For fiction writers to write successful fiction, we must know the characters driving our stories like the back of our hands. No – more than that. We need to be able to embody our characters – feel what they are feeling, see the world through their eyes. We need to understand their motivations for every decision they make in the story we create. I often suspect one of the real causes of writer’s block is not understanding our characters well enough to narrate their story. This results in our stories reaching a stalemate when we cannot move forward.
Creating three-dimensional characters is vital if we want to build the bridge of empathy between our characters and our reader. If we fail to make our readers feel for our characters, we fail in writing our stories.
Character construction is the beating heart of writing fiction. I am especially aware of the importance of shaping character through engagement with historical context to write successful historical narratives. I craft character through appreciation that character/or identity is a product of the context of history, culture and gender.
I want to show you in this column an example of a powerful and fun tool I use to get deep into my character’s motivations, and mindset. So, what's my tool? I interview the characters in my stories. Believe me, interviewing our characters is a great way to ‘hear’ their voice. I also learn a lot about my characters when I interview them. Every time I have used this tool, I have come away from the experience surprised by what my characters confide to me. I especially love how interviewing them reveals more about their backstories. It is also a great exercise to solve the problem of ‘writer’s block’.
Let me now provide you with an example of one of my interviews. I gave voice to María de Salinas in All Manner of Things, the conclusion of Falling Pomegranate Seeds: The Duty of Daughters, my Katherine of Aragon story.
Of course, there was a time during the drafting process that I had to interview María to be better able to write her story…
WJD: Thank you for giving me your time, María. Can you tell me why telling this story is important to you?
María: I need to tell it. I must tell it. I am dying. All the signs tell me my heart is failing. My ankles are swollen, and I can no longer wear any of my rings. Even a short walk leaves me breathless. I sit in this chair before you, feeling the pain of my heart.
WJD: But you have studied the healing arts. Surely there are treatments you could use to help you.
María: Perhaps. But I do not believe so – and I have no desire to drag out my life for one day longer than it will take me to write my letter to my Catalina.
You ask why telling this story is important to me.
I need my daughter to understand that life gave me no other choice but to give her wardship to Suffolk. Do you think I would have given my only surviving child to others to care for if I had any choice in the matter? I was widowed and had only the queen’s support. When Will, my beloved husband died, the queen’s influence with the king, her husband, had waned to hardly anything at all. My daughter’s uncle was like a wolf at our door. He was determined to rob my daughter of her inheritance. I knew Suffolk as a friend, and I believed him a good man. As a duke, he had the necessary power to protect her. He promised to marry her to his son when they were of age.
How was I to know it all would go wrong?
WJD: You are saying you’re estranged from your daughter?
María: Yes – since her wedding to Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. I had hard enough time understanding why Suffolk decided to marry my daughter only weeks after the death of his wife, Mary Tudor, the White Queen. As soon as I received his letter telling me of his plans, I left my residence in London and rode to his estate. I arrived the night before the wedding. My daughter began weeping as soon as I managed to get her alone. She was distraught – and confused. She had been raised to be the wife of Suffolk’s son – not the man she had been encouraged to call ‘Father’ since but a small child. She was grieving for the death of Mary Tudor, and grieving for the boy she believed would one day be her husband. She thought I had the power to talk Suffolk out of the marriage. I thought so too, but the man was crazed with grief. He had not only lost his wife, but his physicians had now told him his son had lung disease and was not likely to survive another winter. My daughter had been trained to be the duchess of Suffolk – and was of an age to give him sons. We began our talk still with some semblance of our long friendship in place, but by the end of our conversation we were close to enemies. Then I had to face Catalina again and tell her of my failure. If I had been left raw from my talk with Suffolk, Catalina’s words soon had me bleeding. I will never forget how she said she hated me and called me wicked. She hides this in public, but I know she has not forgiven me.
WJD: So you think telling your story will help you restore your relationship with your daughter?
María: It must restore our relationship. Catalina is all that is left to me in this world. She is all that is left of her father. I love her with all my heart. I cannot die knowing she hates me.
WJD: So, by telling your story, what do you want her to understand?
María: I want her understand many things. I want her to understand that women make the best of the hand dealt to them in life. I want her to understand that all through my life I had tried to live the best life I could. I want her to understand that I am not a woman who would give up her child if she had any other option open to her.
I want her to know that I believed Suffolk would keep her safe. He vowed to me he would keep her safe. I was not to know he would decide to marry her. He betrayed me, betrayed his son, and betrayed my daughter. I thought him my friend – but, like other men I have known in my life, he proved a man unworthy of all trust.
There are other tools you can also use as a writer to help construct your characters. We can do profiles of our characters and include things like their age, height, ethnic heritage, likes and dislikes – and even their birthdate, which will give you their astrology sign. All these things help construct the point of view of our characters. Even a simple thing like height can be important to consider when building up a profile of your character. For example, Katherine of Aragon was no more than 160 cm or five-foot-tall, which means she was far, far shorter than her 1.88 metre or almost 6 foot 2-inch husband, and far shorter than many at the English court. That fact gives me a lot to think about when constructing her character.
I want to leave you with one more quote from Kundera:
“Indeed, two centuries of psychological realism have created some nearly inviolable standards: (1) A writer must give the maximum amount of information about a character: about his physical appearance, his way of speaking and behaving; (2) he must let the reader know a character's past, because that is where all the motives for his present behaviour are located; and (3) the character must have complete independence; that is to say, the author with his own considerations must disappear so as not to disturb the reader, who wants to give himself over to illusion and take fiction for reality” (Kundera 2003, p. 33).
Works Cited:
Kundera, M 2003, The Art of the Novel, Reprint Edition, Harper, Perennial Modern Classics, New York.
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