How well does a writer need to know her characters?
There seem to be two sets of conventional wisdom about this. One holds that writing characters is rather like method acting – the writer has to become the character, so as to know them from the inside. The other is more mechanical, and is typified by “character sheets” – pages-long lists of questions about each characters’ physical and mental attributes and backstory.
Each of these methods works sometimes, for some writers, and doesn’t work other times, for other writers. Most writers lean one way or another, especially for their major characters, but I think both approaches can be useful. My major characters tend to walk into my head, so for them I’m more at the method-acting end of the scale, but I don’t have to understand all my characters in depth, all of the time.
For instance, I don’t need to understand the inner soul of most of the spear-carriers and walk-ons. The guard at the gate who says “Welcome, heroes!” and opens the door does that because it’s his job; he doesn’t need any more motivation than that. The cab driver who takes the heroine from the airport to the meeting and never shows up again, the grocery-store clerk or fast-food cashier who hands her food and change without looking up from the register…they’re generally people who don’t have much impact on the main character. Most of the time, they don’t have more than a couple of lines of dialog and don’t even need names, let alone all the details from a six-page questionnaire.
Minor characters are usually more than anonymous faces in the crowd. They generally have more than two lines of dialog in a book, and often have several scenes or a recurring presence. I usually understand this kind of character “from the outside,” the way I understand real live people (which means, not very well). I can predict their actions, and sometimes I can say why they did X or Y instead of A or B, but sometimes I just know that that’s what they’d do, because they’re like that. These are the characters where those questionnaires sometimes come in handy for me, though I don’t need six pages or details about their childhood traumas.
Yes, the spear-carriers and minor characters have their own stories…but those are different stories from the one I’m telling. I don’t have to know those stories in order to make those characters perform their roles in this one. In fact, getting too far into their heads can get in the way, rather like the method actor who was making a commercial for a fruit drink. He asked the director “What is my motivation in this scene?” to which the director replied with a sigh, “George, you’re a banana!”
Sometimes, knowing more about the spear-carriers and walk-ons can make a story richer. The fascinating-conversation-with-the-cab-driver is a classic example, both in fiction and in real life. It never really hurts to know more about one’s characters…as long as what gets into the story is only as much as is needed. A three-page essay on the life history of every cab driver, city guard, and store clerk will slow most stories to a crawl, unless the whole point is to showcase all the interesting people with minimal attention to plot in the first place.
The central characters – the protagonist, antagonist, main and secondary characters – are the ones I have to have some sort of heart-level emotional understanding of. The questionnaires don’t help me with this at all – if I know those characters well enough, I can answer the questionnaire without thinking; if I have to think to answer the questionnaire, all the answers are wrong in the end. I don’t build my characters from childhood up, unless, like Eff in Thirteenth Child, they’re starting off as a child on page 1 and growing up as the book unfolds.
For me, it’s kind of like writing real people. Some of them have very strong personal voices; given three different phrasings, I could easily pick out which one sounds like them, and/or the thing they absolutely would not say, even though I’ve no idea what shaped those speech patterns and personal idioms or the reasons behind why they do and say certain things. Most real people don’t start out your acquaintance by blurting out their entire past life, preferences and beliefs, fears, hopes, and idiosyncrasies. (And if they do, they’re usually leaving out something important.) I learn about my friends gradually. I learn about my characters the same way. And the first thing I learn is usually something on the order of “Oh, she doesn’t like fish” or “Huh, he doesn’t drive,” rather than anything traumatic or joyful out of their past history.
It’s not nearly this clear-cut, of course; some minor characters I know inside and out from the moment they walk on, and once in a while a main character refuses to provide even a teeny tiny clue as to what’s going on in hiser head (“Why should I tell you?” “If you didn’t want to tell me anything, why did you walk into my head demanding that I write a story about you?!?” “<shrug> Didn’t have anything better to do. Got it finished yet?” “I CAN’T WRITE IT TILL YOU TELL ME WHAT’S GOING ON!” “<beady stare> You’re supposed to be bright. Figure it out.” “ARRGGH!”) Note that I can do his dialog just fine… I simply haven’t a clue as to why he’s like that, and every time I make up some background for him, he glances over my shoulder, sneers, and says, “Wrong again.” Jerk. Which is why he’s been sitting in limbo for the past six or seven years – and why he’ll probably end up a major secondary character rather than the protagonist when I do finally figure out where he fits.
*laugh* That last person sounds kinda like you met my little brother. (the other one) Its not that he is anti-social or withdrawn – he just enjoys messing with your head too much to give you straight answer to ANYTHING. Good luck trying to figure him out! The only person who ever got my brother to open up and be serious is the girl he fell head-over-heels in love with.
