Creating Characters: How to Build Story People by Dwight V. Swain

keep striving to attain it, physical and emotional reasons why she can’t quit.
    May this process start from either end? Yes, of course. You’re playing God for the duration of your tale, so if you prefer to begin with motive, the “Why?” approach, it’s perfectly acceptable that you do so. From a practical standpoint, however, ordinarily your task will prove infinitely easier if you begin with goal, with purpose, than if you wander off through a morass of pre-assigned motives. The trick is to decide what you want or need your character to do in order to move your story in the direction you want it to go. Then rationalize the necessary “whys.”
    And while it may appear I speak only of “major” characters above, this principle applies to all your story people, not just heroes, heroines, and villains. The issue is merely the degree to which you develop the picture.
    Have we said enough about the world inside your characters’ heads? More than enough, quite possibly, since the thing that really counts is your own work, your personal gropings and experiments and (sorry) failures.
    Be that as it may. Just bear in mind that in shaping up any given character, and regardless of whether or not you reveal it to yourreaders, it’s vital that you provide him with a private inner world compounded of direction, goal, drive, and attitudes. Without such you’ll have trouble to spare when you try to predict his conduct in your story.
    In addition, you’ll need to know how to bring your man or woman to life with words on the printed page. You’ll learn a proven approach to doing it when you turn the page to Chapter 7 , “The Breath of Life.”

7
THE BREATH OF LIFE
How do you bring a character to life?
You make the character reveal emotion.
    Our most revealing moments are those in which we experience stress.
    What’s stress? Mental tension springing from emotion.
    What’s emotion? To oversimplify, it’s liking or disliking, feeling good or feeling bad about something.
    Emotion, feeling good or feeling bad about something, is what gives a character direction. If something gives him pleasure, he seeks it out. If it gives him pain, he avoids it.
    Direction is what makes us aware that a character is alive. Without it, a person or a character is a vegetable—eating and breathing and existing, perhaps, but going nowhere.
    Herewith, a mousy little man, Mr. Holcomb. A wimp, a nonentity, a nothing. So far as most of us are concerned, he might as well not exist.
    Only then, one day, something leads Mr. Holcomb into a display of emotion. Something makes him mad or glad—the neighborhood hoodlum drives a car across Mr. Holcomb’s freshly seeded lawn, let’s say. Or the woman across the street towards whom Mr. Holcomb has entertained tentatively amorous thoughts presents him with a spectacular Valentine’s Day cake. Or the sister who’s his only living relative dies. Something like that. At which point Mr. Holcomb screams or beams or hangs himself. And because this is so, all at once he exists . . . takes on a new dimension and acquires a focus.
    Why? You already know the answer: Mr. Holcomb cares about something, so he reacts to something that affects it.
    In a word, emotion has brought him to life.
    Or consider Alice Withers, the woman in the shabby house on the corner. Old and pale and without color, she is, in a word, another nonentity. But unknown to those about her, somewhere deep inside she still feels.
    Then something stress-provoking happens: The husband who deserted her thirty years ago comes back.
    Joyously, Alice welcomes him to her bed.
    And cuts his throat.
    Instantly, as in the case of Mr. Holcomb, Alice comes to life for us. We’re fascinated by her. She’s enveloped in a pulsing cloud of speculation, gossip.
    And all because, all at once, she’s displayed emotion.
    Actually, the issue isn’t just that the person involved has revealed emotion. It’s because , in showing emotion, she’s roused emotion in us