Potpourri
Building Believable Characters
Characters Are People, Too
Beginning writers tend to slave over plot, and forget that a book is memorable for its characters. Think of Gone with the Wind. We remember Scarlett, not how she extricated herself from debt. And not much happens in Little Women, but we fall in love with the Jo and her sisters. Then there's movies. Speed and The Terminator, both very plot-oriented, would nonetheless have been humdrum action thrillers if not for their complex and interesting characters.
But to achieve those characters, you have to create real people on the page. They can't just be vehicles for action and plot. Yes, your plot does dictate your characters to a certain extent. Grisham's The Firm wouldn't work with an experienced lawyer. Mitch had to be unfamiliar with certain realities of legal work, someone who could be sucked in before he knew what was happening. And there are rules governing romance characters. After all, you must have a man and woman capable of falling in love—already married people are generally not good choices, for example.
You must go beyond those minimal requirements, however. Contrary to popular opinion, romance characters can't be built from a laundry list of admirable qualities. Like characters in any other fiction, they must be real. The reality is, good writing consists of creating "real people" characters and throwing them into your fictional situations.
How do you do this? Although I know people who fill out character sketches listing the character's favorite color, etc., you don't develop real people characters by making up lists of characteristics. No person is the sum of their parts. Real people are integrated personalities driven by their past and their genetics.
Let me use myself as an example. I spent ten years of my life in Thailand. That is part of what makes me how I am. I'm willing to try a variety of foods, for example, because I was forced to try lots of things as a child. I don't get nervous when I travel. When I went to a big city conference with my friend from a small town, she couldn't believe that I would take cabs and the subway by myself to do research. But after navigating foreign cities in my youth, I found navigating an American city to be a breeze. Yet I'm spooked by stray dogs, because I was exposed to a rabid dog in Thailand and had to have the series of fourteen rabies shots as a result. My friend, however, isn't bothered by stray dogs. Our respective experiences shape our behavior.
When you create your characters, ask yourself what experiences make them who they are. Consider Amanda Quick's Mistress. The characters are typical of a romance—the smart, independent, feisty heroine and aloof, independent hero. But Amanda Quick tells us what made them that way. Her heroine is adventurous because she spent her life being staid and reliable for the sake of her younger sister. When her sister marries, she's free to do what she wants, so she rebels against those strictures. But those years of being responsible also mean that she doesn't do anything irretrievably irresponsible. The hero was a farmer until a distant relative passed the title on to him. So he's more interested in what would make a piece of farm equipment work than on what the ton thinks of him.
If you have trouble creating "whole" characters, try some of these tactics. Use a "helper": a system of personality like the enneagram (which divides people according to their key motivating factor) or even horoscopes. Draw on characteristics of people you know. My favorite technique was suggested to me by Hailey North—take on the persona of your character and write a letter to yourself in their voice (first person). Unleash the subconscious part of your creativity and let your character tell you why she's how she is. I've done this several times and was surprised to find my characters take shape almost effortlessly.
Look at how an actor like Tom Hanks can portray different characters. In Forrest Gump, he's utterly believable as a slightly slow, lovable eccentric. In Big, he was a kid. In Philadelphia, he's a gay lawyer, and he's been a romantic lead in several movies. None of these were necessarily Tom Hanks, although he probably used bits of himself to create those people. Stanislavsky's Method Acting (also popularized by Lee Strasberg) is a way of teaching actors to find the person in their character—to link their experience to the characters, to remember their own emotions in certain experiences and then copy them for the camera. As writers we can do the same thing.
Put yourself in your character's shoes. If you want your hero and heroine to meet at a five-alarm fire, think of how you would act in such a situation. If you've ever been in a similar life or death situation, remember how you reacted. Then use that. I've seen too many beginning writers have their hero and heroine exchange witty banter while the building is crumbling around them…or worse yet, think about how handsome or pretty the other person is. If you were dodging rubble, holding on to some man or woman's hand, do you honestly think you'd noticing their sparkling eyes? But you might notice that they walk with a limp that will hold you up, or they seem particularly good at navigating through flames.
And forget every preconception you have about romance writing. Don't have your characters fight for no reason. They should fight because they have believable and legitimate differences that create tension between them. At every step, put yourself in your character's shoes. Would you be so unreasonable as to call a man you just met a jerk because he held the door open for you? This is the kind of stuff that makes bad romance novels. If you want your heroine to be angry at the hero, give her a good reason—whatever would infuriate you.
In romance, the hero and the heroine are supposed to clash. But even in other genres, there needs to be conflict between the various characters to make them interesting. A group of people all thinking and acting alike would be very boring. If you make them real people, however, they won't think and act alike, will they? And that means they won't be boring.
Once you have a good sense of who a particular character is, try to make his mannerisms and speech fit his personality. Actors do this all the timel. Think of Forrest Gump's choppy wave that shows he's not quite with it and Scarlett's "fiddle dee dee" that demonstrates her lack of concern for the serious things in life. In Silent Sonata, my heroine Suzanne is a musicologist who is extremely anal-retentive, doing such things as alphabetizing her CDs. After all, the musicologist side of music studies is very different from the creative, artistic side, and music is almost mathematical, with its measures divided up into fractions of notes. This presents infinite opportunities for minor conflicts between Suzanne and my hero Devin, the concert pianist, who never plans anything. His creative side is even evident in the way he parks his expensive car on the street without worrying about exposing it to vandals, thieves, or random scrapes.
You see what I mean? Your characters should be whole and integrated. Everything they do should emerge from the governing aspects of their personalities. Then, and only then, will you have "real people" characters.