If the writing’s competent, my interest may flag nevertheless if I find that I just don’t give a damn whether the characters live or die, marry or burn, go to the Devil or come out the other side. This may happen because I just don’t believe in the characters the author has created. They don’t act like real people, they don’t sound like real people, and they don’t seem to have the emotions or thoughts of real people. Thus they’re unreal as far as I’m concerned, and I say they’re spinach and the hell with them.
Note, please, that my complaint is that these wooden characters don’t seem like real people, not that they aren’t ordinary people. Some of the most engaging characters in fiction, clutching my attention as the Wedding Guest hung on to the Ancient Mariner, have been the farthest thing from ordinary. Nothing about Sherlock Holmes is ordinary, yet the character’s appeal has been such as to keep the Conan Doyle stories in print to this day, and to have Holmes resuscitated and brought back to life in several novels by contemporary authors, novels which owe their success almost entirely to public enthusiasm for Conan Doyle’s eternally fascinating character.
Similarly, I’ve found Rex Stout’s books about Nero Wolfe endlessly rereadable. There’s nothing ordinary about Wolfe, and it’s not only his corpulence that makes him larger than life. I don’t reread the books because their plots are so compelling, certainly not the second or third time around. Nor am I dazzled by Stout’s sheer writing ability; while it was considerable, I never got interested in his non-Wolfe books, either the mysteries starring other detectives or the several straight novels he wrote before creating Wolfe. No, I read him as I suspect most people do, for the sheer pleasure of watching the interplay between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, of seeing these two men react to different situations and stimuli, and of participating vicariously in the life of that legendary brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street.
Ordinary? Scarcely that. But so real that I sometimes have to remind myself that Wolfe and Goodwin are the creations of a writer’s mind, that no matter how many doorbells I ring in the West Thirties, I’ll never find the right house.
That’s characterization. It was the ability to create characters readers could care about, too, that made Charles Dickens a monumental popular success. While Oscar Wilde might have remarked that only a man with a heart of stone could read of the death of Little Nell without laughing, the truth of the matter is that readers did not laugh when they read that scene. They wept.
Some novels depend rather more on characterization than do others. In the novel of ideas, the characters often exist as mouthpieces for various philosophical positions; while the writer may have taken the trouble to describe them and give them diverse individual attributes, they often have little real life outside of their specific argumentative role in the novel.
Some whodunits rely on the clever intricacy of their plotting to hold the reader’s attention, stinting on characterization in the process. Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mysteries can be compulsively readable, but does Mason himself ever emerge as anything more than a forceful courtroom presence and a keen legal mind? Agatha Christie supplied her Hercule Poirot with a variety of attitudes and pet expressions, but I’ve never found that the little Belgian added up to anything more than the sum of these quirks and phrases. He serves admirably as a vehicle for the solution of brilliant mystery puzzles but does not interest me much as a character.
On reflection, it seems to me that even in these categories — the novel of ideas, the plot-heavy whodunit — my favorite novels are those in which the author has created characters to whom I am capable of responding strongly. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a brilliant novel of political and philosophical argument; I find it ever so much more effective because the lead character, Rubashov, is so absorbing a human being. And, while one of Ms. Christie’s Poirot mysteries will always do to fill an idle hour, I’m a passionate fan of her Jane Marple stories, not because their plots are appreciably different from the Poirots but because Marple herself is such a fascinating character, warm and human and alive.
So characterization is important in fiction, and especially so in the novel. The argument is hardly a controversial one. With that much established, how does one go about creating characters with whom the reader can identify, characters he’ll want to spend time with, characters whose fate will be a matter of concern to him?
A first principle of characterization may seem fairly obvious, but I think it’s worth stating. Characters are most effective when they are so drawn that the author can identify with them, sympathize with them, care about them, and enjoy their company.
At the risk of sounding like an armchair psychoanalyst, I would suggest that all characters are to a greater or lesser extent a projection of the author’s own personality. I know this is true in my own writing. While all my characters are not like me by any means, they are each and every one the people I would be were I clothed in their particular skins. In other words, when I create a character I work very much in the manner of an actor playing a role. I play that character’s part, improvising his dialogue on the page, slipping into his role as I go along.
This is most obviously the case with viewpoint characters; indeed, it’s commonplace for readers to make the mistake of too closely identifying an author with the attitudes and opinions of his novel’s narrator. But I know that in my own writing, this identification is true too for the subordinate characters, the villains, the bit players, for everyone who puts in an appearance. I do most of the work of characterization from the inside out, playing all the parts myself, writing all the dialogue, and walking all the characters through their paces. Naturally, in any given novel there will be some characters with whom I can more readily identify than others; it’s generally true those are the characters I do a better job with.
It’s important, I think, to play around with the idea of a character before plunging into a book. Occasionally in the past I’ve rushed to get a first chapter written without taking the time to figure out who the people were, letting the characters define themselves on the page. This was the case with Deadly Honeymoon; I was concerned with a plot and incident and dramatic effect, and so I began writing the book with no clear picture of the bridal couple who served as the book’s joint leads. I think the book might have been a good deal better had I known more about my characters before I began.
With Tanner, I had an abundance of time. After I’d first been taken with the notion of writing about a permanent insomniac, as I explained in the preceding chapter, I read something in an encyclopedia indicating that the British royal house of Stuart survived to the present time, with the current pretender some sort of Bavarian princeling. I thought this was splendid, and decided my insomniac could be plotting the restoration of the House of Stuart to the British throne.
That didn’t go anywhere, but it gave me this image of Tanner as a devotee of political lost causes. I thought of him from time to time and figured out other things about his character. I decided he’d have lots of time on his hands, not having to spend eight hours a day sleeping, and I thought he could put that time to use by compulsively learning one language after another. This sort of scholarly devotion seemed to fit the occupation I decided to give him — I had him write theses and examination papers to order for students with more money than industry.