Mozart’s Brain, Too
What?? More Random Creative Writing Squibs??
…And More Odd Things To Consider??…
Broadsheet No. 2.5 – Giving Life To Characters
Wim Baren
Copyright June 2016
Westminster & York, Ltd.
ISBN: 978-1-3103-5890-6
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[A broadsheet is, well… You already know, because I say it before every Mozart’s Brain Broadsheet. Go ahead… Nail it to a tree. Or to the cathedral doors in Worms, Germany, like Martin Luther did a couple hundred years ago. ‘Nuff said…]
♠
Characters. The life of the story. The subject reminds me of this anecdote.
Tallulah Bankhead, a Famous Person many decades ago, once quipped as she entered a room crowded with dignitaries and others in the entertainment world, ‘There’s a lot less here than meets the eye…’
But for us, our characters are an infinitely rich playground, a broad open canvas for our brushes, don’t you think?...
Now, all of us can find or recall tales where the characters are so vividly portrayed, you can see them in every important detail, you can know what they’re like, you can predict what they’ll say or how they’ll respond in almost every situation.
Stories like these draw us in and along, and we, like sheep, willingly follow, enthralled.
But, how is it this vital dimension is so often missing or incomplete in other stories whose plotline and situations show promise to be as captivating, but within which you sense the ‘lack’ of something which has blood running through it, or is missing a heart which beats, or in which passions should be flooding, or a sharp mind calculating, but they aren’t there?...
Speaking of hearts and souls, Napoleon once said of his foreign minister Talleyrand (whom he detested), ‘He could sell his soul to the Devil for a bucket of muck, and he’d get the better end of the bargain!...’
But I digress.
Sometimes, the stories’ characters just don’t make any sense at all. There’s a reason for that. And a possible solution as well…
The reason is, they’re not drawn in three dimensions. They may have one. Sometimes two. But not three.
Pick up any work on creative writing which purports to be a guide, and somewhere in it you’ll find a lot of material about how to ‘bring your stories to life’ or ‘create memorable characters,’ and suchlike. There are a strictly limited number of these kinds of books, set by law not to exceed, oh, twenty million or so. Some of them - quite a lot, in fact – have some good bits of counsel and advice.
Now, I write Historical Fiction – lots of real people and places and times mixed with purely fictional characters, events and things, et cetera. I write Fantasy as well, but I also weave in a lot of historical perspective in those stories. If your genre preferences are different, what I’m about to say next may not apply. You be the judge.
Some writers justify an incomprehensible and overwhelming amount of descriptive detail. It’s fun for them to write all this down. They’ve made themselves believe they’re creating a mammoth panorama of drama and excitement and vibrancy of a civilization and a setting so lifelike and deep it cannot but amaze you, the reader.
Maybe it works. But more often than not, it leaves you still wanting something. And often it’s not more of the same.
I said I had a reason and also a solution. Now for a (not necessarily the only) solution.
Let me first say, however, I don’t pretend this is a comprehensive guide to the subject of characters and their development.
Different authors treat it differently. Some provide only broad Zen-like strokes, and rely on you, the reader, to exercise your imagination to fill in the details to fashion a whole person out of the bits and pieces.
Others, like Charles Dickens (he who was paid by the word for his works, by the way) spend a lot of time creating truly memorable characters.
I know I’ve already touched on it in at least one of my prior broadsheets. But I’ve got something to add to the way in which we can create our characters, so they have a living, breathing presence, and so the effort of creating them yields yet more inspiration to you as your Next Great Story unfolds before your hungry eyes.
I spoke of three dimensions. Here’s what they are:
1. Who the character is;
2.What they have;
3.What they think and feel.
Who the character is. When I develop characters, I find it helpful to give them family, some kind of lineage. So I create the character’s parents – whether living or dead in the story, it helps either way to have real people with real names.
Yep. I fabricate what the character’s ancestry looks like. In several cases, I’ve created parents and grandparents, as well as distant ancestors some three hundred – and in one case, three thousand - years back. Each is painted in broad brush-strokes, each has a name, a vocation or one or two things about them which sets them apart from the flat plain wallpaper of the uninvented past.
Creating these ancestors can bring your primary character more to life.
After I’ve created these background people (and believe me, you might get even more story ideas from doing this!), I can more easily continue to shape my primary character.
What do they look like? How tall are they relative to others around them? What coloration of hair and eyes? Do they have a large nose? What do their eyes say to you? Is their presence commanding or retiring? Are they stocky, or thin as a rail?
Aspects like these can help you begin to flesh out the person you’re creating. Let your imagination go. Use your sculptor’s chisel freely. People are often seen more clearly when they are comparable to others around them, or related to them.
Now, I also draft up some habits or mannerisms, if I think they make sense. Remember, these are the things others in your story – your other characters? – would see and remark upon and retain as things about the character to distinguish them. They also will influence the emotions we feel when we view, or think of, these characters.
Does the character walk in an unusual way?
Do they have a steady gaze, or do their eyes shift about quickly, like a bird’s, with nervousness or something else?
What does their voice sound like?
Does their speech suggest disdain, respect or an obsequious fawning?
What do their hands look like?
Are they vivacious, retiring, controlled, laid-back?
Is their demeanor agreeable, or does it grate on you and others?
Are they noticeable when they enter a room?
You will be surprised at what happens when you start developing your characters. You will begin to see them in real life, to ‘know’ them. And now it gets interesting, because ‘things’ begin to appear you might have wanted them to possess, but which it might not make sense to endow them with anymore, because you’ve done so much to flesh them out already.
At this point, you’ll start seeing what further characteristics are consistent with your character, and which are not.
For example, if you’ve painted a woman as a strong, vivacious and domineering personality, it might n
ot make sense to have a scene in which she is suddenly obsequious and submissive, quite contrary to her given nature. Not to say it couldn’t happen, but you’d have to be real careful about how you weave in such a major departure from a character the reader may have come to see in a certain well-defined light.
The further you develop your characters, the more they become defined by themselves, and less easily subject to major contradictory behaviors or impressions.
Let me go on to the next dimension…
What the character has. Now we get more outside the character himself / herself. We are not thinking only of what their physical possessions might be, but the whole environment and its influences they move within, including relationships.
This is your chance to build the social and family setting – or whatever group setting you want – in which the character dwells and has been shaped by. You’ll notice as you start how the setting also begins to mold your character.
Is it a humble background?
A wealthy propertied family bound by tradition and a slavish devotion to ancestral bloodline purity?
A son and heir, with a sizable patrimony and equally sizable demands placed upon him?
An only daughter of impoverished aged parents?
One child of many in a poor agrarian village in the country?
A sharp-eyed city-dweller - a survivalist of questionable morality - living in a SoHo loft?
Here are some other things you might think of.
What kind of society is it your character is most comfortable moving within? Patriarchal? Democratic? Monarchical? Brutally