Creative Kicks - Week 5 - Creating Characters with Clare Flynn

Creating Characters that Readers Care About 
By Clare Flynn
Photographs by JD Lewis

Whether you’re a daredevil seat-of-the-pants writer who sits down with a blank page and lets the story unfold, or a meticulous planner and plotter who knows in advance what will happen in every chapter, there are times when a character will surprise you. What? You might say, I’m the author, I’m in control! But that’s not always the case.

Why do characters have a nasty habit of running off on their own - sometimes in a different direction from the one we intended, leaving us lolloping along behind them? Well, it can be a sign that they are living, breathing people who have a clearer idea of their own destiny than the plot structure imposed on them - or it could mean they aren’t yet fully formed.

One way to find out, is to know your characters as well as, or, given that self-knowledge is rarely a strength, better than yourself.

A fundamental element of story, from Shakespeare to Star Trek, is the concept of a hero’s journey. One of my favourite expositions of this is shown in this short clip from Kurt Vonnegut. 

So, what are your characters’ journeys? The start point is getting clear on what each character’s role is in the story. The main character or protagonist (MC)? - the central focus of your story - the hero on his or her journey. The antagonist? - whether well-intentioned or plain evil, they are out to foil the MC’s mission. A minor character? - if so, what is their role in the story and relationship to the MC? For the purpose of this post I’m going to focus on the main character - as if you get that wrong you’ve lost your reader.

Exercise 1

Answer these questions about your MC (it’s a good idea to do them for the antagonist and supporting characters too).

· What’s their role in the story?

· What do they yearn for? This is fundamental! It’s what drives them and sends them on their journey

· What do they look like? Whether you include these details in the book or leave them to the reader’s imagination is irrelevant - YOU need to know this - and this goes for all of these questions!

· A brief pen portrait of their personality - just a few sentences

· What’s their occupation?

· Do they have any habits or mannerisms?

· What’s their background? (history, family, location, backstory)

· What are their internal conflicts? What causes their angst? Their dark nights of the soul?

· What are their external conflicts? Who or what are the source of these?

Exercise 2

Once you’ve done that, here’s another exercise. This time write freely in the voice of your character filling in the blanks. Don’t stop to think - just get it down on paper, preferably by hand.

Let me tell you who I am ------

As well as all that, what you really need to know about me is ------

OK confessional time here, what I really want is --------

I’d be able to have exactly what I want if only --------

Don’t tell anyone, but what I dislike most about myself is --------

My life changed forever the day ---------

The worst thing that ever happened to me was ---------

The best moment of my life was -----------


Exercise 3

To get right under the skin of your characters, give them the Spanish Inquisition.

You can use The Proust Questionaire http://hoelder1in.org/Proust/fill_questionnaire.html ,

or any online personality test

or do what I did when I was writing The Alien Corn and needed to reconnect with the characters in the previous book, The Chalky Sea, and use the excellent one JJ Marsh wrote about here, or make up your own.

I recently did an online course with a university on outlining (I was trying to move from being a seat-of-the-pantser to a plotter). One of the exercises was to fill out a very comprehensive questionnaire in the voice of your main character. Many of the participants found it difficult, if not impossible, to answer as their character rather than as themselves. That’s fine if you’re writing a memoir, a fictionalised account of your own life, or are transplanting yourself into your novel as the main character Hey, why not live vicariously? You too can swing through Amazon jungles or live as a Trappist monk. But in most cases your characters are NOT you and you need to get to know them better than you know yourself.

Most of the questions in a questionnaire may seem pointless - I’ll never use it in my book, you say. But you’ll be surprised at the gems you uncover that can add colour and shade to your characters. Think of characters as being like icebergs - the biggest part is hidden from view but it’s what gives strength, power and presence. A character who only consists of the words that make it onto the page is going to be thin and insubstantial. We are all what we lived in our pasts - a complex construct of past slights and injuries, compliments and excitements, moments of joy and sadness.

Some of the areas to think about (not an exhaustive list) in forming your characters are -

· What is their backstory?

· Voice and manner

· Tastes

· What do they dream about?

· Quirks and behaviours

· Skills and aptitudes

· Fears and desires

· Strengths and weaknesses

· Formative experiences

· Friends and enemies

My last top tip is, having done all the exercises, print them out and keep these together as a reference document to inform your writing. Or if you are paper averse, save them in a folder where you can easily refer to them as you’re writing. If you ever feel “stuck” a dip back into the folder can produce rich pickings.


