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

action to achieve it, it constitutes a motive.
    Stated thus bluntly and simplistically, the picture is obvious. Give a character so compulsive a desire to make a given change that he can’t let it be, and you have the basis for a story.
    In life, the issues may come through as a bit less easily understood.
    Why? Because in life we can’t see inside other peoples’ heads.
    Back when I was a boy, a young man of perhaps eighteen or twenty lived down the block from us. Though he bothered no one, he perpetually wandered about at loose ends, jobless and clearly abit strange. People felt sorry for his decent, hardworking parents.
    Then one day, abruptly, the situation changed. Police appeared with the young man in tow—first questioning his family, then searching a shed behind the house.
    Their findings chilled the neighborhood. Unsuspected by anyone, the young man apparently lived a macabre inner life that saw him secretly prowling local cemeteries while his parents assumed him to be asleep. A couple of nights before, he had reopened a grave and mutilated the corpse of a young woman buried that afternoon, removing selected organs in the manner of an inept Jack the Ripper. These he took home and stored in Mason jars in the shed.
    It was a situation fit for Robert Bloch or Stephen King, but that’s not the point. The issue is that no one suspected that our addled young man, in some private world, was motivated to set to digging in the night-darkened graveyard. His secrets remained secrets until, returning to the cemetery, he was caught in the act of further desecrating the girl’s body . . . because none of us could see inside his head.
    Another case in point—less gruesome, even if for me almost as disturbing. The incident concerns a man with whom I worked many years ago while editing labor papers. He was president of the union at a local factory. I think I can safely say that we rated as close friends—working together, drinking together, vacationing together, sharing a wide range of interests.
    And then, one day, almost by accident, it was discovered that my friend held down a second job, one about which he hadn’t shared confidence with me. For he wasn’t just a worker or a union president. First and foremost, he was a labor spy, on the payroll of one of the nation’s major industrial security agencies. And all those weeks and months I’d thought I’d known him so well, I’d been deceived. Because try as I might, I couldn’t get inside his head.
    I can’t tell you what a cataclysmic shock that was, back in those days when the struggling union movement was fighting to survive. I seldom—maybe not ever—have suffered such a blow. The very fact that it still stands out so sharply in my mind after half a century tells the story.
    Nor is my experience unique. Every wife or husband betrayed, every employer who finds that a trusted employee has tapped the till, every parent shattered by the discovery that a son or daughter is doing drugs goes through the same bitter trauma. And “He wasalways such a good boy,” said in regard to assorted serial killers, is a line so familiar it has become almost a litany.
    Not that we’re talking only of unhappiness or disillusion, you understand. Revelations may be positive as well as negative. Witness the notorious tightwad who, after death, is found to have sponsored dozens of poor students who needed help in financing their educations. The quiet man who’s never mentioned military service, but who has the Congressional Medal of Honor tucked in the back of a dresser drawer. The woman with crippling arthritis who conceals her youthful fame as a nationally acclaimed dancer.
    (Indeed, my friend Phyllis Whitney, suspense novelist supreme, has projected this to a highly effective plot device. Every major character, she says, should have a secret: some hidden something that he or she doesn’t want exposed to the world. She’s got a point. But more of that later, in Chapter 6