Character Development

About three years ago in a workshop with J. Robert Lennon I learned a trick of character development, which is to complete a sort of worksheet that asks questions about everything from the character’s education to favorite music to hobbies to habits to formative childhood experiences. Now I complete this worksheet for every one of my characters as I’m writing, and it’s amazing how much contemplating such details can help in making a character feel real and alive. I’ve been thinking a lot about character details this month especially – maybe it’s just the holidays that bring out everybody’s rigid preferences, their best and worst traits. For example, the differences between me and my husband would fill a couple of worksheets nicely and you could begin to see where conflicts would naturally develop.

Just to start: I find it exciting to visit a Christmas tree farm on a below-zero sunny Saturday, love tramping through knee-high snow to find just the perfect tree, digging the snow out from around the tree’s trunk to allow it to be cut, and then dragging it many, many yards through the deep snow to where the truck waits. He finds below-zero weather to be cold and uncomfortable and believes that the pre-cut Christmas trees at the gas station near our house would be just as functional as the one we labored so hard to locate. Add to this the fact that I work indoors at a computer and he spent many years (until just a few months ago) working outside doing hard physical labor, and our characters may begin to flesh out even more. The thing that’s great about this “difference of opinion” from a writer’s point of view is that neither of the characters is wrong, and their equally valid feelings will automatically create a multi-faceted conflict.

Of course, you’ll want to keep adding more details. He likes coffee, I like tea. His favorite part of Christmas dinner is the mashed potatoes and gravy, while I love the sweet potatoes, my mom’s special Jell-O, cranberry sauce, and my dad’s bread dressing. Baking cookies together, he’s in a hurry to measure and mix (yet doesn’t preheat the oven until the cookies are all ready to go into the oven) while I’m methodical, planful, slow, doing my best not to miss a single step. I could listen to nothing but Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” all through December; he likes the radio because he never knows what’s going to come next. His ideal gift usually comes from Tool Crib, while mine… doesn’t.

Of course, there’s common ground, too: we both love pumpkin pie and make far too much fuss over our cat. And this year we decided to buy cross-country skis for our Christmas gift to each other. Skiing is something we both did as kids, but we’d both gotten away from it for various reasons; I hadn’t skied in more than twenty years, he in fifteen. But, on Christmas Eve day, we set out for the local ski trail with all our shiny new equipment, stepped our new boots into our bindings and then we were off. We were still in the parking lot when we realized that he had my poles and I had his, which, given the fourteen-inch difference in our heights, was no small problem. We switched poles, and then swooshed into the woods.

Through some miracle of motor memory, we both found skiing to be easy and heart-liftingly fun, and as we made our way around the “beginner’s” loop watching the sun setting through the trees, we vowed to come back again soon to try the harder trails. The day after Christmas found us on the intermediate loop. The snow was falling fast and every branch of every tree was covered in white. There was no sound except our shouts as we whooshed down hills and herringboned our way back up, looking ahead to what would be around the next bend, looking forward to the next time we could come back again and try the next-hardest trail.

Listing cross-country skiing on each of our “character worksheets” as a “formative childhood experience” would seem a good trick for a novelist to use. Despite all the evident differences between us, there is this one off-the-wall, base thing from our childhoods where we can find common ground, a way for us to surprise ourselves and each other after so many years.

Happy New Year!