vividly, we know Bella without entering her mind in great depth.
A character is also directly created by what she says. Simply calling a character boring or witty doesn't engage or convince readers. They aren't experiencing the character -- they're just being told about her. But if readers hear the character speak, they can make up their own minds:
Before we could drink, Bella insisted on explaining to us how champagne was made and how there were two methods, one was better than the other, but she didn't remember which, but that one involved rotating bottles and the other had something to do with vats. "The man at the store said you could tell the difference on the label, but he left before I figured out what part of the labels it was. Brut -- I think it means it was made by force. That sounded like the cheap way, so I got the ones marked Sec which has to mean delicate, right? You're not going to get me to drink champagne that comes out of vats. But the guy told me there really wasn't that much difference, they both got up your nose the same way."Let your character talk not simply for plot or exposition, but to create the person for the reader. Then she starts to live. Talk alone can create a character and a story.
The most intimate way of knowing a character is through her mind, her ideas and memories, her fears and hopes. She may speak little and do less, but her thoughts can give readers the feeling that they understand her:
Bella knew how she sounded, felt the words twisting away from her. There was some reason an old-fashioned way of doing something was better than a cheap way even if hardly anyone could tell the difference, but she could feel the idea getting confused and the panicky sense that not only had she gotten it wrong, but no one even cared if she did. "Oh hell," she said, "let's drink up."Thoughts lead us to feel strongly for characters, to worry over them, so that even when they misbehave we feel sympathy for their inability to live up to their best selves. The more you let your readers know, the more they are likely to be interested in the tensions between thought and behavior.
An absent character can also be a powerful figure in a story. She'd be created by the effects she's had on others. The other characters seem to be under her influence -- their conversation keeps returning to her, and their mosaic of impressions makes her present though she never appears. In novels, talk about a character is often used to pique our interest and to heighten the arrival of the character. But with such an extended fanfare, the character had better live up to the advance publicity.
Physical description is useful in making your readers see the character, not merely to describe what the character looks like in the ordinary sense of the information that appears on driver's licenses, but in order to give the character corporeal life. Flesh ahs heft, takes up space, feels through its skin. A fat thigh or bony arm makes a person more vivid than height and eye color. A spectacularly running nose is worth a paragraph of prosaic physical description.
Minor characters are extraordinarily important. Goofs, worms, and slugs are vividly remembered. Creeps, twerps, and bruisers are filled with life. Neurasthenics and parvenus enrich the texture of narratives and become memorable figures in their own right. Since they tend to appear briefly, they must be established strongly and clearly, and they must be invested with traits that are both distinctive and recognizable.
Minor characters are often given a distinguishing feature, and every time they appear we are reminded of that peculiarity. If the trait is simple, like a character who hiccups whenever he appears, or says "Whops, golly me" in every scene, the character is called flat. That isn't necessarily a negative term. It means that the character is functioning more like a prop than a person. If he has a few more features with some emotional resonance (maybe he's a vivid whiner), the character becomes round, or half-round perhaps. So a comic doorman who always drops luggage becomes a more developed figure if he shows a picture of his family who admire him a great deal because of his smart uniform and important responsibilities. E. M. Forster's classic Aspects of the Novel (1927) talks about this dimensional declension of characters from flat to round.
What happens to main characters is intimately involved with the definition of the short story. Some people feel a short story is a narrative that shows a change in a character. Without that change, the story is merely an incident or an anecdote. Change usually means psychological change -- realization, revelation, revision, epiphany, understanding, decision. Whether that is the only way of defining a story is open to question, but it does remain the ultimate criterion for significant numbers of writers, editors, critics, and ordinary readers.
See Anti-hero, Archetype, Façade, Flashback, Hero, Juggling, Motif, Names, Position, Stereotype, Suspense.