Author of seven novels, Clare Flynn writes historical fiction with a strong sense of time and place and compelling characters.
After a career in international marketing, working on brands from nappies to tinned tuna and living in Paris, Milan, Brussels and Sydney, she ran her own consulting company for 15 years and now lives in Eastbourne where she writes full-time - and can look out of her window and see the sea.

Clare’s latest novel, The Gamekeeper’s Wife, is available in paperback and as an e-book on Amazon http://mybook.to/gamekeeper
Website www.clareflynn.co.uk
Facebook - www.facebook.com/authorclareflynn
Twitter - www.twitter.com/clarefly
Instagram - www.instagram.com/clarefly

Characters in Novels: People Like Us?

by Sue Carver

What distinguishes novel writing from other artistic endeavours is the necessary and unavoidable affinity that novelists have with their subject-matter: people. According to E. M. Forster, characters in novels are “word-masses” made up by the novelist “…conditioned by what he guesses about other people, and himself”. ¹

Characters in novels differ from people in life in one important respect: to a greater or lesser extent, their inner lives are revealed. That we can fully understand characters in novels when, in life, people - including ourselves - are essentially unknowable seems to be a large part of the novel’s appeal. Great novels evoke a real sense of the unique consciousnesses of the characters portrayed and it is on that aspect of character creation that I will focus here.

Surface and Depth

Writers can choose to stay on the surface, portraying character via speech and behaviour, as in this extract from Hemingway ²:

The doctor went out on the porch. The door slammed behind him. He heard his wife catch her breath when the door slammed.
“Sorry,” he said, outside her window with the blinds drawn.
“It’s all right, dear,” she said.
He walked in the heat out the gate and along the path into the hemlock woods.

 or to dive deep, giving thoughts and emotions in addition, like McEwan:

Willing himself not to, he raised the book to his nostrils and inhaled. Dust, old paper, the scent of soap on his hands, but nothing of her. How had it crept up on him, this advanced stage of fetishizing the love object? ... He had spent three years drily studying the symptoms, which had seemed no more than literary conventions, and now, in solitude, like some ruffed and plumed courtier come to the edge of the forest to contemplate a discarded token, he was worshiping her traces - not a handkerchief, but fingerprints! - while he languished in his lady’s scorn.” ³

Regardless of which approach is chosen - surface or deep - every utterance, gesture, thought and feeling needs to be consistent with the writer’s empathic understanding of his or her fictional characters.

Empathy in therapy and fiction 

Carl Rogers, humanistic psychologist and creator of the person-centred approach to therapy, described empathy as the “… understanding of the client’s world as seen from the inside. To sense the client’s private world as if it were your own, but without losing the ‘as if’ quality - this is empathy.” ⁴

Drawing a distinction between empathy and the related concepts of sympathy and identification is vital for my day job, clinical psychology. I also find it valuable to have in mind when creating fictional characters.

Flaubert is often quoted as having said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi, d’après moi ...” (Madame Bovary is me, based on me). By his own account, Flaubert appears to sail perilously close to identification: a psychological process by which an individual assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of another. In my view, he does himself an injustice: empathy is in evidence in Madame Bovary, not identification. 

Too close identification of novelists with their characters can produce results in fiction that are as messy as they are in therapy, the most extreme example of this being the creation of ‘Mary-Sue’  characters, which are little more than wish-fulfilments of the author, projected onto the page.  Ensuring the necessary degree of objectivity required by empathy, I suggest, poses the greatest challenge for the author when writing characters that are autobiographical or semi-autobiographical.

Can Empathy Be Enhanced?

The role of the novel in shaping empathy in readers has been debated for centuries. Recent research offers support for George Eliot’s bold declaration: “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, then it does nothing.” ⁵

Does empathy felt while reading fiction cultivate a sense of connection, which leads to altruistic actions on behalf of real others?  In “Empathy and the Novel” (2007) ⁶, Suzanne Keen - drawing on psychology, neuroscience, literary history and philosophy - concludes that while certain novels can provoke empathy in readers, this does not necessarily translate into altruistic behaviour. She observes that the greater the degree of ‘fictiveness’ a given novel has - according to the readers’ perceptions - the more likely they are to empathise with its characters.

As with many complex human qualities with profound implications for social functioning, the foundations for empathy are laid down in early childhood, with both nature and nurture coming into play. The ability to empathise is likely to be on a continuum and there will be individual differences with regard to how well-developed this capacity is.

What if empathising with one’s fellow human beings isn’t a particular strength? Can one learn to increase empathic understanding? Research into the enhancement of empathy in adulthood is thin on the ground, but what there is suggests that there is greater plasticity than was previously thought. For example, a very recent study indicated that ‘imagining and enacting oneself as an imaginary other’ can enhance empathy in adolescents (Goldstein and Winner, in press) ⁷.

