CHARACTERS

Here's a few words about creating characters for your works of fiction.

It may be these words will be irrelevant to you. Perhaps in your case there are characters flowing from your fingertips without limit, all clamoring to take up space in your next oeuvre.

I'm writing for the rest of us.

There are a number of ways of coming up with a character:

You can grab one right out of the world. Just use somebody in your book you know from life. Your dad, your sister, your barber, your dope dealer.

But if you put your best friend in your book—and use his or her real name—you might get sued.

Actually, even if you change the name, the real person may recognize himself and object. They might claim you are holding them up to ridicule from the world.

So you could try this: Take a real person, then change him in some significant way. And change the name, of course.

(A woman used her best friend as a character, but changed her into some sort of a bitch [she really wasn't a bitch]. The writer got sued—successfully, I'm pretty sure.)

If you're taking from real people, its safer to mix and match a number of traits. And keep your lawyer handy.

Safer yet: write under a pseudonym and never hint to anyone you're publishing stuff.

Because even if you make it all up, folks will find themselves in your work and get mad (followed by litigious). Thomas Wolfe claimed all the characters in Look Homeward, Angel were fictional, along with the events. Still, the folks in his home town saw themselves in his work and bristled. They even remembered events Wolfe claimed he made up out of whole cloth.

(They hated his guts for awhile, but reconciled shortly before the end of his short life.)

Sometimes you come up with an interesting character and cast about for a place to use them. Character is action, they say (Aristotle said it first, no doubt). Your characters just naturally ache to perform, to act out their traits, to make themselves real.

One way to develop a plot around a character is to ask yourself what his most vulnerable area is—then attack it in the story. If he's shy, make him give a speech before a large audience. If she can't swim, toss her in the ocean and watch the fun begin.

Books on writing suggest you write a detailed biography of your characters. What they look like, what they wear, what they drive, how they live, what they were like in high school, and so forth.

The books say "write it down." What they mean, of course, is "make it up." And then write it down.

(Of course you don't have to make it up if you're writing about real people, like some high school idiot who really did barf down the back of a chick's dress.)

The novelist E. M. Forster (in Aspects of the Novel) says readers find characters "real" when the author knows everything about them—though it may not all be revealed in the novel.

In his lectures about the people in novels, Forster suggests a mixture of flat and round characters is acceptable for most books. Flat characters have but one trait, which is easily described in a single sentence. Flat characters border on "types."

Forster would have you save the round characters for the main guys. They have multiple traits and cannot be summed up in a single sentence. The test of a round character is that they can surprise the reader in a convincing way. In other words, round characters have hidden content that may come out under pressure, like pearls hidden in a tube of tooth paste.

(By the way, Aspects of the Novel is well worth a look. But it's not so much a book about how to write a novel as it is a book about how to read one.)

Like I say, some writers begin with characters and contrive something for them to do—a way of revealing that character. Modern novels rarely explain their characters explicitly; readers have to build them up on their own from a list of their actions. (Dialogue is action, as are revealed thoughts.)

Other writers conceive of situations (a new way to murder someone, a new place to do it, etc.) and engineer characters to play the rolls required by the situation.

This method does not prevent you from creating round characters to act in your dramas. You just have to put on your "people making" hat. And be prepared to let those three-dimensional characters distort your precious plot. Might do you some good. (Or do the book some good, at least; you may be seething with rage the whole time.)

If you're constructing your characters from a junk yard of random parts, consider this: Astrology may be a load of crap, but a lot of people think they can guess your sign by your exhibited traits.

This would suggest the cluster of traits provided by astrology books for a given sign is widely considered to be credible. You might therefore be able to use these descriptions to reinforce the internal logic of your made-up characters or to help fill out their 3-D forms.

There's also information in astrology books (widely believed, apparently) detailing which signs are compatible with one another. Who should couple with whom, and who should be avoided at all costs. Could be useful for getting your characters in and out of trouble.

(I'm not suggesting you tell the reader what astrological signs your characters have—though I suppose you could.)

If you know a lot of real people very well, you could also use clusters of their traits as a guide. But here's the danger in that. Fiction is fiction, and you must stand guard when you allow the real world to roam your made-up territory.

Whether you're creating characters or constructing plots, reality is no excuse. That "it really did happen just that way" is irrelevant. Reality pulls no weight here. Inner consistency should be your watch word. A person or occurrence needs to be plausible in the context of the world you've created.

And maybe just a little surprising.