Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [37]
I had this to say about Spinner:
They called him the Spinner because of a habit he had. He carried an old silver dollar as a good-luck charm, and he would haul it out of his pants pocket all the time, prop it up on a table top with his left forefinger, then cock his right middle finger and give the edge of the coin a flick. If he was talking to you, his eyes would stay on the spinning coin while he spoke, and he seemed to be directing his words as much to the dollar as to you.
This spin-a-silver-dollar bit was a handy character tag; it gave Spinner something memorable to do, made for an interesting bit of business to go on during Spinner’s conversation with Scudder, and later in the book provided a way for Scudder to underscore Spinner’s death—he purchases a silver dollar from a coin dealer and takes to carrying it around himself and spinning it on tabletops.
This isn’t characterization. It’s gimmickry, but sometimes for me it’s the first step in the process of characterization. It gives me a tag, a handle, and the actual character evolves in due course through a process that seems to be largely intuitive.
The sort of handle you get on a character varies with the kind of writer you are and the particular character you’re dealing with. I find I’m most likely to latch onto characters by the way they sound, the manner in which they use language. It’s often through their dialogue that they become real for me, and I frequently fasten onto this while having a less concrete notion of what they look like physically. Sometimes, though, I start with a particular visual picture of a character and all the rest follows.
I still remember a line that popped into my head a few years ago after I caught a glimpse of a woman in a Los Angeles restaurant. “She had the pinched face of someone who’d grown up on a hardscrabble hillside farm and would do anything to keep from going back.”
I didn’t write down those imperishable words but they stayed in my mind, along with not only an image of the woman I’d seen but a whole set of attitudes. I knew who the woman was and how she would sound and what her reactions would be to various phenomena. I didn’t know what use I might one day make of her, whether she’d be a heroine or a villain, a protagonist or a spear carrier. So far the only use I’ve gotten out of her is here and now, to illustrate where characters come from and how they evolve, and it’s possible that’s all the use I’ll ever get out of her.
If you keep a notebook, character sketches are a logical item to include. Maugham’s Writer’s Notebook makes fascinating reading because of the character sketches it contains, many of which ultimately found their way into his short stories and novels. You can jot down whatever you want—your actual observations of a real person, some bits and pieces of gimmickry you’ve thought up or observed and might eventually want to use for a character of your own creation, or any sort of tag or impression that might blossom into a full-blown character.
Which comes first, the plot or the character?
There’s no answer for that one. A book may start with either the plot or the characters more fully grasped, but both aspects generally take shape side by side as the book itself is formed. Even in books where I think I know pretty much what’s going to happen before I start writing, unplanned incidents crop up in the plotting and invariably call for the creation of new minor characters on the spot. My lead, say, goes looking for someone at a hotel. His quarry’s out, but a conversation ensues with the hotel clerk, either to develop certain information or just because such a conversation would be part of the natural order of things. I can make that clerk as much or as little an individual as I want. He can be tall or short, young or old, fat or thin. He can have something or nothing much to say.
Is he doing something when my lead approaches him? Looking at a girlie magazine? Filling