In this, and other studies in this area, role-play was used, but I see no reason why the sustained cognitive and emotional effort required to create fictional characters, and to follow their journey through the course of writing a novel, should not enhance empathy. The good news for fiction writers is that this aspect of writing fiction, along with others, may well improve with time and effort, but we won’t necessarily become more altruistic in the process.

References

1.    E. M Forster, Aspects of the Novel

2.    Ernest Hemingway, The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife

3.    Ian McEwan, Atonement

4.    Carl. R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy           

5.    George Eliot, letter to Charles Bray

6.    Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel

7.    Goldstein, T.R. and Winner, E. Enhancing Empathy and Theory of Mind, Journal of Cognition and Development (2011 in press)

Sue Carver, consultant clinical psychologist and writer of fiction and poetry, has a keen interest in the psychological aspects of the creative writing process. She doesn’t entirely agree with Erica Jong that “all writing problems are psychological problems...”, but she would be happy to consider, from a psychologist’s perspective, any writing-related questions that you may like to pose. 

Her Q and A column, Carver’s Couch, will appear in the October issue of WWJ. Please send your questions to: [email protected] with the subject heading Carver’s Couch. 

Scripts: American Character

by Ola Zaltin

As a newcomer to the craft of writing literary prose, I was somewhat surprised to hear of the term ”Show, don’t Tell”. As in, when writing Novels, have your characters show their character through their actions. Tell the story with images and actions.

Which totally threw me. I come from screenwriting, and the first thing you’re learnt in American screenwriting 101 is this: Film is Action and Images, and Action describes Character. Tell your story in images and actions, and at all costs avoid dialogue, voice-over and similar cheap tricks attempted by Europeans, auteurs and other such riff-raff.

Which is why about every screenwriter I know is a closet novelist. People like us have x-rated fantasies about telling, telling, telling and showing fuck all. Interior monologues by the chapter, exposition running for pages and dialogue by the yard. This be the stuff our dreams are made of.

Because in screenwriting, space is premium, and action is king.

I once had the good fortune to participate in a screenwriting master-class held by the novelist and screenwriter Richard Price. He recounted his journey from successfull young author (The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers, etc), to budding screenwriter. A big-time producer contacted him with the idea of transforming Price’s first novel into a film. He received a sum ten-fold what he had earnt so far on his first two novels together, and got a deadline of six months for a first draft. When the six months were up, he turned in a 490 page screenplay, correctly formatted, on time.

This is when the kindly Hollywood producer called Mr Price up and informed him that the screenplay was exactly 400 pages too long, had no forward momentum, and zero plot.

Richard summed it up in his laconic Bronx patois: “What I learnt that day was this: a screenplay is maximum 90 pages long, every scene has to carry the story forward and the plot has to be tighter than a crab’s ass.”

With infidelity, the three golden rules may be Deny, Deny, Deny. But let me tell you, with Hollywood, it’s: 

Momentum, Momentum, Momentum.

Going back to character.

Character Presentation

Film is images and action, character serves these two and plot is the natural born child of the three aforementioned. Amen.

Anyone casting a glance at a screenplay page will immediately realize that very few words actually get to go on it. The font has to be Courier 12 pt, and the line-spacing 1.5, and that’s before you get to the narrow middle space you have to write dialogue in. Screenplay formatting is structured in such a way that one page is roughly one minute of screentime. This way, producers can directly flip to The End on page 96 of your labour of love and declare without reading a word of it: "Aw, I can’t make this shit!” And they will.

For short, you need to be smart about setting up your character and do it in the most economic and visual way you can think of. Screenplay space is scarce.

In the opening of Red Rock West (1993), Nicolas Cage is a lone drifter in some American desert, out of gas, out of cash and out of luck. He finds a seemingly abandoned petrol-station way back of beyond, walks into the store and flips open the cash-register: it’s full of cash. He has none. There’s no one around. He closes the cash-register without taking a bill out of it.

Voilá: he’s a good guy. No dialogue, just action, not five minutes into the movie, we know who to root for, no matter what may come.

During the opening sequence of SE7EN we are visually told the morning routines of detectives Mills and Somerset. Mills (Brad Pitt) is the young pup, who pulls on his shirt with buttons buttoned and selects his tie at random amongst a variety of pre-tied ties and runs out through the door. Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is the older gentleman who has everything laid out neatly ironed, chooses every item carefully and with deliberation.

