Creating Characters

My summer took a turn for the amazing when I was asked to lead a Creative Writing workshop at our local library. Let me tell you...it's a humbling experience. These young writers are leagues beyond where I was at their ages; they're funny and clever and talented, and it's a complete honor to be working with them.

So they don't have to bother with note-taking (it's summer vacation, after all), I'm putting the key points of each week's workshop here. Perhaps you experienced writers will discover something helpful, too!

Week One: CHARACTER

First of all: quick exercise. Quickly introduce yourself, sharing one interesting fact that will help us know “the real you.”

For example: I’m Faith. I’m the middle of 5 kids, and I gave my big brother the only 2 black eyes he’s ever had.

 

What you just did was the basis of any story.

Stories are about people--or bugs or mice or aliens--but people all the same: characters. Every person is worthy of being a character, but the key is to find the interesting points and sharing them with your audience. Many amateur storytellers forget this, and they present half-baked characters who aren’t interesting to follow; or sometimes they just forget to reveal the intriguing bits early enough to make their readers care. (I’ve been guilty of that.)

In my opinion, the character itself is the most important hook a writer can use--the hook being the element that will make a reader want to keep reading. A unique description will instantly evoke a character that I can’t help wanting to follow.

EXAMPLE: “Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her pack. She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere.” (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler)

EXERCISE: Introduce us to your character. (If you don’t have one in mind from a current project, make one up!) You can either phrase your introduction like the dust jacket of a book, or the first two or three lines from a story. Don’t worry about plot here, just about sharing something intriguing about your main character. You might do this with humor, drama, the presence of difficult circumstances, conflict--or just something simple that we all can relate to, that’ll make us say, “Oh, me too!”

Sometimes it takes a while to find out the interesting things about your character.

TRY: Interviewing your character (here's a helpful form); journal entries in character’s voice--preferably from incidents before the beginning of the story; writing short passages that involve putting your character in a variety of situations (even if--especially if--it’s something they won’t encounter in your story). (What would your character do on a blind date? Or caught in the middle of an angry mob? Or forced to appear on Jeopardy?)

EXERCISE: There’s a saying that to tell a good story, you put your character up in a tree and throw rocks at him or her. Take this “literally” and write a passage with your character up in a tree with someone throwing rocks. Think about: who’s throwing the rocks? why? is it deserved? how does the character respond? (Credit goes to my friend Betsy Devany for this exercise.)

Further reading:

Second Sight, by Cheryl Klein, the chapter titled “Quartet: Character”

For a more advanced (but amazing) analysis, read Chapter 2 of Adam Sexton’s Master Class in Fiction Writing, which explores how the master Jane Austen handles character in Sense & Sensibility.