Discovering your characters

How do you discover who your primary character(s) will be, in a story?  Often, for me, the character comes first — I see her or him, leaning against a counter, or walking with a friend on a golf course, or chasing after a child, and the story comes to me through the character.  Sometimes, though, it’s not so quick or direct, and I have to search — especially when the story is also one I am searching for, because it appears embedded and half-buried in history.

With Edgar Degas’ winter sojourn in New Orleans, in 1872-3, it was his gorgeous, odd paintings that touched me, and moved me.  Each of them appeared to enfold some part of a larger story — possibly one filled with conflict and sorrow.  I wanted somehow to write about that whole winter — to discover why these paintings of his cousins and family members held such intensity and power.  I tried so many voices: Edgar’s; a servant child’s; 10 year old Josephine’s (Edgar’s cousin Tell’s daughter from Tell’s first marriage); Didi (Tell’s older sister).  In each case, I was happy with some elements of the voice and the implicit story, yet I felt frustrated, because I just couldn’t get inside the character with honesty and a sense of truth.

Portrait of Estelle Musson Degas, by Edgar Degas (1872), in The New Orleans Museum of Art

One day, a new voice came to me — I don’t know how.  Maybe I was simply ready for it.  I wrote it down, just a floating paragraph, and I knew — this was it!  I had discovered a voice for Tell (Estelle Musson Balfour De Gas, Edgar’s cousin and sister-in-law, who had lost her sight in her twenties).  And with Tell’s voice, came her character.  With each word, I found out more about her: how honest she was, and pragmatic, and loving.  Also, how carefully she resisted knowing too much of the truth about her own marriage and her relationship to her cousin Edgar.

I had thought I couldn’t possibly write in this voice, because I wasn’t sure what it would have been like to have lost my sight by the age of 29, and to be pregnant with my fourth child in a rented mansion in New Orleans.  How does a fiction writer ever have the courage to write a story outside of her or his own experience?  I have to say, though, in this case, I got lucky.  I started to listen to Tell, and she was happy to let me in.  It was a great relief.  From that first floating paragraph on, I came to know her, as fully as she would let me.