CREATING CONVINCING CHARACTERS

Well, there I was, trawling for online articles on characterisation – specifically, the importance of drawing your reader into a ‘relationship’ with your characters – ie, making the reader believe in them, believe they are ‘real’ for the duration. Not everyone has a copy of Short Circuit - shame...
Without the belief of the reader my friends, you may write a nice story, but without the compliance of that reader, you are telling the story to yourself. In sex, there’s a word for that… which best not use here, OK?
So – whether or not YOU believe in your character is irrelevant. Actually. What you need, if you are still learning, as most of us are, is an indication that other people, readers, also believe. If you ask for feedback - including submitting to an experienced editor – and they tell you they don’t believe your character is real, or they ‘would not do/think/act like that’…… especially if they are good writers, experienced readers, don’t simply brush off their opinions. It is possible you’ve failed. Have the humility to think for a moment or two, that they may just have a point? Or you are in danger of - er- telling your story to yourself. Oops.

I digress. I wanted to share this article with you, as it seemed good stuff. On Fiction Writing - Convincing Characterization by Sandi Payne.

Or this one...actually, masses of different articles!

Or, you can just buy a copy of Short Circuit, and see what a group of top prizewinning writers have to say about it. Buy from Salt Publishing at 20% off. Cheaper than Amazon!!
Next craft article: dialogue. As and when.

More on 'The Gathering'

Cover to cover, this book is memorable for so many reasons.

From a writer's perspective it is one of those you know you will learn from. It's just so good. The writing is brilliant, the whole peeling away layers of character, layers of story, until the centre is reached. And it's a sad centre, but one that does not surprise when it comes.

The reader becomes part of The Gathering. Complicit, judgemental as much as they are. You become so aware of the people, the tensions, always tensions, the small cruelties.

Enright says somewhere in the book that people don't change, they reveal themselves. I went to sleep last night with that thought uppermost in my mind. And how, if I can take one thing away from this book as a writer, it's a deeper understanding that character is story.

One of the things that creates character is voice. And here, the voice is true, straight, unmanipulative.

I was fascinated to see on The Guradian book blog from the time of the Booker award, more than a little sniping about The Gathering. Assertions were made that Animal's People was a far better book.

I bought Animal's People at the time, rather than the winner, because it sounded fascinating.

I couldn't get into it, and have not read right through. I felt overtly manupulated by the writer, who was all over the pages like spilled soup. The voice was nothing... not coherent, not authentic in character, far far too aware, articulate, educated for the character it was meant to be portraying... it did not hold up to much scrutiny, and I can understand why it didn't win.

I felt manipulated too by the 'feeling' behind the book.. 'Lets create a really misshapen Calibanesque person... make him say 'Fuck' every few paragraphs... that'll sell!!"

and it does sell, sure, but it's not good enough.

At no point in The Gathering did I feel I was being manipulated. I felt I was instead in the hands of a strong, interesting intelligent writer who didn't need to use sensationalism to sell her story to me. When the revelations come, as they do, they are lightly done, as is the whole. Clever. I saw what happened as a child would see it, and as an adult. And far more importantly, as a reader... I was not fed the scenes cut up piecemeal, delivered in primary colours for me to watch like a bad B movie.

I was led to the scenes, slowly but inexorably downhill, so my feet wouldn't stop. And I was complicit, because I met the writer halfway.

Is reality in characterisation the same as stereotype?

Fascinating discussion in a writing group.

We all know that characters in strong fiction need to be ‘real’ for the duration of the story, in the sense that they must be ‘believed’ by the reader. They have to hold the ability to take the reader by the hand for a few minutes, helping to create the ‘fictive dream’ necessary to a seriously good read.

The reader has to be willing to be led, as well. It’s a two-way thing.

But as always, the writer is creating the world of the story, weaving the spell of the voice, the characters… to allow the reader to suspend disbelief for the duration.

How does the writer create ‘real’ characters?

Life is full of ‘real’ people... do we simply draw a few more of them?

Is it OK to create stereotypes on the basis that life is full of stereotypes, and they are ‘real’, so there’s nothing wrong with that?

Do some strong stories not need flesh and blood, differentiated characters?

All things to think about over Easter.

But I’ll just copy over a few NO NO snippets from The Willesden Herald’s list of things not to do in literary fiction, to add to the pot.


• Undifferentiated characters. A name is not a character. Pinky said this, Perky said that, Blinky said something similar and Pisky said the same, as the old wartime song might have gone. Each character should be a complete person, with their own C.V. if you like, their own history, temperament, habits, weaknesses, plans, objectives etc, though these need not and should not be explicitly listed as such.


• Boring. “Middle of page 3 and I am totally bored.” “Well enough written but what is the point?” “I’m losing the will to live.” Again, I keep repeating, the reader does not have a gun to his or her head. We have lives of our own. We don’t need to substitute somebody else’s dreary domestic arrangements in our minds for our own. To us, yours are far less interesting – and ours were not that interesting to start with. Who cares if somebody listened to a news story on the radio, went shopping, bought a packet of corn flakes. Yawn, yawn, yawn.


• Banal. Commonplace, dull, the sort of thing you hear every day. This is really a continuation of “boring”. A lot of stories about elderly people living in squalor. A particularly English phenomenon. A lot of stories about dying relatives. Ok, but they better be good. It’s important to write about these things, but when you do you need to realise that there will be ten other people writing about the same thing, so you’d better make it very good.


Me again.

I think strong fiction HAS to have a 'point' or why bother? If the close reader comes to the end of the story and thinks 'So? Why have I spent time reading this? ' because it is a close representation of life and how it is anyway... it's failed.

I think strong fiction HAS to have differentiated characters. Not just within a single piece, but your coal miner MUST differ from the hundreds of others in the lines. YOUR bored mother MUST stand out from the squillions of bored mothers in squillions of boring lives. YOUR old lady at the bus stop MUST engage the reader, not let the reader's eye wander past because shes been met thousands of times before.

The best line in the whole Willesden list , for this reader, is this

"Life can be banal, but we turn to fiction to find ...transcendence."

To be taken out of ourselves for the duration. To be given a glimpse of something else. To be lifted up and out.

Sure, an ordinary person can do that for us. A 'real' person. But they need flesh on their bones, blood in their veins, a beating heart, and they need to touch us.

To do that, they have to make us stop and listen. They need to fascinate, on some level, intrigue. They have to make us want to know...