Deeper People: Putting Yourself into Your Characters © by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
A lot of fiction by beginning writers, and unfortunately a significant
amount of fiction by published writers, is plagued by paper people
– characters who never really come to life on the page. The
published writers who still get away with this do so because they’ve
learned to tell a story so compelling that editors will buy from
them anyway. Beginners really don’t have that luxury, and paper
people will kill a sale as fast as anything.
Paper people fall into categories – and that is much of their
problem. You have Evil Villains, Oppressed Virginal Heroines, Naïve-But-Stalwart
Heroes, and Smart-Ass Sidekicks, among other common types. (Depending
on genre, you’ll meet Hookers-With-Hearts-of-Gold, Strong-But-Silent
Sheriffs, Nubile-Young-Secretaries-Who-Always-Think-They’re-Too-Thin,
Brilliant-But-Distracted Scientists, Ever-Dedicated Cops, and the
inescapable Fearless Soldiers.) You recognize them as I list them,
and can probably name as many novels where they feature prominently
as I can.
They’re recognizable at types, but they aren’t recognizable
as people. Real people have interests both broad and deep, friends
and enemies from as far back as when they were two years old, hobbies
that have absolutely nothing to do with their current Quest for
the Silver Nematode, and the occasional pet, favorite book, and
favorite song. More than anything else, living characters have passions,
hungers and desires, and they aren’t all related to the story
of the moment.
Flat characters begin and end with whatever they’re doing
in the story.
Here’s how to test your character to see if you have any hope
of breathing some life into him as he stands. Write down the characteristics
he has to have to successfully complete the story you’ve plotted
out for him. You’ll probably have things in there like Intelligence,
Deep knowledge of spaceship construction and navigation, and The
ability to fire weapons accurately even while hanging upside-down
by the ankles and with hands bound.
Hey, my characters can do some nifty things, too. Part of the fun
of writing is writing people who are better at cool things than
you are.
But if your character starts and ends with the things that will
help him get through his mission, you have created Yet Another Paper
Person. YAPP. Bad. YAPPs don’t sell books.
I’m going to show you the method I use to make my people real.
It gets a bit personal – when I occasionally complain about
writing being like dancing naked on your rooftop, this is the part
of writing that most closely fits that description. This takes some
courage. But it works.
You’re going to put yourself into your characters. Not just
the public things that you’re proud of, like having won the
fifth-grade statewide spelling bee, or being president of your graduating
class and the person voted Most Likely To – but the things
you wish you never had to admit to anyone, like the fact that you
screwed up four marriages and three of the four were almost entirely
your own fault. Or that fact that you had a teenage pregnancy, and
a teenage abortion. Or adoption. The fact that you had an affair
you never told anyone about. The stupid stuff, too, like the fact
that you couldn’t carry a tune on a stretcher with two paramedics
helping you. The fact that you whistle “La Bamba” in the
shower. Like the fact that you absolutely, positively refuse to
look at your butt in a mirror, clothed or unclothed, because you
just hate it. The fact that you wear glasses, or are balding, or
have dimples on your thighs and stretch marks from four pregnancies
in which you frequently mistook yourself for the Hindenburg.
This workshop is private. There isn’t any place on the board
to do it, because in this voyage of discovery, you’re going
to have to be brutally honest – and you’ll do that better
with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t panic. Once you’ve
been honest, I’ll show you how to lie to disguise the truth
and still have it be true to the story. First though, you have to
be honest.
Here we go.
Part One of the Workshop
A. Write ten things about yourself that you think are fantastic
– things that you don’t think other people really appreciate
fully about you, or that they haven’t noticed, or that they
simply don’t know about. Ten. Really.
B. Write ten things about yourself that would embarrass you terribly
if anyone else knew about them. These can be things you have done,
things you have wanted, things you have thought, fantasies you
have entertained, or secrets you have been keeping. Doesn’t
matter. The only thing that matters is that you tell the truth.
If it doesn’t hurt and make you uncomfortable to write each
of these, you aren’t digging deep enough.
C. Describe your body as honestly as you can – what you
like about it, what you hate about it, and what you hope no one
has noticed.
D. Describe five of the most wonderful moments of your life –
things you still look back on with pleasure and joy.
E. Describe five of the most painful moments of your life –
mistakes you’ve made, people you’ve hurt, things that
you will probably regret until you die.
F. Write the ten things you are most passionate about. These
can be religious, political, philosophical, personal, romantic
– these are your causes. You can be in favor of them, or
against them, but they have to matter to you. They don’t
have to be big; they just have to be yours.
Part Two of the Workshop
Okay. Enough soul-searching. You’ll have to do this from time
to time, but if you’ve done the exercise honestly this time,
you now have enough goodies to give a whole novel or three full
of characters some resonance and depth.
Obviously, you are not going to transfer any of this stuff directly
into your novel. You’re going to change it, transform it, invert
it, spread it out around a whole bunch of people who are not like
you. Yes, to do good work, you have to put yourself into your writing,
but no, you don’t have to put yourself in recognizably.
Let’s say that one of the really tough-to-deal-with moments
in your life came when you caught your girlfriend of five years
cheating on you with her girlfriend. Ouch. You aren’t
going to get over that one any time soon. You’ve spent time
wondering what was wrong with you, how many other people knew what
was going on, if you were a laughingstock, if she’d ever done
this before, with whom . . . and those questions aren’t going
to go away.
So give them to one character. Give them to a character who is
otherwise unlike you – different gender, or different sexual
orientation, or different interests. Make the situation in which
he or she finds out about the cheating entirely different. If you’re
writing a novel about a female vampire-hunting space captain, and
she’s carrying around these feelings of yours, they aren’t
going to be your feelings anymore. They’ll be hers. Give her
relationship with the cheater some backstory, make it as closely
or distantly related to the plot as you wish, but get it in there.
She has a life outside of chasing vampires through space, and sometimes
her anger at what this person has done to her is going to find itself
displace onto innocent people who for one reason or another will
remind her of the cheater. This will affect, to greater or lesser
degree, her movement through the story. And it will, because it
is personal and true – even if disguised – resonate with
your readers.
For you to be able to use the events from your own life effectively
in fiction, you must, then, do the following things:
1. Search out those events in your life that have meaning to
you;
2. Honestly explore how each of those events affected you;
3. Disguise the events and your reactions to them while still
maintaining their essential, emotional truth;
4. And give these altered events to your characters, both good
and bad, as part of their personal histories.
And a final, essential point. If this isn’t hard for you to
do, you aren’t digging deep enough. The things that matter
are never easy. Including the things that matter in your fiction,
though, will help you get sales, reach your readers, and write something
that isn’t just the next Paper Hero Goes on A Quest doorstop
novel. Say goodbye to Evil Villains, Oppressed Virginal Heroines,
Naïve-But-Stalwart Heroes, and Smart-Ass Sidekicks forever.
Because once you put yourself into your characters, they become
Deeper People. They become real.
Lost on the Border at Twilight:Finding
-- and Using -- Your Life's Essential Strangeness >>
(reprinted from Holly
Lisle's Vision: A Writer's Resource
Vol. One, Issue 3 -- May/June 2001)
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