Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014
The depths
Character building
In planning this book, I organized my posts into categories. The longest category, the one I got the most questions on, was character development, and the most persistent subcategory concerned creating characters with depth.
So let’s jump in at the deep end.
This came from Jaime: “I really need to learn how to make my characters more dimensional.”
In my response I admitted that I’m uncertain about my characters near the beginning of a book when we haven’t been together for very long. I haven’t dropped them into many situations yet and seen their reactions or dreamed up reactions for them. I’m feeling my way.
When I was three years old, my mother took me to a university for an intelligence test. I’m not sure why, but I suspect I wasn’t talking as fluently as my older sister had at the same age. I remember the event because my mother made me promise not to tell my father. The examiner, a friendly man, asked me what a puddle was, and I couldn’t find the words to explain. I smiled at him and shrugged. Inside I felt frustrated and foolish. Of course I knew what a puddle was!
Afterward, he told my mother that he’d worried about me at the beginning but then I’d improved. He wound up concluding that I was normal. On our way home, I remember having the forgiving thought that naturally my mother needed me to take the test. I was only a few years old, and she hadn’t figured me out.
At the time I was the newest character in the tale of our family. The authors of me—my parents—didn’t know me well yet. My mother was trying to discover what role I’d play in our ongoing saga. So it is with our fictional families. We have to put our characters to the test of story events to find out who they are.
Suppose, for example, that a character named Patrick somehow loses the allowance money he’s been saving for a year. How will he react? If I’ve just invented him, I don’t know. I don’t even know why he was saving. So I think about what his response might be, write notes and list several possibilities, pick one, and keep going. What he does about the lost money may give me a clue to how he’ll behave later when he has an important exam coming up. I already know that he saved for a year, so he prepares for the future. But since his preparation did him no good, maybe he’ll decide to wing the test. Or he may do something entirely different.
Again I choose, this time with the help of Patrick’s previous actions. As I continue, the effect snowballs. I understand Patrick better because of the weight of his history.
The point is not to feel that you’ve failed if you haven’t mined the depths of your characters right away. Just keep throwing them into new situations and help them find themselves. As they do, they’ll become complex.
There’s more coming up on developing complicated characters, but first it’s writing time!
Let’s get into Patrick’s heart and mind by inventing new challenges for him.
• Write a scene in which Patrick finds a wallet on the street. This is after he’s lost his savings, and the money in the wallet roughly equals his loss. How does he handle his ethical dilemma?
• Patrick wins the lottery and the prize is in the millions. He’s greedy. Make trouble for him with his new wealth.
• Patrick’s best friend, Kaylie, texts him that he’s never there for her, that he’s selfish and thoughtless, and everyone agrees with her, and she doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore, and he shouldn’t even text her back. Jot down three possible responses from him. Pick one and write the story.
Have fun, and save what you write!