4. The Characters

The third part of our triangle is the creation of memorable characters. In a short story you have limited time to fix characters in your readers’ heads, so: Don’t overdescribe physical appearance. Do choose a defining personal characteristic. Don’t create too many characters. Don’t make them too complicated. Don’t give them back-stories you end up having to spell out. Don’t over-explain or over-analyse them. People are intrinsically willful and mysterious. My mother once wrote a short story in which she established a family dynasty of about thirty characters – on the first page! By Page 2, I was hopelessly confused. However, a short story free you up to do anything with your characters, and you can establish a lot in a brief time. You can write ‘When Jack Smith was born, his mother was frightened by a taxi and gave birth to him in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. After this he walked around London acting as if he owned the place.’ A bit of childhood history, kept simple, will establish your hero’s later behaviour. It’s been repeated by everyone, so it must be true; look at Dickens. He’ll establish a character in a few lines, with a few broad strokes, but his trick is to make each stroke recognizable. Look at, say, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House – a woman so wrapped up in her charity work that she neglects her own children – and you’ll find an exact equivalent today. Simplicity – I’ll keep hammering this home – is the key to a short story. Characters tell us who they are by the actions and decisions they take. It’s fatal to have a character just think about their life on the page when you’ve only got two thousand words. Why should we care? A simple action might place us squarely on their side from the outset. Jack catches an old woman who is about to fall in front of a bus, and sees her home, but he also takes some money she’s left lying on a table. Those two actions tell us much more about the character than having him stand at the window and think about the conflicts in his behaviour. Most great short story writers use action to reveal the nature of their characters to the reader. But not all – a writer like JG Ballard gives us little information about his characters, not because he ever found it difficult to create them (he does, wonderfully, in two of his best novels) but because he chooses instead to explore ideas about modern society. Your lead character does not have to be a nice person – some of the most exciting are fairly horrible anti-heroes – but you still need to make the reader care about them. Evelyn Waugh’s heroes are often hopelessly passive and lost, but you do care. In ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ (actually the concluding chapter from the novel ‘A Handful Of Dust’), the hero becomes fatally lost in the jungle and is saved by a kindly old Englishman who has been living there for years. But when the hero’s rescuers arrive, he misses them because he is asleep. They look around and leave – and our hero is doomed to stay in the jungle forever. Why? The old man drugged him and hid him, because he enjoyed having the hero read Dickens to him. But, thinking about it, is the villain of the piece really any worse than the hopeless hero? They both wanted something, but the ‘villain’ took action – which makes him, strangely, almost more appealing than the leading man. When I say define your characters in broad strokes, don’t take this as an excuse to use cliché. There’s nothing more boring than a character who behaves predictably. The good villain and the bad hero are more interesting this way than the other way around. Part of the brief is to surprise, and the easiest way to do that is by having someone take an entirely unexpected action. One way to jump-start a story is by giving your hero a flaw, and putting them in a situation which will expose that flaw. A young woman is a kleptomaniac. On her first day at work she is visit a jewelry shop where a cabinet of gems is left unlocked – what will she do? A boy tells lies in order to look big. He sees someone being bullied, and the teacher asks him to describe what happened – what will he do? The examples look ridiculously simple, but that’s where stories start. In Pushkin’s ‘The Queen Of Spades’ a young officer hears about a countess who knows the secret of card-playing, because she sold her soul to the devil. The young man is ambitious and in debt. Doesn’t that present a lot of possibilities to you? It seems to me that the simpler the set-up, the more fun you can have with it. Stacy Aumonier is a long-forgotten English author who used to do just this. Here’s the set-up to his story ‘Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty’. A shy county spinster who has never been abroad before has to stay in a French hotel. Using the shared bathroom, she goes back to her room and shuts the door, but the handle comes off in her hand. Then she realizes that there’s a man asleep in the bed – she’s locked in the wrong room. (What do you think happens? Answer at the end of the piece). By dispensing with anything complex, Aumonier is free to explore the situation for several pages. A hero’s character can define an entire story. Write down two traits and put them into your hero, suggest a scenario and see how your character reacts. The Hancock rule is at its best here. If the plot demands that the hero acts out of character, it’s the plot that needs to be changed. When I finish the second draft of a novel, I usually find that the ending needs adjusting to stay in line with the characters’ natural inclinations. By strongly defining a story’s characters, you can keep the tale organic and true to itself. Having said all this, there are a great many tales where the character is almost entirely undefined. In Dino Buzzati’s story ‘Seven Floors’, a man is moved through the floors of a hospital towards his inevitable death, and the story works best by not telling us what the main character is like at all. The reader superimposes himself on the character.