Dean Koontz on Credible Characters

 Last month, we considered how to create sympathetic characters—those a reader can feel an affinity for because they have desirable character traits. This month’s subject is closely related. How do we create characters who realistic and believable, even if we feel little sympathy for them? Villains must be as credible as heroes are, minor characters as realistic as protagonists. Anything less betrays a careless author.

Koontz says, “I believe very strongly that the success of a novel hinges on good characterization as much as it hinges on good plotting. To my way of thinking, those are the only two absolutely essential elements of fine popular fiction. I expend a considerable percentage of my writing time in the careful development of three-dimensional characters.”[1]

He suggests compiling a dossier on each character before you begin to write. This detailed list of factors that have shaped the character won’t be used in the text itself, but it’ll make you aware of attitudes and actions that would be natural for a certain character—and which factors would not. Scrivener™ provides a character template to help you start such a dossier, but you could include so much more. Here are the elements of a character dossier that Koontz recommends:

·        Physical Appearance

·        Voice and Speech

·        Movement and Gestures

·        Past Life

·        Religion

·        Sexuality

·        Vocation

·        Skills and Talents

It could include much more, of course, but these factors will help you begin to paint a credible portrait of the person in your story. It’ll help you maintain consistency in the way you handle that person and it will remind you to avoid cookie-cutter character designs. No one that you know has a cookie-cutter personality. Neither should anyone you create on paper.

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[1]Dean R. Koontz, How to Write Best-Selling Fiction (Cincinnati: Writers Digest Books, 1981), 147.

Why Should I Care?

I seldom put a novel aside without reading it through, but last week I did. It was a new book by an author whose historical novels I admire a great deal. His new book is a thriller with a contemporary setting, but I don't think my interest flagged because of the genre or setting. So why did I part company with him after reading nearly 300 pages?

Because none of the characters deserved my attention. I felt no emotional tie to the heroine or the people she loved, and most of the others were (How can I put this kindly?) not the sort I would want to be my roommates. Perhaps the author wanted to tantalize me with the possibility that one of them would become a "person of interest" in the investigation, but that was precisely the problem--I wasn't interested in any of them. I'm not a callous person, yet all of the characters left me cold.

I've come to realize that stories I enjoy most are those with characters I care about. I imagine the same is true for you. So why might we care about a fictional character?

We see ourselves reflected. I saw myself in Father Tim of Jan Karon's Mitford series, for example. Having been pastor of a church in Fort Wayne for several years, I heard my former parishioners in the voices of Father Tim's parish. I saw my own foibles and blunders in Father Tim's attempts to serve his people, and I recognized my own feelings of joy when his efforts succeeded.

We get a second chance. When a fictional character is placed in a predicament similar to one we've experienced, we see alternate ways we might have dealt with a problem. Or we may feel vindicated by our own handling of it. Either way, we enjoy reading about realistic characters who afford us a second chance to deal with our own problems.

We become more aware of God. A spiritually mature character sees God at work in situations where we might miss him. Depression Era stories such as "Spencer's Mountain" and "The Journey of Natty Gann" offer us good examples of characters who see God at work in desperate circumstances.

Characters don't have to be likeable or worthy of imitation in order for us to care about them; but unless we care, we're not likely to follow their stories to the end.

Joe Allison has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN. His non-fiction books include Setting Goals That Count and Swords and Whetstones.

When Characters Come to Life

While spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at the Abe Martin Lodge in Brown County, I was surprised to learn that the renowned tourist attraction is named for a character of fiction—a cartoon character to be precise. Hoosier artist Kin Hubbard conceived Abe Martin as a backwoods philosopher who commented on the political scene, family life, and a wide range of other topics with more candor than a proper editorial writer could have. You’ll find sketches of Abe and his cohorts all over the inn, as well as the nearby tourist haven of Nashville.

