Articles

Beyond Betsy McCall (C) 2007
By Elizabeth White

One of my earliest memories is sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table making paper doll chains out of newspaper. Mamaw showed me how to fold the paper accordion style, draw half a lady against the fold, and cut her out so that when the paper was unfolded a beautiful string of hand-holding women appeared. (If you’ve ever done this, you’ve probably experienced the chagrin of seeing them all fall apart when you draw and cut on the wrong edge of the paper!) My grandmother also had a subscription to McCall’s magazine. My sisters and I took turns confiscating the page with the Betsy McCall paper doll and all her lovely clothes. Eventually (being the creative sort) I would get tired of trying the same three outfits on Betsy, and I’d scrounge up a piece of paper to design my own clothes. It didn’t take me long to get bored with perpetually smiling Betsy. I started cutting apart the newspaper chains to make original dolls with varied shapes, sizes, positions, facial expressions, and wardrobes. I gave them families and friends and backstories. They talked to one another. Out loud. When my cousins started looking at me funny, I took my “people” into a spare bedroom and played by myself for hours on end. Mamaw gave me a cigar box and let me keep them on the closet shelf.

You know where I’m going with this. Characters are the blood and bone of good fiction. If your “people” are not thoroughly developed, what you wind up with is a flat, uninteresting paper doll. So how do you flesh them out? How do you make them so real that if they walked around a corner and smiled you’d recognize them?

Psychology 101
A lot of a novelist's job is armchair psychology. I’ve taken a few college courses on psychology, I’ve read books and articles by Christian psychologists and therapists, and I listen to my elders. Much wisdom is packed into the experience of grandmas and grandpas in our churches and nursing homes. I also absorb what the Bible says about human behavior. I truly want to understand why do people behave the way they do. I believe that as we live this life, we bounce off one another, affect one another, change one another. This happens to be a theme that runs through all my work. I study and listen to people. When I meet someone interesting, I find myself interviewing them. Everybody has something to teach me.

Pragmatism
Character development for me often starts with a vivid mental image of the physical person. And that physical image usually springs from their function/place in the story.?For example, in my latest release, Off the Record, I started with the heroine, Laurel Kincade.

As a candidate for Alabama Supreme Court chief justice, she needed to be a highly educated woman with enough self-confidence to run for a high state office. So I imagined a strong physical presence as well. Tall, beautiful in an off-beat way, dramatic coloring. But...why would a woman like that not already be married at the age of 32? Because, I answered myself, she intimidates most men. She's been raised in a well-to-do family with good connections (which is how she could afford law school and the money it takes to run a statewide campaign). So what would her family be like?...

Those are the kinds of questions I ask myself before I begin to compose a story. I make bulleted character notes in a Word document. As I develop a character, usually someone I know who may be similar in personality will appear in my head. When I get to a situation where the character must make a decision or respond to someone else's dialogue, I picture what that real-life person would do or say. The characters change as I write, partly because I'm the puppet-master, and I know what I want to happen plot-wise. So I tinker with the backstory to make it plausible.

Secondary characters start out as sidekicks as needed, then they develop as I go. ??Usually I'm looking for "foils" to the hero and heroine. Sisters like Gilly and Laurel will share some “environmental” characteristics that affect personality––a bossy, self-absorbed mother, for example. But Gilly is sixteen years younger than Laurel, so her take on life will of course be different.

If you want to think of it in physics terms, it's like a game of chasing reactions to stimuli. Keeping in mind the character's background, temperament, and emotions, I put myself inside that person's skin. Sometimes I get it wrong or over-exaggerate for dramatic effect, and then an editor or critiquer has to challenge me. Which makes me re-think and rewrite. Sound messy? It is!

The Woo-Woo Factor
Pragmatism aside, there’s something mysterious that triggers my imagination in the first place. Something that makes me question why? Usually before I begin a novel, I freewrite as if I were writing in a main character's diary about some event that occurred way in the past. It’s always some event that triggers or deeply affects what happens in the present story. That freewriting won't be in the actual novel, except in fragments of dialogue or stream-of-consciousness thought. But it undergirds the narrative like an imbedded stream of water that seeps to the surface occasionally and feeds the growth of the story.

Most writers say their characters surprise them, and that's true for me too. It’s the coolest thing about the process. Often a line of dialogue will pop out naturally from the flow of a scene, and I'll track it down to see if it fits the character. Maybe it’s a little off, in which case I have to either delete it (painful) or adjust backstory. Or maybe the story yaws off in a completely different direction than I'd anticipated.?An example of this would be the line at the end of Off the Record’s first chapter, which told me that Laurel and Cole had had a physical relationship in the past. That was a powerful surprise. But it fed a lot of conflict into a plotline about a woman who is trying to pretend she’s morally above reproach. And we all know that the more physical a relationship gets, the harder it is to sever emotional ties.

Truth
Bottom line, the element of truth to a character’s behavior and thought processes is what forges the connection between him or her and the reader. As a reader, I want to put myself inside the skin of other people for a while and experience life with them––in order to learn something, in order to escape from my own mundaneness, in order to better understand the nature of God. If I can do that for my readers, I’ll be satisfied.

A member of Gulf Coast Chapter RWA, Beth White writes romance and romantic suspense for Zondervan and Love Inspired. Her novels have been finalists for the American Christian Fiction Writers Book of the Year award and have won Romantic Times Book Club’s Reviewers Choice award and the Inspirational Readers Choice. Visit her on the web at www.elizabethwhite.net.