Ah, yes, the population of our fantasy worlds, the strange and twisted personalities who we torture, confuse, and entice with our nefarious plotlines. From their mouths come the deadly threats of a murderous thug or the long-winded eloquence of a Danish prince. They are our puppets, dancing on invisible strings to the manipulations of our fingers, but on rare occasions, they can tug back and do things quite unexpected. That is when the magic happens.
How can that be, you might well ask. If they are our creatures, following our direction, marching to the outline of the plot (whether written or mental) to that hotly anticipated climax, how can they clip their strings and go off on their own? That involves the question of where characters come from. If an author “manufactures” a character, creating them with the sole purpose of fulfilling part of the storyline, then, no, Pinocchio is never going to leap free and become a real boy. That’s not a criticism, just reality. We have far too many secondary characters in our stories, people who appear for only one or two pages, for us to breathe life into all of them. Nor should we. The real world is populated with far more mundane and predictable people than the exceptional, those special few who stand forth as our protagonists or antagonists. Give them their lines, let them have their fifteen minutes of fame, and then fade them to black (or splatter them against the wall, whatever the story requires).
The question, rather, is where do these lead characters come from, those that we slowly link to the readers’ feelings, whose fate we become caught up in, and whose victory, comeuppance, or final enlightenment we so anxiously await. Many authors – and I suspect nearly all if they are pressed on the question – would admit that very often this inspiration, in whole or in part, comes from people they know in life. I consider live people to be fair game. Individuals who get an emotional response from us (a smile, a frown, or a rolling of the eyes) are rich material to try to invoke those same reactions from our readers. The trick, of course, is not to blatantly libel a person by cutting-and-pasting them directly into our novels, but rather to identify and embrace those parts of their personality that stir us.
Another variant of this theme is to expand or explore characters from other novels or plays that we love and admire, invoking that sincerest form of flattery. In my novel Mortimer, I had a major secondary character who was the brilliant creator of the AI program and sort of a protagonist/antagonist combined. In many ways, I saw her as a latter-day Rene Descartes, a razor-sharp mind that bordered on madness, and I even gave a hint of this through her name: Rachel Carter (we all love our private jokes). For personality, I went to an old-favorite, the movie Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I envisioned Rachel as a female Frankenfurter, minus the castle and the drag outfits. I wanted the uninhibited extravagance that Tim Curry brought to the role, the simple, amoral courage to surge ahead without restraints, except Rachel was driven by her intellect and purpose rather than Frank’s extraterrestrial sexuality (though Rachel was certainly no prude). By imbuing her with Curry’s memorable performance, I gave her a life of her own, and on two occasions, the character simply took the plot line in a different direction, Frankenfurter delivering an unexpected new song. Like I said, that’s when the magic happens.
We all have our own methods and quirks for developing our characters. An old friend once told me she spent a good deal of the day trying to develop the “voice” of her characters by speaking to herself as if she were them and trying to perfect their lingo and dialect. Another acquaintance emphasized the use of distinctive names to help identify minor characters for the reader and even giving them unusual physical characteristics (curly red hair, a pronounced limp, or a minor stutter). These are all tools in my character toolbox, and I’m never shy about reaching in and grabbing one as the situation requires, regardless of its source. As characters have never been my strongest suit (I tend to excel more at plot and dialogue), I need all the help I can get to breathe life into these people. So, that’s me. A god quite willing to steal a little thunder from his fellow deities.
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