I wonder how many other states have named public works after characters of fiction. Indiana may be unique in that respect. Hubbard drew the character so clearly and expressed his opinions so winsomely that Hoosiers now give old “Abe” as much deference as a real person.
While there, I read the autobiography of Anthony Trollope, a 19^th century British satirist who is best known for the Barsetshire Chronicles, a series about the foibles of clergy in an imaginary Anglican parish. Trollope says that the series “failed altogether in the purport for which it was intended” (i.e., to end a system that allowed clerics to use endowments for the poor to feather their own nests). “But it has a merit of its own… The characters of the bishop, of the archdeacon, of the archdeacon’s wife, and especially of the warden, are all well and clearly drawn. I had realized to myself a series of portraits, and had been able so to put them on canvas that my readers should see that which I meant them to see. There is no gift which an author can have more useful to him than this.”

Most of Trollope’s work is now forgotten, but the Barsetshire Chronicles remain in print and became the basis of a “Masterpiece Theater” series by PBS some years ago. These characters still live in the imagination of millions of readers and TV viewers.

How do such characters “come alive”? In these blog posts, we talk a good deal about the techniques for evoking them, but notice Trollope’s comment about how his characters began to take shape: “I had realized to myself a series of portraits,” he says. He visualized each of them as vividly as if he were standing before their portraits, studying every eyelash and wrinkle with appreciation. Only when he saw them in his imagination did he “put them on canvas” so that readers could see them as well.

Do you see your characters that clearly? In Trollope’s opinion, it's the most useful gift an author can have.



Joe Allison has been a member of the Indiana Chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN. His non-fiction books include Setting Goals That Count and Swords and Whetstones.
 

"He Is in the Pain"

Dan Wakefield is a Hoosier native who became a leading writer in New York's "beat" scene of Greenwich Village in the 1950s, then went to Hollywood to seek his fortune in network television,  where he fell into alcoholism and sexual promiscuity. His closest relationships unraveled and he found himself a wayward, lonely vagabond until he "happened" to visit a Christmas Eve service at a Unitarian Church in Boston. There he became aware that God was with him--in fact, God had always been with him--and God was ready to restore his life to wholeness.

Wakefield tells his story in Return: A Spiritual Journey (Beacon Press: 1997), which journalist Bill Moyers called "one of the most important memoirs of the spirit I've ever read." It was the first book I read this year, and it has given me a lot to think about. I was especially struck by what Wakefield says about his relationship with Jesus when he was experiencing deep pain and loss:

For me the light is Christ, and it is not just a light as in "sweetness and light" but an illumination of pain as well, and a force for understanding and bearing it. When I went to our minister once at a time of particular anguish I asked him suddenly, with a challenge, "Where is Christ in all this?" and he answered without hesitation, "He is in the pain." I learned that resurrection is not just the "happy ending" that follows crucifixion but, as our minister put it, those events are "two aspects of the same reality, even as Easter and Good Friday are the same reality" (Return, 249).

 Reflect on the times of anguish and sorrow in your own life, and ask yourself where Jesus Christ was during those times--totally absent, observing your pain from a distance, or part of the pain itself?

We need to understand His role in our pain, not only for our personal spiritual growth, but for the sake of realism in our writing as well. Where do your characters see Jesus Christ in their times of deepest pain? What do they learn about Him in their suffering? Do you avoid writing about your characters' experience of pain because you are baffled by its purpose in your own life?

On this Holy Saturday, I invite you to find Jesus in your pain. He took our sufferings upon himself yesterday, but we still experience suffering, don't we? So do the people we write about. If our writing is to be true to life, we must be able to answer Dan Wakefield's question: "Where is Christ in all this?"

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Joe Allison and his wife, Judy, live in Anderson IN, where Joe serves as Editorial Director of Discipleship Resources & Curriculum for Warner Press, Inc. Joe has several nonfiction books in print, including Swords and Whetstones: A Guide to Christian Bible Study Resources. He's currently writing a trilogy of Christian historical novels set in the Great Depression.

Visit Joe's blog at http://southernmtns.wordpress.com