Mills will turn out to be the impulsive, daring, intuitive character, battling throughout the story with Somerset’s analytical, cool, considering character. Again: characters presented through action and images.

The Character Arc

Having thus introduced your main character, you’ve got to present us with his or her inner-conflict.

This is something that’s bugging them at the core of their very being. What is stopping them from expressing their true potential as human beings (if this sounds eerily like a recruitment folder for Scientology or the US Army, fear not; we’re still in the la-la land of movie suspension of disbelief. That being said ... yes, there are similarities).

At the outset, you have to present the public with the antithesis of what is to come:

•      Jerry Maguire can’t stand what his job is and what he has become. (Jerry Maguire)

•      Dewey Finn is an irresponsible kid in a man’s body. (School of Rock)

•      Frankie Dunn believes women have nothing to do in the ring. (Million Dollar Baby)

They need to change, right? No? Well, according to American storytelling 101, they do.

Basically, what happens in all three films is that these three white American males (imagine that ...) round about 20 pages into the screenplay do something life changing; write that memo about the failed business of sports-agenting, take a teaching job, accept a female boxer as his charge.

From then on and for the next 60 or so pages, the protagonists go through every kind of hell and obstacle on his (or her) journey of adversity, understanding and finally change (cue the Burbank Philharmonics).

Classic example: From the starting point of hating kids and loving his house and solitude above all else, grumpy old Carl Fredricksen at the climax of UP has to let go of his house (literally!) to save the kid. His inner conflict is illustrated in action by him hanging onto the house, floating in the air, and having to let it go to save the boy. (Okay, you have to see this film to get the just mentioned). Brilliant piece of inner-conflict resolved through image and action.

The Character Transformed

The transformed character is the opposite of what he was in the opening of the film. He - or she - but most often he, alas and alack, has Learnt something and Changed.

Now, if this happened as much in real life as in the movies, for one thing, there wouldn’t be a 3 billion dollar a year diet-book industry in the USA. Because if people in real life really did read the book, followed the advice, got slim and stayed slim, well, then ... why buy another book?

For short: people don’t change very much in real life, so we seek hope, faith, and the possibility of Change for an hour and a half with a bucket of popcorn, a barrel of Pepsi and five hankies. Then we walk out into the light and enjoy a triple bacon-whopper-heart-stopper-mega-everything meal with none of that green stuff and extra cheese, please.

Now, back to the world of tinseltown make-believe:

•      Jerry Maguire mans up and takes care of both business and his lady love and has her at hello.

•      Dewey Finn keeps on rockin’ but now as a responsible adult teaching kids to roll with the rocks.

•      Frankie Dunn takes Maggie Fitzgerald into his heart in lieu of the daughter he never knew.

(NB: In American films, if the character fails to conform and to change in a cute way, they’re killed off at the ending. Forrest Gump’s girlfriend - AIDS gets her for leading a hippie lifestyle, Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty has to die because he steps out of the bourgeois norm, Thelma and Louise rebel against patriarchial American society and drive off a cliff smiling. Etc. Same could be argued in Maggie Fitzgerald’s case: she tries to take the fight to the male-dominated boxing society, and - surprise - dies. Etc)

In the end, I have but one piece of advice tacked to my wall. At the end of that master-class we asked Richard Price’s advice to us (then) young and hopeful screenwriters. What had his dismal start taught him and how had he become so good. He paused, then looked at us and growled: “Go to the movies. Pay attention!”

Amen. 

Populating the Fictional World

by Sarah Bower

The fiction writer is a strange, parthenogenetic species whose offspring arrive in the world in all sorts of guises. They may be fully-formed or mere outline sketches, male, female, child or ancient, human, robot, or anything in between. Some are sweet-natured, some seething with evil intent, most shift up and down this spectrum in devious and unpredictable ways. All are, or should be, in some way memorable. They bristle with barbed hooks that, once they have entered the reader’s heart, cannot be easily removed.

Having looked last time at tips for how to find inspiration and begin writing, we now come to the nuts and bolts of creating a story, the set of technical components - plot, character, setting, point of view, voice, pace - which make up a piece of narrative fiction. The greatest of these is character. What do we really remember about our favourite books? What is it that makes them our favourites in the first place? Imagine you are among a group of people who all loved Little Women as children. The first thing you do is play the categorisation game. Who are you? Glamorous Amy, worthy Meg, the ‘little mother’, gawky Jo with her ink-stained fingers? Long after we have half-forgotten what happens to these girls in the course of Alcott’s novel, we remember them, the essence of who they are and what they say to us as - usually - women.

