6th July 2017
A couple of weeks back the daughter of a old mate of mine asked me about creating characters in fiction.
She's in Year Eleven and struggling a bit with her writing in Lit Studies, and wanted to know how I go about it and could I give her any tips. I asked (way too glibly in hindsight as she was clearly having trouble with her writing projects and it was hurting her grade average) had she ever seen, or read, "Frankenstein"? "No, but I understand what it's about - why?"
"Well, creating characters in fiction is a bit like that. You round up a bunch of people-pieces and cobble them together into a human being. Zap life into them."
She nodded politely but obviously needed something just a tiny bit more constructive. From someone she thought might actually be some help.
So, I went through how I saw it, that there are in fact three basic ways to come up with a character in fiction...
(a) I know him/her personally.
Not rocket science, it's a person I know very well, right shape, size, sex, has a whole bunch of interesting characteristics that translate well onto the page, have watched them operate at close range, probably socked them away for future use long ago. And if I didn't have them earmarked for the job in hand right from the start they usually spring to mind quickly when I'm drafting out the MS. Where I use their actual name. Temporarily.
(b) The Frankenstein Method.
I take bits of two or more of the (a)-type people above, where each bit is what's needed but sadly the complete person you borrow from isn't right. Then smudge over the joins and plug them into the mains. Turn on the current - Zzzzzzztt - wholly believable character gets up and walks around. Hopefully. I probably use this method more than I realise.
(c) He/she is totally fabricated.
I resort to this only when the other two methods don't cough up what I need. Sounds a bit troll-ish but first I trawl the web till I find a picture that is as close to what I have in my head, and start with that. Maybe they're from a film, a newspaper, those zillion pix that are up on the internet for reasons that totally escape me. I take a print, put them in the file, give them a name, build a personality around the image, often by going into my Odds & Sods file, a compendium of people-things I've seen or heard or read over the decades that sound as though they'll be useful sometime - "On his morning walks he wears what looks like black pantyhose, but no shorts, and he struts, and is bow-legged, just a touch, as if he's trying to advertise that his balls are too big for him. He doesn't realise that the young tradies laugh behind his back after he's passed." Stuff like that.
Okay, all that was taken on board, but then she asked - did one method work better than the others? - and wouldn't the believability of the end characters be affected by the method used? Which had me on the back foot a little and trying to quickly visualise a selection of my own creations - a hopelessly subjective task even if she wasn't right there waiting for an answer.
So, I said best if she made up her own mind, that I'd email her a .DOC copy of "The House In Gondwanaland", and she could analyse the characters in that and decide which of the three methods I used on each of them. And the challenge was on.
Emboldened, I asked her if she minded if I blogged all this, and put the analysis up here in two or three weeks? - sales of "Gondwanaland" haven't been bad, so just in case any other lit-challenger out there wanted to get into the act. And she had no worries with that. Results soon.
Cheers......
T.R.E.