HOW TO WRITE FICTION - Lesson 5: How to Reveal Through Telling

So. By now you’ve created one or more fictional characters. Maybe you based them directly on people you know well, or not so well. Maybe you combined the traits of a variety of relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers. Perhaps you’ve even constructed profiles.

In other words, you’ve done your homework. Now what? How do you reveal this carefully observed, compiled, and recorded information to your readers? How do you let your characters come to living, breathing life on the page?

Reveal Gradually

Well, you could simply show the readers your homework. As soon as a character appears, you lay your cards on the table, revealing to the readers everything you’ve learned about the character. Certainly this method would be efficient, not to mention easy.

It wouldn’t make for good fiction, though. Imagine if Fitzgerald had taken this easy route. Remember the scene when Nick first meets Gatsby at one of Gatsby’s lavish parties? Well, suppose at this point Fitzgerald had just given us a profile similar to the one you saw in the last lesson. You would wonder why the book is considered a classic, that’s for sure.

In real life, we don’t know everything about someone as soon as we meet him. We have some first impressions but that’s all. It takes time to get to know a person. Similarly, it should take some time to get to know characters, especially the round ones. It’s also more entertaining if readers gets to piece things together for themselves, rather than receiving the whole person in one neatly tied package.

The way that Gatsby is gradually revealed to the reader – changing from distant silhouette to a fully realized person – is one of the major charms of the story. This has been a recurring theme in our analysis of The Great Gatsby and, in fact, the character of Jay Gatsby is a masterpiece of gradual revelation.

Think of the narrator in Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." We get some information about him early in the story but we don't get to know him deeply until the story's end. Of course, there are things we never know about him; he's like Gatsby in that respect. But wondering about this man, then growing slowly to understand him – perhaps being downright surprised by what he does – is part of the fascination offered by this story.

In general, you want to dole out the material you’ve prepared on your round characters gradually, somewhat mimicking the way people are revealed to us in real life.

Narrators Tell

Now, how do you dole out this information? Here’s where things start to grow really interesting. As a writer, you can reveal your characters in two fundamental ways:

Telling vs. Showing

Let’s focus on telling right now, and on showing during the next lesson.

Telling is a perfectly legitimate way of revealing character. You are, after all, telling a story. The telling about a character may be done by the writer/narrator or by a character. It can be done through narrative description or dialogue.

In "Cathedral," the guy who lives in the house serves as the narrator, telling the story in First Person. (Interestingly, he never gives us his name and, interestingly, he mostly refers to Robert as simply "the blind man." What does this indicate about the narrator?) The narrator is often telling us information about the other characters. Here is he telling us about Robert:

"This blind man was late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stooped shoulders, as if he carried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a light-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard."

Here he is telling us about his wife:

"She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her."

Notice here that Carver isn't dramatizing this information, as a playwright or screenwriter might – perhaps by having Robert say, "I just turned forty-seven" or by showing the wife intently working on a poem. Carver (through the narrator) merely tells us what we need to know.

We can assume all this information is accurate. There's no real reason why the narrator would lie about Robert's age or clothing, or his wife's poetry habit. Usually, the narrator of the story is giving the reader trustworthy information. However, be warned. This isn't always the case. Especially if the narrator is also a character in the story, as in "Cathedral."

Characters Tell

Characters in fiction are frequently telling us about other characters. But characters can't always be trusted to tell the absolutel truth. After all, they're only human (sort of). They may, indeed, tell us something about a fellow character in the story that isn't quite accurate. Even narrators can be guilty of this.

At one point in "Cathedral," the narrator tells us this about Robert's late wife, Belulah:

"And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved."

Is this true? Probably not. From what we learn about Robert, it seems that Robert is the type to shower his wife with compliments, even if he couldn't see her. We would guess that Robert was a very loving husband and that, in fact, he made his wife quite happy. Maybe the narrator can't understand this because he's not exactly winning any husband-of-the-year awards himself. The reader senses that Robert could "see" Belulah much better than the narrator "sees" his own wife.

In the above example, the telling is done through narration. But characters also tell about other characters in dialogue. Is what they say always true? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. As in real life, we have no easy way of knowing.

When Robert says, "Bub, I'm a scotch man myself," we sense he's telling the truth about his own drinking preference. What about when he says:

"My dear, I have two TVs. I have a color set and a black-and-white thing, an old relic. It's funny but if I turn the TV on, and I'm always turning it on, I turn on the color set. It's funny, don't you think?"

