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

on them by their fellows.
    That such labels may be wrong, of course, goes almost without saying. Externals are handy indeed, but they may distort or contradict what’s going on inside a person . . . Not too often, though, or you’ll confuse your readers.
    That’s an aspect of character that’s absolutely essential for any writer to understand. We’ll explore it in the next chapter, “Fleshing Out.”

4
FLESHING OUT
How do you make a character real?
You provide him or her with appropriate tags, traits, and relationships.
    Labeling—assigning a story person a dominant impression—is a primary step in character creation.
    But a dominant impression alone doesn’t go far enough. Leave it at that and Character will end up a stick figure at best—a caricature, not a person. If he’s to be of any real use to you, you need to flesh him out, develop the picture of him in more detail, internally and externally, inside and out.
    Specifically, you need to give him tags, traits, and relationships .
    Before we go further, however, let’s emphasize one point too often forgotten, especially by beginners: People are like tapestries; that is, each is woven of many threads. But some threads are more vivid and visible than others, like strands of red through a gray fabric.
    It’s also important to remember that making a character too complex will kill him. A good character is a simulation of complexity, not the real thing. Fairly clear and simple traits work best. Otherwise the effect will be that given by a “busy” painting, one too cluttered with detail. So while ordinarily you’ll want to go beyond the cartoon/caricature level, try not to carry development so far in depth that your people fall over the edge into total confusion. The meaningful character in fiction is the one with a salient feature, or two or three, like the real-life Ayatollah Khomeini, Richard Nixon, or Elvis Presley, with individuality and color added via modifying touches.
    Thus, in life, we don’t know most of our friends and neighbors in depth. They exist for us mainly in terms of dominant impression plus externals—appearance, speech, mannerisms, attitudes, abilities—plus how we get along with them. (Goals? We’ll take that up later.)
    With that caveat out of the way, let’s get on to consideration of the tools you’ll use in fleshing out story people: tags, traits, and relationships.
    Tags come first.
    A tag is a label, but a limited, specialized label. It identifies a character and helps your readers to distinguish one story person from another. Thus, a name is a tag, and it’s important. It should identify him, characterize him, give your reader an idea of the kind of person he is and his role. (Witness the skinny black detective nicknamed “Biafra Baby” in William Caunitz’s Suspects; the “Biafra” and the starvation in that area ties to his being black and gaunt. Or Inspector Herman Schmidt, known to all as “Herman the German”—the stereotype “German” draws an immediate image in colleagues’ and readers’ minds.)
    Names also characterize by telling of age. Relatively few girls today are “Agatha” or “Althea” or “Sophronia,” common enough seventy-five years ago. “Kim” and “Kelly” and “Jessica” appear more often. Men? How many Jedediahs or Ebenezers or Zebulons have you met lately?
    Naming a bruiser “Percival” or “Algernon” may be out of line, too. If a name isn’t appropriate—well, see what Johnny Cash did with “A Boy Named Sue.” The late John D. MacDonald had planned to call his McGee character Dallas, until President Kennedy’s assassination. Then, concerned that the city’s name would create bad connotations where the character was concerned, he rechristened McGee as Travis.
    Just how and when you decide on a name is another matter. You may choose it early in your story’s planning stages, or you may still be fussing over it until the final typing. One friend of mine even went so