Creating Characters: How to Build Story People by Dwight V. Swain Read Free Book Online Page A

consequence, instead of starting with a detailed dossier, I make a quick pass at laying out my characters. That means assigning each (tentatively and subject to change if my first notion doesn’t work out) an occupation, fragments of physical description, dominant impression, and basic attitudes, plus any color details that come to mind.
    (This matter of collecting color details, striking fragments and bits of business, is tremendously important, incidentally. Try to think them up when you need them and your brain will tend, too often, to go blank. Better by far to jot them down as they flash by in odd moments. Later, you’ll be glad you did.)
    Then I write. And as I write, I find I need things. Character A, for instance, needs to know how to pick a lock, so I give her a bit of background involving time spent years before with a locksmith uncle. Character B is going to have to deliver a baby; I plant references to his training as a paramedic. Character C? Her mother was an amateur gemologist/rockhound, so she can identify semiprecious stones.
    All this material goes into a sort of working file—a dossier after the fact—as my story progresses, creating the details of characterization catch-as-catch-can as I go.
    Then, when my rough draft is finished, I go back and edit and correct and insert.
    This is the moment of truth. I discover that I’ve accidentally included a Joe and a Jobe in the story, and that all three females are redheads. (My wife once was unkind enough to point out to me that my women always had breasts that “rose and fell too fast.”) And I’ve even discovered that the protagonist’s goal really was too weak to carry 40,000 words, and had to go back and do a major patch job.
    Would I have avoided these flaws with more detailed planning? In some cases, yes. But not always. You simply can’t foresee all the facets of a story’s development, and trying to out-guess every turn and twist may hang you up for longer than you think. Nor can you fuss and fidget over each precious line—not if you’re being paid by the word the way we were in the old pulp days. What we had to do was get the story down on paper; and that, to my way of thinking, is still what’s important. Instruction’s vital, true. But in the last analysis, in large measure you learn to write by writing.
    Indeed, that’s why I’ve handled this book as I have. The rawmaterial is all here, but I’ve spread it out so you can pick and choose pieces that you need at the moment or that strike your fancy, rather than trying to force patterns on an entity that, after all, is supposed to be your own creation. So much for fleshing out your characters, giving them physical and psychological dimension. It’s also important that you have at least some idea why they’re the way they are, what cast them in their present mold. To that end, it’s important that you know at least key portions of their background.
    It’s a topic we’ll begin exploring in the next chapter, “The World Within: 1.”

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THE WORLD WITHIN: 1
How do you motivate a character?
You devise something that he or she must change in order to win happiness.
    When we talk about the world within a character, at root we’re discussing motive: “A mental force that induces an act; a determining impulse. Intention; purpose; design,” as one dictionary puts it. It is the spine of any story.
    Motive, in fiction, is another name for a desire for change on the part of some character or other.
    It works this way:
    Happiness is the universal human goal.
    Un happiness, regrettably, is all too often the human state.
    For an individual to move from unhappiness to happiness ordinarily means that some aspect of his or her situation—state of affairs or state of mind—must be changed.
    Change may be anything from getting a raise to humiliating an enemy to experiencing the feeling of youth again.
    If the desire for change is so strong as to impel an individual to do something about it, take