Where do characters come from?
When I was teaching a writing course in February, we spent one evening working on character development. As part of an exercise, I asked the participants lots of questions about the character they were working on, ordinary things you’d be able to tell anyone about a friend. What colour are her eyes? Would she give up something to make someone else happy? What does she want more than anything else in the world? This is often an exciting moment for developing writers because characters can suddenly seem very real. One of the participants said after that she had been struggling with character development. She was devoting a lot of time and imagination to back story and this wasn’t helping to bring the character to life. You don’t need to know everything about a character, just as you don’t need to know everything about a friend. What you do need are vivid, precise details— a laugh, an annoying habit, and endearing dedication. Think about the things that come to mind when you remember actual people. Those are the kinds of traits that bring characters to life in fiction. Some writers even use real people. I think this is a mistake for a few reasons. We can never know a real person totally, and we need to know our characters better than we know any real people, better, even than we know ourselves. Also, if you use a real person, feelings about them that you aren’t fully aware of and may not acknowledge or understand could cloud the picture for the reader and interfere with the creative process of bringing a character to life.
It’s an odd truth that many professional fiction writers were lonely children for one reason or another, children whose best friends were imaginary. Depending on imaginary people for emotional support may not make for an ideal childhood but it does seem to equip people to become skilled at creating fictional characters who seem real. Anthony Trollope, a Victorian novelist with a very unhappy childhood, created characters that seemed as real as live people to his readers, and he was able to carry characters over from one novel to another so that the reader had a sense of how they developed over many years. Here’s what he said in his autobiography about how he created them:
“...The novelist...desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creatures of his brains should be to them speaking, moving, living human creatures. This he can never do unless he know those fictitious personages himself, and he can never know them unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy.”
Beginning writers may not realize how complete this involvement with characters must be. Trollope even spoke of arguing with the people he created. Once you’ve created a character who is completely real to you, this imagined person may start to do unexpected things when you sit down to write, and that’s the best thing that could possibly happen.
