Where do characters come from?
(published November 2004)

It’s said that the three most important elements in real estate are: location, location, location. Similarly, the three most important plot elements for fiction are: character, character, character. With the exception of certain types of technology-influenced thrillers or a small segment of “hard” science fiction, it is characters that determine the success of a story or novel. You can have the most exciting plot in the world, but without believable and sympathetic characters, the story will simply not jell.

How do you create believable, sympathetic characters? In my experience, most characters develop in one of three ways:

Out of nowhere. Some characters seem to appear full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus. ASJA member Sally Wiener Grotta, who is finishing her first novel, finds that her characters usually “are born full-blooded, usually already named, so that I can hear the sound of their voices.” Zach, one of the main protagonists in my first adult novel, Pandora’s Genes, appeared to me in just that way, a gentle giant of a man whom I could envision so easily that describing him was simply a matter of recording the vision in my mind.

Charlene Baumbich, author of the “Dearest Dorothy” series from Penguin Books, has had similar experiences. She says that for her, writing fiction is more a job of "listening and watching than it is writing.” She describes a particularly vivid incident: “Once I was writing a visitation scene (pre funeral) that takes place in a church. In my head, I see this young woman, wearing a backwards baseball cap and jeans, come running in at the last moment. She apologizes for her haste, pays her condolences and says she has to get to baseball practice. I pulled my hands from the keyboard (after ‘recording’ what I ‘saw’) and said aloud, ‘Who was THAT?!’ Took me two more chapters to find out.”

Based on people you know. I think everyone who writes fiction has consciously based characters on their own family and acquaintances. I remember modeling the villain in an early (unpublished) novel on a former lover who had dumped me. Years later, after we had become friends, I told him about the character, whom I killed off. “Wow,” he said. “You killed him? You must have really cared about me.”

Of course this strategy can backfire when the model recognizes himself or herself in the final work. Or even thinks he recognizes himself. I recall the scandal over Truman Capote’s last, unfinished novel Answered Prayers, which reputedly contained so many unflattering portrayals of Capote’s high-society friends that he was ostracized by those same friends for the remainder of his life. It’s probably safer to model your fictional characters on casual acquaintances or composites, or simply to use other people as the starting point.

Built from scratch. The third method, consciously creating a character from the ground up, can work well depending on your writing skill and life experience. In fact, simply making up a character can sometimes suggest a complete plot. Science-fiction writer Hayford Peirce suggests that a good way to overcome writer’s block can be to start out “with, say, eight disparate characters pulled more or less out of thin air. I haven't the faintest idea what would bind the characters together, but if they’re interesting enough, anything I could think of to bring them together would, I think, automatically have to have enough structure to support a book.”

For teen series books that I’ve written under tight deadlines, I’ve often had to make up characters who would be believable while serving the needs of the particular plot. For example, for a story involving an ancient, evil cave spirit, I thought it might be interesting to have a blind protagonist, so I began with the idea of a blind boy who feels the need to prove his independence from his parents. I later added elements from blind children I met at a local school for the deaf and blind, and incorporated the feistiness of one of my sister’s childhood friends to create Jason, protagonist of The Dark.

Ultimately, I believe that most memorable characters in fiction are probably formed in just this way: from a combination of serendipitous appearance and similarity to people in the author’s life, informed by our writer’s knowledge of the human heart.
Next time we’ll take a look at some surefire ways to make readers care about and root for your characters..