Your story’s characters are real. Yes, they are real to the reader who adds dimension, likes, dislikes and their own experiences to them. If they are finely and exquisitely drawn from your mind to the page, they will live on way beyond your final draft and published work. If not, they will enter into oblivion.
Let’s look at a few memorable characters, good, bad, but rarely indifferent to the reader’s imaginings. Charles Dickens is my favorite writer, even with his betrayal of a wife who bore him ten children. Even if many critics perceive him as egotistical and self-important. Who knows? I didn’t know him personally. But his characters are haunting. From “Great Expectations,” I think of Miss Havisham, lost to the present moment as she endlessly relives her wedding that never happened. Her whole world, in the confines of a neglected estate, is preserved in time and yet spoiled and rotting away. A cake with mice running through it. A bridal dress she’s worn for sixteen years like a hair shirt or form of torture, not for her sin but as a reminder of the man who betrayed her. If a character is finely drawn, another dimension comes to life, an undercurrent or subtext of society itself. Miss Havisham symbolizes emptiness and decay at the core of society’s upper echelon and elitism that poor Pip, our central character, strives for in his pursuit of Estella, Miss Havisham’s niece. I love Miss Havisham’s character because she disturbs me immensely. She is more than a two-dimensional figure. She wears her pain like a banner! How many of us do the same when we constantly relive a past hurt or can’t get beyond a ruined moment? Oh, I could spend pages on Miss Havisham, and some day, I’ll have the courage to don her likeness in costume!
As a child, I cried for days over E. B. White’s book, “Charlotte’s Web.” My mother was so disconcerted by my reaction to the story that she lamented my ever reading it! Charlotte! Oh how, I loved that self-sacrificing, altruistic, kind, clever spider loyal to Wilbur, the pig, vulnerable to life on a farm. She was honorable to the end and wise enough to know that Wilbur would protect her baby spiders. I had more difficulty letting go of Charlotte than Wilbur did! She was real to me, and how ironic, because, in adult life, I hate spiders. I’m still nursing a spider bite on my bicep that is taking weeks to disappear. If I see a spider, admittedly, I kill it without hesitation. Although I haven’t read the book since childhood days, I recall how it left me feeling Charlotte’s painful loss. Somehow, in my writer’s DNA, Charlotte must have made her imprint, because my favorite character in “Unearthing Christmas” the novel that spawned a five-book series is: Charlotte. I also have a lovely anecdotal story associated with the character. When “Unearthing Christmas” was first published, I was so excited that I sent a copy to Kate Middleton, since my favorite character, Charlotte, is also her daughter’s name, born the same year the novel was first published. Well, I now have corresponded back and forth to her Royal Highness and have several pieces of royal mail. Yes, life is always more fascinating than fiction.
Finally, there’s the character I detest, and I have to go back to Charles Dickens because his characters are so very finely drawn, even more than the pen and ink illustrations of his day! Madame Defarge in “A Tale of Two Cities” knitted at her wine shop and placidly awaited the start of the French Revolution. Many will justify her anger, outrage and revenge in defense of the plight of women. But, I never think of her charitably and she’ll always be a troublemaker, someone who celebrates chaos and destruction at any cost. I’ve even been so mean-spirited to define people as Madame Defarge types sitting on the sidelines in the real world with smirks on their faces as they look at evil triumph because they themselves are filled with some sort of self-loathing. Okay, overboard? Maybe, but that’s what a finely drawn character can elicit days, months, and years after meeting them in the pages of a book.
So, I ask you, dear writers, what characters have left their impression on you? What are you willing to expose about your characters? Don’t worry if they’re likeable. Make them memorable!!
Happy writing!