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

stood him up, every girl who learns the job she sought has gone to the boss’s daughter.
    The point is that change demands that we adjust, adapt to a new set of rules, a different circumstance. But we may not be able to make that adjustment successfully, no matter how minor the alteration demanded appears. Therefore, it constitutes a threat and potentially holds danger. The more important the status quo is to a character, the greater the emotion it will evoke.
    This is not to say that an initial change may seem to be of particular consequence. Quite possibly it will appear to be, at best, trivial . . . then lead into another event or events that reflect pure trauma. Witness a New York friend of mine, who coming out of an office building in heavy rain, was deluged by gutter water when a cab swerved to the curb. His pants were so soaked he couldn’t make what turned out to be a vital meeting.
    (A side note: It’s axiomatic in fiction writing that it’s permissible to use coincidence to get your hero into trouble, never to get him out .)
    Am I exaggerating the chances of such things happening? Of course. But it’s the way you must learn to think if you’re to be a writer. Indeed, it seems to me, one of the most vital qualities for a writer to have is an ability to see the potentialities of impending doom in everything that happens.
    This is not to say that your writing must present emotion in supercharged terms. To the contrary. In humor, or stories told with a light touch (the old Craig Rice mysteries come to mind) the wry and the whimsical frequently work better than does the heavy-handed. But the emotion, the like/dislike factor, is still there, no matter how masked with drollery.
    Emotion also may lie screened in apparently non-emotional material. Many of Dell Shannon’s books offer fine cases in point. The writing at first appears flat, uncolored, stripped of feeling—strictly work-a-day reporting. Yet the facts, the details cited, in themselves accumulate to draw a response from readers. Why? Because we, the audience, are pre-conditioned to react to certain things in a certain way—that is, with certain emotions. The very fact of death or sex or potential danger or humiliation evokes feeling. A character’s behavior in a situation involving a dog or a baby or an aged couple both characterizes the character and creates emotion. So does portrayal of frustrations, as when someone has troublerepairing a faucet, raising tropical fish, or coping with a rebellious seven-year-old . . . because readers have themselves been frustrated. (As a bonus, it also provides human touches and so builds identification and empathy.)
    What counts most of all, however, is that your major characters somehow exhibit purpose and show direction.
    Indeed, to reiterate, Character doesn’t necessarily need to know he has a goal. Quite possibly it will be enough if he simply behaves as if he’s trying to attain an objective: the boy who “accidentally” breaks a dish he doesn’t want to wipe, or clowns in an unconscious effort to attract a girl’s attention; the man who consistently fails when thrust into a job he feels too much for him; the woman who, convinced that she’s unattractive, dresses in a manner that stresses her bad points. We all can think of a dozen cases from life without even trying. The issue is, when action clashes with words, we judge a man by what he does, not what he says—and the same principle applies in fiction.
    However, a central character, a hero, ordinarily will prove more satisfactory and easier to work with if he’s consciously trying to do something, accomplish something—that means he’s trying to change some aspect of the situation with which he’s confronted and meets with trouble in the process.
    One reason for this is that more emotion—that is, interest—is generated when goal-oriented effort is frustrated than when routine action simply goes in a straight line, with no complicating