Creating Unforgettable Characters (27 page)

Fiction can be powerful. Characters have the potential to affect our lives on many levels. They can inspire us, motivate behavior, help us understand ourselves and others, expand our insight into human nature, and even be role models—leading us to new decisions about our lives.

But just as characters can have a positive influence, they can also affect us negatively. There is strong evidence that criminal behavior has, at times, been copied from television shows. A number of studies have inferred a relationship between violence on television and violence among children and adults. And there is evidence that stereotyping can cause audiences to have a negative impression of an entire group of people. As a writer creating dimensional characters, understanding stereotyping and breaking stereotypes is essential.

We might define a stereotype as the continual portrayal of a group of people with the same narrow set of characteristics. Usually a stereotype is negative. It shows a cultural bias toward the characteristics of one's own culture, painting characters outside that culture in limiting, and sometimes, dehumanizing ways.

Who gets stereotyped? Anyone who is different from us. Anyone we don't understand. This can include ethnic minorities, such as blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans, if you're a white writer; or it can include whites, if you're a minority writer. People with physical disabilities are often stereotyped, as well as the developmentally disabled, the emotionally disturbed, the mentally ill.

Religious groups are often stereotyped, whether Muslims, Catholics, Jews, Fundamentalists, mainline Protestants, Hindus, or Buddhists.

The opposite sex can be stereotyped, whether female or male. People with sexual orientations different from our own get stereotyped—gays, lesbians, even occasionally heterosexuals.

People who are older or younger than we are often are stereotyped, as are those who come from another culture.

Stereotypes vary for different groups. Women and minorities are often portrayed as victims. In many films, particularly, they tend to be expendable. Either they're the first ones to die or they're the ones who need rescuing by the white male.

People with disabilities are often portrayed as the "handicapped horror, " with a certain deformity of the body symbolizing a deformity of the soul. Or they are portrayed as the pitiful victim, or else as the Supercrip, a term sometimes used by people with disabilities to connote the Superman or Super-woman who performs tremendous feats and is able to overcome the disability through miraculous means.

Blacks are often portrayed as comical, or the butt of the joke, or as perpetrators of crimes. Asian women will often be portrayed as the exotic-erotic, the men as mindless hordes, or sometimes, even as the model minority—well off and well behaved. Although the latter may not seem negative, it is limiting and stereotypical since it doesn't recognize that Asians are affected by the same problems as any other group.

Think how often the Native Americans have been portrayed as the bloodthirsty savages or the drunken, cowardly outlaws. And how often Hispanics are portrayed as gang members or bandits, or as Luis Valdez says, "The assumption is that Hispanic stories only take place in the Southwest behind adobe walls and under a tile roof. "
¹

Even the white male has not escaped stereotyping. An emphasis on the man of action, whether the strong silent type or the supermacho, denies a whole group of men images that reflect their identity. Men who are househusbands, massage therapists, or schoolteachers can feel their contributions as nurturers devalued. The thinking man or the man of compassion rarely sees images that reflect his reality.

Most groups, from secretaries to blondes to basketball players to WASPS to Vietnam vets to lawyers, have at one time or another been portrayed in a stereotypical manner. Very few groups have been immune from our natural desire to simplify complex human characters. No one is exempt.

A
character type is
not the same as a stereotype. The doddering father or the braggadocio soldier are character types, not stereotypes, because the portrayal is balanced with other images of fathers and soldiers. Readers and audiences do not form the conclusion that "all fathers are doddering" or "all soldiers are braggadocio" as a result of this image. The character type doesn't suggest that everyone in a certain group (such as fathers) has the same characteristic (doddering). The stereotype does.

MOVING BEYOND THE STEREOTYPE

In spite of the good intentions of many writers, fictional characters are predominantly white and do not accurately portray reality. The population of the United States consists of about 12 percent blacks, 8.2 percent Hispanics, 2.1 percent Asians, and 2 percent Native Americans, and 20 percent of all people have a disabling condition—but most fiction portrays quite a different reality.

In a recent analysis of television shows, a study by the U. S.

Civil Rights Commission found that although 39.9 percent of the U.S. population is made up of white males, white males make up 62.2 percent of all characters on television.

Whereas 41.6 percent of the U.S. population consists of white females, and 9.6 percent of the population consists of minority females, television drama vastly underrepresents them. In the analysis, 24.1 percent of all television characters were white females, and only 3.6 percent were minority females.
²

In a country where 95 percent of all women work outside the home during their lifetime, the "woman in the home" stereotype is no longer true. In a country where 40 percent of theology and law students are women, it's a misrepresentation to only occasionally portray women as lawyers or judges or ministers in films or on TV. In a country where women are pilots, mechanics, telephone repair people, and rabbis, an accurate portrayal of a society would show women characters in these roles. To only play the white male gender ideal in characters ignores the variety of people within our culture.

Such statistics can be helpful to a writer in deciding what kind of characters to add to a story. It's a good beginning point, even though the makeup of a society changes from city to city. If you want to truthfully represent reality in your San Francisco story, you will have a larger percentage of Asians and gays. If you're writing a story that takes place in Los Angeles, the number of Hispanics will be greater. And a story set in Detroit or Atlanta will have a larger percentage of blacks.

