Playing at being God - Creating Characters

Fifty people walked into a lecture room at York. A hundred walked out.

No, it wasn’t some strange cloning experiment – it was the session on ‘Creating Character’ by the author Julie Cohen at the Festival of Writing 2013. I’d heard about this session when Julie ran it previously at York, because everyone who attended rated it so highly. I decided to sit in this year, and wasn’t disappointed; Julie is an engaging speaker who obviously loved controlling us and the characters we were led to create!

I have to admit, it was to a certain extent pure indulgence on my part; I love creating characters for my stories. Perhaps it comes from my days in Am Dram and my love of fancy dress? It’s an excuse to dress up and become anything I want to be. In the same way, I like moulding the people in my stories, giving them little quirks that bring them alive on paper.

So I went, not really expecting to learn much.

Boy, was I wrong!

We started simply; the letters on two yellow cards, picked at random, gave the initials of a character. The number on an orange one - their age. The toss of a coin, gender. (Dropped coins meant you ended up with a robot, dragon, androgenous humanoid…)

Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy, I thought.

Describe the character. Great! I’m a very visual person, so I really enjoy picturing the physical characteristics and mannerisms. A chance to let my imagination fly? My character was easy to describe.

Make the character walk into a room and pick something up. Classic character-in-action or ‘show, don’t tell’. Again, something I enjoy. No problem with that stage, even if he did only pick up a silver goblet.

Now say why the object that was picked up is important to the character. (Pity the poor attendee last year whose character picked up a prawn vol-au-vent! I’m reliably informed by him that he still made it work…) Nothing unusual here. In my stories, the MC is always after something. I kept it simple – he wanted the drink.

But there’s a problem, related to the object. O-kaaay. Still alright, I think – there’s always something which puts a spoke in the works and makes the MC stumble in their quest. I can work with that and create some conflict for my new character. Let’s make the drink run out…

What’s your character’s best quality? What’s their worst fault? Make them the same thing.

Say what?! Qualities? Do they need qualities? I thought they just needed something to do! If they succeeded, we’d got to the end of the book!

At this point, I realised I was breaking new ground. I have never consciously thought about my character’s qualities. In my new character, I focused on his memory…

The last two tasks dealt with dialogue and inner voice, where our character had first to keep a second character from discovering a secret, and then show us their stream of thoughts. I muddled through these two sections, because lightbulbs were literally popping in my head.

I realised I’d been drawing my characters in all their fine detail and putting them in some super settings, but I’d completely failed to let the reader see how they’d grown and changed through the conflict they’d experienced during the course of the story. Oh, they found the object/gained power/thwarted the baddie, but essentially, they were the person they always were.

(This was a point reinforced in a separate workshop by Jeremy Sheldon on ‘Strong Storytelling’. I’ll blog about that one another day!)

Wowser.

Maybe that’s what was missing from what I’d written up to now? A character’s qualities. Or if they were there, it was more by luck than judgement. I’m going to have to make a conscious effort to include them in future, that’s for sure.

What’s that? Before I sign off, you want to know who I created in the session? Meet...

Theo Arblewurtle, 44, snappy dresser with a missing tooth and a phenomenal memory which he maintains by drinking a special potion - it’s his job to remember the faces of people who seal deals with his boss. Unfortunately, he’s on the last bottle of potion and there’s a big meeting coming up where his boss, an underworld criminal, is relying on Theo remembering who he’s got to give the stolen money to. Theo’s memory is going to get him into trouble when he tries to use it to blackmail the boss.

I think I created a potential story, not just a character…