From the Fiction Desk

Walk into a bookstore and travel back to the writing reference shelves and you will find a half dozen books on creating characters. Maybe, instead of a book, you turn to a writing magazine and read about some author’s methods of creating a character. You take this advice to heart, sit down with your laptop or pen/pencil and notebook and start trying to write out these characters. You spend time creating them and when it comes to write the story . . . splash like a plane that lost power over the ocean and you can see the wreckage from miles around. Why does a method of one author not work for another in quite the same way? Why not turn to archetypes and create cookie cutter like characters? The techniques and the archetypes do work—at least for the authors who can breathe life into them. What often happens is the author who is struggling with the character has not realized their character is not an automaton or a game piece to be moved across the game board of their plotline.

There is no unique solution to character creation. There is no silver bullet to be fired out of the finger to bring life to a being created of pixels or ink. For every author, there is a unique approach to this part of the art, but what should not be unique is a simplistic step that many writers forget in their quest to create their stories. The step is faith. Not the faith of a religious belief, but the faith that the character is able to be unique and filled with their own imaginary will which often defies the author’s willingness to go down a plotline. Characters must be able to feel real to the author long before they feel real to the reader. For this to happen, they must be real. They do not move like robots with set personality patterns and habits, but are unique within their personality patterns and their archetypes—that single spark of life that gives them the ability to seemingly life on their own if somehow they could step off the page and enter the universe of the author and the reader. Consider for a moment all the great characters you enjoyed knowing, loving, or even hating. You can think back to a book or a story—or even a movie or play—from years ago and recall a character like some lost school time friend. Now stop and ask yourself, what made that character unique? Get past the dress, the super powers, or the cool vehicle they may have owned. Get past the surface clutter of the character and begin to recall the soul of the character. What do you remember?

Now, with this knowledge of the reason in mind, look at the characters you have been creating for your fictional story. Do your characters come to life or are they simply metaphors for something else. There is nothing wrong with a metaphor, used wisely, but if that is all your character is then you have failed in the character’s creation. Paper thin characters destroy works of great fiction. Stop yourself and take a moment to breathe life into this character and make them unique. It is not easy to create artificial life out of your imagination, but that is what the best of authors do. Learn and study and try—be willing to fail and do it all again. When you do, you will find characters coming to life and being so realistic that you and your readers will believe that they would know these characters in a crowd.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for articles, blogs, poems, and stories that I write.