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

said in Chapter 1 , he must care about something, feel that some aspect of his world is important—important enough to fight for.
    To that end, and though they can hardly be separated in practice, you need to give him an appropriate direction, goal, drive, and attitude .
    Let’s consider each of these separately.
1. DIRECTION: THE ROAD TO HAPPINESS
    A character’s direction may be defined as his tendency to lead the kind of life he enjoys. In effect, it’s a sort of unstated search that causes him to seek out experience he finds pleasurable and to act in a manner that fulfills a quite possibly unverbalized “dream of happiness” for him. That this dream may be vague—even nebulous or totally unformulated—is of no consequence. Nor does it matter whether it makes sense to anyone, including the character himself. It still shapes his behavior, just as the alcoholic continues to get drunk despite certain knowledge of the hangover to follow.
    Thus, any character, any person—and that includes you, and me, and the woman next door, and the man down the street—lives from infancy to a greater or lesser degree in the grip of an indefinable inner hunger, a gnawing sense that something is missing from his life.
    Actually, it may be that what’s missing is in the person himself. It’s rooted in the sense of inadequacy born of childhood helplessness. What he wants, realize it or not, is to control his life, his destiny.
    Not grasping this fact, however, Person—or Character, where fiction is concerned—attempts to fill the void with ego-inflating exploits in the world outside him—his own private combination of what W. I. Thomas, respected sociologist of another day, termed the “four wishes”: the human animal’s desire for adventure, security, recognition, response . (Personally, I’m inclined to add a fifth item, power, to the list.) And the way you combine these, the ratio between the elements you zero in on, establishes the direction that you go.
    When you translate this into more concrete form, adventure comes out as a yearning for new experience, as exemplified in activities ranging from climbing Mount Everest to throwing a brick through a neighbor’s window . . . joining the Marines or Peace Corps to signing up for a night course in computer graphics. Security ? A job with the Postal Service, a bulging bank account, a well-tuned car engine, you name it. Spell recognition as fame via election as selectman, winning a breakdance contest, being awarded a scholarship, making headlines with a jailbreak. And response, for most of us, equals love on any one of its multitudinous levels: warming to the feeling that someone that counts cares about us. If you want to include power, obviously it’s exemplified in the authority to hire and fire, the officer’s command over his troops, and the woman who includes a potential palimony suit in her armorarium.
    So much for the generalities of happiness. More to the point is the way that each of us, consciously or otherwise, selects a certain state or situation as, for us and for the moment, constituting bliss. Call it a symbol, if you will. It’s a condition which we subjectively visualize as creating the paradisiacal sense of self-worth/self-importance/self-esteem that we all yearn for.
    (Assume that you win such happiness. Is it likely to prove enduring? Not necessarily; indeed, not even likely. The “perfect husband” turns out to be a penny-pincher. The “dream house” floods every time it rains. A failed bank swallows up your nest-egg savings. The town forgets football fame the day you graduate. And that’s life, as they say.)
    Remember, too, that both in life and in fiction characters operate on separate wavelengths, different levels of intensity. Consider two women, for example. Slender equals happy where both areconcerned. But for whatever reason, slender is a compulsion for Woman A. Woman B, on the other hand, finds slender in competition with a growling