"It's a legitimate question, isn't it," he said, and I nodded. It sure is a legitimate question -- the answer to which I had probably taken for granted far too long, given that I didn't have a ready-made answer.
Well, maybe that in itself is a good thing. People with all the answers usually only have the answers for themselves.
The comment came after someone had finished reading the current novel-in-progress, which features a woman who is the daughter of a Shinto priestess, now a scientific popularizer and author of a bestseller on science vs. mysticism, not to mention a burgeoning alcoholic -- and her adopted daughter, a precocious eleven-year-old who has more than a little of the budding artist at work in her. The supporting characters included a conspiracy buff and his associated hangers-on, a "throwaway kid" who finds the best way to protect herself is by being dangerous (and smelling really bad to boot), and God knows who else. "Where the hell do you *think* of these people?" came the question.
The word I liked to associate most with such characters was "pungent", because 90% of the characters I read in books aren't as interesting as people I actually know -- even the dull ones. Everyone has a streak of pungency, of something off-center within them, and it takes a good eye and ear to latch in on that and demonstrate it. Which in a way answers the question about where these folks came from: look around you. I've been hard pressed to make up a character from whole cloth the entire time I've been writing; it's always been more a matter of paying creative attention, so to speak, to what's out there. World equals oyster.
A woman who has three kids and a good husband and a steady job at the supervising office of the collection agency is never just that and nothing else. What about the canvases she keeps in the basement, the weird little sayings she thinks up in the middle of the day and scribbles on notepaper, the fact that she has become addicted to the same cartoon show as her nine-year-old son -- only she roots for the bad guys? Everyone, despite their usually drab surroundings, has elements that fight their way to the top to be known -- sometimes well and sometimes badly.
A lot of writers substitute clever tricks of dialogue or a whole heap of unrelated details -- mannerisms, really -- for character. I almost fell into that, and stepped out of it narrowly with a few simple realizations. With the Shintô priest's daughter, for instance, I knew better than to simply throw things together, unrelated: everything that is in her has a reason for existing and stems from the trainwreck of a life that she's made for herself. A *life* can contain an assortment of unrelated oddities, but within a *person*, *nothing* is unrelated. You were in a train crash at the age of four and your parents moved to Florida and your brother ran off at the age of sixteen to mine jade and wrote you letters about the whole thing and -- well, what's that do to *you*? All those things add up to character at the end and are not themselves character. They're history. (Which is also important, but just so long as you don't confuse the two.)
Sometimes I go, "Tell me about this person," and someone reels off a list of dates and places and hobbies. At which point I clutch my head and go, "Right -- so WHO ARE THEY?" How do they feel about the way they inhabit their own skin, their own life? What do they plan to do about it, if anything at all? It's frustrating, but I guess predictable, because the distinction is still lost on a lot of people.
The history makes the person. The ideas make the history. The world outside makes the ideas.... so keep your eyes and ears open.
And not just character, but plot and color and all the other goodies, too. Anything can be re-used. Once I saved bad jokes and added them to a story when I needed to establish that someone was a terrible joke-teller. Everything's useful. Important in varying degrees, but they're all useful.
The trick, then, is for most people just the beginning: just letting it in is hard enough. People say to me, "Oh, God, I'm blocked, I haven't written a thing in MONTHS..." and I ask them what else is new in their lives and they do one of two things. 1) They shrug and say, "Not much, how about you?" 2) They regale me for an hour about their lives.
Either way, they're missing something: in the first case, they don't have their eyes open. Any day, even the dullest, is rife with assaults on the soul and senses, and can be plumbed thoroughly. And should be. In the second case, there's a simple lack of connection: Where is it written that you are forbidden to assimilate any of your own life's happenings as a way of fueling your work?
Sometimes when I make mention of this second item, people wince and shake their heads: "My life's dull, nothing happens, nobody wants to read about that, etc." Words of fear -- and the more people recognize them for what they are -- weak reaction-formulations instead of reasons -- the better equipped they may be to say, "Wait a minute -- that guy at the video store ripped me off and I'm furious. Over four cents I'm furious?! Well -- I'm just that kind of guy -- and hey, maybe that guy Henry in my story is the same way... and now I've got an example to show that!..."
I should say that kind of introspection and self-examination is rare; few people have the patience or the insight to separate their responses to the world from their thoughts about it, and put them to use in just such a fashion. It might have something to do with the misuse of words like "introspection", which seems to have a negative popular meaning -- sitting in a darkened room and wallowing in depression and misery while playing Smiths records at that "special" volume reserved for waking the neighbors in Poughkeepsie.
-- When in fact "introspection" means nothing more than being aware of WHY you entertain given thoughts about things. It's a skill which only comes with a good deal of personal courage, and I have not known a single writer worth his salt who did not have the courage to look down inside both himself and others without shying away and offering only cant as a response to what they saw there.
It's not an easy job. As it was printed at the entrance to the Theater in Hesse's STEPPENWOLF: "Not for Everybody".