Creating Unforgettable Characters (13 page)

We see the sociopath (who is antisocial) or psychopath (who is also mentally unbalanced) in many films, as well as in the daily newspapers. These are often the villains in a story, the "hardened criminals," the people with no moral center who can be fearless, untrustworthy, out for their own personal gain and self-preservation, with no empathy for others. As an antagonist, a sociopath or psychopath will go to any lengths to impede the good intentions of the protagonist.

These characters do not transform. If you decide to have characters who are psychopaths or sociopaths, remember that they cannot become normal, well-adjusted individuals by the end of the film.

Almost all of the famous Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney films, such as
White Heat, Little Caesar,
and
Scarface,
focus on the sociopath. The sociopath also appears in
The Godfather, Helter Skelter,
and
Bonnie and Clyde.

Drama and conflict can come from the relationship between these characters. Paranoids need someone to persecute them, and will find the manic's aggressiveness a threat. The manic finds the depressive's lack of energy and drive a frustration. The psychopath has no understanding of the anxiety neurotic's fears.

If you are writing an abnormal character, you will probably need to do additional psychological research. Reading medical journals and psychology books, talking to psychologists, perhaps even meeting or observing people with an abnormal personality disorder will all be helpful.

Although this material may seem clinical, thinking of your characters as having some abnormal tendencies can add conflict and complexity. Some writers try to make their characters too nice, too likable, too sane—thereby destroying any edge that might make them interesting. Looking at these categories can help you round out your characters, recognizing that even nice characters may have a little craziness in them.

Barry Morrow says: "Whether you make a formal study of psychology, or whether you learn it by being in the world and being observant of human behavior, you need to have a deep enough well to write from. You have to have had the opportunity of being bounced around enough in this world by strange people, in order to understand human behavior."

Novelist Dennis Lynds concurs: "The person who becomes a writer is undoubtedly already interested in the psychology and sociology of character. Just as a painter had better be interested in color or he's not going to be very much of a painter, we as writers have to be interested in psychology."

James Dearden adds: "We don't go out and learn psychology as we're writing the character. You probably hope that you have a sense of how people tick, but any psychology you learn, you try to learn in a general, not a specific way. You're not there to study psychology because you're creating this specific character. Hopefully you already have a general sense of psychology, which enables you to create characters. We all have psychological knowledge on the most elemental level. We may not have fancy names for why we do things or why other people do things, but we all know that if you brutalize a child, chances are that child will brutalize when he gets older. You don't have to be a genius to figure that one out. These are part of one's experience. I think that's why in the end I keep coming back to knowing oneself. If you know yourself you can know other people. Until you know yourself, you can't know other people."

A CASE STUDY:
ORDINARY PEOPLE

Ordinary People
is a psychological novel, about a boy tormented by guilt over the death of his brother. It's a novel about identity, transformation, and change. The film version, written by Alvin Sargent, won several Academy Awards. For the purposes of this book, we will be dealing with the novel, although readers may want to watch the film to see how this psychological information was adapted to the screen.

Novelist Judith Guest approaches psychology from an understanding of her own experience, by reaching inside herself to get to the core of a character.

"Although I only took one psychology class in college, I collect news articles and I read a great many books on psychology. I haven't read a great deal of Jung's work, but I decided the Jungian theory is the theory I'm most closely aligned to.

"So much of what I do to understand psychology is unconscious research. I'm like a sponge absorbing all kinds of information from every direction I turn, yet I'm not always aware that that's what I'm doing. But because it's a subject that interests me, my ears, eyes, paws are wide open for it all the time. "

Judith's work on the psychology of her characters includes understanding their behavior, their relationships to each other, and their potential to be transformed. Most of the strokes she gives her characters come out of her intuitive understanding of why people act the way they do.

Notice that when she talks about her characters, she talks about their
inner
workings. It's not so much their outer behavior that interests her as how they think, how they see the world, the relationship between their inner and outer realities.

"With most of the characters I was going on my gut feeling of what they would be like. When I developed Burger, I wanted to create a psychiatrist that would be the best kind of psychiatrist for Conrad [the suicidal son]. I thought, What kind of guy would this be? He'd have to be as smart as this kid and have a pretty good sense of humor, because that's Conrad's way of combating the world. And I wanted a guy that uses the same method of dealing with the world through humor, but uses it more constructively than his patient. I wanted a man who was able to look at life in a Lighthearted way. Not to be able to push away the reality of life and discount his feelings of what's happening in life.

"Beth [the mother] is like a number of people I've known. With her I was trying to create a character who had been desperately hurt and her only way to deal with it was to deny and become more and more remote from the realities of her existence. She was afraid of her own emotions and of dealing with them. I think she was afraid if she ever faced the situation she would totally fall apart. This was her way of holding herself together, which makes her not different from a lot of other people in the world."

