Characters

        Question: How do I create characters?

        Answer: My first impulse is to say that I have no idea. I have no idea how characters get created. In my case, character creation is something which generally gets done pretty much automatically. I'm not sure whether the results are good, bad or indifferent ... however, because this is so easy for me, to be honest I have no idea (at least not from my own experience) how it is done.

However, looking at the requirements of characters analytically, I think the following procedure is legitimate:-

        (i) Decide what functions need to be performed;

        (ii) Decide what kind of character would fulfil one or more of those functions;

        (iii) Show this character in action.

        For example:-

        Suppose you are going to write a story about a crime. You need, then, a character who will carry out a criminal act. You might, then, want to create a cold and hyper-intelligent serial killer (or similar) or, alternatively, you might want to be more realistic, and create someone with poor impulse control, someone who acts on the spur of the moment without worrying too much about the long-term consequences.         In other words, (i) is that we need a criminal and (ii) we decide to settle on someone who has poor impulse control. We now want to (iii) show this person in action. This is pretty easy:-

Ratbag Chops was alone on the bus, apart from the driver and the old lady. He was thinking seriously about following the old lady off the bus and mugging her. But, no. His days of poor impulse control were over. The medication was supposed to guarantee that - right? Plus, Charlotte had made it clear that their relationship would be over if he went to jail again. And Charlotte undoubtedly meant it. She was not the kind of person to want to establish a relationship with a habitual criminal - she was, after all, a law enforcement officer.

The bus stopped. The old woman got off. Minus her itty bitty little backpack, an anomalous item which would have been more suitable for a teenager. As the bus drove away, Ratbag saw, through the back window, the old woman's mouth opening in an "O" of dismay. She was shouting something, but the driver never heard. Ratbag couldn't hear what she was saying either. The big city traffic was too noisy for that.

The bus rounded one corner then another, then it was slowing, stopping, and there were people standing in line, and Ratbag was out on the street, walking not too fast and not too slow, taking off his jacket, wrapping it round the backpack, and he couldn't really say why he had done it. It was just like ... well, how he was.

        Notice that Ratbag has been given a desire, a motivator to keep the plot going: he wants to sustain his relationship with police officer Charlotte.

        Note that Ratbag is shown in action. Literature is not an exercise in the art of still life. If your characters are combing their hair in the mirror for a couple of paragraphs while your describe them, then maybe you need to rethink.

If we want to describe Ratbag, for example, physically, then we could have him look in the mirror for a couple of paragraphs. Or, alternatively, we could show him interacting with Charlotte, who wants to cut the hairs out of his nose. Ratbag does not want to lose those hairs because he is afraid of ants crawling up his nose.

While the creation of characters is a bit of a mystery to me (because I don't have to work         I have more of an idea about how to use characters once they have been created, because this is something I have to work at. The key thing that I have learnt over the years - it took a painfully long time to learn it, and if I'd had a mentor I could have learnt it in a couple of days rather than a couple of decades - is this:-

Ger your character working with other characters.

Ratbag interacting with Charlotte is more interesting than Ratbag on his own.

Here's a possible plot:-

Ratbag meets up with a hyper-intelligent clinically controlled mastermind criminal, who decides (correctly) that Ratbag is a pliable creature who can be used as a tool. By the time Ratbag is too deeply involved in the mastermind's plot for the mastermind to find someone else, Ratbag's impulse control problems threaten to throw the mastermind's plot out of kilter. This gives us a tension between Ratbag and the mastermind, a tension which can be used for the purposes of horror or comedy, or both.

Now, Charlotte starts to get suspicious, and eventually works out who the mastermind is. The mastermind tries to get Ratbag to kill Charlotte, but love conquers all, and Ratbag kills the mastermind instead. Ratbag is ready to confess all, but the mastermind's scheme is close to fruition, and Charlotte, whose life as a law enforcement officer has taught her to break the rules when it is convenient, takes over the mastermind's role and continues to direct Ratbag toward the intended goal (robbing the bank, killing the president, stealing the uranium, unleashing the anthrax, kidnapping the baby or whatever.)

At this stage, however, Ratbag gets religion, turns on Charlotte, denounces her, and does a deal which lets him walk away unscathed. Fast forward a couple of years, and we have Ratbag running his own church ... the perfect cover for the various criminal enterprises he has in train. He hasn't exactly changed, but he has matured.

You may or may not like the plot sketched out above. However, note that it pretty much turns on who Ratbag is. If he wasn't weak and pliable, then the mastermind wouldn't try to bend him. If he wasn't stronger than he looks, then he wouldn't be able to save Charlotte when the mastermind threatens her. And if he wasn't a little more complex than he initially seems, then he wouldn't turn against Charlotte.

Some simple rules:-

(i) Establish character by showing your character in action. If you want to establish the fact that the character has poor impulse control then you need to show him doing something which demonstrates poor impulse control.

(ii) Bring characters on stage one at a time rather than in big groups. In the text fragment above, the only character with a name is Ratbag. The next step would be to introduce Charlotte. A third step would be to introduce the mastermind (Ratbag's parole officer, say.)

(iii) On a purely mechanical level, make sure the names are distinct from each other. If you have a boy named Ratbag then do not hook this boy up with a girl called Retabag and a mastermind criminal called Rutabag. That would give us Ratbag, Retabag and Rutabag.

If the impulse criminal is Ratbag Chops and if his girlfriend is Charlotte Epelsplont (Ratbag and Charlotte) then a good name for the mastermind supercriminal would be Mike Hag. That gives us Ratbag, Charlotte and Mike, three names which have a distinct sound and a distinct look.

(In Tolkien's novel The Lord of the Rings there is one bad guy called Sauron and another called Saruman. When I was reading this, over-hastily, at the age of thirteen, I got those two hopelessly confused. It would have been much easier if one had been called Baaldrop and the other had been called Zazinthacro. The confusion is made all the worse because both Sauron and Saruman control armies of orcs. It would have been easier if Baaldrop had been in charge of an army of carnivorous frogs and if Zazinthacro had been the lord of the vampire cockroaches. When the copyright of The Lord of the Rings finally expires, someone might like to rewrite the novel to implement this idea.)