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

assigning the elements that have shaped him into the individual he is today. Knowing that he marched with Mad Mike Hoare in Katanga, or that his grandmother introduced him to War and Peace when he was four, or that he pledged himself to the church at age seven can’t help but give him dimension as you think his story through.
    Your first step, of course, is to decide on the role Character plays—the things he has to do, the functions he has to perform.
    Check this against each of the four components of background: body, environment, experience, and ideas.
    Finally, choose and build up pertinent aspects from each, in terms of incidents, anecdotal bits, word pictures that create the impression you want Character to make on your readers.
    You seek to convince Reader that Character is cruel and vicious, for example. So, you introduce an incident in which Character recalls the pleasure he felt when he revenged himself on his sister for some imagined slight by lying about her to her boyfriend, or destroying undelivered the letter that offers her a better job, or poisoning her beloved dog.
    Or maybe you don’t introduce it. But just by the process of conceptualizing it you create a picture in your own mind and a reaction to Character that will help you on a subconscious level to select, arrange, and describe the current action in a manner that will evoke the response you seek from readers.
BODY: THE PLACE IT ALL STARTS
    Body begins with history—or, to put it in more specific terms, ancestry—heredity, genetic roots.
    Does ancestry make a difference? It does indeed. We all know that some of us are brighter than others, with a spread that extends from the “transcendent mental superiority” of a da Vinci or Einstein or Francis Bacon to the slavering helplessness of the hopelessly retarded. Heredity is what makes a dwarf a dwarf, while a Watusi grows to seven feet tall. Diabetes, allergic asthma, epilepsy, sicklecell anemia—all tend to take their toll from one generation to another. Ancestry is why most Blacks have kinky hair and Baits have blue eyes. Genetic twists pop forth in Down’s syndrome and hemophilia and phenylketonuria and thin enamel on teeth. And where would Dracula have been had he not had his vampire forebears?
    Indeed, the old nature-versus-nurture controversy is far from dead, for recent studies indicate that such traits as timidity, risk-seeking, aggressiveness, vulnerability to stress, and obedience to authority may be inherited, at least in part, rather than being the product of conditioning.
    Beyond this, there’s the body of the character himself: the specific physical equipment with which he’s endowed. Thus, the pretty girl sees the world through different eyes than does her plainer sister, because her conditioning has accustomed her to being flattered and deferred to—perhaps spoiled. Consequently, she responds in a different manner. Depending on other modifying factors, she may consider a request for a date from a boy who can afford only hamburgers an insult. Or, she may look upon it as an opportunity to prove her egalitarianism and social consciousness. But she’s unlikely simply to be grateful that someone’s asked her, the way her homely sibling might.
    In the same way, the six-foot athlete is used to one kind of treatment, the five-foot bookworm another. The man hailed as “Fats” doesn’t have the same outlook as the one called “Slats.” And can anyone doubt that the size of Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose played a role in shaping his personality? Would Long John Silver have been the same man had he not lost a leg? Was Quasimodo influenced by his hump, Superman by his indestructibility? And Theresa (in Looking for Mr. Goodbar ), deformed by childhood polio—how would you rate the handicap as a factor in her murder?
    Deafness creates a behavior pattern unlike that of the blind or nearsighted or cross-eyed. The stutterer’s speech may turn him into a recluse or a Demosthenes. Would