Some writers plan everything before they start drafting. Others don’t. Yet many fiction technique sessions give thorough blueprints for designing characters, assuming that all writers should be planners. My question at these sessions is always the same: do characters spring into being from having been mapped? Do they come alive from scales drawn from the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator? When does the lightning strike and bring the monster to life?
I’ve never been a planner. I begin with characters in scene. But I argue here not for either planning or not planning, but both/and. Hence my subtitle “Method and Madness” above. Method advice must be nuanced by advice to create characters based on real people, not types. It is too easy for types to spring from maps. Working from real characters, at least what we understand of them, can deepen types into individuals. (Obviously, we will be projecting a great deal of ourselves onto these people.) What follows is how to start the method and madness, or yin and yang, of character study.
Method: My workshop requires lists for generating details—for example, how a character talks, how he or she is talked about. For description, I especially focus on how features of appearance affect us, and how desire can motivate or twist people. Both of these, which can be mapped, I suppose, can lead into complexity and life.
Types: Another method is generating types. This can get me outside of my own experience a little. Types can offer playfulness and variety. Psychological theories of personality can lead to discovery of patterns of others, whether based on an emphasis on thinking or feeling, introversion or its opposite, or some pattern of neurosis. Just as colorfully, there are those types arranged around medieval blood humors: melancholy, sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic types. The point is not to argue for blood types but to know how to use some understanding of how types—whatever scheme fires our imaginations—help us to create variety in characters.
Madness: The last part here is madness, or what we know of people from experience. This should never be ignored in favor of method. Obviously, most characters are extensions of their creators. But we can also move toward making composites. I have noticed that my characters are often combinations of people I have known more than they are creatures of certain molds.
Moving the discussion between individuals and types is intentional and even may imitate the way we live. Perhaps we classify ourselves as certain kinds of coffee drinkers or sports fans. But we are more than these, often concealing hope and desire behind socially acceptable masks. Perhaps we see our closest friends as individuals, our acquaintances as types. I offer that the method—the lists, the type schemes—can serve as form. The “madness,” the focus on our experiences of real people, can provide us with content and depth.
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Thomas Allbaugh is an associate professor of English at Azusa Pacific University. He has published fiction, essays, and poetry. His first novel, Apocalypse TV, is available from eLectio Publishers.