Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [35]
More often, the characters we create are drawn in part from people we have known or observed, without our in any sense attempting to recreate the person on the page. I may borrow a bit of physical description, for example, or a mannerism, or an oddity of speech. I may take an incident in the life of someone I know and use it as an item of background data in the life of one of my characters. Little touches of this sort from my own life experience get threaded into my characters much as bits of ribbon and cloth are woven into a songbird’s nest—for color, to tighten things up, and because they caught my eye and seemed to belong there.
The first time I consciously transferred an aspect of a real person into a novel was when I wrote a book called After the First Death, a murder mystery set in the half-world of Times Square streetwalkers. I had at the time a nodding acquaintance with one such woman—and on one occasion she told me about a relationship she’d had of some duration with a married man from Scarsdale. She’d evidently been off drugs at the time, and seeing him exclusively, but after he’d cancelled a planned European trip with her and took his wife to the Caribbean instead, she ended the relationship and returned to prostitution and heroin addiction.
I don’t know that the character of Jackie in my novel had much in common with the woman who told me this story. Jackie was certainly a romanticized character; if she didn’t have a heart of gold, she had at the very least a soft spot in her heart of brass. Nor did I know the real-life hooker well enough to haul her off the streets and plunk her down on the printed page. But certainly the portrayal of Jackie owed a lot to my impression of her, and the story about her Scarsdale Galahad found its way almost word for word into print.
Some years later I wrote a pseudonymous novel in the manner of Peyton Place—sensational doings in a small town, that sort of thing. I very deliberately set the book in a particular town with which I was personally familiar, and several of the characters owed something to real people who lived in the town. For one character, I borrowed the physical description of a local actor, not intending to ape him too closely; only to find that the character I’d created had a will of his own and insisted upon speaking and behaving precisely as his real-life prototype spoke and behaved. I couldn’t write the character’s dialogue without hearing my friend’s voice booming in my ears. Now I suppose it’s possible to fight that sort of thing, but what writer in his right mind would presume to do so? The best possible thing had happened. A character had come to life. I might be inviting a lawsuit or a public thrashing by allowing him to play out his part, but I’d have been false to my art to do otherwise.
For me, the most exhilarating moment at the typewriter is when a character takes on a life of his own. It’s not an easy thing to describe. But it happens. One can scarcely avoid playing God when writing a novel, creating one’s own imaginary universe and arranging the destinies of the characters as one sees fit. When the magic happens, however, and a character speaks and breathes and sweats and sighs apparently of his own accord, one feels for a moment that one has created life.
It’s a heady experience, and so satisfying that you’d want it to happen all the time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t—at least not for me. Some of my characters live for me as I’ve described. Others walk around like empty suits, doing what’s required of them but never coming to life. They may work well enough for the reader—craft can disguise the fact that certain characters are just walking through their roles—but not for me.
This was the case with the war novel I talked about in the last chapter. The lead character in my first draft