“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.”
-Edward Albee
“If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.”
-Stan Lee
“How do I know vampires exist? Because I see them!”
-Gabriel Brimstone
I am a person who has done a lot of quirky things just to see how other people react. On a crisp summer afternoon, while grocery shopping; I would push my grocery cart on the left side of the lane, just to see how people would react. On each encounter with another shopper, I would get a grumble, a few choice (four letter) words, and a disapproving sneer.
An assignment that I give students in my Workplace Communications class is to go into a business or organization, observe their surrounds, and record the reactions of the customers/employees/supervisors and analyze how they interact with one another. The day they turn in the assignment, my students and I get into a brief discussion (aka debriefing) of their findings.
On occasions when I am traveling, I make a habit to take a tape recorder with me to record conversations with other people and listen to the rhythm of their language. Afterwards, I play the tape over and over to hear accents, pauses, and other “quirks” in the wording.
What do these three things have in common (other than the fact that it solidifies my weirdness)?
It means I am trying to learn and understand people in order to learn and understand my characters. The characters that I write are people, too. They think, feel, love, and hate just like anyone else. I want my characters to be as three dimensional as the person who I pass in the hallway, the student in the classroom, or the person ringing up my groceries in the checkout line. My characters may have the same hopes, dreams, aspirations, or obsessions as a person I speak to at the bank. In order to understand them, I need to understand people.
In the novel that I am currently writing, I have a multitude of characters and I want to get to know each and every one of them. In order to have true authenticity, I need to know what the character’s innate desires are. I have protagonists who are selfish, villains who have had troubled pasts, and characters in-between who are more than just “cannon fodder” or are “disposable”. Even those characters that are merely in the opening prologue or a single chapter (and are brutally killed off) have desires as well. In order to know how tragic their passing is, I need to know who they touched and who would mourn their passing.
Some writers create “character profiles” of their major protagonist (or antagonist) to get to know who they are. They have a “file” (of sorts) that lets them learn who their subjects/characters are. They act as if they are therapists or physicians for their characters. I, on the other hand, act in the similar way as a friend or confidante would. I have “conversations” with these characters. I sit down with them and I “talk” to them. Yes, this does seem quite “schizophrenic” (hence the title of my first blog). Acting as their best friend, I can learn different things about them. I learn if they have fetishes that they haven’t told their significant other; I learn where the bodies are buried (literally, in some cases). And by listening to them tell their story; I can learn of the patterns of dialogue and speech impediments that they may have.
This allows me to explore a part of my psyche that I haven’t explored since I was a child. If you have ever had an “imaginary friend”, this is the exact same exercise. I am sure this exercise is no less socially acceptable as when we were children, it is a very good way to get to know the characters that you hope other people will believe in.
If you want to create people that the reader will believe in, then you must first believe in them.
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