One of my favorite fictitious villains of
all time comes not from any novel, nor from any film, but from a TV show.
In the action
series Alias (2001-2006) evil genius
Arvin Sloane starts the ball of badness rolling by having the fiancé of the
show’s heroine killed for the flimsiest of reasons. He then sets off along a
course of murder, torture and treachery that finally culminates in wiping out
the populace of an entire Russian city. He’s ruthless, vicious, quite fanatical
in the pursuit of his goals. And yet – and this is why I consider him to be
such a fascinating character – he’s also shown at certain points displaying
kindness, compassion, empathy and tenderness and even love.
How can he be like that?
asks the heroine of her father. How can
he do such evil things, then turn around and be so nice? To which her
father responds very simply.
Nobody, he
says, is “just one thing.”
One of the most
confounding aspects of the job of writing lies in the creation of a realistic
character. It means … getting inside someone else’s head, now doesn’t it? Which
in the true physical sense is completely impossible. None of us can read
another’s thoughts; none of us is even slightly telepathic. If you’re in a room
and talking to a stranger, or even a friend, you might be listening to their
words and watching their expressions, but you cannot possibly know what’s
really going on inside their skull. All that you can do is take a guess, and
with no slightest way of telling if that guess is even close to being correct. So how do you take on the thought processes
of someone other than yourself, with different life experiences that have
shaped their own view of the world? A doctor, say? A homeless man? An art
critic or a serial killer?
A good part of
the answer to that lies in the short phrase that I alluded to above. No human
being is “just one thing” … and that applies to you as well. If you understand yourself – and a writer needs to,
warts and all – you’ll know that there are not just several facets to your
personality but dozens of them. And
those different aspects of yourself have been fed, watered and given focus by
the myriad experiences you’ve been through. So make use of that.
You want to
write about that homeless man, for instance? But you’ve never been homeless and don’t intend to start,
and so how can you?
Well, surely
you have felt extremely cold from time to time, brutalized by a spell of harsh
weather? You have been hungry on more
than a few occasions. You surely have felt lonely, lost, from time to time. You
must have even felt, occasionally, like the whole world is against you. And that is where your fictional character
has to start from, those relevant aspects of yourself and your own background.
It’s not the end of the task of creating a character, but it gives you a strong
foundation and a good place to start out from.
But then you
might well need to take some extra steps to reinforce your own experiences.
We’re still with that homeless man, remember? Go out on a busy shopping street,
preferably on a chilly day. Stand in a dark doorway for a while, blending back
into its shadows, watching all of those strange faces passing by you. They’re
in such a hurry, so intent on what they’re doing that they barely notice you,
if they manage that at all. Their skin is clean and their clothes are neat,
since they’ve not slept on any sidewalk. Their shopping bags are full and they
are all headed intently for some destination, so they obviously have homes and
money.
You’re
beginning to see the world in the same way that a homeless person might. And
that becomes a part of your experience, an aspect of your personality, which
you can draw on as you labor on your story.
The same type
of approach applies to almost any other kind of character. A serial killer? Go
back to those incidents when you were treated very badly as a child, and then
throw in a few things that you genuinely, quietly loathe about some people.
What do you occasionally imagine yourself doing to those aggravating folks, if
you could only get away with it? Hold all of that resentment in your mind, and
then create a character who doesn’t simply fantasize.
But what if you
– and you’ll hardly be the first writer to do so – want to create a central
character who is a fearless action hero or an unstoppable warrior? He or she is
as physically tough as any human being gets, laughs at danger, eats bad guys
for breakfast … and you fully understand that you are no such creature as the
one I’ve just described?
In Becoming A Writer, Dorothea Brande
opines that fiction writers are most usually the kinds of people who play
Walter Mitty games inside their heads, imagining themselves in the lead role in
a wide variety of situations, punching out the villains, getting all the girls,
saving the world while winning the Super Bowl. Which sounds fairly juvenile,
until you start to get that whole weird aspect of your persona working for you.
