NovelTalk - Making Characters Count

Making Characters Count

Character is everything. Regardless of what genre you’re writing--or even if you are writing fiction or non-fiction--the characters you are writing about are the substance of your book.

It is because of who your characters are that certain actions take place and become your plot. It is because of who your characters are that they speak in a certain way, reside in a specific place, interact with other characters who in turn shape your story and your characters’ world.

Think of your book as if it were a living, breathing being - after all, it is, isn’t it? If the action of your book is the spine, and your theme or purpose is the heart, what is the life blood? What makes the story work, the heart beat? The characters.

All too often we become, as writers, focused on “getting the story down.” We focus on the theme, the wisdom, the point of the book, and we walk our characters through the mechanics we’ve set up for them without exploring the reasons they are walking.

And you finish your book and you find that in all ways it is competent, it is what you meant to write about, the language may be beautiful, the plot structure superb and yet there feels like there is something missing. That it doesn’t quite work.

hat could be missing is character depth, the point at which your characters are rich enough, full enough, three dimensional enough that you know what they’d order when they walk into a diner, what they’d wear to bed, what they think about when they first wake up in the morning.

If you want your characters to come alive, to be memorable, to walk off the page and maybe even tell you what they are doing on that page, you need to know them. You need to make each of them count.
Here are some simple ways to make your characters count.

1. Gender. Each sex has distinctive styles of speech and speech patterns, and innate way of relating to the world. Naturally sex affects many aspects of your character, but in terms of basic conversation it’s particularly evident, or it should be. Women tend to ask more questions than men, and use more words that are considered qualifiers (kinda, almost, sort of) in their speech. Look at this example, of tough, street wise police, discussing their first arrests.

COP ONE: Yeah, him. Packed a mean punch. Put up a helluva fight, before the cuffs went on.

COP TWO: You know, I won’t forget that guy. He almost took me down before I cuffed him.

Which police officer reads female and which one reads male? And why?

2. Careers and status. Your character’s walk of life is very important. A used car salesman will relate to the world differently than a poet. A used car salesman who wants to be a poet will also relate to the world differently. An unsuccessful used car salesman poet will relate differently to the world than a highly successful salesman up for a promotion who likes to write poetry in his/her spare time.

3. What about his/her parents? What did they do? Where were they from?

4. Where was your character raised? And where does your character live now? That used car salesman poet from the deep South whose mother worked in a cotton mill is different from the one in Los Angeles whose father was a famous actor.

5. What is your character’s name? Not just the nickname he’s using now “Greenie”, but his full heritage. First, last, middle, and what his teacher called him in grade school. Do your research - there’s plenty of web help on first and last names - names by region or ethnicity, historical names.

6. Describing your character. This applies to both physical traits and emotional ones, visible and invisible. You’re not going to reveal your character all at once of course, but suppose you had to sum him up in a paragraph or less such as:
Kim’s hair was as red as her face. She flushed frequently, whenever she was embarrassed or she felt she should be. Tall, twenty, Scotch-Irish, the last of fourteen children, always waiting for someone else to tell her what to do.

You can base a lot on a description that simple, and keep it handy, too, for whenever you character’s doing something he or she wouldn’t really do. Kim, as described above, would not be sunbathing nude on the French Rivera, for example.

7. Descriptive words. Free associate. Write down a list of words that describe something about your character - i.e., still using Kim above: restless, stifled, interested, fair, scared, embarrassed, accommodating, observant--I’m sure you could fill a page. Or ten.

8. How your character feels at the beginning of your story - or of his appearance in your story. The characters feelings will of course change, as they must for the drama of your story to occur - but how does he feel when you first begin?

Our example, Kim, is somewhat shy, easily embarrassed, looking for someone to tell her what to do in life. Boy, is she ever ready for a lot of changes. A lot of interesting changes.

Some characters--your p.i., your romantic swashbuckling hero, your biographical subject--will remain in a more fixed emotional state than others. But regardless of how much your character does or wants to change - or not - you need a sense of how that person is feeling at the beginning of his role in your story.

A caveat — just because you need to know this information about your character, your reader may not. Perhaps your used car dealer poet from LA whose father is an actor only has a few lines, such as
Something that looked like a haiku dropped from his pocket. He was looking for the bill of sale. “You look familiar,” I told the salesman, while he rummaged through his file. “Yeah, well, my father was an actor,” he mumbled.

--Genie Davis

Author of The Model Man - Kensington Zebra - January 2006
As Nikki Alton, "Rodeo Man" in The Cowboy anthology - Kensington Aphrodisia - August 2006