Invented to flesh out the tales.

That is always true. Modeling characters on life is not a method, it's a starting point. The characters who come to life on the page or on the stage are the ones that have passed through the storyteller's imagination. Your readers already "know" people as well as real people ever know each other. They turn to fiction in order to know people better than they can ever know them in real life. If your story tells them nothing more about people than they already know, you've let your audience down. By sticking to the facts, you cheat them out of the chance to learn the truth.

Yourself

OK, you've never murdered somebody, and your character is a murderer. Does that mean you've got to go interview people on death row in order to find out how they think?

No. Of course you can interview them, and you might get some interesting insights-though all the warnings about modeling characters on friends and family also apply to modeling characters on interview subjects. There's an added problem, too: Interview subjects never tell the truth. Oh, they may think they're telling the truth, but in fact their stories and statements are altered by the fact that they're telling them to someone else. They want you to think of them a certain way, and so they'll emphasize certain things and leave out others that don't make the right impression. If you believe everything you're told in an interview, your story may be less true than if you never interviewed a soul. At best, an interview will be a starting point-you will still go through the whole process of character invention.

There is one person you can always interview, however, who will tell you much m9re of the truth than others ever will-yourself. You can imagine what it would take to get you to behave in a certain way.

So what if you've never murdered somebody? Haven't you ever been blindingly angry? Haven't you ever longed for cold revenge? You've felt all the emotions, all the motives. All you have to do is imagine those feelings and needs being even stronger, or imagine your inhibition against violence being even weaker.

Was it a crime of passion? Then imagine what kind of provocation it would take for you to be filled with murderous rage, and then find the sort of provocation that would get that same reaction in your character.

Was it a calculated murder in order to win some objective? Then figure out which of your own attitudes you'd have to change before you'd come to regard murdering somebody as a reasonable way to get him out of the way in order to achieve your goal. What if you were righting for some desperately important cause? What if you had grown up in a situation where killing was commonplace? What if you had cause to think other people were all beneath consideration?

30

CHARACTERS AND VIEWPOINT

Analogy

What if you just can't imagine yourself doing something? Then, instead of trying to think of what it would take to get you to do what your character does, think of something you actually have done that is like what the character does.

For instance, Michael Bishop faced this problem in his brilliant 1988 novel Unicorn Mountain, in which one character, Bo, is a young homosexual who is dying of AIDS. Bo and another character are at a motel swimming pool when three muscular young men come to swim. Bo might have had any of several responses: envy at their health and strength; resentment that these boorish young heterosexual men don't have to pay a price like AIDS for their sexual activities. But what Bishop chose to show was simple lust. These three young swimmers had attractive, muscular bodies. Having AIDS hadn't stopped Bo from being a homosexual. He still looked at these young men with desire.

I believe that Bishop, who is not a homosexual, based this scene primarily on analogy. What is it like to be a homosexual with AIDS? This question surely came up again and again as he worked on Unicorn Mountain. I think it led him to this analogy: It is very much like being a heterosexual with a fatal disease that has cut you off from having sex with anyone, but hasn't yet made you impotent or weakened your desire.

Bishop knew what we all know, that swimsuits reveal people's bodies a great deal more than business suits do, and that nowadays swimsuits are designed to emphasize sexual attractiveness. It just happened that Bo was interested in and aroused by the men at the pool. Yet he was not affected the way a woman is usually affected when watching men in swimsuits. He was affected as heterosexual men are affected when they watch women in swimsuits.

Complicated? Yes. And yet it led Bishop to write a quiet but startling scene that rang true-with me, at least. I did not realize that I had been asking the question: What is it like to be a homosexual? But when Bishop showed me this scene, showed his character's attitude toward these young men, I realized the question had been answered, at least in part-and that it was an important question, one that would matter to me even after the story was over, because it gave me a new way of looking at and understanding other human beings. In other words, Bishop had achieved one of the primary purposes of fiction.

So if you can't imagine doing what your character must do, then compare that act with something you have done. Is my character going to kill somebody to get her out of the way? Then I might think of a time when I carelessly disregarded someone else's feelings because I was rushing to get a job done. I lost a friendship. I didn't kill anyone, but I did feel that same single-minded focus on my goal that left no room for regarding another person's needs. In my mind, that former friend had ceased to be a person. And, remembering that painful event in my past, I can then, by analogy, show how my character completely disregards the value of other people's lives.

Where Do Characters Come From? 31

Memory

I've come to this last, because this is a deep well, but one that can quickly become exhausted. Whether you mean to or not, you will constantly draw on your own memory for incidents and characters in your fiction. In fact, all these other sources of characters arise out of memory-your memory of your friends and family, your memory of strangers.

All these memories are distorted by time or your own needs and perceptions. No less distorted is your memory of yourself-what you did, what you meant to do, what caused you to do things, what the results of your actions turned out to be. Yet, distorted or not, your memory of yourself is the clearest picture you will ever have of what a human being is and why people do what they do. You are the only person you will ever know from the inside, and so, inevitably, when your fiction shows other characters from the inside, you will reveal yourself.

This will happen unconsciously, whether you plan it or not. Sometimes it will startle, even embarrass you, when you look back on a story you've written and suddenly realize how much you have confessed without even meaning to. I once handed the manuscript of early chapters of one of my novels to a friend and fellow magazine editor. She read it, and when she gave it back, among her comments was this one: "It's an interesting exploration of self-alienation. This guy really hates his own body."

I smiled and nodded, as if that had been precisely my intent. But the fact was that I had no idea that such a theme was emerging in the story. Yet I knew at once that she was right, that without even meaning to, I had created a character whose situation exactly mirrored the cause of many of my deepest injuries and much of my personal anguish during my teenage years. It made it hard to go on writing the novel, in fact, because I was afraid that my novel was exposing more of me to my audience than I ever intended. In fact, it was. But I finished it and published it, and despite many flaws, the book remains one of the truest stories I've told.

Whatever obsessions you have, whatever memories are most important to you, either negatively or positively, they are going to show up in your work n'o matter what you do.

However, just because your memory will be an unconscious source of characterization doesn't mean you can't also mine it consciously. When I needed to show a child character's attitude toward his older brother and sister, I remembered how I felt toward my older brother and sister when I was little; I even used incidents that showed what those relationships were like. In no sense were the characters of the brother and sister based on my own brother and sister-but the child character was based on my memory of what it was like being myself at that age. I know far more about myself than I'll ever know about any other human being-it only makes sense that my most truthful material will usually come from my own recollections.

The danger of delving into your own memory is that you've only lived one life. You're going to keep coming up with the same incidents and attitudes over and over again, without even realizing it. This is where per-