Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in the 2011 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Christine Kling
These days you’ll find my boat TALESPINNER docked in a small marina and me down below spending less time enjoying life on the water and more time doing the “butt in chair” work of getting a novel written. Why is it that no matter how many books you’ve written, they never seem to get any easier?
There’s this cliché of a question that always pops up around writers: “Where do you get your ideas?” The funny thing about it is that is makes it sound as though there are only one or two ideas in a book. In fact, books are made up of hundreds of thousands of ideas and decisions that authors must make. In the past few months, I’ve been working at putting together the cast of characters for my new novel and while characters are made up of ideas – for example, one must imagine what they look like, where they live, what their families are like, how old they are, etc. – yet to really breathe that magical life into them, characters must be something more than just a bunch of ideas thrown together.
When deep in the throes of writing a book, everything around you becomes research in one way or another. Nearly every detail of every day is seen through this prism of the story you are imagining 24/7 in the back of your mind. You pluck the ideas and details from the world around you. I went to the movies the other night, and I stole a character’s name from the credits on the screen. I saw a dog at the dog park and decided that was the breed one of my characters should own. These details might stick or they might get jettisoned along the way as each character becomes a person.
This afternoon, I received an email from a reader in Seebring, Florida. She wrote, “I must tell you, I almost yelled at Seychelle when I knew she would get into trouble. The woman surely had a hard head. She should have been a police detective instead of a tug boat captain. Keep writing, I love Seychelle.” What I love about this email is the implied knowledge that Seychelle does things that are reckless, but this reader still loves her. The reader understands and believes that Sey would behave that way. (Believe me, one reason I love that note so much is that not all my readers see it that way!)
To me, some of the most amazing characters are those who should not be believable when you try to explain them in your own words. Take for example, Lisbeth Salander from Steig Larssen’s novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Try it. See, she’s this Goth girl who looks like she’s about 14, but is really in her 20’s, is brilliant and has a photographic memory, is a world-class hacker, and she can fight and win against men twice her size. What? you say. Who’s gonna believe that? Yet I and several million others adore this character. There is a mountain of crazy contradictions packed into that tiny person but she leaps to life on the page and grabs the reader’s emotions. You CARE about what is going to happen to Lisbeth. I am in awe of the incredible talent it took to make that woman who should not be believable – spring to life as a real person.
A couple of days ago, I was in the car driving and I was listening to Terry Gross interview Dustin Hoffman on NPR. Hoffman said something that has been resonating with me for the past few days. He was talking about his early days in acting, before he became famous, and explaining why he didn’t do well at auditions. He had studied acting extensively, so he explained that for him, “… there was a craft and an art to acting, and one of the conditions or the precepts were that when you first start, you don’t do anything. You let – see what happens. And the character takes time to build, just like in painting or in writing. And so at an audition, they want the performance.”
It was that phrase, the character takes time to build, that has been echoing in my mind ever since.
What struck me was that the audition he was talking about is very similar to a first draft of a scene. This is what makes the first third of a book so difficult for me. Every new character who first walks onto the page is auditioning for his part. He or she hasn’t been properly built yet, and what makes you, as the writer, crazy is that as he gets more fully built in future scenes, you might discover he’s acting all wrong in what you wrote three chapters ago.
As writers we want to create amazing, surprising characters like Lisbeth or Hannibal Lechter. We want to write stories where characters discover things that twist the story and surprise the reader in a way that plays fair with the reader and makes perfect sense at the end of the book. I love this statement by the thriller writer, Patricia Highsmith. “It is a cheap trick merely to surprise and shock the reader, especially at the expense of logic. And a lack of invention on the writers’ part cannot be covered up by sensational action and clever prose. It is also a kind of laziness to write the obvious, which does not entertain, really. The idea is an unexpected turn of events, reasonably consistent with the characters of the protagonists. Stretch the reader’s credulity, his sense of logic, to the utmost — it is quite elastic — but don’t break it. In this way, you will write something new, surprising and entertaining both to yourself and the reader.” A character like Salander puts the elasticity to the test – and she survives – Lisbeth always survives.
Hemingway once said, “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
I don’t think readers understand how difficult that is to come up with characters (people) who will shock and surprise the reader – yet be absolutely believable in so doing. It’s not always something we writers can do on cue – or on deadline. If you merely throw together a bunch of random quirks and hope that will make your characters interesting, no amount of artificial respiration will bring them to life. There is some indefinable moment when the imagined molecules align just right and the magic occurs.
The question most writers would want answered, is how do you summon up that magic?
Fair winds!
Christine
Share on Facebook
I think it was also Hemingway who said, “You sit down at the typewriter and open your veins.” Thanks for opening your veins, Christine. Well said.
I often find my first draft has flat characters. I concentrate on moving them around on the page and making sure the plot is in place. Then, I set the story away, (usually for a long stretch of time because I am busy working) but my mind keeps thinking about the story and characters. Everything I read, everything I see becomes a ‘Can I use that?’ question in my head.
