Characters to Go

 This month's blog hop topic is Creating Compelling Characters who drive the plot and keep readers reading. My heading is somewhat of a cheat, in that it's the title of one of my how-to writing manuals which I produced years ago in concert with my assessment and editing service. Eventually, I combined a dozen or so of the manuals into one giant edifice (truly, you could use the thing as a stepladder) with a long title. Characters to Go became a part of that.

Mind, I'm not simply reproducing chunks of that book for this post. That really would be cheating!

I've been creating characters for more than fifty years. My earliest ones were generally girls of about my age (then) or animals. The human characters tended to be fascinated by animals, fantasy, stories and country adventure, just as I was. I suppose most of them were offbeat, just as I was, and am.

I never had any desire to write about immoral characters, or MCs who were cruel or nasty or unlawful or even disobedient by nature. I suppose my philosophy might have been summed up by parts of the Twelfth Doctor's farewell speech... which was apparently written by Steven Moffat and Peter Capaldi. 

As I've grown beyond my teenaged self, I have no doubt my characters have become more complex and more shaded and three dimensional, but my basic feeling about them hasn't really changed. I want the characters in whose company I will spend days, weeks, or occasionally months or a year or so to be people (or animals) whose presence I will enjoy. So- my characters aren't shrill, strident, self-important, pessimistic, bullying, overbearing or--well, you get the picture. Oh, and they're never wilfully stupid. They don't jump to silly conclusions.

A reviewer once said it takes a great writer to produce a (morally) good character who is interesting. I make no claims to be a great writer, but I do want my characters to be interesting. 

So, with my penchant for writing likable characters, how do I make them interesting to readers? 

The truth is, I seldom  plan my characters in any detail. I begin with a name, age and general story role and let them develop from there. This is not to say I don't know how to characterise, but more that it's become an organic process. I get to know them as I write. Think of how friendship grows. There's always a first meeting, at which you usually don't know much about the other person. As you come to know that person, the acquaintanceship might develop into friendship, or not. Often, we meet a group of people at the same time- classmates, a work team, a club or sports group, or a mob of mums and dads at Playgroup. Often, we take to one or two of them almost immediately. We first notice the obvious- appearance, clothing, manner, voice, expression, body language. Next, we learn the details, family situation, interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes. Sometimes a friendly acquaintanceship never becomes anything more. Sometimes it turns into a true friendship. It can also turn into dislike or annoyance, of course, and what we come to dislike might be the very things we found attractive at first meeting. 

Someone who is immediately friendly, interested and welcoming might become over-familiar, clingy, or possessive. Someone whose wit and ready laugh seemed so entrancing might come to seem a bit cruel and patronising. The talkative person who asks you questions might turn out to be a gossip. The open person who tells you so much at first meeting might really be self-absorbed. 

So it goes as we get to know people in real life. So it goes for me as I get to know a character in one of my stories.

I don't go in for long descriptions, but I do try to give enough visual cues for readers to be able to picture the characters.  I allow them to reveal their other quirks and attributes as we go.

Here is a scene with three characters present. The POV character, Tamzin Herrick, has been away from Sydney for seven years. She's now in her twenties and she's come to find her highschool boyfriend from whom she was parted abruptly when her parents flitted and refused to let her say goodbye.

She has just seen Dequan come down the steps from his flat.

Tamzin would have known Dequan anywhere. He was broader in the shoulders than the boy she’d loved, but he moved in the same way. His brown hair was a little longer and more unruly, but there was his old affectionate smile.

Love you, schat.

That was the last thing he’d said to her, using a Dutch endearment he’d picked up from his mother.

She wanted to run to him, as she had imagined doing so often over the past seven years.

She wanted to snuggle into his arms and kiss him in the way she never had.

She’d waited so long to be home in his arms, and in his bed, showing him how much he meant to her, but now it came to the point, she couldn’t do it.

He was smiling, but he hadn’t even noticed her. His attention was focused on the shapely redhead by his side. They had their arms around one another, and they were dressed for a run. The woman wore short shorts that displayed the sturdy legs of a netball player, and a white singlet athletic top with ANASTASIA stencilled across the chest in blue to match the shorts. Whether it was a brand or the woman’s name, Tamzin had no idea.

Probably her name. She looks like an Anastasia.

She watched, frozen, as Anastasia peeled Dequan’s arm off her waist and pulled his head down for a kiss while her other hand loosened the drawstring of his shorts.

She’s not…

No, she wasn’t. She let go, laughed and then she took off at a run.

Dequan got five steps after her before he clutched at his shorts and paused to tug them up and to re-tie the tape. He stared after the woman with obvious amusement, shaking his head.

“You’ll pay for that low trick, Stace,” he called, and then he loped after her.

Tamzin’s heart did a swoop and a jerk before it settled in her chest like an accidentally swallowed lump of ice. 

