What makes fictional characters seem real, like you could reach behind the wall of words and find a living, breathing person there?
A related question is: As a writer, how can I pretend to inhabit the mind of someone who has a different world view, background, knowledge, obsessions, and longings than I do?
There is a lot of advice about how to create convincing characters. Usually it involves filling out a questionnaire about traits: mannerisms, quirks, cultural influences, childhood memories, and appearance. But is that enough? Creating characters is more than filling out a form. The writer has to draw on inner resources to understand them. And fully identifying with a fictional character whose personality and world view is a lot different from my own means crossing an emotional barrier.
According to Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Franklin, writing believable characters is impossible when the writer is unwilling to see from a point of view that opposes his own. Believing that he is special and endowed with absolute truth, he thinks that his tendencies, habits, and passions are the only valid and correct ones. Therefore, allowing a fictional character to possess a full outfit of human qualities is difficult, and even painful, for him.
Creating convincing characters means allowing characters to be as real as their writers; to be as vital, heroic, despicable, or complex; to have fantasies, phobias, and silly obsessions; to be attached to a certain routine; or to dream.
To fully delineate a character, the writer has to peek behind his ego to see that others exist in an emotional world of their own and have a pattern of behavior that is logical to them; and that their solutions to conflict, though alien at first glance, are human.
However, like many people, I am attached to my own opinions, seeing them as being forged from the crucible of my life experiences. The problem is that everyone believes this of themselves.
Writing fiction means struggling against a powerful tendency to surround myself in the snug certainty of my own limited viewpoint.
The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes dramatizes this drive in an amusing way. Calvin wakes to find that the perspective of his physical surroundings is skewed like a cubist painting. As he runs through the house, he becomes confused. Up is down. Angles are wildly irregular. The floors and ceilings tilt.
At the end Calvin rejects the terrifying chaos of a skewed world for the comfort of his own viewpoint, possibly wrong but at least stable. His world rights itself and Calvin is happy again.
But writing well means letting the floor become the ceiling. I\’ll always have strong personal views, but if I\’m unable to let them go for a little while, I risk creating characters who are clones of me or, worse, stereotypes.
Jon Franklin in Writing for Story suggests that for a writer to move beyond creating stereotypes, he must reach a crisis point where he realizes that his “specialness” is an illusion; that many of his most sacred “truths” are mere prejudices; and that, though he is unique, there is nothing “unique” about uniqueness.
This insight, he says, arises from thorough observation, careful listening, and self-searching, and it is usually painful. Though I\’ve never had the moment of epiphany he describes, his personal story of painful insight has always intrigued me.
Of course, being able to entertain an opposing intellectual viewpoint is easy compared to allowing a fictional character to cross my moral boundaries. For that reason, I sometimes have to dig deep to build identification with someone like a villain whom in my life I would avoid and despise.
Many times, after hearing about a brutal murder, people angrily say, “I don’t understand.” I\’ve thought and said the same thing, usually in a tone that reveals the real meaning: “There is no part of me that identifies with the person who did this; if I understand him, if I even try, I am complicit and may become like him. I do not claim him as a member of my species or an inhabitant of my planet.”
But the best fiction writers deny themselves the tonic of forbidding themselves to understand. This is not to say that all viewpoints have equal validity or value.
But, while not a moral relativist, I sometimes have to be an “emotional relativist.” To create believable characters, a writer must be willing to identify with anyone, to find some part of herself that can say, “Although he act was loathsome and despicable, what he did was still human.”
This can be scary and disturbing, leading to worries that I might become permanently trapped in the head of another, adopting values I hate or condoning actions I find despicable; or that I will become un-moored and my personality, unglued.
But the problem of clinging to certain views isn\’t restricted to writers. Many people think that they need their belief systems and opinions for them to stay mentally whole; that without them, the ground will shift, and possibly open and swallow them.
But part of the allure of writing for me is taking that emotional risk, and for a time allowing the world to turn on its head. Like a cat sprawled on its back, I become mesmerized by my shift in perspective. I allow the world to open up, to become too vast for comfort.
And when I return home to myself, a little less innocent, my defense mechanisms rattle back into their place: I am right and they are wrong. For a moment the floor stabilizes, and the ceiling rests securely on the walls.
Until tomorrow, I think. Then, mentally exhausted, I crawl into bed, close my eyes, and prepare for a dreamless sleep.