I’ve got a son like that character of yours. Complete and utter mischief maker. (I’d suggest a trickster for your character, but he *is* your character, after all.)
I admit, I much prefer writing to a cast over throwing characteristics together. Character design suffers a bit too much for me when I take the latter approach.
When I was a child I saw a Carol Burnett sketch (which I can’t find online) with one of the actors sitting at a typewriter and the rest as his characters.
He keeps changing his mind about what they’re doing until they all get mad at him. I always smile thinking about it, especially when I change my characters’ actions or attitudes as I write.
In my current WIP, I’m trying something new and letting all my characters show me who they are through their actions. So far it’s working and I’m having lots of fun but I just hope that I’m able to pull together all the bits and pieces into a coherent ending…
Oh, yeah.
Truly minor characters are like all those little villages that dot the lovingly-detailed map of a big epic fantasy. If a few become startlingly memorable, and the rest are just tantalizingly implied or glimpsed detail in a great wide world, what I get is a sense of reality. It took me a long time to understand how much I needed this, as opposed to the boring package-tour with the guide who won’t shut up, as a writer no less than as a reader.
And of course, now and then you will get a real surprise – as when one of my favourite characters and pivots of worlds leapt up fully-formed from a throwaway joke in somebody else’s story. But there’s neither world nor time for that to happen very often.
I’ve tried questionnairing my main characters in the past, and it’s only death by boredom for them, because then they get saddled with a history and characteristic-set that’s merely there, instead of the things I later discover absolutely have to be true. And the force of that discovery – I’ve had quite a few over the past month – shows me smack-dab what it means to the character, at the moment it matters to them.
In the case of opaque characters, like one of my two current protagonists, I’ve never found anything to work except to keep telling stories of them until the true ones stick. It’s not that the guy plays games with me: it’s just that he has no taste for introspection, and usually gets it wrong. He can’t tell me what he doesn’t know, and only finding out what he’s done by trial and error – and keeping contradictory accounts in mind until one falls apart – gets me anywhere at all in writing him.
I don’t think it would be half so interesting story if I made him transparent. He isn’t a mystery to be resolved: he’s just like that.
What I do often find useful is sketching major characters’ families right from the outset, even if they don’t appear in the story. It gives me a handle on them, and disciplines my lazy tendency to Sprung From Zeus’ Brow Syndrome. If something in it turns out not to fit, I can always change that later.
Esther – Playing head games is what this guy seems to be about.
Deborah – Hadn’t thought of making him a trickster, but it could work. I like the idea, because it makes him different from the usual smart-mouth-happy-go-lucky-rogue that so many writers use.
Alex – Your description of the Carol Burnett sketch made me think of the movie Stranger than Fiction, in which the protagonist discovers that he’s a character in someone’s novel and he has to find the writer before she kills him off! (I very much recommend renting it. Emma Thompson and Will Farrel and Dustin Hoffman do just an amazing job – I especially liked Hoffman’s ruthless literary professor, and Thompson having to deal with the assistant her publisher has sent out to make sure the book comes in on time. [Sometimes I wish my publisher would do things like that…])
Gray – Yes! To both the glimpses of tantalizing details and the “he’s just like that” part. On the first, I think the realism comes from having to engage the imagination to fill in all those blank spaces.
I loved that movie. And yes, it reminded me of the Carol Burnett sketch…
I think the person you write in – 1st, 3rd – can somewhat indicate how you need to work with your characters. If you think you really have to BE your character, 1st person is the way to go. If you’re like me, where you don’t want to BE your character, you just want to feel a strong affection for them and know them as you would a best friend, you write in 3rd person.
I think minor characters are so cool! I have one girl, who at first glance, is just your classic, pretty, girly-girl. Then, as the story unfolds, you see how spunky she really is. But as I wrote, I found that she was taking more and more plot responsibility. Characters surprise you sometimes.
I’ve just started to test out the questioner method, and I find it’s great for helping me think through villains. I have a nasty tendency to skimp on their motivation, so I’m learning a lot by planning them out, and knowing their reasons helps me think of new and horrifying acts they can commit against my heroes, which is good.
I think you have an important point about sometimes the door opener just opens the door. One problem I’ve had since getting hold of the questioner I’m using is thinking `oh no, a maid is helping my princess dress for the ball, and I don’t know the maid’s life story!’ It’s a relief to think I don’t HAVE to know it.
I agree with the “first person= you *are* the character, and third person= you are almost their best friend in your knowledge of them” idea!
One problem that I have with the questioner method is that whenever I am doing it, I start thinking, “Why don’t I do a questioner for this (minor, minor, minor) character?” So then I dismiss the idea, but a new story idea has popped up. And then, without my knowing, It isn’t my *princess* anymore, it’s my *maid* and her point of view, to use Chicoy’s example. Sigh… Very good post, though!