TOOT 1:

BUILDING CHARACTER

Ever hear the saying "God is in the details"? (Feel free to insert your own favorite deity.) I believe it, certainly as applied to creative writing, especially when it comes to dramatic writing. To me, a dramatic character is best approached, not as a psychological "type," but as a conglomeration of details, facets - some meaningful, some silly, some random, some very strategically-chosen. It's these details that make a character real -- you can tell us that someone is a "fiery individualist," but that isn't half as meaningful as saying he carries a picture of the Unabomber in his wallet and logs onto the libertarian newsgroups on the net every night. Eventually, such details add up to a composite portrait that we then give a name to: "Tom" or "Sue" or "Captain Kirk" or "Medea".

Here's a detail of a mosaic.

Mosaics work the same way -- many individual facets (textures, colours, materials, shapes) adding up to one whole.

That's why I prefer to begin with the concept of a character "collage" rather than a character sketch. (Actually, I don't usually start with either -- I just start writing: "Act I, Scene 1 -- something happens." But that comes after a long period of thinking about the characters, during which I do -- consciously and otherwise -- accumulate a lot of details about them: how they dress, speak, hobbies, vices, favorite brands of scotch. I also know that many people feel more prepared to write if they've first sketched out the characters. I don't discourage that, but I do try to get them to try this other way, which, among other things, has a lot more potential for surprise built into it. That is, they're more likely to surprise themselves with what they come up with.)

A GAME

Here's how we do it in my class: a student comes to the front of the room. I paint a vivid scenario about how they're a thief who steals out into the night and breaks into a home and ascends to an upstairs bedroom where they can just make out the figure of someone sleeping in a bed in the corner. They tiptoe to the dresser, reach in and find an object hidden under the underwear in the corner. (At this point the student reaches under my jacket and withdraws one of a few random objects I've gathered from other members of the class.) They then (the thief, that is) scurry out of the house and back to his/her lair, to see what they got.

I then ask the student, based on whatever object they're holding, to tell us as much as they can about that person who was sleeping in the bed -- who are they that they would have bothered to keep this object safely tucked away in their underwear drawer? I also tell them they're God now (talk about rehabilitation) -- whatever they say becomes true. Thus if they say the person has blue hair, the person has blue hair. This is to encourage them to be as specific in their choices of detail as possible. (Nothing like being told you're Omnipotent to get your creative courage up.)

Eventually, the student will run out of steam, which is when the rest of the class steps in, asking questions to further fill out the character ("What's the last book they read?"; "Do they wear boxers or skivvies?"). In this way we gradually build up a composite impression of them, until, finally, I ask "God" to give them a name.

Well, actually, that's not the very last thing I ask. But we'll get to that in a moment.

I want to try an equivalent of that game for our first exercise.

EXERCISE 1:

You can approach this one of two ways. You can either begin with a character you already have in mind. Or you can just answer the questions below randomly and see what (who) emerges. Because that, to me, is the most exciting thing about this method: accumulate enough details, however randomly, and they will eventually form themselves into the shape of a character (the way Nature will eventually organize itself into meaningful patterns, or so scientists now tell us). And in my experience, it's often the details picked most hastily, nay desperately, that pay off down the road. I once gave a character a Quebecois accent as a shorthand way to differentiate her from the other characters in the play. The fact that she came from Quebec eventually (a few drafts later) became very significant in the play.

Answer the questions below. Answer them as precisely as possible. Don't just tell me your character likes to drink beer -- tell me which brand. Do they prefer it in bottles or cans? If your answer suggests other details, tell me those too. The more the merrier -- for purposes of this exercise, you can't do too much. Will your mosaic be made up of a handful of tiles, or a few dozen, or a few hundred?

1. What do they do for fun?

2. If they have to type something, how many fingers do they use? (Contemporary characters only, I guess.)

3. How often do they do their laundry?

4. Describe their last dream.

5. Innie or outie? (their belly button)

6. What song do they know all the words to?

7. Describe what they wear on their feet most of the time.

8. How do they get their news?

9. What's in their pocket or purse right now?

10. When's the last time they were really scared?

11. What secret wouldn't they tell anyone?

12. If they were up at three in the morning with nothing to do but watch TV, what would they watch? What would cause them to switch channels? What kind of TV is that, anyway?

13. Spiritual, religious beliefs?

14. What's the last election they voted in? How'd they vote?

15. Hair?

That should get you started. Proceed in this fashion, asking yourself yet more questions, serious and silly (or get a significant other to ask you), until you've built up a big wad of details. Then send them to me, questions and answers, in that form.

But wait. One last, crucial thing.

THE BIG DIFF

You may have created a character in this fashion. But what makes him/her/it a dramatic character? What distinguishes a dramatic character from many (though not all) characters in fiction, or, for that matter, from most human beings?

You probably know the answer: a want. A goal -- or rather, goals, both short-term and long-term. (The former is something they can act on to get the latter; for example, if a character's long-term goal is to be rich, their short-term goal might be to come up with a surefire formula to win the lottery.)

Why's this so important to creating a dramatic character? Because once a character has a goal, they can take action to get it, and that's when we start to find out who they really are. Said F. Scott Fitzgerald, "CHARACTER IS ACTION" -- we learn about and understand a character through the things they do -- and it's even more true in our biz than his. Also, the "want" has a way of gathering those zillion little details you've created into a coherent whole, and helping you decide which ones are important and which ones aren't.

So, after you've answered all the little questions, ask and answer these two big ones:

BIG QUESTION 1: What does she/he want most in life (or, for that matter, after it)?

BIG QUESTION 2: How is she/he going to get it?

By answering these last two questions, you not only turn your character into a dramatic character, you turn her/him into a -- horrible word -- "protagonist." Click here to see dictionary.com's definition of the "P" word.

Oh yeah, and give your character a name too.

POST-IT NOTE (apropos nothing in particular):

"A play is a Phoenix, it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think. It is somewhere in between and success versus failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it actually approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft."
- Tennesse Williams

To Handout 1