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Yes, Foxes Are Sly, But They’re Not Always Sly

I was talk­ing to a sixth-grade class the oth­er day when one of the stu­dents asked: “How do you make a char­ac­ter in a book, you know, all the dif­fer­ent things and feel­ings she has?”

That’s a vital ques­tion! It’s real­ly good because there is no one answer. My guess is if you ask ten dif­fer­ent writ­ers that ques­tion, you’ll get ten dif­fer­ent answers. Here are a few I’ve learned about.

  1. One of the basic ways to cre­ate a char­ac­ter is not to cre­ate one but base the fic­tion­al per­son on some­one you know well in real life. Mind, no mat­ter how well you do it, it will not be that per­son, but some­one like that per­son. Also, be cau­tious, if the real per­son you are depict­ing comes across your por­tray­al, they may not appre­ci­ate it. 

[Years ago, I pub­lished a book in which there was a nasty char­ac­ter. A friend of mine decid­ed the char­ac­ter was him and was deeply offend­ed. Actu­al­ly, I had nev­er giv­en that friend a moment’s thought when I was writ­ing the book. Still, it meant the end of the friend­ship — his choice.]

  1. Some writ­ers have told me they invent a whole biog­ra­phy of a char­ac­ter, before set­ting down his/her adven­tures. Where, when, cir­cum­stances of birth, and so forth. Almost like writ­ing anoth­er book.
  2. You have briefly seen or met some­one, and you bor­row (as it were) the person’s phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics, and let the character’s phys­i­cal­i­ty deter­mine who and what they do. The way the per­son dress­es, way of talk­ing, and act­ing can be help­ful here. The char­ac­ter of Bear in Crispin, The Cross of Lead, is based on some­one I met but did not real­ly know. But his phys­i­cal pres­ence was quite impactful.
  1. You can evoke a his­tor­i­cal per­son­age and work that char­ac­ter into your sto­ry in such a way that what is known about him/her shapes your char­ac­ter and sto­ry. My most recent book, Lost in the Empire City, has a real per­son in it, Lieu­tenant Beck­er of the New York City Police. He was, no ques­tion, a crooked cop, being the only NYPD offi­cer to be exe­cut­ed for mur­der. But from what I read about him, he was not just a ruth­less man, he was also con­sid­ered quite charming.
  2. Curi­ous­ly, how you name a char­ac­ter can influ­ence how you write about him/her. Names, con­scious­ly, or uncon­scious­ly, car­ry emo­tion­al weight which is quite indi­vid­ual. It’s not unusu­al for me to change a character’s name until it feels right. I won’t even pre­sume to under­stand that, but it does hap­pen, and work.
  3. If you are writ­ing about an ani­mal char­ac­ter, learn­ing the bio­log­i­cal facts about the crea­ture can often sug­gest char­ac­ter traits. But beware of clichés. Yes, fox­es are sly, but they are not always sly.
Poppy and Ereth
illus­tra­tion © Bri­an Flo­ca, from Pop­py and Ereth, writ­ten by Avi, pub­lished by HarperCollins
  1. Some­one tells you a sto­ry about some­one they knew, an odd uncle, a wild office mate, a curi­ous stu­dent, a sin­gu­lar teacher they once had — all of them quirky in one way or anoth­er, but upon which you can base your char­ac­ter in fiction.
  2. Speak­ing for myself, my char­ac­ters most­ly emerge in the process of the many rewrites I do. I equate such a method­ol­o­gy as learn­ing about a per­son I just met. It is only when I come to know them in the evolv­ing con­text of a sto­ry (as in life), do I learn about their traits, whims, and how they deal with real events. Be warned, this method requires a lot of rewriting.

Hav­ing said all that it is cer­tain­ly a tru­ism of great books: great char­ac­ters make great books.

But the deep­er and hard­er truth is, cre­at­ing a mem­o­rable fic­tion­al char­ac­ter is brought about by the writer’s knowl­edge, con­scious and uncon­scious, of peo­ple, in all their bewil­der­ing and adorable complexity.

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