Hintlord Series #4: Character building 101

Your Hintlord returns! I’ve had a request from a reader who asked about characters and how to build original ones! Here’s her note:

I'd love to hear if and how you manage to create characters who not merely represent a part of who you are or would like to be. I really struggle with creating someone new who is independent from who I am.

This is a great question and I am AWARE there are many schools of thought on this. Even some from my own alma mater that may differ from what you read here. But what you have to understand is: I̶'̶m̶ ̶s̶m̶a̶r̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ I do things differently and they’ve worked out for me so far. :)

For example, some may say that good characters inform the plot; their choices direct the plot and therefore the character’s personalities come first. That’s all well and good in theory but sometimes it doesn’t work out. What if you’ve started your story with a couch potato character who sees something going on out of the corner of his eye but Maury’s on and he doesn’t wanna go check it out? That’s the end of your story unless your “something” comes barreling into Couch Potato’s living room. But that is a conscious choice of the author, so don’t give me that spiel about characters being voodooish and moving around on their own. That comes later.

So, instead, try out this lesson from the School of Robyn: try thinking about your story first. What does the story require?

I’ll be the first one to call myself out on this — my stories often require a blushing, rather submissive twink to be anxiously receptive to another guy’s advances. So I build one. Now, for the reader’s question. How to do this without your character being you/someone you want to be? Well, first of all, don’t make them look like you and there’s a world of separation there to begin with. Second, there’s a difference between who you ARE and what you KNOW. Just because something is in your wheelhouse — for example, characters I have that are into poetry/drawing/yoga — doesn’t mean the character is exactly like you. You use this to add spice, not meat.

In terms of “who you want to be”, hopefully you don’t want to be a shitty person, so you can make the character a shitty person! Trust me, this is always fun. And shitty people are good for a story because they inherently bring conflict with them. They pump in new blood.

(There’s seemingly this stigma against “negative character development” in this new day and age, which is just stupid. There’s nothing wrong with a character deteriorating over the course of the story, becoming less and less someone you’d feel comfortable meeting at night in a parking lot. But that’s a rant for another day.)

So let’s do it how I do it: first, we start with the story. The story always comes first. What do I need to make this idea in my head pop off? Well, let’s use my last published story Impossibly Tender as fodder. The story idea was: man kidnaps kid. That’s pretty basic, huh? To embellish it, I needed a flourishing, multi-layered character to pull that kind of thing off. He would need to be well-liked at least locally (so: teacher), deemed non-threatening to law enforcement (read: white), and he’d also need to be the kind of person who’d do something like that (unhinged) and also have an internal reasoning so that it seems reasonable in both his head and the reader’s, for a time (his own moral compass). And, why would he do this? (Past transgressions.)

When we use the story to build the characters, you’ll be hard-pressed to build one that’s like you.

Now: for all you voodoo purists out there, that’s not to say that building characters this way ensures they never do their own fantastical things and make choices on their own that informs the story in turn. Of COURSE they do. But they can only stand on their own feet if you give them bones and tendons and muscles. It’s not magic, it’s storytelling.

[Would you like a writing hint from the Hintlord? Just send in a request here!]

Why You Annoyed Every Girl in Your MFA Cohort

It was your first day of your fiction MFA and you knew this was it; the first day of the rest of your life. You made it. Through all the hardship of high school where no one understood you — and the horror of undergrad at the local state school where no one gave you a second glance just because you couldn’t throw a lousy football or run long. You made it. Out of the gutter and into the sunshine — where you belonged. Smooth sailing from here on out. All you had to do was get that piece of paper at the end of the stage and editors and agents would be throwing themselves at you. Hell, maybe sooner than that, if you played your cards right. It happened to Bret Easton Ellis, and after all, you were way better than him.

When you walked into your Short Story Workshop, no one applauded. Strange. That was okay though; they’d learn.

You sat across the long table from the professor. As she would soon learn, you had as much wisdom to share as she did, and students would gradually turn from her end of the room to yours, waiting to see what you would say.

Students filed in and chatted unnecessarily. Wasting words, wasting words. You sat there quietly in your tweed jacket, with your leather bound notebook and quill pen at the ready. Class began when the professor glided in — she was edging on fifty and grey-haired and tall with easy eyes. You’d read one of her short stories in The New Yorker six months ago and thought she had some things to learn. You wrote down some edits on a piece of parchment and planned on delivering them to her with your thesis at the end of your stay.

She looked around the room pleasantly and invited everyone to take turns introducing themselves. She started with the girl to her left; a lithe young thing who you could see yourself having a one-week bohemian affair with and then dumping when you saw her woefully minimalist writing style.

“I’m Ann,” she said, smiling. “I’m from Tampa originally, went to Florida State for undergrad, and I have three dogs. I love Netflix and dubstep.”

The room welcomed her. All but you. Your thoughts of the affair were instantly dashed. She hardly deserved your scorn.

The rest of the room proceeded in a similar fashion. No one listed their favorite author, their favorite book, their favorite review. TV, movies, streaming, games, stargazing — what oh what was the writing world coming to? You all but swooned in your chair at the state of this school’s MFA program if this is what they’d let in beside you. But you were given a fellowship, so at least you knew the committee had some sense. Surely these people had to pay their way in. They would not last long.

Finally, all eyes turned to you, as was your due.

“Greetings,” you said, relaxing your shoulders down. “I’m Craft McSentence Level. My nom de plume will be Crafterson, however, so please address me thuswise. I don’t have favorite authors, as I feel we all can improve, but those I most identify with are Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. My writing style has been described as torrid. I’m twenty-one years old and plan to be out of this program in a year and a half. My thesis will be an enlightening treatise on the unjust affairs of the middle east. I don’t like wasting time, as time is a finite resource, so I’ve copied some flash fiction pieces I worked on over the summer. I was hoping we’d have time to review them.”

You held up your stack of papers. Everyone looked at you wide-eyed, breathless. Surely even they could recognize it — the hot white flame of greatness. John Updike’s classmates must have felt similarly.

Class ended without any time given to your materials but that was okay with you, deep down. Best to space out the important stuff or else its importance might be lost. Your fellow classmates exited quickly, none looking at you. The poor things must have felt embarrassed to have given such paltry first impressions.

Before you left, the professor called out to you.

“Craft, that was—”

“Crafterson, please.”

She smiled wider. “Crafterson. That was quite an introduction.”

“Yes. Please expect more of the same from me.”

“I surely will.”

You left the room with your breast full, your mind at ease. You went home to check your email. An agent must have heard about you by now.