Creating Characters: How to Build Story People Read Online Free PDF Page A

behavior of the people you meet, on every level. Focus on it, labeling manner. Is this man blank-faced or bored or blasé? Is the one next to him uncertain or scared or nervous? Is the woman suspicious or sick or tired? What image is her friend trying to project? Disdain? Superiority? Hauteur?
    Question 2: How do you capture manner?
    While finding adjectives, putting labels to manners, you also gather incidents that convey impressions—even if later you don’t use them. Collect or devise bits which will reveal precisely why people think of this person or that as roughneck/roué/saint/sad sack or what have you. What does he do that leads others to think of him in such terms? Does he blow his nose on a linen napkin at a formal dinner? Suffer agonies rather than use a public restroom? (Remember Mark Twain’s famous comment that modesty had ruined more kidneys than bad liquor?) Push little old ladies aside in order to get a better seat in a theater or bus?
    Do I hear cries of outrage? Angry voices protesting that few of us fit into such simplistic packaging? Said voices are right, of course. Simplistic labeling often gives a false impression. I admit it frankly.
    What to do about it? The answer, of course, is to modify the label—insert ifs, ands, and buts into the character as needed to flesh him out. But that’s a subject calling for attention on a different level. We’ll take it up in a later chapter.
    Does this mean you introduce each character with his dominant impression? Not necessarily, though it’s certainly not the worst way to go.
    Indeed, on occasion, you may set down pages without stating the dominant impression a character makes in the specific terms of the vocation/manner pattern I’ve described. You may, instead, bring him or her on with a memorable or colorful tag—a toupee that’s forever slipping down, false teeth that keep getting in the way of speech, or the like. Or use minor action: “A girl opened thedoor. ‘This way, sir,’ she said.” Or, “The man wriggled through the mud to the fence.” That kind of thing. After all, there are all kinds of situations in this life where a person remains virtually faceless and so doesn’t make a real impression, plus or minus. What counts is that you get him on stage. Defining him can come later—though not too much later.
    You yourself should surely know the dominant impression behind such a mask, simply because you’ll need it in order to write about the person effectively later on. Maybe, at the moment, the girl who opens the door above doesn’t register. But if she’s going to play a part of any consequence later on, it will help if she’s a slattern or a flirt, young and timid, or old and perpetually disgruntled.
    How do you bring in a character? Here are four possible approaches—not the only four, certainly, but they’ll do for starters till you devise techniques of your own you like better:
    1. Description, appearance.
    “The hair was what you noticed. It was bright orange and stacked on top of her head in what they used to call a beehive.”
    2. Action.
    “The man ducked back into the shadows, one foot scraping on the pavement as if he couldn’t lift his leg.”
    3. Dialogue.
    “‘Lookin’ for someone?’
    “Eleana turned. A woman was standing in the doorway, an old woman a head shorter than she, with pinched features and squinty eyes. ‘Who are you?’ she gulped. “‘Me? Depends on who you are, what you want.’”
    4. Thoughts, introspection.
    “Edwards pondered, scanning the passersby and trying to define the person called X. A man, surely—or was it? The note really hadn’t given any hint.”
    Meanwhile, the principle for simplistic labeling remains both sound and important. For ease of recognition it can’t be beat. Far too many writers create characters who are, at best, gray-neutral confusing, when it’s totally unnecessary. In life and in fiction alike,unfairly or not, we do identify people by labels aptly slapped