Creating Characters: How to Build Story People by Dwight V. Swain Page A

home. Men today are no longer ashamed to be seen changing the baby’s diapers or cooking a meal. Some, by choice, stay home as house-spouses, while their wives work outside the home for financial support of the family. And often both spouses must work, just to make ends meet.
    Fact is, contemporary marriage no longer follows traditional male/female sexual stereotypes, and your characters had better reflect those changes if you hope to appeal to modern readers.
    Unhappiness? That’s the other side of the coin, something we all strive to avoid. Call it the loss of self-esteem as a result of disapproval by self or others. Perhaps it springs from a harsh word from the boss, a sidewise glance from a supercilious clerk, the sense of helplessness one feels when a loved one dies, the rage and frustration that comes of a picked pocket, a broken date, a crumpled fender.
    But again, each of us is different. The prospect of a visit to the hospital may chill your blood, while I look forward to making such a visit because the anticipated pain will assuage a secret sense of guilt, or give me an excuse to wallow delightedly in self-indulgence, self-pity, or friends’ attention. My son-in-law’s insults may cut me to the quick, yet bring a certain grim pleasure as I gloat over the shock he’s going to get when my will is read.
    Now these are things we all experience. Yet in the words of Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal Sherlock Holmes, we see but we do not observe.
    This is a luxury which we as writers can’t afford. We must learn to pay attention to human behavior in all its varied shades and nuances. Most especially, we need to become reflex-familiar with those twists and turns that influence the manner in which people’s lives develop. Why? Because they’ll provide insight into possible paths our characters may follow and actions they may take.
    Is it possible to attack the issue of character dynamics from a different angle? Yes, of course it is. You very well may begin from the assumption that fear is the underlying factor. In which case, the question to ask yourself is: What’s Character scared of?
    Because all of us are scared. When the feudist in pioneer Texas cried, “I’ll die before I run!” what he really was saying was, “I’m less afraid of death than losing face.” And how many times, covering triangle murders, did I hear the line, “We couldn’t stand the shame of a divorce” as motive? It’s the same peer pressure thing that’s sent so many teenagers to death mainlining heroin with their friends.
    The person—or the character—may not know he’s scared, of course, or if he does, he may not know just what he’s scared of. Fear of responsibility may lie at the heart of his secret inner dread, as witness many an educated, once-cultured bum along skid row, many a remittance man in Mexico or Monaco or Marrakesh. I have hypochondriac friends whose blind panic at the thought of disease has immobilized them for life. The fear of failure has locked hundreds, thousands, millions into private cells of never trying. A woman I know was so devastated by Depression poverty that today she lives the life of a virtual indigent though her net worth is more than half a million dollars. And Alfred Hitchcock so feared the possibility of a traffic arrest and jail that he never learned to drive a car.
    So much for fear as a dynamic, a source of human conduct. But whether you choose to work from it or from man’s never-ending search for fulfillment and happiness, ultimately you’ll need to give special consideration to four other concepts: direction, goal, drive, and attitude .
    We’ll take them up in the second part of this appraisal of the world within in the next chapter.

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THE WORLD WITHIN: 2
How do you keep a character moving?
You point that character towards his or her private future.
    Each character about whom you write, whether you’re aware of it or not, must have a private future. That is, to go back to what we