The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [82]
Brianna’s back story, though, was really her parents’ story (all three of them). She found herself in situations as the result of actions that certainly had an effect on her—but in which she had had no active part.
THE RATIONAL APPROACH
I once heard a talk on character development in which an author advocated using a standard psychological test (the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, in fact) to figure out what characters were like, and get a grip on them before writing. I’m not a rational writer at all, so this notion does nothing for me (though I suppose I wouldn’t really like to think of myself as an irrational writer).
THE INTUITIVE APPROACH
And finally… you can just live with characters for a while, put them in different situations inside your head (not story situations, necessarily; just things like “Character A cuts his toenails. Does Character B offer to help, watch closely, turn away in disgust?”), and gradually get a feel for them.
Similarly, you can learn about the characters by the way the other characters regard them. Brianna finally began to come to life for me when Roger, watching her in church, thought to himself, Though capable of the most tender expressions, hers was not a gentle face. Aha! I thought. At last I know something about her; she doesn’t have a gentle face. And from that, I began to intuit why, and the conflicts that might underlie someone ungentle but at the same time capable of tenderness.
Returning to the basic story question: What does this person want? That’s where the complexity of Brianna Randall Fraser lies, I think. The superficial answer would be “She wants her father.” But that’s not quite it.
If she were a teenager or a younger girl, then yes. But she is an adult young woman, well-educated, fairly self-confident, and on her own. Of course she has the deep-seated yearning for a father that all girls have— but at the same time, she’s had a father’s love … and returned it.
So she may want to know Jamie Fraser out of a sense of curiosity, loneliness, obligation, etc.—but it’s not the same feeling as that of a woman who had never had a father at all. She feels complete in herself; and yet there is that urge to know the truth about herself—and about her parents’ relationship.
The urge to find out, though, is complicated by her feelings of attachment to Frank. Many adopted children refrain from searching for a birth parent out of feelings that this is somehow a betrayal of a beloved “real” parent. Add to this the feelings of abandonment caused by Claire’s disappearance into the past, and you have a young woman with greatly conflicted feelings: the urge to find out battling with the urge to avoid the whole issue, love for her mother versus subconscious anger at her departure, and finally—curiosity about Jamie Fraser, warring with feelings of filial love for Frank.
The general result of all this is to cause her to become rather secretive; she deals with her conflicting urges by concealing them. Only Roger—adopted himself, but with a firm grounding in his own history— understands.
And so gradually I “found” Brianna, mostly by watching Roger as he fought his way through Brianna’s layers of self-protection.
ARE YOU CLAIRE?
Evidently there are a great many people under the impression that all fiction is essentially autobiographical; I think these are the same people who want to see a movie made of the Outlander books because they want to see “what Claire and Jamie look like.”
But to answer the question …
Physically? Well, disregarding such small matters as height, hair and eye color, hair texture, skin pigment, and build, of course—I mean, we’re both obviously female.
In terms of personality and attitude … well, as the result of having been raised in a conservative Catholic home and school, I am completely unable to swear. I will say, “Damn!” in situations of extreme stress, such as dropping an iron skillet on my foot, but that’s it. Consequently, Claire swears for me. Being a person of great courage and forthrightness—attributes