The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [81]
Well, there are various ways and means of giving a character reality, none of which necessarily works all the time, but all of which may be worth trying sometimes.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
This tends to be easy for me; I “see” people very easily. Other writers have told me that they deliberately visualize popular actors or people they know as the original basis for their characters. With the exception of the Real People (see p. 140), I never do this. In fact, I was actually rather appalled by the idea when I heard this; it seemed rather like body-snatching. Still, whatever works …
Some writers write out the physical description of the character separately from the story itself—rather like the police description of a suspect. This description may grow to involve more than the purely physical, including things such as mannerisms and incidental characteristics (e.g., this person bites her nails, sunburns easily, smokes like a chimney—but only mentholated Super 100s—and is so overweight her thighs are chronically chafed). I don’t do this, either—I seldom write down anything at all, other than the actual text of the book itself—but many good writers do.
I could in fact “see” Brianna quite easily; the physical part of her persona was there from the beginning. I happen to have a tall, redheaded husband, and two redheaded daughters, so I had some experience to draw on, in terms of appearance and resemblances. Still, appearance is only a beginning.
IDIOSYNCRASY
One may also develop a character by supplying him or her with a striking idiosyncrasy of some kind. Mr. Willoughby began to assume a personality for me when I purchased a sprightly little volume from a remainder table, titled The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe. This went into every variety of foot fetishism one could imagine (and several that would never have occurred to me, I having led a sheltered life before I began writing novels), including a section on foot-binding and ancient Chinese attitudes toward the perfect “lotus foot.”
Having a Chinese man in the story already—and foot-binding being in fact an aspect of Chinese culture in the eighteenth century (as well as earlier)—I couldn’t resist the notion of letting Mr. Willoughby have a “thing” for feet—with the concomitant notion of a strong attraction toward women in general—which in turn led me to the story of his escape from China, and his true vocation as a poet.
Brianna, though, seemed not to have any striking idiosyncrasies. Part of the difficulty there, of course, was that she was quite young, with a sheltered upbringing. Parts of her emerged slowly—she had a feel for objects, the ability to make a space her own, manual dexterity, and a flair for building—but none of that was sufficiently striking as to illuminate her character for me.
CULTURAL BACKGROUND
One can also develop a character by supplying her with an Exotic Background. If a character comes from a different culture or society than the writer does, or than the story’s main characters do, one can sometimes understand her or round her out by reading about social customs, fairy tales (you learn as much about people from the stories they tell as from their more “official” histories), or other cultural attributes.
Mr. Willoughby, the houngan Ishmael, Louis XV—all these characters drew on elements of an exotic cultural background. But Brianna? English by descent, American by upbringing, thoroughly contemporary in outlook. Nothing helpful there, I’m afraid.
BACK STORY
One can also tell the character’s “back story.” That is, what led this character to his involvement in the situation where the writer has placed him? Even though this information may not be included in the story, knowing it may give one substantial insight into the character. (And then again, some of us write the back story and can’t keep it out of the main story, which is one of the