Manual For Fiction Writers by Block, Lawrence (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

for me, as I thought of her when I sat down to write this piece. For others she's part of the scenery, serving to evoke the ambience of the restaurant in which the protagonists are about to have a conversation and thus to lend atmosphere to that conversation. It doesn't really matter whether she's memorable or not. She's a bit player, a spear carrier.

The way you delineate such minor characters is one of the things that separates-hmmmm. Not the men from the boys. That's sexist. The adults from the children? The sheep from the goats? The fool from his money?

Enough. Out in Hollywood, where they know how to delegate responsibility, it's the job of the casting director to select actors for minor roles. The casting director studies the script, conceptualizes the characters for their roles as written, and combines intuition, experience, and familiarity with available talent to pick the right people.

The poor prose writer, hack of all trades, has to be his own casting director. He uses his intuition and experience, adds his powers of imagination and observation, and does his best.

Where do you find your minor characters? A good many writers do their casting from the world they live in, patterning characters after friends, acquaintances, or passers-by. This is perfectly legitimate, and is quite different from the roman ˆ clef, where a real story about real people is told in the guise of fiction. Instead your real-life model serves to give you a handle on the character you're creating?a conversational mechanism, a physical trait, an attitude of one sort or another.

Wherever your minor characters come from, one thing you ought to train yourself to do is visualize them in your mind before rendering them on paper. Perhaps visualization is the wrong word here; it implies sight, and for some characters your process of realization may not be specifically visual at all. Sometimes I will get a strong visual impression of a character. I'll be able to picture him as graphically in my mind as I would a close friend. Other times I'll know instead how his voice sounds, or that he shifts his weight from foot to foot as he talks, or that there is something noteworthy about his eyes or hands.

He stood five-ten, weighed around 155 pounds. His hair was dark brown verging on black, slicked down and combed straight back. He had a broad forehead and a strong, hawklike nose. His eyes were a medium brown. His mouth was wide, full-lipped, and when he drew back those lips to smile he showed large even teeth. His suit was a gray sharkskin, a three-button model with padding in the shoulders. He wore a buff-colored shirt with a tab collar, a navy silk tie with a restrained below-the-knot design. He?

There's nothing horribly wrong with the description above but neither is there anything terribly right with it. It's photographic. It tells us how tall and how heavy the character is, what his features are like, what he's wearing. It's exactly the sort of description a cop would want to get from an eye-witness. As a quick study of a minor character in a work of fiction, it tells us more than we need to know and less than we'd like to know.

In contrast, look again at the description of the waitress from Cutter and Bone. Thornburg doesn't tell us if the lady's tall or short, heavy or thin. He doesn't tell us much about her physical appearance, just a few words about her hairstyle and the hardness of her face. But I know what she looks like. And so do you. And while my picture of the woman may differ from yours, and while each of ours will differ from Thornburg's, that's irrelevant. We have a sense of the person, and we can fill in the rest ourselves to reflect our own intuition and experience and imagination. Reading, after all, is an audience-participation venture, and every story is a slightly different experience for every reader.

What's important, then, is to furnish the reader with those details which impress themselves upon you when you visualize the character. Here's an example from Out the Window, a detective novelette of mine which appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine:

The door opened. He was tall and thin, with hollow cheeks and prominent eyebrows and a worn, wasted look to him. He must have been in his early thirties and he didn't really look much older than that but you sensed that in another ten years he'd look twenty years older. If he lived that long. He wore patched jeans and a tee-shirt with THE SPIDER'S WEB silkscreened on it. Beneath the legend there was a sketch of a web. A macho spider stood at one end of it, grinning, extending two of his eight arms to welcome a hesitant girlish fly.

I chose this paragraph partly out of vanity (it is a nice paragraph, isn't it?) but also because I remember how it evolved. When I started writing it I didn't know what the guy looked like. I knew who he was?a bartender who'd been living with the girl whose death the lead character is investigating. I had a vague impression of his face, my idea amounting to a sort of composite of the faces of a slew of footloose predatory males I've met in life and on celluloid. More important, I had a sense of who