Developing Characters

 

The protagonist in my current work-in-progress has to give a keynote speech on developing characters. The majority of the speech goes horribly wrong, but it starts well. In fact, I’m so much in love with her opening that I have used it in the next two paragraphs. What follows them is an abbreviated version of how Jo might have continued if she hadn’t been burned out. The writing project I reference is one of my own, however.

William Faulkner said, “It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.” That’s been my experience, too. As writers, we don’t create our characters. They create themselves.

So where do we find them, and how do we keep up with them once we do?

Every writer is different, but here is my process.

Unlike Faulkner, I begin with a plot idea, but, like him, it is my characters who shape the story. I find them in bits and pieces of the people around me in real life, and, occasionally, in books. My mind accumulates the knowledge subconsciously, and it pops out when I need a character.

Imagine Lewis Carroll creating the Mad Hatter and his friends. He can’t have known anyone with those exact personalities, and obviously the traits he used were greatly exaggerated. But he must have known people with the seeds of those characteristics or he couldn’t have painted such a convincing picture.

I create the characters, and I get to tell them what to do. But sometimes they have a mind of their own. When that happens, it’s my job to decide whether to let them follow it.

For example, I have been working on a story where a girl heads out west in a wagon train with her older sister and brother-in-law. Although all of them are inexperienced, my original plan was to make both the sister and the brother-in-law particularly naïve and helpless. It wasn’t long before the brother-in-law rebelled, however.

To put it in Faulker’s words, the character stood up on his feet and began to move, and I had to trot along behind him trying to keep up. Fortunately, he knew himself better than I did, and the book is better for letting him take the lead.

In the long run, it’s my book, and I get to decide how my characters will act. But forcing them to do things they don’t want to do creates cardboard cutouts. It also proves the truth of a quote by G.K. Chesterton, “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

Because sometimes the characters know themselves better than I do.

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The image at the top of this post is one of John Tenniel’s illustrations for the original 1865 edition of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. It is in the public domain because of its age.