Wiley Briony, from Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT
INVENTING people. Walking, talking, breathing people. Sounds simple?
Lately, I’ve come to a crossroads about creating characters, particularly as I make the transition from short story to novel. True, both are narratives. Both have plot. Both need real, believable people driving this thing we call story. But somehow, in a novel, it gets a whole lot more interesting.
With a short story, the conflict opens in the first paragraph, tension building from the get-go. The character’s inward motivation bumps uglies with the external force of the plot, and by george we’ve got ourselves a story. But with novels, there are more tangents and nuances, more complexity and twists and turns–not to mention hundreds of pages to fill, which calls for a meatier character that we can really sink our teeth into.
Having always been a short story writer, taking on a novel of 300 pages + has been a whole new experience. Having just completed my first draft, I find myself now going back through the explosion I’ve created and analyzing my lead character (in particular) like a mad-raving psychoanalyst, picking up the shards of her past, present, and future and clarifying them, bringing them into razor sharp focus. Everything must count.
In my current attempts to do this, I’ve found the need to create bio sketches of all my characters–a kind of test for myself to see how well I really know them, how complex I really need to make them, and what really needs to be reconsidered as I embark upon the scary task of the dreaded novel revision, part 1.0.
There are several models out there for biosketching your characters. However, Ginny Wiehardt’s is my favorite among all others (probably because she’s a fiction writer and instructor herself), and the one I find most useful for my purposes. Her approach involves answering ten questions about your characters:
1. Where does your character live?
2. Where is your character from?
3. How old is your character?
4. What is your character called?
5. What does your character look like?
6. What kind of childhood did he or she have?
7. What does your character do for a living?
8. How does your character deal with conflict and change?
9. Who else is in your character’s life?
10. What is your character’s goal or motivation in this story or scene?
Taking this on as an exercise, I’ll be posting soon what I’ve come up with for Esther Thomas, the heroine of my novel-in-revision. My plan is to do this for all characters in my novel over the next few weeks. Stay tuned. Or tune out, if it becomes overwhelming.