There’s another of these games. In your choice of partner are you a Darcy girl, or do you prefer the maimed Mr. Rochester? Or Heathcliff, with all that that entails. You may only half-recall the finer details of the stories of Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennett and Cathy Earnshaw, but you never forget the women themselves or the men they fell in love with.

So, when thinking about how to construct a story, even if the characters are not the element which comes to you first, they are the key to involving readers. It is the characters who will ventriloquise what you want to say.

The most obvious - and most hotly denied - source of characters is your own friends and family. This is not to say that you will want to lovingly recreate every detail of Auntie Gladys, or your annoying little brother, or your best friend from school. While all fiction is, by definition, autobiographical because it is generated by the author’s own imagination, there’s autobiographical and autobiographical. A mistake many beginning authors make, when enjoined to ‘write what you know’ is to write what is, in effect, memoir, not fiction.

The way to use the people in your life as characters in your fiction is to cannibalise them. As Graham Greene famously remarked, every writer must have a sliver of ice in his heart. So, much as if you were playing Tops and Tails, you can take Auntie Gladys’ honky tonk piano playing skills and blend them with your best friend’s taste for Malibu to create the basis for a character who is completely fictional yet composed of ‘real’ parts which will help you to achieve the authenticity and true-to-life feel that strong and memorable fictional characters always have.

People watching is a great source of material for characters. I have a chronic inability to be late for anything, which means I frequently find myself hanging around in bars and cafes, waiting for people who have a more wholesome attitude to punctuality than myself. On these occasions, I shamelessly watch people and eavesdrop on their conversations. I make up scenarios about groups and couples based on their demeanour with one another and snatched words and phrases overheard, and busily noting these down in my notebook or on my phone makes me look less like a billy-no-mates as I wait for my companions to arrive.

You can be more pro-active in this process if you actually choose someone in the street and follow them for a while. This is an exercise often set for student actors, to follow a stranger for, say, half an hour and then be able to reproduce their walk, their attitude when sitting or standing, getting on a bus, ordering a coffee etc. This approach is, of course, particularly useful for the budding author of crime fiction!

Once you have amassed the raw material you need to construct a character, how do you adopt the mantle of Dr. Frankenstein and breathe life into them? Fiction, even when it is at the outer realms of fantasy, is an imitation of life. It cannot be anything else because life is all we know. Consequently, the best way to approach the business of making your characters live is to think about how we learn to know our fellow human beings in the real world. We do this from the outside in; it is not, usually, until we know people well that they reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings to us. Even then, they may be selective with the truth, and will give their lies away to the attentive observers by a whole series of ‘pantomimes’. Our knowledge of other people is built up through our senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, possibly, in certain circumstances) and our intuitions. So, when you set about revealing a character to your readers, this is how you should do it.

Try to avoid ‘telling’ readers about characters. When you introduce your heroine, do not give us a paragraph detailing the colour of her hair, the number of brothers and sisters she has, her preference for jasmine tea and pinot grigio over espresso and margueritas. This not only stops the forward momentum of your story because it is merely descriptive, it also tends to be off-putting to readers because it leaves them no opportunity to put their own imaginations to work in conjunction with yours. Focus on showing what she is like through her actions, so she is revealed to readers in just the same way as she is revealed to other characters in the story. 

Let us learn she likes jasmine tea through seeing her order it, or overhearing her telling someone else it’s her favourite. Let us know she has red hair because she wishes it was blonde, or decides she can’t wear purple because it will clash with it. This way we learn not just that she is a red head but that she lacks confidence in her appearance, likes the colour purple, is a little vain and possibly fancies a man who always goes out with blondes. You tell us one thing, but you show us many more.

Finally, remember Stephen King’s dictum that, however minor a character, when that person is centre stage, the spotlight is on them and no-one else. All your characters, even the walk-on parts, must be multi-dimensional and nuanced just as real people are. The milkman isn’t just the milkman, he’s a forty-two year-old father of three whose wife suffers from depression and who dreams of bungee jumping in New Zealand. The hero isn’t just tall, dark, handsome, square-jawed and ripped, he’s terrified of spiders, gets eczema on the backs of his knees and likes seventies soul music.

The power of fiction lies in its ability to turn a mirror on the world we live in and tell us, truthfully, who is the fairest of them all. The driving force behind this process is the characters, the representations of humanity who act out their lives on the page and thereby offer us catharsis. Our relationships with our favourite fictional characters may outlast friendships, marriages or the bonds between parents and children. Wouldn’t you love to think that the characters you create might have this power?