Sometimes I can be walking or driving
somewhere and I’ll see a face of an older person.
The facial lines, the squint or
furrowed brow sets off that face from the crowd around it. Veterans gatherings
have dozens of faces that thousands of stories to tell.
One exercise that I use quite
often is to get on Fiverr and give five photoshoppers two pictures of two
different men. I ask that they merge the picture to create the face of a new
man. Each rendered image looks unique because it is the perception of the
photoshopper and the manipulation tools used.
It is that rendered image that I
blow up to an 8-1/2 by 11” portrait and hang on the wall. I have a set of
questions that I ask myself about that face.
• Who
are you?
• Where
have you been?
• When
did you leave X and go to Y?
• What
have you done?
• Why
do you have that scar?
WHO ARE YOU?
The answer to this question is
not a name. It is more like a “What.” A
good man gone bad. A schoolteacher who
snapped one day and picked up a gun. A man who was fired off his job and
decided to go back for revenge. There are 5 specific areas in a background that
fill in:
• Someone
who worked with him said- •
Someone he drank or hung out with said –
• Neighbors
said – • A former
teacher said-
• A
deputy or police officer said-
This is designed so
that no one person can know the whole story about this man. It is a
conglomeration of information that forms the picture in the reader’s mind. And
it is an assembly of information over time. You want to paint an abstract
picture of a life so that the reader must think about the personality of your
character. You want the reader to “tell me more.”
WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
I like to ask that picture on the
wall about where they were before they were here. Remember, today’s bus drivers
and truck drivers are not all that much different from the stagecoach drivers
of the 1800s. Everybody has been somewhere. Some people have been everywhere,
click here to learn more about fiction
.
Try this on for size: Man
was born in West Virginia. Father moved them to Ohio at age four. Nice life.
Flew to Florida to get away from the bad. Stayed for four years living on the
bayou, drinking, and shrimping. Now you have a forty-year old man who has been
back and forth across the US. He cannot seem to hold a job, bad luck in love, a
drinking problem and likes to bare-fist fight.
Where can you take this character?
WHEN DID YOU LEAVE X
AND GO TO Y?
People one day packed up
everything, got on a boat and months later landed in the New World. My
next-door neighbor loads up his big Harley and heads for New Orleans because he
feels like it. Or maybe it is time for the Sturgis run.
Try this on for size:
Your character used
a crow bar to wedge open that back door of a store in Bakersfield. No alarm. No
dog. Inside he took clothing, socks, and a pair of shoes. Five minutes, he was
gone. All along the way, you have your character do something that portrays his
desperation. Petty crimes. Robberies. Shoplifting. Something that drives him on
to the next location. Give your character the “running form the crime”
attitude. It is a drifter existence. A nomadic life. And you as a writer and
author leave a trail of broken locks, broken bones and lucky breaks in his
wake.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
A while back there was a huge
shoot-out between a couple of motorcycle gangs in Texas. Over fifty people were
arrested for assorted charges. As each
one came up for indictment, their personal history began to come out.
One man’s legs were gnarled and severely
scarred. He had trained fighting dogs for years and suffered bites and attacks
from his pupils. Read these stories and connect someone’s real life background
to your fictional character.
Also, not everyone walks around with a beautiful halo
hovering above them. Even the best of men have shortcomings and failings. Maybe
your character discovered the cure for lung cancer, single-handedly
terra-formed Mars and solved the world hunger problems. He also suffers from hemorrhoids and ingrown
toenails that make him want to kill something.
WHY DO YOU HAVE THAT
SCAR?
There are three reasons why
people have scars. Mother Nature, another human being, and myself.
Mother Nature
Tree fell on me.
Wind blew shingle off the roof and it hit me. Lightning struck a power line and
the arc jolted me. Dog/horse/cow/elk/cat/snake bit me. Sun burned me.
Earthquake/Flood/Hurricane did that to me.
Another Human Being
Knife fight. Bar
fight. Buckshot. Broken bottle. Lynched. Hit by a ar/truck/scooter/bicycle Myself
Cut myself shaving. Tripped and
fell. Car accident. Slipped off trail/bridge/road/path
Hammer/saw/screwdriver/knife
missed and hit me. Climbing over/crawling under/squeezing through someplace.
It signifies a level of common
stupidity when a character admits to doing something ridiculous. The reader
empathizes. Inside of us is the secret about us doing exactly that. We get a
memory flash going back over that little white scar on our left forearm. One of
the most human things you can do to make your character real is to have him
do
Do something to your character that will
make someone else walk up and ask, “Mister, why do you have that scar? What happened to you?”
I have one of those minds where I
can see a painting of an old, broken down barn and within five minutes tell you
about the men who used to work in it.
That barn on Walking Dead where all those zombies were kept is the end
result of someone dreaming up driver. Get started.
Read all of Lee Anne Wonnacott’s western romance and
adventure novels, Newton Cutter, Iron and Rawhide, Rage at
Rancho del Oro, Nick Stolter and From
Windy Ridge to the Flint Hills.
