Exploring Personality: Part One -- "Who Am I?"

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde

The search for self is central to the human condition. Selfhood is our first great struggle in life. Differentiation. "Who am I?" "Why am I?" I am not just an extension of my mother and/or my father. Okay, well, after potty training, the struggle to establish an independent identity, to become "me," is our first great obstacle in life. Some people, perhaps most people, as Oscar Wilde says, never become "I;" they remain, in some form or another, "we" and "us."

Actually, that's a true thing that most people never really become themselves, but we'll get to that and the research around it later in this series. However, it is that thing, that thing where people are mostly other people that has always struck me about the Bible's use of the term "sheep" in its description of humanity. But I digress...

The issue for writers in all of this is not that most people are other people, it's that most characters are other people, namely the writers. Mostly, the characters that writers write are just... themselves. This becomes especially true of first person. No matter what you say or how much you protest, it just lends itself to it. This is why most first person narratives sound so much the same, they are characters that are extensions of the authors who are like most other people.

But it's not exactly fair to pick on first person exclusively as there are plenty of third person stories with completely bland and same characters. For instance, all of the characters in Madeleine L'Engle's Time books act identically virtually all of the time. The only real difference is Meg's insecurity about how she looks, etc, and that is only in A Wrinkle in Time. After that book, she falls into pattern with everyone else and their completely rational way of speaking. If you remove the speech tags from their dialogue, there would be almost no way to tell the characters apart. [Yes, I'm picking on L'Engle because I'm waist deep in her series, right now, but I could give plenty of other examples.]

The thing that makes books great is great characters. Characters that are completely themselves. Characters about whom you cannot say, "Well, this character is just like this other character." Great characters can make a weak plot shine. In fact, David Eddings, in The Belgariad, purposefully uses the most cliche fantasy plot arc possible, but his characters are extraordinary, which makes the series one of the best fantasy yarns I've ever read. Each character was an individual with its own quirks. However, in his later writing, all of his characters merged into just one character with different names, so much so that it didn't matter what name you attached to any given piece of dialogue. All of the characters were busy being the "clever one."

When I think of books I've really enjoyed, it very often focuses on having enjoyed specific characters. Like Tom Sawyer. The book is nothing without the character of Tom, possibly the greatest conman character ever created. Tom gets himself into trouble. A lot. And so does Huck, but Huck and Tom get into different kinds of trouble, because they are not the same at all. It is that they are different that makes them stand out as great characters in American literature.

It's also the draw in the Harry Potter books. You don't just have Harry and different shades of Harry. If you take out the dialogue tags, you can still tell when Hermione is speaking as opposed to Harry or Ron. Or, even, Luna or Neville. Each of Rowling's characters is its own person.

Having written a book with multiple first person perspectives, I do have some experience with this. As I've mentioned on my own blog (StrangePegs), the book The Pigman by Paul Zindel was a big part of the inspiration for the format I chose. At the time, it was the only multiple first person book I knew of (who knew it would become a "thing"?), and I wanted to experiment with that. In Zindel's book, each chapter starts with the writer of that chapter saying something like, "Hey, this is Lorraine," or, "It's John, now." It was necessary, too, because, mostly, if you take out those introductions, the chapters feel pretty much the same. I knew I didn't want that. I didn't want to have to "greet" the reader at the beginning of each chapter.

Not using any kind of intro meant that I was going to have to make sure the tone of each chapter was significantly different from the others so that the reader would be able to tell who was talking fairly quickly. And I think I did that. I mean, readers have reported distinct favorites in regards to the characters, and I don't think that would be the case unless there was significant differences between the ways each characters "talks." Adults, especially adult males, tend to favor Tom; kids tend to favor Ruth. Only a few people have told me they favor Sam (unless it's to say they like Tom and Sam, or Ruth and Sam). No one has told me they didn't like Sam, though, and I've had more than a few people tell me they found Ruth to be completely annoying. So I think I did my job.

Of course, I cheated. I used my kids as the templates for each of the characters, so I was using a real personality to start from. Of course, that's not really cheating, because some of the greatest characters in literature have been based on people the authors knew. It's a normal thing to do.

But what if you don't want to be so direct? After all, some people get upset when they read your book and find that they're in there. Where do characters, where do personalities, come from? How do you write them so that they are not just extensions of yourself? And how do you write them so that they stay true to themselves so that you don't lose your audience by having a character do something to which the audience reacts, "Oh, she would never have done that!" That can be a killer.

For the next... while, we'll be talking about personality, the different types, and how to design your characters and have them behave in manners consistent with those personalities. I hope you'll come along.