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

too. By feeling strongly, she’s led us to feel also.
    Indeed, this is what empathy means. It says that we feel with another.
    In helping readers to empathize with story people, you as a writer are selling them emotion . . . your ability to rouse feelings in them, good or bad.
    Feelings come in all shapes and sizes. Quite possibly the reader who’s totally disenchanted with blood and violence or purple passion will respond with great waves of throbbing nostalgia to your description of a sagging, gray-weathered Ozark farmhouse at dusk. And though often overlooked, fragments of daily routine or ineptitude or stupidity that we ourselves have experienced can go a long way towards helping us to feel warmth and sympathy for a character.
    The message here is that it’s to your advantage to consider the tastes and prejudices of your particular audience. Are you writing for men or for women? For “young adults” or the Modern Maturity set? For people who love pets and rural life or apartment dwellers? It does make a difference!
    Also, most readers prefer fiction that rouses their emotions and evokes their feelings as soon as possible. They seek the promise that something interesting—that is, emotion-provoking—is going to happen, and the sooner the better.
    To this end, most writers tend to try to capture their readers’ attention (“hook” them, in the parlance) quickly.
    A hook may be defined as a scene at the beginning of a storythat is striking and self-explanatory and plunges some character (the hero or heroine, preferably) into danger in a manner that intrigues your readers.
    Ordinarily, you do this by raising the fear that something will or won’t happen. For example, in the film Jaws, a picture that concerns the menace of a shark in a beach area, the shark is introduced early. The hint of disaster to come is riveting beyond escape. Other ploys that have proved highly successful at one time or another include the case of the hero who awakens to find a murdered girl sharing his bed or a deadly coral snake coiled on his bare stomach. And the play that opens with a sinister character surreptitiously planting a bomb under the sofa on which other characters take seats moments later allegedly is surefire theater.
    Or if you prefer something less redolent of blood-and-thunder, there’s always the “springboard scene” to fall back on. In its simplest form it, in effect, relies on a character engaged in some motivated action, whether or not it’s apparently related to the overall story. What counts is that it presents Character as having direction, being involved in some exhibition of relatively inconsequential purpose, which builds into a scene that puts the character in a position to be endangered; his ordered existence is disrupted. You see it when Heroine telephones her boyfriend, but gets a wrong number—another, different man. Or when Hero, opening his mail, spills $500 from an envelope that bears no return address. Or when, hearing an ambulance siren, someone goes to the window—just as said ambulance brakes to a halt in front of the house. What counts is that you present a character who has direction, some pattern of existence, which is interrupted by a change that forces him or her to make an adjustment.
    (Would you rather make your readers smile? A TV commercial not long ago showed a boy racing to his girl’s house under the delusion that her parents were away. But when he rings the bell, her father opens the door. Which demonstrates that danger can be a happening that merely disrupts anticipation.)
    Why is this such a useful pattern? First and foremost, because every story is the record of how somebody deals with danger.
    One way or another, every change constitutes a danger . And yes, I do include the situations of every father who finds his young daughter has tied up the bathroom, every mother who discovers that someone’s turned off the oven while the cake is baking, everyboy who finds his date has