Creating Characters: How to Build Story People by Dwight V. Swain
Authors: Dwight V. Swain
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For now, though, the thing to bear in mind is that no matter what you may suspect, you can’t really read another person’s thoughts or get inside his head.
As a matter of fact, a character either in life or in fiction, may, for his own personal reasons, intentionally convey a false impression.
Item: The girl with the hideously bad disposition who’s doing her best to project an aura of sweetness and light until she can land the man she wants.
Item: The man who oozes perfect poise until you discover him weeping in the company restroom.
Item: The woman who wallows in piety for the benefit of her church friends, while on the job she embezzles bank funds.
Item: The friendly retiree whose young manhood included years working in the gas chamber in a Nazi death camp in Poland.
So much subterfuge, so much deceit, so many false impressions.
Yet you, as a writer, can’t afford to be taken in by such deceptive masks. Remember, always, that you are the creator; first and last, you are in control. Deceit and subterfuge are merely tools you use to give your story people depth and interest. Understanding their dynamics, you bring them on as needed, neatly packaged and inserted into characters’ heads.
How do you gain the necessary insight into the human reactionprocess? Specifically, what principles undergird people’s—which is to say, characters’—thinking and behavior?
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE TICK?
Shall we start with a basic premise—the one set forth in the summarizing capsule on which we opened? The thing all of us seek, at root, is what we call happiness.
What constitutes happiness? Call it a state of mind that exists in a person when, his bodily needs satisfied, he also feels a sense of self-importance, self-worth.
That sense of self-worth takes all sorts of forms. You find it in an illiterate, immigrant Vietnamese mother who sees her only surviving child graduate from high school. It sparks again when a doctor saves a life . . . a lawyer wins a case . . . a farmer banks the check for a bumper crop . . . a housewife wins a garden show . . . a teenage swinger beds a rock star. It glows in the sense of superiority a carny feels as he short-changes a mark or a vacationing couple boards a plane for Acapulco under the envious eyes of friends who must stay behind. Each finds what, for the moment, he or she calls happiness—“fulfillment of function,” in academic gobbledegook. One way or another, each can approve of himself, however briefly. And if others see fit to approve also, so much the better.
Such a state may prove murderously difficult to achieve, however. Why? Because the world and life keep throwing trouble at us—circumstances that block our efforts to attain our goals, shatter our dreams, make us feel helpless and ridiculous and unimportant. Yet in spite of everything, most of us keep striving.
Also, happiness is different things to different people. Inheriting a fortune may, to me, bring only panic at the thought of the responsibilities that will ensue. Or I may so thrill to the excitement of battle that I forget the fear of death.
Too, it may operate on a variety of levels. Witness what’s come to be known as the “generation gap.” In large measure it sprang from a clash between the traditional concept of “earned happiness” that dominated an earlier period and the “instant happiness” of an affluent society, in which credit cards and bankruptcy filings and singles bars took over. In the past a couple may have attained feelings of self-worth by caring for their elderly parents. Today, some couples seeking instant happiness may consign their parents to anursing home and get their ego boosts from driving two cars and living in a bigger house. (Which isn’t to say, of course, that a nursing home may not be the only answer in many cases.)
Whether these changes in society are good or bad is subject to debate. But the sun has set on the era when women found pride solely in managing a
For now, though, the thing to bear in mind is that no matter what you may suspect, you can’t really read another person’s thoughts or get inside his head.
As a matter of fact, a character either in life or in fiction, may, for his own personal reasons, intentionally convey a false impression.
Item: The girl with the hideously bad disposition who’s doing her best to project an aura of sweetness and light until she can land the man she wants.
Item: The man who oozes perfect poise until you discover him weeping in the company restroom.
Item: The woman who wallows in piety for the benefit of her church friends, while on the job she embezzles bank funds.
Item: The friendly retiree whose young manhood included years working in the gas chamber in a Nazi death camp in Poland.
So much subterfuge, so much deceit, so many false impressions.
Yet you, as a writer, can’t afford to be taken in by such deceptive masks. Remember, always, that you are the creator; first and last, you are in control. Deceit and subterfuge are merely tools you use to give your story people depth and interest. Understanding their dynamics, you bring them on as needed, neatly packaged and inserted into characters’ heads.
How do you gain the necessary insight into the human reactionprocess? Specifically, what principles undergird people’s—which is to say, characters’—thinking and behavior?
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE TICK?
Shall we start with a basic premise—the one set forth in the summarizing capsule on which we opened? The thing all of us seek, at root, is what we call happiness.
What constitutes happiness? Call it a state of mind that exists in a person when, his bodily needs satisfied, he also feels a sense of self-importance, self-worth.
That sense of self-worth takes all sorts of forms. You find it in an illiterate, immigrant Vietnamese mother who sees her only surviving child graduate from high school. It sparks again when a doctor saves a life . . . a lawyer wins a case . . . a farmer banks the check for a bumper crop . . . a housewife wins a garden show . . . a teenage swinger beds a rock star. It glows in the sense of superiority a carny feels as he short-changes a mark or a vacationing couple boards a plane for Acapulco under the envious eyes of friends who must stay behind. Each finds what, for the moment, he or she calls happiness—“fulfillment of function,” in academic gobbledegook. One way or another, each can approve of himself, however briefly. And if others see fit to approve also, so much the better.
Such a state may prove murderously difficult to achieve, however. Why? Because the world and life keep throwing trouble at us—circumstances that block our efforts to attain our goals, shatter our dreams, make us feel helpless and ridiculous and unimportant. Yet in spite of everything, most of us keep striving.
Also, happiness is different things to different people. Inheriting a fortune may, to me, bring only panic at the thought of the responsibilities that will ensue. Or I may so thrill to the excitement of battle that I forget the fear of death.
Too, it may operate on a variety of levels. Witness what’s come to be known as the “generation gap.” In large measure it sprang from a clash between the traditional concept of “earned happiness” that dominated an earlier period and the “instant happiness” of an affluent society, in which credit cards and bankruptcy filings and singles bars took over. In the past a couple may have attained feelings of self-worth by caring for their elderly parents. Today, some couples seeking instant happiness may consign their parents to anursing home and get their ego boosts from driving two cars and living in a bigger house. (Which isn’t to say, of course, that a nursing home may not be the only answer in many cases.)
Whether these changes in society are good or bad is subject to debate. But the sun has set on the era when women found pride solely in managing a
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