You’re Not A Big Enough Thief: Writing Characters and Dialogue
Characters are something I’ve always done well or, if not well, then easily. What I mean is that some authors spend a lot of time agonizing over both characters and character names. If you have trouble with either, there’s a simple answer to the question, “Why do I struggle so much writing characters?” That answer is, “You’re not a big enough thief.”
Names are the easiest part. You don’t have to be JK Rowling, who is known for her incredibly evocative names. You just need names that sound decent and, hopefully, which embody some aspect of the character as you picture them. Just pick names from lists of baby names online. If your character has an ethnic background or a specific nationality, there are endless numbers of lists online for names and surnames for every nationality you can imagine. Choose a first name from column A and a last name from Column B if the name feels like a good fit for your character. You don’t have to manufacture it yourself. You can just steal a first name and a last name from lists already compiled for you. I do this all the time for surnames of specific nationalities. For example, if I need an Iraqi last name, I look up lists of Persian surnames and Persian baby names and pick two that go together and sound good to my ear.
As for the characters themselves, you can steal those too. You are surrounded by realistic, vivid characters. You have access to an endless supply of them. That supply starts with your family, your friends, your acquaintances, and your coworkers. People will sometimes ask me if they can be a character in one of my books, and I always tell them, “Don’t worry. Everybody who knows me ends up in a book eventually.” There are two reasons for using people you know as characters in books: It makes it easier for you to write and it makes it easier for you to keep track of your cast.
When I’m writing multiple characters, I tend to pick people I know or, more often, certain aspects of people I know. Often I will take the defining traits of a friend or acquaintance and exaggerate them to suit my purposes. A villain can be based on anyone you know, from a hated coworker or boss to your best friend. The key is to view everyone in your books as actors and then visualize what that friend would say or do in a given situation (taking into account the aspects of their personality that you may have amplified to make the character more useful to your story).
If you don’t have a friend or enemy you want to use, you can use actual actors. I tend to picture all of my narratives visually. That means I’ll pick famous actors whom I think would be perfect for the “role” of the character I’m writing. Then I picture that actor and how I think he or she would behave in a given scenario. For example, take James Marsters. He was great as “Spike” on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and he’s turned up in a few other films I’ve seen since then. If I model a character on him, he’ll have Spike’s English accent and his generally cynical, anti-social demeanor, but he won’t be a truly evil character in most incarnations. I can picture how my almost-Spike character would behave and, more importantly, I can picture how he would speak. That means that when the character engages in dialogue with other characters, I can predict what he would and would not say (and how he might or might not say it).
There’s no shortage of characters to model from your own life, or from television and movies. Just steal what you need and make it your own. Don’t create any obvious cookie-cutter simulations of more famous characters (you don’t want to write a spy novel about an English super-spy named Jules Blonde, for example, unless he’s a deliberate parody), but do feel free to steal liberally from the catalog of people, personalities, and actors that you know, then picture them as the cast of your novel.
When creating a character, always have in mind the backstory for that character, even if this backstory is never discussed. The character’s history informs his decisions and his dialogue now, and the better you know it (and thus the character), the easier it is to predict what the character does and says. Where this development pays off is in dialogue. New writers often find it hard to write realistic dialogue — speech that does not found stilted, awkward, or contrived. But if you know your character very well, all you have to do is present him or her with a situation. The dialogue will flow from your conception of that character almost as if you aren’t writing it so much as transcribing it.
As for where that backstory comes from, I steal those too. I make up elaborate histories for my characters from bits and pieces of movies, anecdotes people have shared with me, news and current events, and anything else I can think of. I always try to be respectful of my friends and family (I don’t share sensitive personal stories, for example) and I am careful not to violate anyone else’s intellectual property (I change many details to this end), but basically every backstory is just pieces of countless other people’s backstories.
One of my favorite parts of writing any Mack Bolan or Executioner novel was always the chapters that I devoted to my villains. The lead characters of these action novel franchises were not dynamic characters. They were fixed points, meaning they were the same at the beginning and the end of the story, by contract and by design. Where I was allowed to have fun was with my villains. I delighted in fully developing these antagonists by giving them elaborate backstories that they would ponder at least once in the book. This gave the reader more insight into why the villain was being villainous (he did not just “wake up one morning hating the world,” the motivation for the psychotic villains in the Sylvester Stallone action film Cobra) and also made their ultimate defeat more interesting and satisfying. It helped me immensely to develop the backstories for these villains because I could then move forward more confidently in writing their actions and speech.
The late author Joel Rosenberg once described the interaction of two of his characters who were reciting verses from a song or a poem (I forget which). In his afterword, he said something to the effect of, “I wanted them to recite the whole thing, but I couldn’t quite get them to do it.” This is the great example of the phenomenon I am describing. He knew his characters well enough that their dialogue flowed from that knowledge and was informed by it. Forcing the character to say or do something they otherwise wouldn’t just produces bad writing.
Your readers notice if your characters are A) not fully formed and developed; B) speaking in ways not consistent with a developed character; and C) people you don’t care about. By this I mean that your indifference to a “filler” character will show in your writing about him, her, or it. There are no throwaway characters. You should understand each of the people in your novel and craft them accordingly, because only then can you write both great characters and great dialogue for them.
