Bringing Characters to Life

I’ve spent the past few days in character development; inventing people, designing their personas, writing their histories, giving them names. I’ve done everything from picking my characters birthdays, to deciding their likes and dislikes, all the way to describing their favorite childhood memories – all so that going forward I will be able to bring these characters to life on the page.

To build a character is not easy. To ensure they are believable you need to make them live off the page, as though they were a real person and not just a fabricated persona. Their life stories can’t just begin and end where you set your novel. For the past few days, I’ve had to look backward into the personal histories of these characters to explain the people they are by the time they arrive in the pages of my novel.

Where characters are concerned Hemingway believes:

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel.”

With that in mind, I have started to think of these characters as real people. All their memories and voices have been building in my head, intersecting with each other. I am continuously jumping from one profile to the next as I think of some mannerism or childhood memory for these people I have created. To really bring them to life, I have been giving them some of my own memories and experiences. Another tidbit I picked up from Papa Hemingway:

“People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him.”

I have also been borrowing fragments and traits from the people in my life to to pull them straight off the page and into the real world. The hardest part has been to spread these fragments around so that no one person from my real life is identifiable with one of these fictional creations. One of my writing teachers once told me that being a writer is difficult because people are always finding themselves in your work, and are not always happy with the way in which they have been portrayed. You need to be willing to stand by your work and lose a few friends along the way. I would like to think that my friends and family will get over it, but with that thought in mind, I have been careful not to overly associate one of the characters in my novel with someone from my life. Again, I think Hemingway said it best:

“Most of the people in this story are alive and I was writing it very carefully to not have anybody identifiable.”

Once I feel strongly about these characters, I will begin really laying down the outline of how my novel will progress (more on that next week!). In the meantime, I need to finalize a few more character profiles. Thank you for letting me borrow your quirks and personality traits, hopefully you enjoy finding them in the finished product. If not, it was nice knowing you 😉