You’re already a practiced fantasist, quite accustomed to becoming different
people in your head. All you really need to do is to apply that talent to your
laptop keyboard, albeit that you need to hem in those wild fantasies within the
rules of realism. Your character can do improbable things, but not impossible
ones, in other words. And how ‘impossible’ is defined depends very largely on
the type of fiction that you’re writing.
The most
popular such character today – as of setting this on paper – has to be Lee
Child’s ‘Jack Reacher.’ And Child has described many times how Reacher – as he
rights wrongs, doles out rough justice, and makes the world around him just a
little fairer – doesn’t merely provide wish-fulfillment for his readers … it is
wish-fulfillment for himself as well.
And that’s a perfectly valid route for an author to take. If there are aspects
to the world that genuinely upset you (see Chapter 1) … how would you most like
to put them right? Rather like the serial killer a few paragraphs back, it’s
all a case of: what I’d really do if I
could only get away with it.
But can that be
the entire matter? Are the characters in your new novel really nothing more
than aspects – in disguise – of your own character or else expressions of your
fantasies? From one point of view, there’s nothing else they can be. You have nothing else to draw
on. You cannot read minds.
What you are
able to do, though, is keep a very close eye on other people. How they speak,
the many different ways. How they behave in different situations. What their
gestures and their mannerisms are. The opinions they express, and how they
sometimes contradict themselves.
And that
applies as much to people who are there and gone in a few seconds as to people
you can observe closely. I was out one evening with a would-be writer friend in
a part of town that I know fairly well – I’d lived there for a few months while
a student. At the end of the evening, heading back to catch our train, we were
still talking as we strolled along … in spite of which, my head and eyes were
going around constantly. I was taking in all over again sights that were
already quite familiar, the beauty of the shadowed buildings round me, the
lights gleaming in their small windows and the shades cast by the tall trees in
a nearby park.
But I was also
taking in the people passing by, this being the hour that restaurants and movie
houses were all emptying out. That young
couple – look how tightly they are clinging onto one another. But that other,
older couple – they are almost walking an arm’s length apart. That teenaged
girl looks desperately sad. That large young guy is slightly drunk, and he
seems to be angry about something.
The very stuff
of fiction was right there in front of me. Any one of those people could have
sparked off a character inside my head, along with an accompanying storyline.
But after a
while of this, I looked round at my would-be writer friend … and he’d been
staring at the sidewalk the whole time.
Nobel laureate
Doris Lessing was of this opinion: many writers, she believed, had difficult
starts to their lives, mistreated by parents or else bullied by their peers so
that, from an early age, they learned to keep a very careful eye on other
people, watching out for any signs of trouble brewing. She was most probably
right, and if you do not have this kind of early ‘training’ then you’ll have to
teach yourself to do it.
You can build
on that by reading about people who live very different lives to yours and
watching documentaries on the same subject. There are plenty of limitations
here – you’ll only ever get as far into their heads as those other folks let
you and past that the rest is – again – guesswork. But we are all of us human
beings, linked by certain commonalities, and so the guesses that you take ought
to be educated by that fact.
Once you’re
home and sitting at your laptop, that’s the point at which you put all of that
careful study to good use. Become the character you’re writing about as much as
is humanly possible. Visualize yourself as him or her. Even – and I understand
this has to sound a little crazy – act out, if that helps at all. Get up from
your desk a while and move around like he or she would. If your character is in
a fight then swing your fists the way he might. Even try holding part of a
conversation in his or her voice.
You can never
fully – truly – become someone else,
not even inside your own head. Your characters will always have a fair-sized
trace of you, be it good or bad ‘you,’ hating or loving ‘you,’ cowardly or
brave.
But you can use
your gathered knowledge about other people to create some characters who are a
solid fusion, one part you and three parts someone else.
This article first appeared in HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WRITING: THE ART OF CREATING PROFESSIONAL FICTION.
