Creating Memorable Characters

If I have any strength as a writer, it is to create vivid and interesting characters. So I have been told. It may be true, since characters are the beginning of any work of fiction I undertake. When the main character acquires a name and a voice, the story begins and it unfolds as the character goes through the various activities and obstacles that I lay out for him or her. In my latest book, The Road to Liberty, a secondary character named George Fallon began as only a necessary agent of a needed action. But, I as I listened to George struggle with English, paid attention to his youthful wisdom and his enthusiasm, I fell in love with him. George had to become more than a means to an end, and the main character fell in deeply in love with him, too.

Hemmingway said …..

Then get in somebody else’s head for a change. If I bawl you out try to figure what I’m thinking about as well as how you feel about it. If Carlos curses Juan think what both their sides of it are. Don’t just think who is right. As a man things are as they should or shouldn’t be. As a man you know who is right and who is wrong. You have to make decisions and enforce them. As a writer you should not judge. You should understand. (Hemingway on Writing, Larry W. Phillips, Ed., 1999.)

I think that being the middle child from parents who did not like each other very well gave me the position from which to see them both as multi-faceted people. I often adopted the role of buffer between them, and both confided their complaints of the other to me at much too early an age to receive such information, one parent decidedly more than the other. I saw both sides of the argument and how often they were both stubborn or prejudiced or refused to see another point of view. I did not arbitrate. That would have been beyond my childish powers. But, I did have an opinion about the arguments or complaints I was privy to. I suppose I empathized with both of them, and yet I was also frustrated that their broken relationship caused my siblings and I so much unhappiness and fear. There being three of us, we wondered how we might be divided if our parents divorced, and the division was never what we wanted. I sometimes thought I would go with dad because someone should.

Look at the people in your life, away from your emotions, and see who they are, strong and weak, stubborn and afraid. This is the best school for any writer to learn to create characters who live long in the imagination of both the writer and the reader.

Blood of the White Bear