In that thousand-ideas session, when we just had a twelve-year-old kid we didn't have a character, really. Once we got a job for the kid, then we had a stereotype: babysitter.

A simple stereotype isn't much to build a story on. But that question I asked-What could go wrong?-is one of the basic questions you ask to get a story or situation out of an idea for a character.

Often you'll find yourself in the opposite position. You'll have an idea for a setting or situation for a story, and you won't have any idea about who the characters ought to be. Then the question you ask is: Who suffers most in this situation? Your interrogation of the idea will then focus on the person who has the most need to change things-that will almost always lead you to the most possibilities, and it usually happens that the character you find this way will end up as the main character of the tale.

Actually, for practical reasons the question should usually be: Who suffers most in this situation without dying or being incapacitated? The

24

CHARACTERS AND VIEWPOINT

story usually can't be about somebody who dies at the beginning, or who is rendered incapable of doing much throughout the rest of the tale.

This whole chapter has been about questions, hasn't it? There are

questions the audience asks:

So what?

Oh yeah?

Huh?

You ask those questions, too, but you ask many more. There are the causal

questions:

What made this happen

What is the purpose?

What is the result?

Then there are the questions that open up story and character possibili

ties

What can go wrong?

Who suffers most in this situation

Finally, there are two processes that wring the last drop from a character

or story idea:

Exaggeration

The Twist

There. Now that we've got a plan for what to do when we find an idea, let's go get some.

CHAPTER 3

WHERE DO CHARACTERS COME FROM?

To GET IDEAS FOR CHARACTERS, you don't have to go searching until you find the Holy Grail. There's no mystical process involved. All you have to do is turn your mind into a net for ideas, always casting out into the waters of life and literature, and gathering in the ideas that are there waiting to be noticed.

Because, you see, ideas are cheap. They're around you all the time. You can't get through a day without running into hundreds, even thousands of ideas for characters or stories.

Not me, you say?

Yes, you, says me.

If you don't notice these ideas, it's because you aren't paying attention. You let them slide on by without ever realizing they were ideas at all.

So let me take you through some of those sources of ideas, so you can see how an idea net can snag characters and get them to where you can interrogate them, whip them into shape-bring them to life.

IDEAS FROM LIFE

Oh, yes, you know all about mimesis-how art is supposed to derive from life. But not your life. Nothing happens around you that isn't ordinary, dull, uninteresting.

How wrong you are. What seems ordinary to you will seem strange to someone else. Furthermore, something that seems ordinary to me will seem strange when you describe it, because you'll see it from a different perspective.

I think immediately of a couple of fantasy novels I read that concern some ordinary teenagers in the hill country of Georgia. These teenagers get involved with visiting elven-folk, or Sidhe, who think of America as the magical land of Tir-Nan-Og. The effect is somewhat like the Iliad, with godlike beings manipulating human affairs for their own benefit. Not until I read the second book, however, did I realize the author didn't seem to understand what was really interesting about these stories. The author, to

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26 CHARACTERS AND VIEWPOINT

whom the Georgia setting was ordinary, was fascinated with the Sidhe, and in the second volume had a lot of the movement of the story take place in their world. But to me, the Sidhe lived in a stock fantasy Neverland, a place I've seen so often in fantasy fiction that it bores me silly. What I loved was the part of the story that took place in Georgia, showing people who were at once believable and strange. What seemed like ho-hum stuff to the author was fascinating to me.

So when you're looking for characters, cast your net first in your own life-the people you see, the people you know, the person you are.

Observation of Strangers

Some writers have resorted to carrying a notebook or tape recorder with them to record observations or snatches of dialogue. You'll be at the gas station, standing in line at the grocery store, in a waiting room before an appointment, and you'll hear someone tell a story or express an attitude or perform some act that strikes you as funny or annoying or weird-or exactly typical. Such an observation can be the root of a fascinating character.

For instance, I was recently at the local Big Star supermarket during the after-work rush and needed to check out quickly. I got in the shortest line, immediately behind a woman with only a few items in her basket, thinking that she wouldn't take long. But while we waited in line, her husband and three children all arrived with armloads of other items. OK, I'll tell the truth: there was only one kid, and the father and the kid each had only one or two things to add. But the minute I caught on to what was happening, I started exaggerating it in my own mind. The idea net was operating without my even realizing it. And a little exaggeration sure made for a better story, didn't it?

Anyway, the result was a family I'm going to use in a story sometime. I'm not sure of their motivation yet, but I think it has to do with one parent's obsession with avoiding wasted time-or perhaps it's the family's cooperative answer to the problem of doing housework when both parents work and all the kids are in school. Anyway, they divide up the grocery list on the way to the store. Each person gets a section of the store. Mom gets a cart and stands in line. Each person has time for exactly two armloads of stuff before she gets to the checker. If anybody fails to get his whole list, he suffers deep embarrassment at the meal where that item was supposed to be on the menu.

