I recently gave a talk on Character Design. These lovely people, all of them brilliant and funny and odd, gathered in a room to hear me talk for an hour and a half about how to write good characters. (Mostly. I also talked about plot and scene design, etc.) And so, you know, I did: I talked about how to make characters likable, tragic flaws, all these basic concepts that I was taught when I was first learning to write fiction.
But recently I’ve been wondering: do I use any of these?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized: no, I don’t really. They inform my understanding, but those ideas are not what I use to actually build a character.
So for just a self-indulgent moment, I’m going to describe how I actually write characters, in case it will be useful to anybody at all.
First of all, I start with an abstract idea of what I need. My writing usually starts with an abstract idea: say, the problem of psychology. I may not even know what I have a problem with about it– I just have this vague feeling that something is a little wrong there. So I think, okay, I need a character who is going to think about and talk about psychology.
The more I was thinking about it, the more I was thinking that my problem with psychology was that I wasn’t really sure that it was an adequate response to human suffering. In short, I thought the idea of doing psychoanalysis on a woman who was raped in the Congo was a laughable idea, and the thought of just giving her a pill–a very dark and depressing idea.
Slowly, I got the idea of a student of clinical psychology who abandons her studies to go to the Congo and help– she doesn’t know how, she can’t even picture how her tiny stupid life could help with a problem so big, but she goes anyway because she’s reached a point where she can’t not go.
So then I have the general shape of what the character will need to be capable of, and from there: I reverse engineer. In this particular instance, I knew I would need someone a little bit over passionate, emotional, and also, in order to get her to feel so guilty that she actually gets on the plane, someone harboring a heavy burden of self-hatred and shame.
So I had to figure out the origin of the self-hatred: I decided she had a really confusing case of childhood molestation, some situation where her own guilt or innocence was unclear, not for the reader, but for her. I decided that her cousin, only a few years older than her, had molested her. She was only 8, an innocent, but he was only 10– so was it really rape? Yes, it was, and yet, she feels it wasn’t. What if she was just a dirty girl? (Which is what her cousin told her, told her, in fact, that she was making him do it.) This seemed like it would cause in her all the qualities I needed.
But that left me only with a shell of a human being when what I needed was a voice. And so…. I began stalking psychology students online.
I read their blogs, I secretly befriended them on Facebook, I read their scholarly articles. I just stalked the shit out of them. In part, I was looking for details of what it was like to be part of a psychology department, but mostly I was looking for an indefinable something. I wanted to hear them talk. I wanted the small, nuanced pattern of a voice. At the same time, I was understanding that I needed to invent work for my character to be doing: what was she researching? What was her thesis about? And so I went about the task of giving myself a fake master’s in psychology.
Gradually, I was able to look up enough clinical trials and read enough texts to come up with what was, to the best of my knowledge, a pretty interesting thesis for her to be writing. And as it happened, right as that was coming together, I came upon a psychology student online who was just what I was looking for.
She was writing, basically, a blog that was complaining about her life. She suffered from clinical depression, self-doubt, and she was a closet feminist, ranting about how none of the men in her department took her seriously. She was pretty perfect for what I needed. So then I started looking at the way she wrote, the way her thoughts moved, the patterns of her speech. I wrote out, well, pages and pages of observations, tried out writing a few of her blog posts myself until I could do a fairly accurate imitation.
Then I spent a few days thinking about how I would have to modify her. For one thing, the girl I had found wasn’t very likable. She was pretty whiny. And she didn’t seem to be very smart. So I decided to make my character a little less whiny, and a little more brilliant. But I needed another characteristic– something idiosyncratic, that would allow the reader to fall in love with such a troubled character. So then I went and thought about all the people I love who are deeply troubled, and what allows me to love them despite the fact that there are very dark things about them. I realized that usually those dark people I love are very aware of their own fucked-up-ness and make interesting commentary about it. The fact that they are in charge of their fucked-up-ness means that I don’t have to be, thus allowing me to love them. Also, usually, these people are very funny.
But funny wasn’t going to work for me. I’m just not funny. I try very hard, and in life I can be pretty funny, but I’m not very funny on paper. So self-aware I could do: funny was harder.
Then I did something that… well, I like to think of it as my secret weapon, but who knows– maybe all authors do it? Anyway, I think that everybody has a mental tick– some thought pattern they use over and over again. I use it as a kind of signature for my characters, so that you can feel them thinking and you feel like their thinking is the same throughout the whole course of the novel. In the novel I’m writing now, the main character’s signature thought pattern is empathy: she’s always thinking about what it must be like to be other people. That’s where her brain goes. So for this character, the psychology student, I decided her signature thought pattern would be: fantasy. She’s always imagining things, either revising what just happened in her imagination, or projecting what she hopes will happen. She’s imagining absurd things, and also realistic things, but no matter what she’s always in a state of fantasy.
And with that piece in place, I started writing. I spent a great deal of time getting the first five pages right, making sure I had the voice, reading it to a variety of people to get their impressions, reading it out loud, etc. And then I just… let it rip.
All of the details: what kind of clothes she would wear, where she lived, what the cousin was actually like, etc, were filled in by my subconscious. I never planned them, they just arrived, and sometimes, if they didn’t work, I would modify them. But it was never my intention to make her like fried chicken, she just turned out to like fried chicken. I had no idea there was a bowl of rotting tangerines in her kitchen until it appeared there when I was writing a scene. It turned out she even had a boyfriend I didn’t know about who showed up in the middle of a scene, literally knocking on the door and asking to be let in. Obviously, I had her answer the door, and then he just sauntered in and he turned out to be one my favorite characters I have ever written, and I didn’t know the first thing about him. It was a joy to write him because I had no idea what he would say. So… who knows where he came from? He just arrived.
I’d be really interested to hear how other writers do it. Do you plan the rotting tangerines? I suspect not: you could never plan everything that goes into writing a piece of fiction, just like it would be impossible to walk across a room if you had to give the orders to each muscle group consciously. But how do you do it? I’d love to hear.
