HOW TO WRITE FICTION - Lesson 2: It's Who You Know

If you go along with nine out of ten fiction writers, you will begin writing your fictional works by thinking of the characters. Even if you’re the odd tenth man out and you prefer to begin with something else -- plot, setting, theme, etc. -- you are going to need characters at some point. There are always characters in fiction. (Can you think of any exceptions?)

So the next logical question would be: where do fictional characters come from? More to the point: where will your fictional characters come from?

Characters Come From People 

That’s easy. The characters in your fiction will come from the people in your life.

But, you ask, what about all the great characters in literature that great authors simply made up -- baked from scratch, sewed together from whole cloth? The characters that simply materialized on the page from out of thin air, as if summoned by a snap of David Copperfield’s fingers? What about those characters? No such characters exist.

Think about it. Even if a fictional character isn’t based directly and consciously on a single person known by the author, the character is likely to act, interact, and react as people in general do. Otherwise, we won’t believe him or her and, as a result, we won’t believe the story.

In other words, no matter how different, how original, how unique an author intends a character to be, that character must behave in recognizably human ways. And the only way the writer can achieve this is, in some sense, to draw inspiration from people the writer has observed in real life.

So don’t think that the success of the great authors was primarily a matter of imaginative powers that you yourself do not possess. Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, Dickens and Victor Hugo, Henry James and Edith Wharton and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison all worked with the same raw material.

That raw material is the human race. As remarkable as they are, if Heathcliff and the Hunchback (of Notre Dame) weren’t fundamentally based on people at least somewhat like the ones we know, we wouldn’t care enough about them to continue reading. Even the four-footed denizens of Animal Farm are based on recognizable people. In fact, the pigs in George Orwell’s book are caricatures of very particular historical figures: Stalin, Trotsky, and others involved in the Russian Revolution.

Origin of Characters in The Great Gatsby 

What about F. Scott Fitzgerald? Did he draw the characters in The Great Gatsby from people in real life? The answer is an emphatic "yes."

Nick Carraway is based on Fitzgerald himself, a Midwesterner who came East to attend an Ivy League university and got swept up in the excitement and glamour of the Jazz Age. Now, Fitzgerald did not sell bonds, nor did he return to the Midwest, as Nick does at novel’s end. However, their reactions to what they witness are very similar. As his notebooks indicate, Fitzgerald responded to the excesses of the 1920s in much the way that Nick does: disapproval mixed with awe and a little bit of the fear of a small-town boy in the big city. (The book’s preface reveals some other interesting tidbits about Fitzgerald.)

Daisy Buchanan seems to be based in part on Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda. Born Zelda Sayre, she was the beautiful daughter of a socially prominent State Supreme Court Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Fitzgerald met her when he was stationed nearby as an eighteen-year-old soldier near the end of the First World War. Because he was neither rich nor even socially well-connected, Zelda refused to marry Fitzgerald. It was only after the sale of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, that she agreed to be his wife.

If you’ve read Chapter 5, you’re probably noticing something interesting here. Wasn’t there a broken romance between Gatsby and Daisy? Why is Gatsby so desperately trying to impress Daisy with his collection of shirts? Yes, it seems that Jay Gatsby too is based, to some degree, on Fitzgerald. Think about it: A man without money or social connections meets a beautiful Southern belle while stationed near her home during wartime. Since she won’t marry him, he goes out into the world and transforms himself into a success in his field (This Side of Paradise was a huge bestseller) before returning to claim the love of the woman who once spurned him.

Clearly, the characters in this novel were inspired by some people very close to Fitzgerald’s home, or, more precisely at his home.

You Know People Too 

If it was a good enough method for the great Fitzgerald, it’s good enough for you. Look at the world of your own life for characters, or potential characters, because that’s where they are. All around you. Numerous people. Every single day.

Consider the following options:

·        People you know well

·        People you don’t know well

·        People you met just once

·        People you’d like to meet

·        People you never met

·        People you saw from a distance

·        People you saw on TV

·        People you’ve only read about

The possibilities are endless.

Surely you’ve met an intriguing person at a party. This person probably didn’t call you "old sport," as Gatsby calls Nick, but perhaps the person used some other term of endearment or turn of phrase that could inspire a character. Perhaps you’ve sat in a crowded restaurant and noticed a "shady" character working a deal over in the corner. You may not discover that this person fixed the World Series, as did Meyer Wolfsheim, but there must be something about that person useful for a character. If you’re not getting out of the house enough, well ... look in the mirror. As Fitzgerald did, take note of yourself, and the love of your life. Look at your family and friends, and at their friends, and even the woman you see every day at the bus stop.

Each of them is interesting, memorable, in at least one way, probably many ways. Each is potentially an inspiration for a character.

How to Use People in Fiction 

It may work something like this. Let's say you see a woman every day at the bus stop. And every day she is reading a different book. You wonder about this. Does she finish them all, sneaking peeks throughout her work day, devouring pages instead of soup or salad at lunchtime, then reading all night, until she reads the final page? Maybe she only starts the books, losing interest before the day is done.

Perhaps she doesn’t read the books at all, just holds them open in front of her, hoping that a stranger will strike up a conversation about Carrie or The Scarlet Letter. She’s terribly shy, you see, and doesn’t know anyone in the big city, having just moved here from Kansas. She works at a bookstore, though, where they allow employees to borrow books overnight, so as to become more knowledgeable salespeople.

One day, an elegant-looking older man does, in fact, inquire about the book she’s holding: The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer. Like the characters in the book, he tells her, he served in the Pacific during World War II, only it wasn’t like Mailer says at all. Stammering at first, she tells him she hasn’t read much, but likes it so far...

This is already starting to sound like a good story, isn’t it? Aren’t you growing curious about this woman? In the last lesson we learned that characters are the source of fiction and here the point is being proven. A little observation of a real life person mixed with a little imagination has given birth to what could be a wonderful story.

And it all started with someone you knew from your life. 

Discussion 

After reading the lecture, try answering some or all of the following:

1.    Do you ever look at strangers and wonder what their "story" is?

2.    Can you think of any additional reasons why the lady at the bus stop has a new book every day?

3.    Is it important for characters to be likable?

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Source: 2005-2006 free online courses at http://bnuniversity.com/