This is slightly harder to believe – how can he tell the difference? But, after learning something about Robert, we sense that this too is accurate information.

What about this heated exchange between the narrator and his wife:

"'I don't have any blind friends,' I said.

'You don't have any friends,' she said. 'Period.'"

Is the wife telling the complete truth about her husband? Well, we can certainly imagine that this man doesn't have many friends. He's not the friendliest guy in town. So she's probably close. But he might have some friends, at least one or two who are perhaps just as close-minded and miserable as himself. The wife may have been exaggerating slightly when she says he doesn't have "any" friends. She's angry at the time and she's trying to make a point. Do you always tell the exact truth about people you know? Ah, perhaps not.

The fallibility of what narrators and characters "tell" about other characters helps to increase the interest level of a work of fiction. Instead of being spoon-fed the perfect truth, the reader gets to draw her own conclusions about what she's being told. In such situations, we're also learning about the character doing the telling, as well as the one being discussed. Whether it's true or not, we sense years of frustration and resentment when the wife proclaims, "You don't have any friends. Period."

Telling You How To Tell

Perhaps this technique of telling is starting to sound somewhat complicated, but it’s really nothing you can’t handle in your own fiction. Let’s go back to our character, Maria Rialto (formerly known as Mystery Woman). If you were using her in a story, you could tell about her in a variety of ways.

You, as the narrator, may write something like: "Though Maria Rialto possessed a well-spring of kindness, she was incurably shy. As a child she had been quite open and playful but around the age of eleven she acquired this shyness, which, over the years, grew increasingly acute."

Good, you’ve told us a lot about Maria, and rather eloquently, at that.

Other characters might tell us things about Maria too. Her mother might say, "My child is not shy, she is quiet." A fellow employee at the bookstore where she works might say, "Maria is so rude. She never says a word to me." Someone else might say, "What a weirdo." Who is right? Perhaps all of them, perhaps none of them. Remember, when other characters are doing the telling, it’s not so easy to tell where the truth lies. You’ll also notice that we’ve learned something about each of these characters by what they say, or tell, about Maria.

What would Maria tell you about herself? If you’re really curious, perhaps you could go ask her.

Discussion

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

1. Is there a stronger way to reveal characters than telling about them?

2. Do you prefer a story to be told by a writer or by a first person narrator (who is a character in the story)?

3. When people tell you about themselves, how do you know whether or not to believe them?

HOW TO WRITE FICTION - Lesson 4: Using Profiles to Know Your Characters

If you’re going to create great characters for your stories, you will need to know a lot about them. Perhaps not too much, as we discussed in the previous lesson, but you need to know a great deal. In fact, characters are like icebergs. Often only the tips of characters are visible to the readers, but the part beneath the surface gives each character weight, stability.

Getting to know characters is part of the creation phase, and often much of this work is done before the actual writing of the story. Bear in mind, though, that some writers prefer just to start writing and see where the characters lead them, and that is fine too.

Very experienced writers can often do their "homework" intuitively as they write their stories. Either way, at some point the writer does need to know the characters well.

Aspects of Characters

A highly effective method for getting to know your characters is to construct character profiles. You do this simply by thinking up and, perhaps writing down, all sorts of information about your characters. For instance:

Physical

What are your character’s physical traits? Logically enough, it helps the readers to have a picture of someone they will be spending time with. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but physicality can affect who someone is. Do blondes have more fun? Not necessarily. But if someone bleaches her hair Marilyn Monroe platinum, that says something about her – about who she is and wants to be. Deformity undeniably affects the personality of Hugo’s Hunchback.

Social

How about social influences? Even if you’re not a hard-core Freudian, you’d probably agree that people are largely formed during infancy and childhood. If your parents are both alcoholics, that will most likely affect you. If you grew up poor in the South, you will be different than if you were raised rich on Park Avenue. Religion deeply influences one’s outlook on life. Whether a character is married or not and has kids or is childless: all help to form who that individual is.

Personality

The personality is largely a function of the prior two categories. (On the other hand, sometimes siblings are born with very different personalities; nature trumps nurture.) Personality is where the real action is, and it will affect most everything a character does in a story.

In a moment, we’ll break these categories down even further. But, for those of you who are thinking "Oh my gosh, I have to figure out all of that for every single character?" – let’s take a slight detour.

Flat vs. Round Characters

The fact is, you don’t have to devote the same amount of time profiling every character in your stories.

