The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [80]
Likewise, Mr. Willoughby, in Voyager, was a “made” character.
Simply put, I needed to find a way to get Jamie Fraser across the Atlantic Ocean without killing him. Ergo, I needed a method of curing seasickness that would be reliable and that could plausibly exist in the eighteenth century. Aha, acupuncture! Perfectly plausible, but only if I had a Chinese person to administer it or instruct Claire in its uses. Enter Yi Tien Cho, aka Mr. Willoughby. (“Mr. Willoughby,” by the way, was entirely Jamie’s notion; I have no idea why he thought that a suitable name, but that’s what he insisted on calling him.)
Now, Mother Hildegarde and Mr. Willoughby are what I call “onions”; characters who develop slowly through the addition of multiple layers of personality, rather than popping up full-fledged as the “mushrooms” do. Mother Hildegarde was an onion, but her dog, Bouton, was a pure mushroom.
“Is that a dog?” I asked one of the orderlies in amazement, when I first beheld Bouton, passing through L’Hôpital at the heels of his mistress.
He paused in his floor-sweeping to look after the curly, plumed tail, disappearing into the next ward.
“Well,” he said doubtfully, “Mother Hildegarde says he’s a dog. I wouldn’t like to be the one to say he isn’t.”
One may not know everything about an onion all at once, but rather discover him little by little, by writing multiple scenes involving him, or by thinking about him and figuring out bits of his personal history. Claire and Jamie both developed in this way; even though I had a good grasp of their essential characters from the beginning, I gradually found out more about them as I deduced their personal histories and became well acquainted with them.
(I have writer friends who do this formally—give characters a history, before they even begin writing scenes involving them. Michael Lee West—who’s one of the best “character” writers around—often draws up extensive genealogical charts for her characters, including generations of people who never appear in the story. She also says that she knows what kind of peanut butter her characters prefer— smooth or crunchy. This would drive me crazy, but as long as it works for Michael Lee …)
What do you do when your characters don’t adhere to a plan, but go off and do things on their own? Ha! One should be so lucky all the time!
Hard Nuts
Beyond mushrooms and onions are the hard nuts (onions, mushrooms, and nuts; this is beginning to sound like an exotic recipe for turkey stuffing. Oh, well; cookery and writing have quite a bit in common, after all). These are the most difficult characters for me to animate; the characters whose function in the story is structural—they’re important not because of personality or action, but because of the role that they play.
One example of a hard nut is Brianna, Jamie and Claire’s daughter. She existed in the first place only because I had to have a child. The fact of her conception provides the motive for one of the major dramatic scenes in Dragonfly, but it didn’t matter at all at that point who this kid was or what she would be like; the fact that Claire was pregnant was the only important factor.
Still, once having created this kid— even in utero—there she was. I couldn’t just ignore her. Her existence—rather than her personality—dictated quite a bit about the structure of the third book, and thus, the second as well; I decided to use her as an adult, creating a “framing story” for the main action of the second book. Here again, though, it was her existence as a structural element that was important, rather than the girl herself. That is, I needed a grown daughter to whom Claire would confess the secret of her past, said confession leading to the future events of the third book.
But who the heck was this character? And having created her purely for plot purposes, how was I to give