11 May 2021

Creating a Believable Character Requires Knowing Their Heart


Writing what you know is advice beginners often get. You want to write something that seems real to the reader, so you need to really know it to write it correctly. Beginners sometimes think the advice means they can only write about something they've experienced personally. Only somewhere they've been. Only a job they've done. There's a funny old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin says he's writing a novel about a guy clicking through TV channels with his remote control; he's writing about what he knows. With time, however, writers usually realize that they can know anything well enough to write about it if they do enough research.

Or can they? Is the answer different when you're talking about voice?

I found myself wondering about this before I wrote my newest story "James." My main character, Nick, is a rock star, and that's something I definitely am not. Sure, I could do research about rock stars, what their lives are like, about touring and writing music and all of that. But could I understand the persona well enough to bring my character to life in an authentic way? The way he'd think. The words he'd use. When I write, I basically become that person in my head. Could I become a big bad rock star? (Those of you who know me in real life, stop snickering!) 

It worried me at first, but eventually I realized that I did know something about who Nick is, something important. Deep down, he's a person with a heart. And I know how to write that.

The big bad rock star
who inspired the story
Sure, there are people--and characters--who have no heart, no soul. But most people do. They care about specific people and specific things. Once you know what a character cares about, you can tap into it, and that enables you to make that character real.

What does Nick care about? His family and his friends. He cares about letting down his grandmother and wanting to make things right. He might be a big bad rock star, but he still has feelings. And these specific ones, I'd think all readers can relate to them. By tapping into them as I wrote the story, it made Nick relatable too.

That was a point I tried to make with the first line: "Even big bad rock stars can feel nostalgic." It's Nick's nostalgia that kicks off the chain of events in the story. It's his heart that drives the plot from there.  

That all said, while knowing a character's heart helps you understand him or her deep down--what pushes his buttons, how she'd react to pressure, for instance--to really bring the character to life, to really get the voice right, you also have to get the words right. And getting Nick's words right, in his thoughts and in his dialogue, wasn't easy. Nick might have been acting believably based on who he is deep down, but in the first draft, he didn't sound right. He didn't sound like a rock star.

He sounded too much like me. 

If you listen to me talk long enough, you'll hear me use whom when it's the correct word to use. A friend told me a year or two ago that no one uses that word, and I replied, "I do." The grammar is ingrained in me. That's not to say I speak properly all the time. But sometimes, perhaps often, I do, and it seeps into my writing.

My friend Tim reads a lot of my work before it goes out in the world. As he said to me after reading an early draft of "James," Nick sounded too grammatically precise. And he didn't use enough idioms. When I revised, I worked on that. I also worked into Nick's vocabulary some words that I would never use, words I find too off-putting, but they're words a man, especially a rock star, might use. So Nick uses them.

Making the right word choices also took due diligence in my next short story coming out, "A Tale of Two Sisters." In that story, my main character, Robin, is a twenty-four-year-old lesbian. I could relate to who she is deep down, and her personality is more like mine than Nick's is. But to ensure my word choices for her (and other characters) were right and that I didn't have the characters do or say anything that seemed off, I not only did research while writing the story, but I also used a subject-matter expert--a sensitivity reader--after I finished it.

Getting a character's voice right isn't always easy, but when you put in the work, you can make that character come alive off the page. That's what I tried to do with Nick in "James" and with Robin in "A Tale of Two Sisters." I hope you'll read these stories and let me know if I succeeded. 

"James" appears in Only the Good Die Young: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Billy Joel. The anthology came out last month from Untreed Reads Publishing. You can buy it in ebook and trade paperback wherever books are sold, but you can get the best deal at the publisher's website. Just click here

"A Tale of Two Sisters" will appear in Murder on the Beach, which will be published on May 28th in ebook form and in trade paperback sometime this summer. The ebook version is on sale for 99 cents until the publication date. To pre-order the anthology, click here. It will take you to a landing page with links to nine retailers that are selling the book, including the usual suspects.

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Before I go, a little BSP: I'm so happy that my story "Dear Emily Etiquette" has been nominated for the Anthony Award for best short story published last year, along with stories by Alex Segura, Art Taylor, Gabriel Valjan, and James W. Ziskin. People attending Bouchercon in August will be eligible to vote for the winner. In advance, you can read all five of the nominated stories through the Bouchercon New Orleans website. Just click here. The title of each of the nominated stories is a link.

22 comments:

  1. Good insight on writing characters different from you. I've written such characters only when they whisper in my ear, and this has me thinking I should be more intentional about pushing the boundaries.

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    1. I would try it, Leone. I think you have the skills to pull it off.

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  2. Voice is the most important and compelling thing to me as a reader. I liked that you showed us the mechanics of creating a believable voice for a character.

