Linda Acaster

WRITER, TUTOR, COACH

Building Believable Characters ©

Believable characters are the mainstay of every piece of fiction. Writers know this, but is it always heeded? How often have you, the writer, taken short cuts with your characters? You know the sort of thing:

Your 60 cigarettes a day, overweight private investigator is spotted by his youthful target as he is being followed along the street. A chase ensues. Passers-by are sent reeling, your PI is attacked by a loose pitbull terrier but manages to shake it off; traffic is negotiated, fences climbed, parklands crossed. Your PI makes a magnificently time rugby tackle to bring down the target, fastens the rogue’s hands with his own trouser belt and in a half page of dramatic dialogue exhorts the felon to change his ways.

By all means smile at the clichés, but let’s face a few facts here. Overweight and on 60 cigarettes a day, no one short of a cartoon character is gong to run 50 metres, never mind shake off pitbulls, climb fences and cross parklands. Have you ever tried to pull down someone with a rugby tackle? A mouthful of feet – guaranteed. And that half page of dialogue at the end of it all? If your overweight investigator has managed to get that far he is more liable to throw up or succumb to a coronary.

The telling phrase, of course, is cartoon character. The investigator is two dimensional, good for a quick wry smile but hardly the mainstay of a short story, never mind a full-length novel. If the players in your fiction are not taken seriously by you, the writer, how do you expect your readers to take them seriously? They need to be as close a facsimile as you can get to the people you meet in the street.

Who do you know the most about? Gold star for those who say ‘myself’. Now for the tricky bit: do you know your true self? I would suggest that anyone who answers ‘yes’ is, perhaps unwittingly, lying to themselves.

From the moment we first draw breath barriers of one kind or another develop around us. Society in general demands a certain level of behaviour (stealing an envelope from your employer isn’t regarded as stealing; stealing a week’s taking is; killing your employer to steal the takings is a definite no-no). Our perceived position in that society also defines expected behaviour (not dropping our trousers in public), and our families set all sorts of sometimes absurd demarcation lines based on how they view their own barriers (‘I didn’t go to university, what good do you think it will do you?’).

The most prolific builder of barriers is oneself. We dress, act and talk in a certain way to melt into the crowd or stand apart from it, to project to another person an image of timidity or fierceness or self-control. What is more, we look at the person with whom we are interacting, second guess all their thoughts, feelings and barriers, and then project an image of ourselves specifically tailored to elicit the response we wish to receive (if I smile warmly, he may smile back). People are complicated. The people in your fiction need to be complicated, too, or they won’t be believable.

People on the street don’t become complicated overnight, and the people in your fiction aren’t found, fully clothed, under a gooseberry bush. They have past lives. They were born of parents. Who were those parents? What did they do? Where did they live? How did they react to their child? When were the apron strings cut? Why did the child leave home?

This set of questions needs to be asked about the person’s childhood friends, teenage contemporaries, love affairs, marriage(s), work colleagues, neighbours, badminton partner, ad infinitum, until a point is reached in that person’s life where he/she steps from under the gooseberry bush and on to the page. And not just asked, but written down and studied like an alibi to ensure that there are no loopholes. If that person knows how to defuse a bomb on page 47 of your novel, then he/she had better have had more than a passing acquaintance with the Royal Engineers, a terrorist group, or some other organisation equipped with the necessary expertise.

You, the writer, are the core of every person portrayed in your novel. Male or female, rich or poor, beggar, thief, angel of mercy, serial killer, they are all you. Because each and every person is an extrapolated facet of yourself, there will be certain kinds of people with whom you will feel easier than others. This is only natural. Empathy does know bounds, no matter how great a writer you are.

I have never been hungry in my life; I have always known where my next meal was coming from; apart from short spells away on holiday, I have always lived in the UK. I wouldn’t dream of writing a novel based on a family native to the Sudan – at least not at this point in my writing career. I haven’t the necessary parallel experiences and no amount of sleight of hand or fancy footwork is going to mask that deficit. The project would be doomed before it was started.

So when you are scouting for a character to star in your forthcoming opus, pick someone reasonably close to home – not necessarily with the same life experiences, but someone whose hopes and fears are within hailing distance of your own. Then add copious amounts of the magic ingredient: What if…?

What if..? is the key that unlocks the shackles from a fiction writer’s mind and is just as important as the Who, What, When, Where, How and Why.

What if your overweight investigator had been the only child of a chain-smoking unmarried mother who had consoled him with sticky buns while she scraped together a living? Is that why he is overweight? Did he initially become a PI in an attempt to find his father?

What if your investigator, the old child of an unmarried career woman, had enjoyed the companionship and love of a set of doting grandparents who had taken an interest in his hobbies. Would he have become an overweight, 60-a-day man? Would he have become a PI?

What if, as the only child of a widower, he had been at the centre of a psychological tug-of-love war between two sets of doting grandparents? Would he have grown up distrusting the motives of all adults? Did he become a PI as a subliminal reinforcement of his belief that he is right to distrust everyone he comes into contact with?

A little What if…? opens up all sorts of doors to the people you are auditioning for roles in your fiction. Write it all down. In the cold light of day some of your notes will be discarded, but among the dross will be the gems which make that person live on the page and in the minds of your readers.

This article appeared in the e-zine Ezee-Writer