Picture Your Characters

Ways in to creating memorable protagonists

A writer friend asked me the other day how I develop my characters. I had to stop and think for a minute. Having lived with the cast of ‘The Oceans Between Us’ and ‘The Child on Platform One’ for so long (nine years in the case of the former) they are sometimes more real to me than my own family (only because I sometimes spend more time with them). I suppose my characterisation starts with an impression: I know a person who is always lining things up – glasses, papers, pens - as if trying to impose some sort of order on the world, and I developed this habit to make it a control mechanism for a domineering man (John in ‘The Oceans Between Us’). My model for Eva (‘The Child on Platform One’) is a woman I know who has a kind of stillness about her – she never fusses or fidgets like I do – and I thought about how someone who likes their own space would react to the confines of a prison camp.

As a teacher I come across all sorts of personalities in my day job and I am currently working up a character who is highly academic but whose intelligence isolates her from others – something I sometimes find in very bright students whose peers find it difficult relating to them.

It’s really helpful if you can find a picture of the sort of character you are creating. In ‘The Oceans Between Us,’ my main protagonist is a young boy named Jack. I imagined him with a shock of dark brown hair and cheeks that were almost permanently ruddy, as though he went outside a lot. I am not sure where I got this image from but it was very vivid in my mind. One day, a friend from my M.A course who had read my early chapters contacted me to say she had found Jack! She’d come across one of those world war two photos that have been recently coloured by modern photographers. I followed her link and there he was – exactly as I envisaged him! He was even standing by a bomb site clutching a soft toy. The photo appears on the top of this blog.

In my research for ‘The Child on Platform One’ I visited Terezin, near Prague, where Czech Jews were interred during the war. Some of the prisoners were artists and I found a heart-breaking gallery of drawings in the exhibition. Amongst them were a young woman in a headscarf and a girl with lovely brown eyes. They became the models for two of the main characters in the book.

Creating memorable characters is not easy, and there are several articles about this challenge on my site (just type ‘Character’ into the search engine) but starting with an impression, a habit or a picture seems to work for me.