bottledworder

What is our relationship to characters we read about in books? What is our relationship to characters we create ourselves? How similar are these two types of relationships with real life interactions? I had to grapple with these ideas last week. 

When you read a work of fiction and remember a character, you may remember them because you like them or hate them. If you’ve liked the book for a long time, over a period of months or several years, the character might stay with you and grow with you. Over a decade or more, your perspective of the character may change as you change. You may become more realistic as a person, more forgiving or capable of understanding why a character may do certain things or behave the way they did. You may also stop liking certain traits that you did before in people and become more appreciative of other traits. In some ways, knowing a character is just like knowing a person for a long time.

In real life too, we move through discrete moments of knowing, from point to point of increasing familiarity with a person. Unless the person is immediate family, we move from one day of meeting them to another day and carry the memory of who they are in their absence as a point of continuity in the interim. Should we feel like they have changed, our point of comparison is a memory of them from the past. 

When the character is fiction, our memory of the person is not real but of what we read in a book, usually some time ago. If we really want to be certain that we remember correctly, we can refer back to the book. The book hardly portrays the person day to day, hour to hour and so we have to form our own impressions of them as points of continuity in the interim. These whole lot of connecting dots later become a living memory of the fictional person as if we knew them. Perspective complicates this idea of knowing but we do form a mental picture from some point of view which is a combination of the presentation in the book and who we are ourselves as a person and what we like or dislike. 

Why do I talk about this? I have been trying to create a character that could become such a living person first in my mind and then in the minds of readers. Someone who would come alive.

There was a character I tried to write about last week. I wanted him to be human, a mixed sort of character with likeable traits but full of human flaws. I have known many people like him in real life. I wanted the reader to like him but also recognize his shortcomings and the reasons he may have developed those unlikable traits. I still wanted him to be attractive to the reader though and also to the female protagonist. I wasn’t sure whether he would overcome his flaws or continue to remain who he is because of these flaws later in the plot but I didn’t want anybody to totally despise him.

Yet, as I tried to write him out though, I ended up creating a character I highly disliked. I realized that not only did I dislike him a lot but my readers would dislike him too. I wasn’t able to make him hold both likeable and unlikeable traits simultaneously, in the same moment. I only had a few moments of dialog and description and interaction to develop his traits. Either he said a lot of unlikeable things and could not stand up to other people or he showed smarts, strength and leadership, never both aspects together. Perhaps I had already disliked him too much before there was any hope of liking him. How could I expect readers to think of him any differently? 

As a writer, I have been thinking about the process of what makes a reader not totally despise a person so that he can be likable later in the plot. I mean Fitzwilliam Darcy is pretty obnoxious at the beginning but we are meant to like him later, aren’t we? He is rich of course and that’s surely likeable in a romantic plot but is that it?  What hints can we give a reader about traits that are currently unlikeable but which can later develop into tolerable or even attractive qualities in a character? How do I do this myself as a writer? How will I show this change?

How do we remember a person? Do we remember a person through our own memories of them or are those memories fashioned by the attitudes of other people towards them? Are those memories and impressions altered by subsequent events in the plots of our lives? How does change or acceptance come? The answers will also have to be woven into other characters and scenes and events, not just into this one character.

Indeed, creating a character is not easy!