Greetings my little parcels of vain strivings tied. I hope today’s rising sun finds you well. Recently I have been thinking about characters, and how we create them, and how that relates to the eternal advice we get from teachers and professors to “write what you know.”

I have been going through some tumultuous relationship times lately, and in the midst of discussions with my (ex?) girlfriend, she posited that she had become one of the characters in a short story I had written long ago. It was not a complimentary comparison. The allusion to the story and that particular couple surprised me because not only does the wife in question share no traits with my girlfriend, but I also did not see anything of myself in the character’s husband. Obviously, opinions vary, and since I am the author, I am probably the person who knows the least about what the story actually means.

This led me to think about character development. The title of the blog comes from a Bob Dylan quote in the documentary film, “Don’t Look Back.” Dylan is reading an article about himself when he smiles and says, “God, I’m glad I’m not me.”

In the first installment of this series I talked about public vs. private writing and how perhaps some private writing can be coaxed out of its dark hidey hole and brought into the light of day. Only the bravest of us will begin those stories with the terrifying pronoun, “I.” Most of us will make sure that our walking talking war wounds are dressed up with wigs and false mustaches, maybe a fat suit and hidden lifts in their shoes. Sometimes we disguise those characters so well that they travel incognito through our stories and we don’t recognize that they are us. However, we must know that our loved ones may sniff the truth out like bloodhounds on a fugitive’s trail.

Beyond when we are purposely basing characters on ourselves, or others, there really isn’t any escape from the fact that we are the source of all existence in our writing universe. When our teachers told us, “Write what we know,” it goes beyond writing about yourself. I am a male, musician, and father, but yet I am able to write about a female, childless accountant and—theoretically—make her a believable character. That is because I have known women, and people with no interest in children, and accountants, but it is also because what I think is a key factor in being a writer is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s place. Sometimes this presents challenges because even the most open-minded of us approach all of life with certain preconceptions and biases. The trap is writing what you think a childless female accountant should be, as opposed to what the story needs, or what is more realistic. Another factor is how characters can sometime take on a life of their own and begin to dictate terms to the writer. That is a subject for a different blog.

Another trap that I see people fall into is what I call “the trope of opposites.” That is when a writer will take a familiar cliché archetypal character and give the character the exact opposite traits as what is expected. For example, the salty old grandmother, or the giant dirty biker who is actually gentle and into Zen Buddhism.  I am sure at one time, many years ago, these characters were cutting edge and effective. Now, whenever I am introduced to an older woman in a story or film, I am expecting her to either curse like a sailor or be oversexed or both. In the end, I believe it is just the writer being lazy and sensationalist instead of doing the work to create something or someone real. More about writing laziness in the upcoming weeks.

So how do you approach character creation? As with all writing rules, there is no objectively correct way to do it. My approach varies with the story. There are some characters that leap onto the page fully formed and I would need to go back and analyze their actions to recognize the inspiration for them in my real life. Others are built from plot. If I want to write a story about how a man is going through a crisis because his wife is dying and he has no idea what he will do without her, then I need a wife. In this case, she probably needs to be sympathetic, and a nice person, so perhaps she is built from pieces of my grandmother, or my sister. Maybe a more interesting story is that, though this man is completely, hopelessly in love with this woman, objectively she is a horror show whom no one else can stand. Then she will be built from different people in my life—and that can be the most fun, because you can vicariously get revenge on the people who treated you badly. Yes, they may recognize themselves, and that may give you pause if you think too hard about it. If that is the case, I will leave you with this quote from Anne Lamott: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

See you next week. Keep your pen to the paper and your fingers on the keys.

REFERENCES

Dylan, Bob, “Don’t Look Back.” 1967 film by D.A. Pennebaker.

Lamott, Anne, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. 1995 Anchor Books.

Thoreau, Henry, Collected Poems of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (Baltimore: The Johns               

Hopkins Press, 1964)