Okay, there are lots of ways to create characters for novels or stories or movies, even to fill out characters in non-fiction. In time, we’ll talk about techniques.
But today let’s start with a surprising one. Interview your characters.
Interview people who don’t exist? Yes. Interview people who have been dead for a hundred years? Right. Interview people who won’t be born for another five hundred years, and then will have beakers and test tubes for parents? Exactly.
You’ll be knocked down by what you find out. Especially if you obey the first rule of interviewing—keep your mouth shut.
My first try at interviewing came about fifteen years ago, when I was working on RavenShadow, a contemporary piece. The main character, a Lakota, was in trouble. He’d taken the alcoholic road, had lost his job as a disc jockey, had lost his marriage, and was taking crazy chances that would kill his spirit and his body.
He got a girlfriend, a political activist from Seattle working the rez. She was taken with his basketball height and build, his good looks, and the fact that he was Native.
He was taken with… He didn’t know what, and I didn’t either. In fact, I didn’t like her. But I needed her. I felt stuck.
“Interview her,” Meredith said.
“What?”
“Interview her. Lie down on the couch, close your eyes, call her up, and ask her some questions.”
Hell, I’d been a newsman for years, I could manage that.
As soon as I closed my eyes, she walked up next to the other end of the sofa. (Other end—significant.) Her walk was nearly a march. Clearly, she wasn’t going to sit down, and her body language said we weren’t going to be buddies. Her eyes said I was in for a dressing down.
She lasered that look at me, impatient with a slow-witted man who wasn’t catching on, and said in three underlined words, “Get me right.”
Her eyes hurled one more lance, she made a quick pivot, and she was gone.
That was it. I hadn’t asked her a question. No chance to. No time to waste on me. Etc.
The amazing thing was, I now had everything I needed to write her.
I gave it maybe five minutes of thought. Height, build, age. Jeans and chambray shirt. Face made up the way high–paid business or political women do it. Sophisticated but not beautiful. Smart and aggressive. Altogether, a lawyer gone to Starbuck’s on Sunday morning, and more than ready to tell people their faults. Especially men and Republicans.
Much more important: Attitude. She was completely convinced that she was fighting with the good guys. Since she was on the rez to register voters, probably a Democrat and a feminist. And she liked the fight itself. She would run over anyone if they gave her a chance.
Just as important: She wanted something from me. It was very important that I understand her and take the trouble to draw her in lines of truth. Why? Didn’t know yet. That was part of the puzzle. Which was now intriguing. Maybe I still didn’t feel bunny-warm to her, but I was fascinated by her. And I would damn well give her what she wanted.
All from three little words.
I’ve never had a more productive interview. Note:
- Got physical appearance.
- Got body language, very important.
- Got social status.
- Got a big part of her basic attitude toward life, anger. (Better described as F-U?)
- Got what she would know (upper-class Seattle woman) and what she wouldn’t (most stuff to do with the rez and the people she was trying to convert).
- Saw a basic problem she was probably stuck on—she was trying to teach people she should have been trying to learn from. That would affect her daily experience with everyone she approached on the rez,
- Got a good notion about the good and not-so-good parts of her relationship with her new boyfriend.
- Saw two qualities of her character, her own dislike of herself and her desperate need for others to see her in a positive way. A huge insight.
How so much from just three words?
- The language of the body is more eloquent than the language of the lips. The WAY something is said is most of the story.
- Attitude is primo. Some people think of it as a philosophy of life, but it’s really more temperament.
- What’s most important to know about a character is to know what she wants, not in life in general but from the person she’s with then and there. The urgency of “Get me right” did that for me.
Natch, what (and how) a character says about himself may count for a lot, too. Example from another novel:
I was writing what turned out to be SO WILD A DREAM. All I knew at the start is that my main character was a Pennsylvania youth in the 1820s and I wanted to super-charge him with a desire to go west, FAR west, beyond all settlements, into the wild, unknown country where the Indians lived.
I got the first problem solved—WHY was he so hot to go?—and got him into the woods with a camp fire, alone. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Now what, Sam? What’s next for you?
Just as I began to think I had no idea, a voice called out of the darkness. “May I share your fire?”
Sam couldn’t have been more surprised than I was.
Invited close, the stranger sat down. A big guy, husky, about ten years older than Sam, dark-skinned, probably an Indian or half-blood. He sat cross-legged at the fire and stuck out his hand.
“Hannibal McKye,” he said.
What a pair of names. Neither Sam nor I could believe it. Hannibal? Sounded classical. McKye? Sounded Scottish. With an Indian face.
He accepted a cup of hot coffee from Sam and handed back some strips of jerked meat from a big pack he was carrying.
They talked a long while. Sam, the kid, kept his mouth shut for the most part. He didn’t have much life to tell, yet, and didn’t even know where he was going to go tomorrow.
So Hannibal told his story, which was a doozy. His father had been a professor of classics at Dartmouth, the college for Indians, and his mother a Delaware student. He’d grown up splitting time between the academic world and a tribal world, and was fluent in each. He was learned. Jokingly, he told his motto, “I laugh, therefore I am,” a twist on Descartes famous line, and in my opinion an improvement.
When they started rolling up in their blankets, Hannibal asked Sam where he was going.
“West,” was the cryptic answer.
“Me, too,” said Hannibal. And suggested they team up.
So, out of the darkness, completely unexpected came the gift of the character who would be Sam’s closest friend for all six volumes of my Rendezvous Series.
Sometimes you just invite the character to your fire and let him talk.
The first secret of all interviewing is keeping your mouth shut.
What the characters tell you will be amazing.
Yes, yes, there is a more intellectual approach. Soon we’ll give you a list of questions to ask characters, questions seeking not so much fact as inner revelation.
About Meredith and Win Blevins
