The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [9]
7. DON'T USE REAL PEOPLE IN YOUR STORY
ONE OF MY NEW WRITING students, a gent we shall call Wally, came by my office the other day with the first pages of a new story. I read the pages and then handed them back to him.
"Wally," I complained as gently as I could, "these characters are really not very interesting."
Wally frowned, not understanding.
I tried again: "Wally, these characters are dull. What they are is flat and insipid. They are pasteboard. They have no life, no color, no vivacity. They need a lot of work."
Wally looked shocked. "How can these characters be dull? They're real people—every one of them! I took them right out of real life!"
"Oh," I said. "So that's the problem."
"What?" he said.
"You can never use real people in your story."
"Why?"
"For one reason, real people might sue you. But far more to the point in fiction copy, real people—taken straight over and put on the page of a story—are dull."
Wally sat up straighter. "Are you telling me my friends are dull?"
"Of course not!" I told him. "That's not the point. The point is that in fiction real people aren't vivid enough. Good characters have to be constructed, not copied from actuality." Wally was discouraged. But I tried to explain it to him with something like this:
One of the toughest jobs we ask of our readers is to see characters vividly and sympathize with them. Consider: all your readers have to go by are some symbols printed on a sheet of paper. From these symbols, readers must recognize letters of the alphabet, make the letters into words, derive meaning from the words, link the meanings into sentences. From that point, readers must make an even more amazing leap of faith or intuition of some kind: they must use their own imagination to picture—physically and emotionally—a person inside their own head. And then they must believe this imagined person is somehow real—and even care about him.
Readers need all the help they can get to perform this arduous imaginative-emotional task. They have a lot to see through to get the job done even imperfectly.
To help them, you can't simply transcribe what you see and know about a real person. You have to construct something that is far bigger than life, far more exaggerated. Then, if you do your job of exaggeration extremely well, your readers will see your gross exaggeration dimly, but well enough to think, "This constructed character looks like a real person to me."
Good fiction characters, in other words, are never, ever real people. Your idea for a character may begin with a real person, but to make him vivid enough for your readers to believe in him, you have to exaggerate tremendously; you have to provide shortcut identifying characteristics that stick out all over him, you have to make him practically a monster—for readers to see even his dimmest outlines.
Thus, even if you start with some real person, you won't end up with him as your character.
For example, if your real person is loyal, you will make your character tremendously, almost unbelievably loyal; if he tends to be a bit impatient in real life, your character will fidget, gnash his teeth, drum his fingers, interrupt others, twitch, and practically blow sky high with his outlandishly exaggerated impatience. In addition, you may find that it helps your creation if you take one or two other real-life people and add their most exaggerated impatient characteristics.
What you will end up with, if you do well, will be a dimly perceived construct who no longer bears any resemblance to the real person with whom you started. Because good characters are in no way like real people ... not really.
In addition, to create a fictional character, you will give him some highly recognizable tags that are—again—more exaggerated than anything we'll ever encounter in real life. Thus our impatient character will also be nervous.