Masterclass: Developing Characters

How to create authentic and compelling characters in your creative writing

Irving Weinman

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781471804465
• eBook ISBN:
  9781471804489
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

LEARN HOW TO WRITE CHARACTERS THAT COME ALIVE ON THE PAGE. A guide to building characterization for writers who want - or need - to go further, this is an ideal course for the person who doesn't have the time or money to attend an advanced fiction writing workshop. It uses a unique interactive Workshop method to engage the writer with their material, editing and redrafting your characters and their contexts to take your work to the next level. With support, advice and inspiration from a leading and respected creative writing tutor, this is an essential book for you if you know you need to polish and hone your manuscript prior to attempting publication. With the help of this highly focused guide you'll create characters with depth and authenticity. ABOUT THE SERIES
The Teach Yourself Creative Writing series helps aspiring authors tell their story. Covering a range of genres from science fiction and romantic novels, to illustrated children's books and comedy, this series is packed with advice, exercises and tips for unlocking creativity and improving your writing. And because we know how daunting the blank page can be, we set up the Just Write online community at tyjustwrite, for budding authors and successful writers to connect and share.

1

Sources of character

What is character in fiction? The short answer: everything. The fiction we read is presented by and through its characters. Even a story without people, say about elephants or extraterrestrials, is still about characters because fiction is written by people for other people to read. Fiction happens by and through beings to whom human readers respond with human understanding and human emotions. Character is so deeply integral to fiction that it’s often assumed in discussions of fiction rather than explicitly presented.

Character is at the heart of fiction. This means:

• The reader connects with fiction through its characters.

• What happens in fiction – the story and plot – is presented through characters.

• What a work of fiction means – the theme – is revealed by what happens to the characters.

Write for ten minutes

Write a one- or two-page start of a piece of fiction (300–500 words) in which no character is present. You can describe a scene, a place, or setting. Write in the third person. Take no more than ten minutes to write this. Then leave it for ten minutes and read it over. Explain to yourself what is has to do with character.

What is character?

Look at the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native (1878). Hardy labels all the chapter headings. The second chapter is labelled, ‘Humanity appears on the scene.’ In other words, only in the second chapter does a character appear; the first chapter, it would seem, is devoid of character. Here is its opening:

Chapter 1

A face on which time makes but little impression

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

From the very start, the chapter label in referring to the landscape as ‘A face’ brings in a human characteristic. Naming the day, the time of day, and the month refers to human culture. And the simile ending the second sentence brings human scale to the otherwise impersonal scene by comparing it to ‘a tent which had the whole heath for its floor’.

This is the next paragraph:

The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while the day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

The first two sentences above are descriptive narrative devoid of human reference: ‘pallid screen’ and ‘darkest vegetation’ are largely generalizations without colour or form. The paragraph continues with even more abstract language: ‘an instalment of night’, ‘astronomical hour’, and ‘day stood distinct in the sky’. But then a hypothetical person appears, ‘a furze-cutter’, who brings life to the otherwise unmoving scene. If he looks up, he’ll continue cutting the fodder; if he looks down into the dark, he’ll finish his bundle and go home. Hardy not only creates life and movement with this ‘character’, he creates a sense of scale – the lone human figure in the midst of this vast open space.

The sentence that ends the paragraph doesn’t refer to a particular person, but it does express a range of human emotions in describing the effects of this strange darkening: the ‘face’ of the heath has this ‘complexion’; it can ‘sadden noon’, ‘anticipate the frowning of storms’, and turn ‘moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread’ (my emphases). In this way, sadness, anger and fear are evoked by the premature dark of the landscape, and the reader relates the landscape to human emotion.

Writing can therefore be said to have ‘character’ without having any characters, but by making a variety of references to human physical, psychological and emotional traits.

Finding sources of character

The most basic source of writers’ characters is the actual writer. This doesn’t mean that writers, especially experienced writers, are essentially just writing about themselves. But most people tend to project themselves into imagining other people. Their ideas about others also involve ideas about themselves. This is also true of writers.

Key idea

The writer’s life is the ultimate source of fictional characters.

In addition to themselves, writers also model characters and aspects of characters on their immediate families. Parents and siblings and spouses and partners and children serve in whole or part as models for characters and for relationships between characters. Writers use immediate and extended family memories to model characters of and at different ages. Friends and acquaintances can also be used in these ways. This means that the fictional character can be built from a number of ‘real’ traits in different people observed and recalled by the writer. This composite character becomes a whole character – someone else – in the creation of the work of fiction.

ASPECTS OF CHARACTER: HUMBOLDT’S GIFT

Many readers of Saul Bellow’s 1975 novel Humboldt’s Gift know that the title character, Von Humboldt Fleisher, is closely modelled on Bellow’s friend and one-time mentor Delmore Schwartz, talented poet and prose writer, New York intellectual par excellence, and alcoholic manic-depressive.

Bellow even names the character as an exaggerated, comic rendition of Delmore Schwartz, with his unusual first name and common, often Jewish, surname Schwartz meaning ‘black’. The ‘Del’ morphs into the German ‘von’ and the ‘more’ into ‘Humboldt’, so that his first name suggests great intellect and achievement – the von Humboldt brothers Wilhelm and Alexander being between them philosopher, diplomat, linguist, educational theorist, scientific geographer and explorer. The surname ‘Fleisher’ is a variant spelling of the German or Yiddish for ‘butcher’, suggesting the cruder part of Fleisher/Schwartz’s nature as paranoid alcoholic manic-depressive.

Nor does Bellow limit the modelling to the name and mental and psychological traits. He describes Humboldt physically as ‘…with his wide-set gray eyes. He was fine as well as thick, heavy but also light.’ ‘Later he got a prominent belly, like Babe Ruth. His legs were restless and his feet made nervous movements. Below, shuffling comedy; above, princeliness and dignity, a certain nutty charm.’ These could be descriptions of Delmore Schwartz.

What’s more, the narrator and central character of the novel, Charlie Citrine, is a barely disguised version of Saul Bellow. Citrine is a famous prize-winning, wealthy writer. Films have been made of his books. He’s divorced and has girlfriends and an ambivalent attitude to both Humboldt and to himself. At one point...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents 
• About the author
• Introduction
• 1 Sources of character
• 2 General character types: flat
• 3 General character types: rounded
• 4 Narration and character
• 5 Showing character through action
• 6 Showing character through dialogue
• 7 Character: symbolism and satire
• 8 Character: voice and turning point
• References
• Copyright