Unit 3

Creating Character

Character is the key element of fiction writing. If you are good at creating characters, you can create fiction that people will want to read, for character leads to plot, theme, and style. But you can’t just imagine a character and describe him or her. Characters need to act, and they need conflict to come alive. Philip Roth has said that for him a novel begins with “a character in a predicament.”

Just as someone who has read widely can tell from the first few sentences whether a writer has authority or not, a reader quickly decides whether a character is credible or not. If a character is credible, the reader believes that such a character in such a place and at such a time would look, act, feel, and speak, the way the writer has set out in their story. Burroway describes credibility as appropriateness, but that suggests conforming to type. Credibility can be individual. If a character is vividly drawn, the reader will feel that she knows her. And she will know whether she would do, or think, a certain thing or not. The character can surprise the reader (and the writer) but they must never cause the reader to think: “I don’t believe it.” Like endings, the actions of the most successful characters must be surprising and inevitable.

Writing Fiction outlines different methods of creating characters on the page. However, before they can live on the page, they must live for you, their author. And this can take time. Know the character: know the details of his life. Know what choices he will make. Project yourself into the character. If you are stuck, concentrate on how your characters move; how each one enters a room, say, or eats a sandwich. Act the motions out. The smallest gesture can be telling. In A Song for Nettie Johnson, Gloria Sawai begins the story with Nettie sitting at the edge of a gravel pit, staring down, imagining the bugs beneath the rocks. “She feels for the buttonhole on her sweater, searches for a button to secure the garment more tightly against her chest. But the button isn’t there, hasn’t been there for as long as she can remember, wasn’t there even when her mother was alive a long, long time ago.”¹ These two sentences, the gesture of searching for the long lost button, tell us so much about Nettie. A straight description—the woman was wearing an old sweater that had lost its buttons years ago-would not have the same effect.

Many writers speak of how their characters become real for them. Some even suggest that the character will tell them what he or she will do. This sounds odd until you experience it. Characters do take on a life of their own, especially if the writer is successful in tapping into their subconscious.

¹ Sawai, Gloria. A Song for Nettie Johnson. Regina: Coteau Books, 2001, p. 1.