Think of The Great Gatsby. Some characters (Nick Carraway) appear on page after page of the novel, while others show up less frequently (Meyer Wofshiem), and some barely appear and are soon forgotten by the reader (the man who gives Nick directions to West Egg). A story that spent an equal amount of attention on each of its characters would either be very long or very superficial or very boring.

All told, there are two basic categories of characters in the well-told story:

Flat Characters

Flat characters are not really distinguishable from the furniture, nor should they be. They do exactly what’s expected of them (in the case mentioned above, giving Nick directions to his house) and no more. In the words of the great English writer E.M. Forster (in his book Aspects of the Novel), they are "flat" – one-dimensional.

So don’t look to the West Egg direction-giver, or most of the attendees at Gatsby’s parties, for richness or complexity of character. Fitzgerald has kept these characters flat on purpose, knowing that otherwise they would distract from the major characters. Most of your very minor characters should be flat.

Round Characters

Round characters, like most real people, are complex. They have more than one dimension. Usually this results in contradictions within these characters. In case you haven’t noticed, people contradict themselves all the time. In fact, according to E.M. Forster, a character is round if he or she can do something surprising, which you accept and believe because the character is dimensional. A good guidepost when characterizing.

You want the major characters in your story to be round, dimensional, contradictory, and fully human.

Making Profile Lists

As you might imagine, flat characters are pretty easily drawn. Just provide readers with the necessary and expected information, and you’re done. A waiter takes orders, brings the food, leaves the check – period. A grandfather is wise and kindly. A young stockbroker is ambitious and randy in equal measure. In other words, if you know a character will be small, you don’t need to spend a lot of effort profiling him or her.

When it comes to round characters, however, it’s often helpful to create rather elaborate profiles for them. Some writers actually make a list that they fill in with various traits of their characters. Here’s a list that might work for you:

Physical Traits

Gender:

Age:

Ethnicity:

Height:

Body type:

Hair color:

Eye color:

Facial characteristics:

Athleticism:

Sociological Traits

Birthplace:

Parents:

Family:

Childhood:

Occupation:

Income:

Religion:

Politics:

Personality Traits

Habits:

Best qualities:

Worst faults:

Favorite foods:

Favorite vacation destinations:

Favorite sports:

Favorite movies/TV shows:

What makes him happy?

What makes him sad?

What makes him angry?

Who does he love most?

Who does he hate most?

What is he most proud of?

What is he most ashamed of?

What is his secret ambition?

What is his darkest secret?

Gatsby Profiled

Now, let’s construct a profile for Gatsby. Take note, though, that this profile will only include information that is available to us in the novel itself.

Name: Jay Gatsby (James Gatz)

Physical Traits

Gender: Male

Age: "a year or two over thirty"

Ethnicity: German-American

Height: ?

Body type: ?

Hair color: Unclear, though it is short and appears to be trimmed every day; sometimes at parties women rub champagne into it

Eye color: ?

Facial characteristics: "tanned skin...drawn tight on his face." Can smile "understandingly" and is "handsome to look at."

Athleticism: Graceful – he has "resourcefulness of movement" – but uncharacteristically awkward when he first meets Daisy. Probably still fit from his days as a clam digger and salmon fisher, and then a soldier.

Sociological Traits

Birthplace: North Dakota

Parents: Henry C. Gatz and unidentified mother

Family: "shiftless and unsuccessful farm people"

Childhood: Poor but highly ambitious (see schedule in Hopalong Cassidy book)

Occupation: Druggist (bootlegger), oilman?, investor

Income: Astronomical

Religion: Capitalism

Politics: Pragmatic

Personality Traits

Habits: Fidgeting, using language ("old sport") that does not come naturally to him

Best qualities: His devotion to Daisy Buchanan, and his optimism

Worst faults: His notion that anything can be bought, and his naivete

Favorite foods: ?

Favorite vacation destinations: the capitals of Europe, so he says

Favorite sports: Yachting, cricket (he’s holding a bat in his Oxford photograph)

Favorite movies/TV shows: Unclear, though producers, directors, and actors attend his parties

What makes him happy? Showing Daisy his shirts

What makes him sad? Looking across the water towards the green light on Daisy’s dock

What makes him angry? The idea that Daisy has loved anyone besides himself

Who does he love most? Daisy

Who does he hate most? Tom Buchanan

What is he most proud of? His material success

What is he most ashamed of? His humble beginnings

What is his secret ambition? To marry Daisy Buchanan

What is his darkest secret? Unclear – did he "kill a man once"? Did he attend Oxford? In other words, his darkest secret is his very identity

Notice that some of this material isn’t available to readers until the final chapters. In many ways, Gatsby is like a puzzle and many of the pieces don’t fall into place until the very end. For example, we learn some key information about Gatsby when we meet his elderly father. And even more when we see the boyhood schedule the father carries in his wallet. (The book’s preface shows how the pieces of the puzzle appear, step by step.) But most likely Fitzgerald knew most of this information all along, much of it even before he began writing the story.