This isn't a story yet, of course. It's just a comic family situation. But I can imagine using, as my main character, one child who is deeply embarrassed about this whole process. But then, maybe I'll give it a half-twist and write about the kid who thought this system up and believes the others don't do it half well enough. I might have the family members compete with each other to see who can get the most items on the list-and then have my main character always win by scanning other shoppers' carts as he scoots through the store, snatching items he needs from their carts instead of having to search them out on the shelves. There are a lot of character possibilities from that one rather ordinary observation.

Where Do Characters Come From? 27

However I end up using the idea-if I use it at all-it came from watching people converge on a cart in the grocery store.

Remember, though, that the words you hear or the event you observe are rarely usable exactly as they happened. You don't have to exaggerate as much as I did in this case, but you do need to demand more from the idea than the plain facts.

When somebody says something intriguing, you need to ask yourself why somebody might say something like that, why someone might have that attitude. Don't settle for your first guess as to motive. An interesting observation is nothing more than local color, a bit of background-until you wring from it all its story and character potential.

People You Know

I know a lot of authors who use their friends or family members as models for characters in their stories. I've occasionally done it myself.

And why not? You know these people. You know their quirky way of talking, the odd things they do, their virtues and weaknesses. Besides, it's easier to simply describe someone you know than to invent someone new.

All true. But let me give you a few warnings, too. There are two categories of Things That Can Go Wrong.

1. Taking characters "from life" can lead to bad fiction.

You may not know these people half so well as you think you do. After all, you are never inside their memory, inside their soul-you don't really know why they do the things they do. You know why they say they do them; you know your own guesses. But when it comes to writing your character, you have to know a lot more than you'll ever know about your friends or family. So it isn't just a matter of copying. You've still got to do a lot of invention before a real-life character-even one you know well-is ready to hold down a job in your fiction.

Also, when you use real-life incidents, it's easy to forget that your readers don't know that the incident really happened to a friend of yours. If the event is particularly strange or intriguing, your readers are going to need some serious justification before they believe it. You, however, may not realize this, and so you'll expend no effort trying to show how such a thing could happen, or justifying why your character does what she does. The result is that at exactly the points where your story is most factual, it will be least believable.

Remember that believability in fiction doesn't come from the facts- what actually happened. It comes from the readers' sense of what is plausible-what is likely to happen. And the further you stray from the plausible, the more time you have to spend justifying the event, piling up details to show the process, explaining motivation and cause and result, so that the reader will believe. "But it really happened like that" is no defense in fiction.

2. Taking characters "from life" can lead to personal problems.

If your friends or family members recognize themselves, you can be in deep trouble, and not just when you do a hatchet job on them. You may even think you've treated them "nicely" or (shudder) "fairly." But remem-

28 CHARACTERS AND VIEWPOINT

her, all the time you've known them, they didn't know they were being "interviewed" or "filmed" for inclusion in your fiction. They may have confided things in you-hopes and fears, memories and motives-that were just between friends. When you put them in the pages of a story or book, they have every right to feel betrayed.

Asking their permission first can be even worse. Then they start to feel a proprietary interest in the story; they call you up with new reminiscences. You'll very soon find yourself having to say, "I'm sorry, I'm only using a few bits from your life, and I just don't need any more." Worse, when the story comes out you'll get the Phone Call: "I can't believe you showed me doing that. I never would have done that." Very few friendships can stand the strain of an author-character relationship. The whole point of being an author is that your characters do what you tell them to do. Your friends and family just don't follow that pattern.

The solution to all this is simple. Use your family and friends as the starting points for characters-but then use the full process of interrogation to transform them from the people you think you know into the characters you really know. In other words, make new people out of the old ones.

Then discard all the extraneous details. Just because you're modeling the character on your sister doesn't mean that the character has to look like her, or have the same career, or the same taste in clothes, or the same childhood experiences. Jettison anything about the real-life model that isn't essential to the new character, and disguise everything else that you can.

Then if vour sister or father or friend later asks you, "Was this character supposed to be me?" your answer can be, in complete honesty, "I'm glad he seemed so real that you thought he was like you. But you're much nicer (prettier/more sincere/gutsier) than that character." If you've taken bits out of your friend's life that can't be fully disguised, you can say, "I might have taken some bits out of the lives of people that I know-that sort of thing can't be helped, it happens without a writer even noticing- but the characters are meant to be themselves. None of them are modeled on any particular person." If you have done thejob of fully inventing your characters, this statement will always be true.

I learned all these lessons the hard way. When I was in college, I wrote a play based on my mother's family. My only source was Mother's own reminiscences of childhood and adolescence, told to her children as we grew up. I loved the stories-and besides, I had been told, time and again, "Write what you know."

The result was a pretty good little play, given the state of my skills at the time. But when my mother saw it, she was aghast. She made me promise not to invite any of her brothers or sisters to see it.

Why? There were no villains in the story. Everyone was sympathetically portrayed.

The problem was that my mother knew something I had not thought of: She and her siblings weren't likely to remember these events quite the same way. Even though these things had all happened more than thirty years before, feelings would be hurt, questions would be

Where Do Characters Come From? 29

raised, and old family tensions would be revived.

And the funny thing was that the best things about these characters

were not the elements I took from Mom's stories. The best things were the

motives and misunderstandings, the dialogue and the details that I had