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    1. I'm happy to be helpful, Susan. Thanks for stopping by!

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  3. It's always a pleasure to welcome you into one of my projects, Barb, and I'm sure that those who read "James" in Only the Good Die Young will find — as I did — that you captured the voice of Nick the rock star convincingly!

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  4. I have to admit that thinking of you as a biog, bad rock star is amusing, but I also know that you can really write, so,I am sure that I will find "Nick" believeable. I often wondered where characters far from a writer's personality came from, but once I started writing in earnest and some characters took off on their own, well,I understood.
    Reaching to try to sound 'authentic' doesn't work; you have to get into the mindset and if you can get into a murderer's, or anothe nefarious character's mind, I am sure you pulled Nick off.
    (By the way,I also use "whom" when it is called for.)
    Good luck with these!

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    1. Thanks, Tonette! (And I think I'd be a marvelous big bad rock star!)

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  5. Barb, you definitely got the voice right in "James," and I think it is indeed a mix of sounding like a rock star and also getting at the heart of the character that makes it work. Will be curious to see how you tackled the same challenge in "A Tale of Two Sisters" (great title!)

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    1. Thanks, Adam! Hearing this from someone as skilled as you in a big relief.

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  6. Greatly enjoyed "James" in the collection, and this article made me want to go back and reread it. Thanks for the insights on how you captured the rock star's voice. Good writers have to do that a lot. I'm sure most (?!) members of SMFS haven't murdered anybody, yet they write realistically about murderers all the time.
    Bob

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    1. Thanks, Bob. But do we write realistically about murderers? I'd like to see one write a review that says, "I've murdered a dozen people, have eluded the cops for years, and this guy doesn't know me at all!" :)

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  7. Interesting post, Barb. I agree that voice is crucial, but you can often find a more common experience/type/situation you've been in that is similar. For example, rock stars are somewhat like teachers or CEOs or star athletes, but with better lighting and sound. They all have a certain amount of control. All artists are "alike" in their desire to create through their skill. And so on.

    I will be doing an event in a couple of months where my starting point is that EVERYONE is an expert on SOMETHING. It's a little like that. And if you can act out the role (preferabley in private), you're most of the way there.

    It's a lot like method acting, which, of course, also has its limitations. This was a fun read.

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    1. Thanks, Steve. And you make an interesting point. Probably really successful rock stars are like star athletes and CEOs because they all usually have to have a certain element of drive and tenacity to reach a top level of success. But I'd question whether some less-successful rockers are like star athletes and CEOs, if something about their personalities have led them to not achieve that high level of success. If Nick weren't as successful as he, I wonder if he would have been driven to take the risks he does in the story. (And here I am talking about him as if he's a real person.)

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  8. Barb, I just finally read "Emily Etiquette," and you got the voice of that one so right and drew me so far in that it didn't occur to me till afterwards that fancy weddings and bridezillas are actually farther outside my personal experience than rock stars. But as a writer, my process is different from yours in that I don't research, correct, or consult sensitivity readers. It's more like channeling the character, whether the voice is one I'm "supposed" to know, like that of Bruce, my cool, sardonic recovering alcoholic in New York, or one I'm not, like that of Diego, my 15th-century Sephardic sailor. I wish more editors had an instinctive feel for voice. I once had to reverse an edit that tried to make Bruce say he "hadn't gone sufficiently far" (oy vey!), because I'd used the word "enough" already earlier in the sentence. All sorts of voices "come through" for me (woo-woo!), but I don't construct stories about characters I can't channel that way. Ohh, that must be why you write a hundred times as many great stories as I do.;)

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    1. Thanks for your kind words, Liz. Delighted that I drew you into "Emily Etiquette" like that. I hear voices sometimes too, and it makes the writing easier, but other times it's a slog both to coax the voices out and to not put incorrect words in their mouths. I know I'm on the right track when I start thinking about the story when I'm not working on it, wen I start emailing myself repeatedly with another idea for the plot or character (or, usually, both, since they are usually so intertwined).

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  9. Voice is everything: once you have the voice, you can write anything. Congratulations on the Anthony Awards nomination!

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  10. Barb, so right! I have characters from places I've never been and who do things I've never done. And I love the "whom." My mother drilled that into me so it's embedded. I also can't do "that" for "who". Years of newspapering pounded "who" is for people, "that" is for objects. And I loved Dear Emily Etiquette.

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  11. I enjoyed your discussion of the process and then how you ensured you'd gotten it right through beta and sensitivity readers. It helps everyone to read how much work goes into writing and finishing a story. Every time I write a sentence in which I know "whom" isn't correct for the speaker, I struggle to omit it and recast the sentence to avoid the "error."

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  12. Thanks, Susan! I always appreciate your comments.

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