As a novelist, think of the demand that we make on our readers. Aren’t the consumers of our work themselves consumed? Their lives injected with professional concerns, financial issues, family affairs, and personal matters, they find leisure time squeezed as they take less and less vacation.
And what leisure time that they have is caught up in competition. There are books to read, nonstop sports broadcasts, streaming events, social media, and video games. Thus leisure time contracts, and its remaining fragment is devoured by many hungry contenders.
So how do we convince this potential audience of ours to put aside these distractions and read our novels?
We are social. We human beings want to know about each other. And the more interesting the person, e.g., the teenager sitting next to us on a bus, humming a song we know, the woman across the street cutting the lawn with a push mower, or the man lying next to us on the beach reading a book that we like, the more we want to know about them. We want to learn about other people because that knowledge affects and impacts our lives.
This is what we seek. Impactful, consequential relationships in our lives. When you think about your day, would you rather run into interesting and engaging people? Or would you rather meet one dimensional projections who reveal little about themselves? Would you rather not be engaged with somebody who, on line in a grocery store, drops something in front of you, turns around, picks it up, and then claims to recognize you?
Great, powerful, moving, characters surprise, influence, and change us. Our goal is to let the reader develop relationships with our characters.
As a teenager, I was overwhelmed by Sinclair Lewis’ Martin Arrowsmith. The story of a young man on a professional journey searching for the meaning of science and his role in it, gripped me by the lapels and fifty-five years later, still has not let me go. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, streaming miniseries and innumerable sports “instant replays” have never come close to the penetrating questions Lewis posed for me in his novel through his characters.
When I want to be moved, I don’t surf the web. I read.
For our novels to be read, they must be more interesting then what the reader would otherwise do with their time. The creation of a positive emotional experience through characters conveys a different take on life, one that intrigues the audience, even if they don’t yet understand the background. Here is the introduction to Josh Silva a student in Saving Grace.
Josh Silva, first year medical student at Cornell-Weill Medical School in midtown New York City, floundered in his work. Today, like all the other Saturdays so far this fall, he sat in the quiet first floor library of Rockefeller University. Head down, the six foot, one inch student focused on his handwritten notes as he desperately tried to memorize the role of dihydrolipoyl transacetalase in the conversion of glucose to chemical energy. It’s just too much, he thought, drawing the carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen atoms in one mistaken pattern after another. Come on, he thought. Everybody’s struggling. It’s not that any one piece of this is hard. It’s that there’re too many of them to keep straight. And it’s the same for each course. It’s all coming too fast and too hard, a tough opponent who keeps throwing uppercut lefts and roundhouse rights of information. And it’ll just get worse, he reflected.
A medical school already lost after only one month in training. And next is a character we meet in Saving Grace.
A cell phone rang. Nicholson yanked it from his pocket and snapped it open. Yes?” He listened while staring right into Lindsey’s face, then hung up. “The shareholders are demanding a response about the fall in our stock price.” “Dr. Nicholson,” Lindsey said, as she exhaled slowly, “is there anything I can─” “I don’t want to hear a single word from your despic—” His cell rang again. “Hello?” he said into the phone. “I’d never forget. On my way.” He hung up the phone then turned to face her. “Get out of my sight, Silva. Those monkeys you didn’t save could have made a better decision that you did.” Stricken, she rushed out of the office.