Notice also that not every question asked by our profile form is answered in the pages of The Great Gatsby. (It’s significant that some of the physical details have been left out.) Fitzgerald only used what was necessary for the telling of his story. You can bet, though, that Fitzgerald knew all of Gatsby’s facets; in fact, he probably knew much, much more than he shares with us, choosing instead to leave many details beneath the surface.

What About the Mystery Woman?

Let’s go back to our Mystery Woman, the one at the bus stop. If you were using her as a character in a story, you might end up revealing a multitude of things about her until by story’s end she was, well ... an open book. Or you might go the other route, keeping her largely a mystery throughout the story.

In either case, you would benefit from knowing as much as you can about her. Even if you don’t reveal much about her in the story, you would be able to write her better, more fully, more believably if you, the writer, knew who she really was.

Suppose you were to give her a name? How about – Maria Rialto. Ah, the character has been christened. And already you are starting to see her more specifically. Imagine how much better you would know her if you could answer some or all of the questions on a profile list.

Constructing a profile is, in fact, a foolproof method for getting to know your characters.

Discussion

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

1.   Does the technique of making profiles seem like it might be useful to you?

2.   Would you rather just invent characters as you write?

3.   Which traits on the profile list do you think will be the most illuminating? Can you think of any important traits that were not included on the profile list?

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

HOW TO WRITE FICTION - Lesson 3: The Composite Method Of Creating Characters

In the last lesson, we talked about basing your fictional characters on the real people in the world around you. Now, our plot is about to thicken. The process is about to become more complex.

It’s usually not enough, you see, to simply pluck people out of real life and set them down in the pages of your story. Even if a character is based on an actual person, it still needs to become a fictional character – something quite different from a true human being. Characters are realistic, and yet they are not quite real.

Therefore, when writing fiction you must create characters. For most writers, much of this act of creation happens before the actual writing of the story begins. If this sounds a bit like homework, well, it is. But usually the payoff is worth the effort.

The Pitfalls of Photo-Copying People

First, let’s look at some reasons why characters need to be fictionalized. (You may do better with your homework if you understand its purpose and necessity).

Truth be told, there are numerous pitfalls to photo-copying people, that is, sticking real people in a story without any fictionalizing. For one thing, you might lose some friends. But that’s not the only reason.

Real people live twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and so much goes on in their lives and inside their minds that it is literally impossible to capture them on paper in a way that is truly realistic. There is simply too much material. Fictional characters require much more focus than people in real life. Otherwise, the readers, not to mention the writer, will get lost.

Besides, it’s difficult – impossible, really – to get inside anyone other than yourself. No matter how well you know someone, you can never be absolutely certain what he or she is thinking and feeling, hoping and fearing. And these are things you, the writer, will want to know about most of your characters.

Consider Jay Gatsby. He’s a total mystery to us at first, and to our narrator, Nick. Gradually we begin to discover what’s beneath the seemingly-impenetrable exterior. In Chapter 6, we learn some of the truth about James Gatz’s humble Midwestern beginnings – a truth that is quite different from the truth Gatsby himself reveals. In a sense, Gatsby is really two people. At the end of this chapter, we gain some insight into Gatsby’s life-altering introduction to Daisy, revealed in the rhapsodic passage beginning "One autumn night ..." We will discover even more about Gatsby in the remaining chapters. If you’re going to base characters on the real people in your life, you’re going to have to know them at least as well as Fitzgerald knows Gatsby. And most of us don’t know many people that well.

But, you’re thinking at this point, "I know somebody better than Fitzgerald knew Gatsby. I know me. I’ll base a character, lots of characters, on myself. That’ll be easy!"

Really? Do you think you know yourself all that well? Well, maybe. But think about it. Your knowledge of yourself is quite literally subjective. That is, you only know yourself from within and can’t see yourself from the outside. You literally have no objectivity regarding who you are and what you do. To write wholly autobiographical fiction is therefore a very dicey undertaking. This is something we see time and again in the fiction classes at Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Characters that beginning writers base on themselves are almost always the thinnest on the page, the least clear and convincing.

