characters

Creative writing hinges on characters. Stories rise and fall with them. More than clarity of language, more than the fire of the plot, more than the description of the setting, it is the credibility of the characters that makes or breaks a story. There are some basic tenets of how to illustrate characters – by their own thoughts and words, in monolog and dialog; by the words of other characters; by objects and behaviors ascribed to the character; by conflict that arises; by plain narrative.

But the compelling drawing of a character is not only in direct words, and a character rests not only in what the writer consciously commits to paper. It is in innuendo and allusion, in possibilities of a future and in the imagination of a past. Most of that happens in the mind of the reader. It can be argued that the reader will only pick up what has been put before him, that he can only read what has existed in the writer's mind.

On the other hand, there's the concept of the death of the author, rather dear to me in its subversive logic. It is said that each piece of writing only comes into existence through the reader, that each reader turns a piece of writing into something highly individual, interpreting, judging, feeling. Each reader makes the material his own. This implied supremacy of the reader, at least what regards to the enjoying of a piece of writing, doesn't excuse the writer because only a successful writer can die. Only with successful writing is the reader willing, even enthusiastic, to take the piece beyond what's in the words.

Successful in this context means good, which takes us back to the first point: the character must be compelling. It must be consistent, even in its contradictions, and powerful, even when it is weak. It doesn't have to be comprehensive, but it has to be convincing. The reader likes, even demands, to imagine, to refine the character, to personalize it, to make it his own. If the character is convincing as a person, the reader is willing to accept flaws in its design, though the writer couldn't do worse than take this as an excuse for shortcuts.

No matter how one see's the position of the writer, the character in all its details must exist in the writer's imagination before the process of writing can begin. At the beginning of a novel, a scaffold is fine, a sketch of a person, the roughest of outlines, because as the plot advances, the blanks will be filled, the character be refined and the picture become more convincing.
In a short story, especially if it is only a few pages long, all the characters must be completely preformatted. There is no room for improvisation. They must have names and professions, builds, hair color and ages, histories, dreams and ambitions. They wear clothes that help define them, have quirks that give them sharpness and depth. Even if none of this is mentioned, even if the characters are nameless and poorly described, their names and descriptions must exist in the writer's conception.

The writer must know his characters inside out and identify with them. Even if action and reaction will only later convey characteristics, these characteristics must be established at the outset in the writer’s mind. Otherwise no believable character will result. The writer must care, from the beginning, even if he passionately loathes the character because otherwise, again, the character won't progress beyond one-dimensionality, contours and silhouettes.

Good writers are thus deeply compassionate, people's people if you will, or passionate misanthropes, noticing every annoying detail of a persona and building characters from that. If the writer's imagination isn't clear and concrete, the descriptions will ring hollow and fake and the suggested actions and behaviors lack in justification. The characters won't go beyond simple caricature and appear inconsistent, artificial, ridiculous.

For me, the creation of character is the biggest step to make in creative writing, the highest barrier to break. If find it frankly daunting. One cannot simply sit down and start writing, seeing in astonished disbelief how the story unfolds – as I frequently do on this blog. Instead, one has to have a plan, one needs to know the characters. On the blog I know the character as well. It is a version of me that I choose to project. A story is different.

I am not a dreamer, I don't concoct fantasy worlds from which I can pluck the most bizarre or most banal figures to turn into characters and populate stories with. So how do I do it? Creativity doesn't exist in a void. Nothing is new, nothing comes from nowhere. Everything is a permutation of something that was. I go through life with open eyes and ears, pick up oddities and conjecture background and dreams of people I encounter.

It's impossible that there wouldn't be enough material, but the next step is still hard, appearing insurmountably steep: Combining these fragments, these shreds of invention into composites that I can believe in and that I can then, in turn, ask the reader to believe. Three months ago, I suggested a tag for all writing that owed more to creative doodling than to the exploits of my public persona. This tag found use exactly five times and then disappeared, in line with my withering enthusiasm and confidence at the creative writing workshop.

Over the last few weeks, instruction has become much more structured than it was before, analyzing conflict and character in way that I outlined above. Thinking through this, as I've just done, fills me with a faint hope that I'll manage to finish a little story – it would be a first – by next week, as I promised Ronnie, the irrepressible teacher, who's quite a character himself.