Tamzin is disappointed but she reasons to herself that she should never have expected he wouldn't move on... Later, she meets Anastasia by chance, when the young woman turns up as a design client.  She finds her likable but a bit brash and ingenuous, and, with the discomfort of that scene months before, she keeps her at arm's length.

Anastasia, on the other hand, seems to want to be friends.

Tamzin eventually gets to know Annie well enough to see that her wide-eyed and up-front approach is a facade. 

There is never an angry confrontation between these two young women. Why should there be? They both loved the same man at different times, and they both left him behind, Tamzin from necessity and Annie by choice when she realised she wanted more from the relationship than he did. 

I liked Annie well enough to write a whole book from her POV, and part of the fun was seeing what she was really like, and why. 

Here, as contrast, is that same scene we just saw from Tamzin's POV, this time from Annie's, in her book.

“Right, let’s get to this run,” Dequan said when Lucy had left.

“Don’t you need to finish the email?”

“I need to run!”

They walked down the stairs from the flat with their arms around one another. Anastasia, buoyed up with the delight to come, peeled free and pulled Dequan’s head down for a kiss. With her free hand she slyly loosened the drawstring of his shorts.

Then she let go and took off at a run.

She heard Dequan start running and slow down to deal with his drawstring. “You’ll pay for that low trick, Stace—”

She glanced behind and, about to quip back, paused mentally as she spotted a young woman on the other side of the street. She was wearing a smart lime-green dress and she had something on her back… a guitar?

Anastasia had an impression of brown wavy hair and hazel eyes, wide with shock and dismay.

What?

Dequan touched her shoulder. “Tag, you’re it!” and they ran on up Abigail Street.

 Just as Tamzin feels awkward when they later meet as client and provider, so Annie feels diffident. They each recognise the other but believe they have not been recognised.

Having this kind of awkwardness between two "nice" characters is, I think far more interesting than if they'd had the kind of rivalry readers might expect. They're not much alike.

Tamzin is an only child who was brought up by amoral, secretive, self-centred parents, then spent time in a very strange place meeting strange people before returning to take up her life seven years on. She is open and friendly by nature, but finds it difficult to trust people and, at the back of her mind, is the feeling that any friendship she makes won't be allowed to last. 

Anastasia is also an only child, but, unlike Tamzin who is contemplative and artistic, Annie is almost hyperactive, lively, curious and ambitious. Annie's family is laid-back and loving, but she also has some problems maintaining friendship, mostly because she doesn't know anyone who enjoys physical exercise as much as she does. 

Nevertheless, they are attracted to the same type of man, which makes an interesting dynamic to their relationship as it grows- especially when Annie meets Tamzin's husband-to-be and sees, with dismay, that he's exactly what she would have chosen for herself.

 Does she set herself up to “steal” Matt from Tamzin? Of course not. Why would she? The person who would do that is someone Annie would rightly despise.

Another of my main characters, Pippin Pearmain, is an eccentric. She's not sociable, but, like Tamzin and Annie, she has a strong work ethic, although she might not put it like that. Pip is in her sixties. She is small and slight, perpetually single, and, since her mother and her theatrical agent died within days of one another, she has effectively retired from performing and from social life. She lives alone in a cottage with two cats. Pip is devoted to routine. She does ballet practice, drinks lemon juice in water, tends her garden, goes beachcombing for the crystals called Jellico diamonds, writes lists in her journal (always with a green pen) and hums in a distracting way which makes other people uneasy. She lives very much in her memories, but when she unexpectedly meets her cousins Jan and Lupin, whom she hasn't see since her mother's funeral, her brittle shell starts to crumble.

Pip is never bored, despite her narrow routine, because her mind is always full of observation, introspection, memory and plans. Her performing (she doesn't think of herself as an actor) was mostly instinctive, and she often recalls advice given to her by her lost family and her agent whom she had known since she was seven.  These days one of the cats gives her advice. Pip accepts it as she accepts most things, knowing it’s unusual and unlikely, but not much caring. 

Having established Pip as a tiny wisp of an eccentric, it was fun to push her out of her retirement so she began to have adventures and experiences at an age when most people are winding down. She even gets a second-chance romance with someone she knew when they were teenagers. He's seventy now, but they take up their conversation as if they'd never broken it off.

This, I think, is part of writing compelling characters. Pip is in her sixties, and in some ways she looks like a stunted personality, but she really isn't. She's simply herself- the self she has always been. The seven-year-old Pip, sitting in a tree in the park as the little nymph, reading her book until required to interact with the performers beneath her, is the same person as the starstruck sixteen-year-old who, acting as an abducted daughter in a film, is enchanted to ride a grey horse in the arms of the actor playing a highwayman. She is the same person as the woman grieving when her mother dies, who finds it too much and so isolates herself from sympathy, who accepts a cat that converses with her, and who adlibs her way through a filmed play at a festival in her sixties, playing the visible consciousness of a comatose woman named Perdita. She's the same as the person who looks for a Jellico diamond on the beach to give to an old friend, who delights in the first pretty dress she's had in a decade, who insists on her rights at the bank, and who tries to educate an airline steward in the right way of brewing tea. 