Moving beyond stereotyping means training our minds to see beyond white. The creation of characters is partly a retraining of our powers of observation. In any setting, we are trained to first see the prevailing group of people. For instance, if you had visited my hometown of Peshtigo, Wisconsin (population 2,504) in the 1950s, you could easily have stereotyped it as a white, middle-class, quiet community made up almost equally of Protestants and Catholics, with a few "We don't go to church" people.

If you took a closer look, you would begin to see diversity

within the community. In those years, Peshtigo had one Jewish family who owned the local appliance store, one family who had fled from Latvia after the war, some Mexicans who in the summer picked cucumbers for the nearby pickle factory, an occasional Menominee Indian from the nearby reservation who shopped at my fathers drugstore, one small-statured person who helped children across the street after school, one mentally retarded fifth-grade girl, one eighth-grade girl who had lost an arm from cancer, four very rich families, and three very poor families.

A few years later, if you took another look at what seemed like a quiet town where nothing ever happened, you would see other details that broke the stereotype. These would include three bank robbers who were caught six hours after robbing the Peshtigo State Bank (they took the only dead-end road out of town!), and an antiwar activist minister who (to the chagrin of his congregation) led local protest marches during the Vietnam War. In recent years there has been the addition of three nationally renowned figures: the lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who has a second home in the neighboring town; Sergeant Medina, who was associated with the My Lai incident in Vietnam; and the mercenary Eugene Hasenfus.

As you may notice from the description of Peshtigo, many of these people are not defined by their ethnicity (the Jewish family, the Protestant) but by their role (owner of a store, antiwar minister).

As a beginning point, looking at the diversity within your own context can affirm the general research you have already done. Any of the people from your own background can serve as excellent models for minority characters.

Adding minorities to a novel or short story can be relatively easy: you just write them in. For dramatic writing, it may seem that adding an Indian doctor or a Korean mechanic is really a casting decision. Often it is—and the issue becomes complex because casting directors and producers don't often think

about placing minorities in the story. But there are actions that a writer can take.

Shelley List, former supervising producer-head writer on "Cagney and Lacey," says: "Because I care about how minorities are portrayed, I generally will write in the addition of the minority. Instead of being general or leaving it up to the vagaries of the casting director, I'll specify that the school is made up of Asians and blacks and whites. Or I might mention the Hispanic Judge, the Black Engineer, or the Asian Anchor-woman. The network usually doesn't question it, or notice it. The script goes to the casting director, who simply follows the definitive descriptions."

Some of the most critically acclaimed performances of the last few years have come from members of minorities who played roles that were not "minority-specific"—that is, roles that could have been played by whites. The Eddie Murphy role in
Beverly Hills Cop
was originally written for Sylvester Stallone. The Lou Gossett role in
An Officer and a Gentleman
was written for a white. The Sigourney Weaver role in
Alien
was originally written for a man. Many of Whoopi Goldberg's recent roles were not minority-specific, and some of them were not even written for a woman. With each of these characters, the actor added something special to the role because of his or her own cultural background, although the role was not defined by gender or culture or ethnicity.

Most members of minorities prefer being cast in this way, rather than being the black playing a black, or a person with a disability playing a person with a disability.

EXERCISE: Imagine creating a scene in a hotel in a major U.S. city that is statistically representative of the types of people who would be staying there. What kind of black characters might you have? Hispanics? People with disabilities? What professions might these people be in? What would be their sex? Age? Religion?

HOW DO YOU DIMENSIONALIZE THESE ROLES?

Writing a character from a culture other than one's own includes, first, creating the character as fully human, with the full range of feelings and attitudes and actions of any other person, and, second, understanding the influence that the specific culture will have on the makeup of a character. As with any characters you create, a character from another culture will be both the same as and different from yourself.

To move beyond the stereotype demands a certain amount of specialized research from the writer. Sometimes the knowledge a writer brings from even the recent past is no longer relevant to the present. Women, men, people with disabilities, and ethnic minorities have all redefined themselves in the past few years, as they have insisted on their own rights within society. It is important to have some experience with the groups you are writing about—and/or to ask for advice. A number of organizations, including the NAACP, Nos-otros (a Hispanic group), the Alliance of Gay and Lesbian Artists, Asian-Pacific Americans, and the California Governor's Committee for the Employment of Disabled Persons, can be resources if you have questions or need advice, and most have people who can consult on portrayals within your story.

You might also ask someone from the minority group you're portraying to read your script or novel. For a woman writer, it can be helpful to have a man go over the material. Male writers can ask women to read their stories. Character details may be very subtle, and it often takes someone who understands the character from the inside out to clarify details, and to create a reality that rings true.

Some months ago, William Kelley (
Witness)
called me about a religious character he was creating. Knowing that I was a

Quaker, he wanted to check a few details about his Quaker female character. Those he mentioned seemed well researched and very astute. He then read me a prayer he had written for his character. I told him, "Bill, you've created a Methodist prayer, not a Quaker prayer." Our conversation affirmed the direction of his character, and also clarified one important detail.

EXERCISE: Imagine writing a funeral scene. What would it be like if it were a funeral from your own culture? Think about the funerals you've attended from other cultures. How do they vary? How would you go about finding out the difference between a Jewish funeral, a Southern black funeral, and a Quaker memorial service?

Think about the weddings you've attended. What are the differences between them? How did the various weddings express the cultural backgrounds of the bride and groom?