Here are the prompts. Name the character. Use myself or someone I know discreetly. And I do, of course, want to have friends, so I’m very careful about how I use other people in my fiction. Borrow from a newspapers story. I’m a big fan of local papers where there’s lots of sort of gossipy little items about who stole somebody’s cabbages. Give the character a house, a flat, a doorway, or a car that I know well. Send her to a careers counselor. Let her talk. Follow Aristotle’s advice and make her act. Save someone. Jump into a river. Give us a sense of her role and position in her family and in society. Show her relationships. We may all die alone, but hardly anyone lives alone. And lastly, describe her appearance insofar as it’s relevant.
Then I have some rules. And I try to keep to these in everything I write. I have five rules: Good characters must have some failure or vice. So a good character might have bad handwriting or hate flowers. Bad characters must have some strength or virtue. Maybe my villain will have perfect pitch or the ability to recognize edible mushrooms. Every character should have something she shares with me. Perhaps it’s a landscape we both like. Perhaps it’s a liking for macaroni and cheese. And every character should have something I absolutely do not share, which might be the ability to recognize edible mushrooms, or, I’m afraid, perfect pitch. And lastly, if the character is a stereotype – the bad sister, the Absent Minded Professor, be sure to make her not only a stereotype.
>>[Text on screen]Admonitions
And here are the admonitions. When creating a character very different from myself, I often need to create from the outside. I give the character a house, I find them a job, I give them activities and friends. And in the course of doing so, I figure out their inner lives. On the other hand, the clones and the doppelgangers, those characters who stand in for me, or whom I want my reader to think stand in for me, I create from the inside out. I know how they feel, I know what they want, I know what they fear. And then I go looking for an apartment for them, and a job, and perhaps a bicycle if they’re lucky.