Paradoxically, it’s also possible to know certain people too well. In writing about ourselves, or our relatives and best friends, we tend to take all sorts of information for granted. You know that your father moved you and your brother and sister back and forth between Orlando and Anaheim when you were kids, because he was obsessed with Mickey Mouse. But you may know it so deeply you forget to tell the readers.

Finally, a character based on an individual close to the writer is also unlikely to surprise the writer and delight the reader. Some of the best things in stories happen when the characters take the writer in unexpected directions. Characters that are photo-copied from life tend to do exactly what the original people did in reality. They remain faithful to the facts rather than going where the story wants or needs to go.

Remember the Mystery Woman from the last lecture – the one who appears at your bus stop each day with a different book in her hands? What if, instead of being a stranger, she were your officemate and casual friend? Then you would know why she had a different book every day. You would know that she took a speed-reading course once, and can now devour a 350-page novel in an hour or so.

If you stuck too closely to who that person really was, it’s unlikely that you would invent the delightful scenario we created, in which a woman from out of town pretends to read a different book each day in hopes of meeting a stranger. It might not occur to you to make this person anything other than a speed-reader. By fictionalizing the person, you open up a myriad of interesting possibilities from which you may choose.

Complicated, isn’t it? Not really. Here’s a relatively simple solution to all the problems discussed above.

Pieces of People 

Perhaps the most effective way to make the transition from real people to fictional characters is to create composites. This method does two things: 1) It forces you to fictionalize, and 2) It allows you to mold people to fit the specific needs of your story.

Using the composite method, you create characters who are actually amalgams of several people you know, or know of. You put together pieces of various people, in much the same way that Dr. Frankenstein created his famous monster.

For example, you may create a character who has the personality of your best friend and the looks of your cousin. Maybe he talks like your boss, smells like your father, and eats like a slob you saw in a diner last week. Note that all of this is inspired by real people in the world around you; that hasn’t changed. It’s just that the way we’re using our raw material is more involved, more active, more creative – and ultimately it will serve the story better.

We talked about how Jay Gatsby’s situation bears some similarities to that of the young F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby is a man without much status who falls in love with a socially prominent Southern belle, and focuses all of his energy on transforming himself into someone he thinks will be worthy of her love

But that’s not the whole story of Jay Gatsby’s creation.

Scholars have discovered that a man named Max von Gerlach once signed a note to Fitzgerald that featured the phrase "old sport." This von Gerlach had a bunch of conflicting identities; he was variously thought to be a baron, a bootlegger, and a car dealer in Flushing, Queens – the location of The Great Gatsby’s "Valley of Ashes." Sound familiar? Many believe that Fitzgerald met von Gerlach in Great Neck, Long Island, sometime during the early Twenties. (Great Neck and Manhasset Neck are thought to be the West and East Eggs of the novel.)

In other words, Fitzgerald combined an autobiographical situation with some of the characteristics of a colorful man whom he seems not to have known all that well. He probably also added details drawn from other people he’d known or observed. The result: a brilliant character.

Or think of Daisy. We said earlier that she was probably inspired by Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda. However, there are things about Daisy that are not true of Zelda. Though socially prominent, Zelda’s family was not, in fact, rich. Daisy is very, very rich – so rich that even her voice is "full of money." Mrs. Fitzgerald hailed from Alabama, not Kentucky. Nor did she cheat on her husband with a man like Gatsby or run over her husband’s lover in a car. Those details probably came from other human behavior witnessed by the writer.

Or think of the Mystery Woman. Perhaps you have taken a piece of her from someone you work with – the fact that she reads a different book every day. But the other pieces of her came from elsewhere. Perhaps your brother is extremely shy and so you borrow that trait from him. Perhaps your college roommate was from Kansas and so you borrow that trait from her. By playing Dr. Frankenstein and making a composite, you have created a terrific fictional character that is willing to go wherever your imagination wants her to go. Who knows what she will do?

On a final note, consider this. Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, sticks very closely to the facts of Fitzgerald’s life, much more so than The Great Gatsby. Though This Side of Paradise was a big success when first released, it is nowhere near as good a novel as The Great Gatsby. And the characters in it are not nearly as memorable as Gatsby, Daisy, Nick, and the rest of this marvelous fictional cast.

The composite method worked well for Fitzgerald, and it can work for you.

Discussion 

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

1.    Can you think of any additional problems that may stem from putting a character in a story without fictionalizing the person?

2.    Does the concept of composites seem interesting to you? Does it seem puzzling?

3.    Are you more interested in writing characters that are similar to or unlike yourself?

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

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/