Show your grasshopper the sky

Inventing a character seems pretty basic. You give him (or her, or it) a name, you visualize a face, maybe even conjure up a voice. Not just a literary voice, but a real one, one you can actually hear. You develop mannerisms, manufacture a backstory, and–then what?

Throw your character into a situation, of course. For which you need a setting.

Now begins the tricky part. Imagining a room, a chair, a lamp, a rug, a wall, and a ceiling is about as far as some of us are willing to venture. Afterall, our character is just passing through, to answer the telephone perhaps, or to pick up a newspaper, or search for a missing car key.

But, making the setting too vague has consequences. So does making the scene too perfect. Either way, you risk constraining your character in an unwieldy box. Suppose your character takes up residence in a contrived place. How do you keep that critter from becoming stuck there? On the other hand, how do you pull that character out and then return that character to the same setting without artificially reorienting the reader? And how do you reorient the reader? How do you remind them that Joe or Sally or Fido has once again returned to familiar surroundings? How do you accomplish such movements without the risk of repetitive redundancy?

Try thinking of your character as a grasshopper–a living organism which, through no fault of its own, is captured by a writer and placed inside a glass jar. The fact that airholes have been incised into the lid is of little consequence to the captive character who longs for freedom. The grasshopper doesn’t belong in the jar any more than an invented character belongs in a contrived setting.

Not unless you make your character feel something, or better yet, want something. To make the character work, to make the scene work, you must transcend the scene. If you want to animate your character and enthrall your reader, you have to make both the character and the reader care.

To do that, you must reach higher. To make anybody care about a character trapped in a box, you have to give everyone a glimpse of the sky.

Don Paul Benjamin

Donald Paul Benjamin is an American mystery novelist. He was born in Greeley, on Colorado’s eastern plains. As a teen he worked on his high school newspaper. Upon graduation in 1963, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving three years as a military journalist, including a tour in Korea. Honorably discharged, he completed a teaching degree at the University of Northern Colorado (UNC). In 1982, he earned a master’s degree in college administration at Oregon State University. From 1982-2014, he worked in Arizona higher education. In 2014, he retired to the wild Western Slope of Colorado, where he lives in the small town of Cedaredge, fishing and hiking in the surrounding wilderness. He recently married Donna Marie, his publishing collaborator, who’s a graphic designer and production artist. The two now operate “Elevation Press,” a company which helps self-publishing authors format their Microsoft Word documents into print-ready PDFs which can be submitted to a traditional printer or print-on-demand service such as Kindle Direct Publishing.

Category: Blog

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