Developing Your Characters

It began like any other workshop. I was speaking at the Bakersfield, California Library, meeting with a group of writers hungry for information. Starved maybe. The topic was how to find and develop a character. Time was tight, so I limited the writing exercise following the lecture to ten minutes.

We writers can create characters in any number of ways. We can write the novel without knowing anything at all about our character and cut out three chapters later.

We can fill out character checklists.

Don’t those lists sometimes make you feel as if you’re back in school and taking a multiple choice test?

Eye color? Blue!

Hair? Red.

No, I mean blond. No, wait…

Jack M. Bickham, who wrote Scene and Structure as well as more than 80 books in his lifetime as an innovative teacher of writing, used to say that he sat in one chair to interview his character, then switched seats to answer himself. A little excessive, perhaps, but he had something there. He was letting himself hear the character’s voice. That’s the purpose of the character letter. You allow the character to write to you, in his/her own voice.

Dear Mary Jane, My names is…and I was born in ….and am …years old.

 Let the character tell you everything. Yes, you will cover some of the information on the dreaded checklists I mentioned earlier, but it's more organic when it flows out in the character's own voice. If dialogue appears, just keep writing. You'll be able to use that dialogue later one. Right now, you are just letting that character emerge. 

Psychologist Dennis Lewis says that we write from the same part of the brain from which we dream. It is the unconscious wanting to be heard and to heal. In a way then, writing is dreaming on paper.

At some point in the letter, you might start to feel uncomfortable and tell yourself it’s time to stop. Don’t. If you keep at it, the character will finally—sometimes after five pages, sometimes more—say to you, “My problem now is…” When that happens, you're there.

In other workshops of mine, writers have written the letters one day and brought them back the next. In Bakersfield, I had no idea what the results would be in such a short period of time.

"Okay," I said. "What do you know about your character that you didn't know ten minutes ago?"

To my surprise, I was bombarded with answers.

"I didn't know what her true motives really were."

"I learned that he isn't as decent as I thought he was."

"She told me why she really ran away."

And even (from a high school student): "I found out my character was boring, and so now she's a jewel thief."

So it went with more than 40 writers. When they finished speaking, we looked at each other in disbelief, and I was as stunned as everyone else, perhaps more so. Every person who had written a letter would leave the room with a more fully developed character.

Why am I telling you this? Because you already know everything you need to know about creating your character. And because just ten minutes really can change everything.

Here's to your next ten.