What a despicable venal man, showing no compassion for a hard working employee. Yet heare the CEOis, two hours later with his daughter
A half hour later, when class was over, he kneeled down and Emma rushed over to him, falling into his arms. “Ummmmmwah” they both said at once. “That was a big kiss,” Nicholson said, he rubbed his forehead against hers. “When’s Mommy coming back,” Emma asked, bushy red curls covering her head. ”She was going to be home tonight,” Nicholson said, pulling back for a moment, “but she got held up. They have to check everybody very carefully to be sure that it’s OK for Mommy to fly with them. She’ll be home tomorrow for sure.” “She’s OK, isn’t she Daddy?” Emma asked, a trace of a frown starting to erase her dimples. “The plane where the people got hurt was on the other side of the world, honey,” Nicholson answered truthfully. “Mommy was nowhere near it. We can call her tonight.” “What are we having for dinner,” she said, twisting her head, keeping her eyes on his. “Daddy’s making something special.” “Yuck.” He dropped his eyebrows onto his brown eyes with a pretend-scowl for a long second. “Wanna go out instead?” “Then a download?” she asked, with a smile. “Sure, he said. “I’d like a movie too. But, only if your homework’s done first,” he said raising his eyebrows. “Will you help,” she said, pressing a finger against his cheek. “Sure.” “Let’s go, Daddy.” It shows a very humane side of a harsh and transactional man who nevertheless has a tender heart for his daughter. Something unanticipated.
Another man of mean character emerges from Breakthrough.
The huge man brought his giant fist down on the hotel radio-alarm clock, shattering the blaring digital instrument in two blows. In seconds, the cheery voice of the vapid weather reporter collapsed to a warbly hiss. She must be ugly, he thought. That’s why they put her on the radio. The broken clock died at 2:55PM. Now, awake and energized, his hate hymn, the daily morning recitation that galvanized his day, rolled into his thoughts, raring to go. Right on time. Waiting for him to climb aboard. But first Jasper Giles, VP-Legal of SSS Pharmaceuticals had himself a little email to send. He pulled his massive frame up in the hotel bed, grabbed his iPhone, and stabbed out the message with his fat fingers, keeping his painful toe from rubbing up against the sheets.
For another, less saturnine example, look at the relationship between Olivia Stedman and Kevin in the Catching Cold –Redemption.
“Kevin.” the female ex-reg exec called out from the sidewalk, backing away from the car, one hand across her full chest. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Thinking such nasty thoughts about me.” Kevin, ex-Senior VP Marketing for Tanner Pharmaceuticals sat up straight in the white Infiniti, watching in horror at the two women to her right, who first stared at Olivia, his ex-colleague and new girlfriend, then glared at him in the driver’s seat.
What fun. They’re both in their 60’s. They both are retired and they both just crazy about each other. They are not slipping silently into their emeritus years, trying to help a struggling company make it over the finish line. They enjoy life and relish each other.
Have fun So, developing characters is the opportunity to have fun with the book. You can play with different ideas as you develop characters. You can discard the, add them, mold them. And it doesn’t affect the writing of the book so much, because you haven’t really started that yet. So you can have a good deal of time flushing out these characters. Rather than make a character, white, make them from El Salvador. Rather than make a character Latino, make them from. Nigeria, These challenges flesh out our own imaginations. And the simple change of an idea that changes the childhood home of a character to the Wisconsin-Ontario border then from LA changes the entire trajectory of the character, opening up in your mind a new river of ideas as to how that character can develop. These are the kinds of character dimensions you free to think about, and play with. Developing characters really requires you to spend substantial time with yourself. Just as we ask readers to suspend their lives to invest in our characters we must, as authors, require ourselves to focus on our own lives and experiences as well as others that we know to generate characters who grip the reader, compelling the reader to follow what it is they do and say, So character development should be a slow process, an enjoyable process, a fulfilling process. And then with the theme of your book clearly in mind, and with the characters now fully developed, you can’t help but write the book, because the characters are going to tell you what it is that they need to say and what they will be doing. We are always interested in the characteristics and personalities of other people. That is a trait we have as a species, and that is something that the novelist wants to take ownership of. The more real your characters are, the more interesting the book will become. People will miss the entire theme of your book, however elevated that is, if your characters are flat, monotonic and predictable. I’m exploring ideas for characters in my next novel, Three Swords. And since this book is going to be exposing the reader to many new facts, I have to offset that pressure by making its characters as interesting, as enriching, as frustrating, as people can be. Because in the end, we all want to learn about other people
