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Humanizing Fictional Characters – with a Grocery Cart

A grocery store is a place full of strangers. There is very little I can know about them just by looking. Nevertheless, to create convincing fictional characters, a grocery store is not a bad place to start – in particular, a shopping cart.

Imagine: someone in line with me is unpacking a bottle of generic Tylenol, a bag of cat treats, a frog soap dispenser. With a glance, I can see that, like me, she probably gets headaches, likes frogs – and that she loves her cat enough to buy special treats for it.

In an instant, the person goes from being a flat two dimensional character, or stranger, to someone real and human. The frog individualizes her, and the Tylenol makes me empathize with her.

Of course, a grocery cart is a severely limited window into who a person is. I cannot tell from a brand of deodorant or orange juice how someone thinks, or whether she is kind or irritable.

What a grocery cart does do – and this is important in fiction – is humanize.

This is essential because otherwise a character will be two-dimensional, a \”type,\” just another stranger in a grocery store. To create a convincing illusion of a breathing person takes conscious effort.

Good fiction writers are aware of this, and use every method at their disposal to provide clues to who their characters are. Writers create reader sympathy by showing characters as having the same worries and preoccupations common to most everyone — often reflected in grocery store purchases.

Imagine a scenario. First, select a member of any group who is struggling for acceptance, any ethnic, religious or racial minority. Now imagine a villain — a bigoted person who sees himself as doing the world a favor by inflicting violence on members of unpopular groups. Suppose he goes so far as to track someone down.

But when he gets to the house, he finds the following in a grocery bag: a chew toy for a dog shaped like a shoe, a box of bargain baby diapers, some glucose monitoring test strips, a book about how to lose weight.

Stipulating that the villain is not a sociopath, does he continue with his intentions, or does he pause? Does he say, \”Maybe this person has a baby and is unable to afford brand name diapers. Maybe he plays with his dog. Maybe he suffers from diabetes. Maybe he worries about fitting into his clothes.\”

Does the would-be assailant continue with his plans? Or go home?

This is the kind of question that fascinates me as a writer. But it also fascinates me on a purely human level.

Maybe it is wishful thinking to suppose that someone intent on violence would be stopped by a chew toy or a diaper. Whether it stops the offender or not, in fiction it will likely make the reader care about the potential victim, and hate the villain all the more for attempting – or carrying out – the violence.

However, if the bigot pauses, realizes that the person he is planning to hurt is more like him than he thought, and goes home, this creates some sympathy for the villain, who has been awakened from a dangerous innocence.

The grocery cart method of humanizing characters works with villains too. Imagine a mass murderer in a grocery store. What is in his cart? Maybe there is a roll of duct tape, dark gloves, a bottle of rat poison – and a Snickers. Most of his items show him to be a dangerous person, but the familiar brand of candy bar is a discordant detail that humanizes him.

Why would you want to humanize a villain? Because if not, the villain risks becoming too nebulous – a shadowy entity not grounded or convincing enough to be a target of hate.

In The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King, Flagg, the villain, is a wizard who is purely dark. He has no clear motive for being evil other than liking the power to do it. However, at one point in the story, he gets a cough, which plays no role in the story at all. Why does King add it? All it does, as far as I can tell, is make a purely evil villain more believable by showing a small human frailty.

Most of us do not often come into contact with purely evil people like Flagg or Voldemort in the Harry Potter series. But we do meet people who seem nice on the outside, but show cruelty in more subtle ways. Even the most evil people we meet are generally complex. And when they are not being evil, they buy groceries –and candy bars.

Giving a villain a taste for Snickers could create sympathy, but it can also do the opposite; it can make the reader hate him even more. The candy bar does nothing to redeem the mass murderer; instead, it is a bit horrifying that he is normal enough to like a familiar brand of chocolate.

The Snickers does something else; it makes the reader want to understand. Maybe at some point in his life, the villain was just a normal kid who liked candy bars. What happened to make him change? What went wrong?

Grocery carts offer an excellent way to think about characters when creating them. It also makes me wonder what my grocery carts say about me; if they are a tool for characterization, then what do grocery carts say about real people?

In writing fiction, I am always tempted to draw parallels between what works in art and what is true in real life. How much can you actually tell about a person from grocery item choices? How much does a squeak toy for a dog actually say about someone? Does it necessarily mean likability?

Maybe not – but I like the idea that a bigot might turn from violence at the sight of one. Fiction may not mirror reality exactly, but it can serve as a lens to focus the effort of trying to better understand people and life – and that is a vital undertaking for everyone.

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