Some of the inner workings of Judith Guest's characters she learns as she writes about them. For instance, her attitude toward Beth changed, the more she observed her. "I think when I first started writing Beth, I hated her. I blamed her for what had happened to Conrad. The longer I wrote, the more complex the situation appeared to me and the less I blamed her. She was the way she was. He was also the way he was and he learned to be different and she didn't. She wasn't able to rise above the situation."

For a novelist, communicating character psychology leaves open the possibility of getting inside the head of the character—of letting the reader know what the character is feeling and thinking. With the characters of Calvin (the father) and Conrad, Judith chose to do so. With Beth, she made a conscious choice not to.

"I didn't think that understanding Conrad's or Calvin's character would be that difficult. So I went inside both their heads, and chose not to go inside Beth's because I felt it would be too difficult to try. The truth is: I didn't understand her character. I know there are people like this and there are reasons why they are the way they are, but to get inside her head and try to portray what they were seemed very difficult to me."

Judith needed to understand the relationship and transforming potential of one person for another—and how that would change what was going on inside their heads. I asked Judith if she thought Beth was transformable. "Definitely. I think a lot of it is timing. What happened in that family was that two people were ready and one person was not. And when that happens you have a choice. That is to hang in there and be ready, or to leave; and she opted to leave.

"Calvin was able to be transformed because Calvin was a less defensive person. And his defenses were washed away by the event of Conrad trying to commit suicide, and his main determination was, it was not going to happen again and he was going to do everything to make sure it didn't. Calvin realized that Conrad's suicide attempt came from not being able to talk over his feelings with other people and if he had to sit on the kid's doorstep and bug him about it every day of his life, he was not going to let that happen again.

"I really see Conrad and his mother being more alike than he and his father. I think it's the thing that kept them apart. They were both afraid of life and they kept life at a distance. They both were real perfectionists. So this real failure in their life—Buck [Conrad's brother] being drowned and lost—was more than either one of them could bear. Perfectionists also are guilt-ridden and Conrad was extremely guilt-ridden even though it wasn't his fault. He took her avoidance of dealing with anything as more evidence that he was guilty. I don't think she hated him or blamed him for the accident. I think it was more that neither one of them was able to deal with the grief of this and they buried it and it leaks out in all these other ways. When Conrad tried to let go of these destructive behaviors in his life, he couldn't tolerate them any more in his mother.

"I think Conrad's way of dealing with things was always to joke about it and slough them off Rather than confronting the hostility he encounters from Stillman [the jock] he makes some crack back, which doesn't resolve anything. To me it was a measure of his mental health when he finally got in a big fight with him. He had had it with Stillman. It was a very direct reaction."

The movement in
Ordinary People
is a movement toward both mental health and transformation for Conrad and Calvin, as well as one toward finding meaning in life. "There are things in people's lives that just defy meaning," Judith Guest says. "You can go crazy trying to figure out what the meaning of something is. When Conrad says to Burger in their final scene, 'Don't you see, it's got to be somebody's fault or what was the whole point of it?' Burger says, "There was no point, it happened. It is true that people search for meaning, but the search for meaning can hang you up if there's a terrible tragedy.'

"Both Calvin and Conrad formed a stronger identity. By the end of the book, they're certainly more expanded people, deeper people, more relational, more feeling—they care more, and I think they're trying to be more honest. They began to get in touch with that core person of who they really are—

and they stop being judgmental. Something good did come of all this!"

APPLICATION

Knowing the inner workings of your character can help create a stronger and more understandable character. To begin with, ask yourself:

• What traumatic incidents in my character's past might affect present behavior? Are there good influences in the past that might influence transformation in the present?

■ What unconscious forces are driving my character? How do they affect my character's motivations, actions, and goals?

■ What character types have I drawn upon for my major and supporting characters? Am I getting contrast and conflict from these character relationships?

■ Have I made my characters too nice, too bland, too normal? Is there anything a little abnormal about them? How do their abnormalities cause conflict with other characters?

SUMMARY

People are always more than systems. Yet there are certain consistent patterns of behavior and attitudes that are governed by their psychology. Understanding that people are both the same in terms of certain basic desires and different in terms of how they respond to life can be a key to creating dimensional characters with both a rich outer life and a rich inner one.

Characters rarely exist alone—they exist in relationships. Aside from an occasional one-character story (for instance,
Krapp's Last Tape,
by Samuel Beckett, or
Duel,
by Steven Spielberg), most stories are about the interaction between people. For many films and television series, the dynamic between the characters can be as important as any individual character quality.

Novelist Leonard Tourney emphasizes the change in focus in the twentieth century. "Couples have become increasingly important in fiction and film. There are innumerable stories with partners—police partners, husband-and-wife teams. It introduces into the story a kind of chemistry, creates a new person, a new identity, something new. When you put any two people or objects together, you have a new thing. People as couples are different from the individual. It's not conscious, but couples tend to behave differently when they're together."