Magically, when I sit down to rewrite, the characters are much more alive with fuller backstories and interesting angles. I once heard this called “dating your characters”. I think you have to take time to get to know each person in your book and find out the interesting things about them. Sadly, like life, that takes time…or maybe my mind just works too slow.
I can’t wait to read who you’ve magically come up with to interact with Riley and Cole next!
Victoria Allman
author of: SEAsoned: A Chef’s Journey with Her Captain
Nice depth and insight into a dilemma we all share, Chris. I find that no matter how much I prepare a character’s bio, no matter how much I’ve thought out his or her persona in advance, once I let them walk on stage, like the reader, I’m meeting them for the first time. By the end of the first draft a 100k words later, I hopefully know enough about them to go back to the beginning and start tightening up the weave until there’s no frayed ends. As far as how to summon up the magic? Well, it’s magic. Your guess is as good as mine.
What a great post! Too many mystery writers fall into the trap of dragging out the same tired, cliched characters–the goofy parents, the handsome cop, the nasty boss, the over-the-top sidekick. Writers under deadlines just whack off one draft with minor corrections without giving the characters time to come alive. I’m getting ready to start the second draft of my book and I see more that I need to do to make the characters unique. I’ve changed some of the names and dropped one character all together who wasn’t a viable red herring and didn’t add anything to solving the mystery.
Conrad – Thanks for that. After two and a half years of blogging weekly, it is often times tough to find something to say. Some weeks I have this little germ of an idea that I think nobody will care about except me, so I just let her rip not caring what anybody else will think. I don’t know if I’d call it opening a vein, but it is definitely my warped little brain, uncensored.
CK
Victoria, Joe, and Sally – Thank you so much for sharing the fact that you share this feeling that it’s so difficult to find your mojo or character magic in that first draft. It makes drafting so hard. And I say hooray, I am not alone in this. It’s not fun moving these stick figures through scenes. But later, when your characters finally do leap to life, it’s hard to let them go sometimes, isn’t it?
CK
Chris, This morning I opened Write on the Water hoping that I would find you words. Instead I found a painting in oil. In every square inch there were jewels of knowledge, beauty for the eyes, food for the belly. Thank you
Like you, I find the beginning of a book the hardest part. Only after each character shows up on stage for the first time do they begin to develop personality. I see how they react to situations and how they respond in conversations with others. No matter how much backstory I’ve created, the character doesn’t come alive until I see him in action. Thus the second half of a book flows for me. I love it when that happens. That’s when story magic takes over and twists can occur that I didn’t anticipate.
I agree, Chris — you need to be aware of everything around you when creating characters. Since I’m usually writing at Starbucks, I look around me for interesting details — quirky glasses, a goatee, the businessman wearing a Tweety bird tie — and those become bits of characters. I know a book is really taking off when characters start talking to me, revealing things I didn’t know about them.
I like the analogy of a character’s first appearance as an audition. And from there we build the character. It’s hard work always. Once the character becomes a person on the page, breathing, acting, it becomes a love story, sometimes even with the bad guys. I have one who visits me again and again, and I know he will appear in yet another book in my series. As you suggest, it’s hard to let go of the character.
I’ve enjoyed this discussion. I try to give each character a physical or personality quirk or have them do or say something that nobody else would say. I’ve just written a scene where my two characters (each married to someone else) really see each other for the first time….
It started one day when she went to hang laundry in the yard and, looking up at the old wire clothesline, felt something drop into her eye, perhaps a bit of rust. Sam came out of the basement to see what she was yowling about.
I’ve enjoyed this discussion. I try to give each character a physical or personality quirk or have them do or say something that nobody else would say. I’ve just written a scene where my two characters (each married to someone else) really see each other for the first time….
It started one day when she went to hang laundry in the yard and, looking up at the old wire clothesline, felt something drop into her eye, perhaps a bit of rust. Sam came out of the basement to see what she was yowling about. “Stop it, now,” he said, holding her still and turning her face up to his. “Don’t fidget. Why do people fidget?” While she tried to think of an answer–why DO people fidget?–he took a piece of her laundry, clean and damp, and twisted a corner into the shape of a cone and lifted the thing out of her eye.
“Thank you! That was agony,” she said, blinking in the bright sunlight. “I’m so grateful.” He shrugged. “No, really, it was that kind of pain. I could go on my knees to you! ” He laughed, showing a tooth so crooked that it gave his face an oddity that made it like no one else’s face. Later she would think that she did go to her knees, her face pressed against his crotch, but it didn’t happen that day.
So I have a character whose crooked tooth will endear him to her and identify him for the rest of the book.
Love this thoughtful post, and all the comments preceding mine. Chris, you should be teaching the character panel at this year’s mini Sleuthfest! You’ve made so many fine points. I especially like how you reveal that each of us has a journey to breathe life into our unique characters … but we share that path (and that struggle) with lots of writers along the way.