Here is Pip having supper with her old friend Alain after meeting him again in their second film together after a hiatus of fifty years. He has invited her to visit his manor.

She said, slowly, “I might be here again in July…or possibly October, for a book launch. Then, maybe—”

Am I doing this?

He opened his arms, stepped forwards and gave her a friendly hug. “Please come, dear Pipkin. I’d love to show you my world and to see you in it. I always meant to. You could stay for a day or a week or a month or so. There’s plenty of room.”

“Do you have ponies?” It wasn’t entirely what she wanted to ask. A week was too little time. A month or so might be too long.

This is Pip telling her new friend Tamzin (yes, that Tamzin) about how she came to meet Alain…

I knew Alain a long time ago when I was sixteen. We spent three weeks together when we were both in a film. I played the daughter of a respectable family, and he was the Highwayman, whose family had fallen on hard times. He kidnapped me down a ladder and carried me off on his horse. He was supposed to hand me over to the villain, Lord Barth—that was an actor called Torren Fairfield—but in the end he couldn’t do it. He fought Lord Barth and took me back home.”

“And asked for your hand?” Tamzin raised her brows.

“No. I was sixteen, but Marigold, my character, was younger. The Highwayman presented me to my father, swore on his honour that I was unharmed and unsullied, told me to be happy, and rode off.” She closed her eyes, summoning the long-ago dialogue.

“Will I ever see you again, Highwayman? And he said, If the fates wish it, mon souci. And then he laughed and handed me a posy of marigolds. Look for me, if you will, at the sign of the marigold… and he blew me a kiss and strode out, ever so swishy, and Hope Gordon, playing Lady Heriot, grabbed my father’s arm and shrieked, After him! And Hein—Hoffmann, that was, said, Let him go, my love. Is it not enough that we have our daughter back? And she said, He’s a criminal! A miscreant! A villain! And Hein said, All of those, my lady, but also a man of honour.”

Tamzin broke into a peal of laughter.

“Yes, it was very corny,” Pip said, “and maybe that’s why it came to be a kind of cult favourite. It was made in the seventies, but more in the style of a golden age melodrama.”

“I wasn’t laughing at that. It was just you, becoming all those characters in the space of a few lines.”

“Oh, that.”

As the twig is bent, as the saying goes, and I believe compelling characters are those whose authors (or readers) can pick them up at any age and find them recognisable.

It's not as simple as giving characters quirks to make them stand out. These quirks have to be fully integrated into the personality. Take Oliver Farnorth, for example. He's in his sixties. He runs his old family house as a convention centre while his wife devotes herself to her mayoral duties, garden parties, crafts and council meetings. Oliver has a grumpy disposition, but he has enough self-awareness and enough pride to present, rather, as a gruff but equable host. He never curses, beyond his own inventions... by dog! He and Christine are childless and have run their long marriage along the lines of consideration and non-intervention. When Christine elopes with the deputy mayor, leaving Oliver with a month's worth of frozen dinners, he is offended, angry, hurt and ready to lash out. The new mayor, a young woman thrown in at the deep end, expects to hold the mayoral garden party at Farnorth House. Oliver expects she won't. Having vented at her he feels so bad at having let himself down that he calls her at three in the morning to apologise. Later, he prunes Christine's roses because the job needs doing. He also donates all the blue and navy clothes his wife used to buy him to charity and buys a new second-hand wardrobe in brown and green. 

He befriends the new mayor, Eve, who listens to his sour comments about his wife with equanimity until he eventually realises his anger is doing him harm and turns it around. He reverts to his grumpy gruff self, but his sense of humour is allowed out to play more often. He is surprised to find that he and Eve are friends who swap stories and advice, and who help one another to navigate tricky social situations.

Once he feels fit to be presented to the world, he astonishes himself by acquiring a temporary peacock...and a mistress, who happens to be Eve’s widowed grandmother.

As a deserted husband, Oliver might be defined by that, and, for a while, that's how he defines himself. However, he manages to move forward, and without the marriage that had become no more than a habit, he is able to find his own tastes, cook what he wants, and hold real conversations again- which, by dog, he does.

As usual, I've written a longer post than I intended. To see what my fellow blog-hoppers have to say on the topic, check out...

Connie Vines  http://mizging.blogspot.com/

Bob Rich  Do they grab your attention? 

Skye Taylor  https://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea

and this is me

Sally Odgers  https://behindsallysbooksmark2.blogspot.com