Post #113 February 26, 2018

“Growing Characters”

To grow a plant, stick it in the ground, add water and fertilizer and let nature take its course.  To ‘grow’ a character in a story, you have to do some other things.

Characters grow when they change in the unfolding of the story.  Sometimes they grow in positive ways.  Sometimes not.  Since our readers experience the events of the story vicariously through our characters, it behooves us to make them as realistic as possible.

How is this done?

1. For me, it starts with knowing your character, especially your main characters, as well as possible.  I do this by writing down beforehand a fairly extensive chronological biography and a basic personality analysis.  For example, let’s use the main character from The Farpool Stories.  Meet Chase Meyer….

“Chase Meyer gives one the impression of a happy-go-lucky fellow.  He seems to be unconcerned about anything and to live in the moment.  He seems to many people, even those who know him, to be almost like a child. This isn’t true but his outward demeanor is often mistaken for childlike innocence and wide-eyed wonder at the world.

Chase is motivated by curiosity, by learning and especially experiencing new things.  Some might call him an adrenaline junkie…he likes to experience things himself.  He does get a rush out of new experiences.  He is not one to spend a lot of time studying things.  Detailed learning is not something he does well.  He prefers to do things.  He learns by doing.

There are exceptions to this.  Chase likes sea sports and he likes music, especially a genre popular in the early 22^nd century called techjam.  He’s always been intrigued by being able to make sounds and make songs.  He likes to sing.  He can find within himself the discipline to do something he wants to do, like learn to play the go-tone, jam with the Croc-Boys, and learn how to scuba dive safely.  His Dad Mack sometimes has to restrain his impulsive, somewhat head strong son.  Scuba diving does require attention to detail and following safe practices.  Mack has hammered that into his son’s head for years.  But his nature is impulsive.

Chase is an ocean bum.  He grew up around the ocean and has spent most of his life around oceans.  He has maintained a lifelong interest in great sea stories, and great sea explorers.  He doesn’t normally read a lot but he likes to follow their lives and stories on tablet shows from time to time.  In his dreams, he sometimes fancies himself as a great explorer.  He has the curiosity and the impulsiveness and the sense of daring.  One of his great loves is cave diving in the Big Bend and central Florida areas.  It can be dangerous.  That’s why he likes it.

What does Chase imagine himself doing ten years from now?  His Dad Mack has offered him an opportunity to come into the surf shop business as a partner, but deep down inside, Chase doesn’t see himself as a businessman.  Mack wants to expand.  Chase wants to dive.

Although he doesn’t worry a whole lot about the future, when asked, Chase would probably say he sees himself as some kind of explorer.  There aren’t too many frontiers left on Earth for explorers.  Most of the oceans are being mapped by robots, by the early 22^nd century.  People live permanently on Mars and the Moon and in the asteroid belt.  Maybe he could explore Europa or some icy outworld.  Frontiers and new challenges beckon to him. 

The opportunity to go through the Farpool and experience another world like Seome is a challenge and opportunity that Chase Meyer could never resist.”

2. The next step for me is to put my main character(s) into situations of increasing difficulty.  Give him or her problems to solve or confront.  And these problems should grow organically out of the story narrative.  Rather than have Chase save Earth from a wayward asteroid that appears out of the blue, why not have Chase deal with the political and cultural problems of organizing an effort to deflect the asteroid?  Much more realistic, don’t you think?

3. Because I know my character from previous work on his background, I can now more easily decide how my character Chase will respond to the next big problem he faces.  This response is one of the most important forces driving the story forward.

4. The next step is deciding (for me, ahead of time), how my character (Chase) will change when he encounters or suffers the results of his response to the problem.  Living life changes us, every day.   Sometimes in big ways, some times in small ways.  In the case of Chase, he is changed in the sense that he comes to a fuller and deeper understanding of what he wants out of life and what kind of person he really is.  In other words, he grows, as a person, just like you and me.  Since that should make him more realistic and perhaps sympathetic, the reader is that much  more fully engaged with the story. 

5.  After this challenge and response scenario, the story advances to the next problem.  Ideally, Chase’s response to the first problem generates complications that lead to the next one.   And the next one could be even more difficult than the first.  Kind of like real life, huh?

Several points should be reiterated about this sequence of events.  The problems your characters face should grow from the story itself, and hopefully, come as a result of their own (often) misguided efforts.  The problems should compound for awhile and throw up ever-greater obstacles to your character’s well-being and happiness.  In the end, your character somehow manages to overcome the problems and either stands on top of his ‘mountain’ in triumph or fails magnificently.  And in this process, he learns something about him or herself he didn’t know or suspect before.

Should the author attempt to guide this process in minute detail or should the author let the characters loose and see what happens?  My answer to this conundrum is ‘yes.’  I actually do a little of both.  I am a meticulous planner and outliner.  I want to know what’s coming ahead of time so I can lay the groundwork for it.

On the other hand, I’m enough of a realist to understand that sometimes a character takes over the story and forces the narrative in directions the author didn’t plan on.  I’m not averse to letting this happen but when it does, I invariably re-outline what will happen next as a result of this unexpected twist.  This is what makes writing fiction so challenging and rewarding.  If done well, it really engages the reader, who can marvel at an unexpected development and say, “Wow…I didn’t see that one coming.”

Authors grow characters by understanding them well and giving them problems to solve.  Just like nature can take a plant, with water and fertilizer, and make it grow, so too can an author drop a well-sketched character into the ‘soil’ of real life, mix in some problems, and let matters proceed from there.  And just like a gardener prepares the soil of his garden ahead of time, so too an author preps the story with his deep knowledge of his characters and what will most effectively and revealingly ‘test’ them to good effect.

That’s how you ‘grow’ characters.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 5, 2018.

See you then.

Phil B.