On the one hand, I can tell you what I normally say about this,
and offer links to numerous writers and pundits who have offered their thoughts
on the subject, and I can tell what my creative writing teaching shtick is on
this, and perhaps that is fair enough. How you invent a character, right there.
On the other hand, don’t look at me. I literally have no idea.
Meaning, I am half-way through my fifth
novel at the moment and omigod. I find myself, on page 180 or wherever, looking
at my joint protagonists (for some reason, novel five has ended up with two
protagonists aged eight and fortyish, don’t even ask), and I have No Idea
whether they conform to want v. need, or the change, flat, negative or open ended
character arc. Worse, or is it worse, I can’t even make distinctions, I don’t
know what their hobbies are, their birth signs, favourite food, or where they
normally go on holiday. When I’m writing, they feel real, and they are doing
stuff, and I have made various discoveries about them. When I not writing, I
return to the various gurus I’ve consulted in the past, and panic. Are they
driving the action? How much agency do they have? What is their Lie? What is
putting this Lie under pressure?
I tried to learn ballet when I was small, between the ages of six
and nine, I think. I was very, very bad at ballet. Not only uncoordinated, but
fundamentally psychologically and emotionally unsuited to the task. My motivation was the lure of appearing in the
yearly dance display at the Mitchell Memorial Theatre wearing a lovely, flowy
costume, this being the closest to being a fairy princess that a bookish speccy
was going to get. But between me and
that glittering goal were endless rehearsals, mostly not even wearing the
proper costume but just my boring leotard and the shoes that weren’t even
proper ballet shoes with blocks. Finally, for my very last performance, I tried
to focus. I practised, I twirled, I plied, I ran in graceful diagonals, looking
surprised (you were supposed to be see an imaginary puppy), I raised my arms
above my head in the exact shape that the ballet master modelled for us. My father, with his usual wry detachment,
observed that I was a ‘slave to technique’.
We need technique, writers, dancers, artists of all kinds, but do
we need to be enslaved to it? That is the question.
Which brings me back to this: how do you invent a character? The
most helpful response I can give is that there isn’t one way. Sometimes, a
character appears almost fully formed before you even have a story – Baroness
Orczy claimed that she ‘saw’ her most famous character Sir Percy Blakeney, the
Scarlet Pimpernel, on an Underground station platform, like a sort of
conjuration. Sarah Waters said the two main characters in her novel The
Paying Guests needed to be capable of murder, and everything else about
them followed from that. Vikram Seth based the matriarch Mrs Rupa Mehra in A Suitable Boy on his grandmother. David Copperfield is a proxy Dickens, and many writers
have taken a similar autobiographical approach, from Francois Sagan in Bonjour,
Tristesse to Sally Rooney in Normal People. In my first book, I
thought I would bypass autobiographical writing completely and wrote the
story from a man’s point of view, but actually, he was just the male equivalent
of me.
There is a huge amount of
advice out there, so if you do want some proper advice check out Linda Seger’s Creating
Unforgettable Characters, K.M. Weiland’s Creating Character Arcs or
the relevant chapters in James Wood’s How Fiction Works, John Mullan’s How
Novels Work or Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings, published
by Routledge and The Open University. For some YouTube thoughts I recommend
Tyler Mowery’s Creating Characters Part one and two
Another piece of advice would be to read as many different sorts
of novels and stories as possible, and let your mind fill up with them, rather
than consciously looking at how each writer tackles this great challenge. Feed
your intuition that way, and feel your way towards these people. I am reading
stories by Alice Munro at the moment, and you experience the characters
and their engagement with their world, rather than being able to say exactly
what they are like, or being able to summarize their character traits. Or
that’s how it seems to me.
And with that, I sign off and go back to the half-written book,
and all those nuanced, nebulous, brain-twisting questions.
