Tonight, my aunt Janet was reading an article in my high school alumni magazine about my second novel, and she asked me, “How did you come up with the name Avery?” I looked at her, blinking like my younger cousin had just shot me in the eye with a laser pointer, and I said, “That’s his name.” She smiled, and then I said, “I mean, what else was I supposed to call him? That’s his name.”
I take my characters for granted. I treat them like old friends rather than like facets of my imagination. Maybe this comes from spending hours on end with them (in any given week, I talk with my characters more than I talk with my parents), but maybe not. Maybe it comes from the power of characterization, an element of fiction oftentimes abandoned (especially by young writers) in favor of an exhilarating plot.
I have what I like to refer to as a two-track mind. While one half of my brain works to answer questions asked of me by my teachers, the other half is considering various sentence structures that could be used for a certain cliffhanger line in my latest story. While the left side of my brain takes a Chemistry test, the other half is conversing with the male protagonist of my first novel, trying to determine whether he smokes cigarettes or not. While I’m supposedly taking notes in Geometry, I’m slowly turning everyone in my world into a character, and as I’ve learned from experience, writers and their characters have intimate, borderline Utopian relationships with one another.
In my first manuscript, my male protagonist is a twenty-year-old musician named Peter Scott, a dark-haired, outspoken romantic. He possesses every quality of a star-struck high school dropout, almost all of which are revealed throughout the course of the novel, but some of his more telling past experiences are kept quiet. Since first discovering Pete, I’ve spent hours getting to know him, and I oftentimes think that I know him better than I know myself. I certainly know him better than I know even my best friends. Only I am privy to the serious relationship he had with a girl named Melanie before he left his childhood home in Cleveland, Ohio, and I am certainly the only one that knows he lost his virginity to her in a field when he was sixteen, their bodies lit only by the dim headlights of his ancient Volkswagen.
Characters are undoubtedly complex, sometimes as complex as the people I encounter on a daily basis. Each day that I spend with Pete, I learn something new. Every time that I write another chapter from his perspective, I realize that I didn’t know him as well as I thought. It once took me an entire day to discover that Pete didn’t drink his vodka with ice, that he smoked Marlboro lights, and that his romanticism stems from his love of pop music.
Halfway through that day, I told my friend Adrian about my problem.
“I’m ninety percent sure that Pete has a substance abuse problem,” I said, sitting down next to him in the fifth floor hallway.
“Ninety?” he asked.
“Ninety.”
“Well, then why don’t you ask him?”
To write is to play make-believe.
“What?”
“Close your eyes,” he said, “and ask him.”
“Fine.”
And maybe it was my desire to write about someone with an addiction to nicotine. Maybe it was my need to explore problems that I’ve never experienced first-hand. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because Adrian and I were alone in that hallway, and I felt safe with him. So I closed my eyes, and I asked Pete.
And he said yes.
So it came to follow that Pete spent a large quantity of his nights with a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes, and I felt that I truly knew him inside and out. That trick Adrian taught me helped me to better understand character. Once Pete had a definite set of personality traits, it became easy for me to deduce (or to learn by working for hours with him) what alcoholic beverage he preferred (Absolut vodka) or what his favorite color was (blue).
As a writer, I am also a manipulator. I take my characters and unwittingly place them knee-deep in the tide. I say, “Good luck finding your way back.” Once I’ve assigned them their basic characteristics, such as Pete’s impulsive romanticism, they’re on their own. It’s up to them to reach their goal. It remains my belief that once characters have been fleshed out to a certain degree, there is little that we can do as writers to convince them to approach their problems in another way. Once a character has been cast into the surf, there’s not much that we as writers can do but record their journey back. We may watch from the edges of our seats, our nails jammed into our mouths, but we are merely observers by that point. We’re simply along for the ride.
Shelby Brody, Editor-in-Chief
Tags: fiction, teen blogs, writing