Futher Activity as God: Creating Ongoing Characters

Creating characters is one more aspect of playing God. Giving characters an identity—their personality for certain but also the way they look, act, react, talk, make love, remember their past—is an intriguing adventure. Characters are often singular, but sometimes they are ongoing. They appear in multiple stories. This presents challenges and opportunities.

Some such characters are famous. Sherlock Holmes is possibly the most famous. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 4 novellas and 56 short stories about his detective character. There are others too. W. Somerset Maugham had a character named Ashenden who appears in novels and short stories. Other mystery writers follow this, creating detectives or crime fighters about whom they pen dozens of stories. And, of course, there is James Bond. Ian Fleming wrote 14 novels and story collections about 007 (I read them all when I was in high school).

 My ongoing character is Sossity Chandler. I have published 35 stories about her. She is a rock and roll singer who struggles for many years before making it big. Some of the stories are about music and her career. But she occasionally meets ghosts and other paranormal manifestations.  She is up and down emotionally. When her marriage breaks apart, she has a “celebrity breakdown” and does some outrageous things. She is a come-back queen, though, and bounces or claws her upward after she is knocked down.

A continuing character creates opportunities and challenges.

Opportunities:  You get to know the character well. When a story idea arises, you immediately know how that character will act, how she (or he) will respond to the conflict. You also have figures you can bring into the story. An ongoing character has friends, advisers, children, maybe a spouse, all of whom are ongoing in their own right and, when a story requires their presence, you know how they will act as well.

You also get to develop the character and, as such, 

have the peculiar privilege of interacting with

her or him on a very intimate level. 

The late John Fowles, author of my favorite novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, once noted that characters originate from the same part of the brain we use to create the narrative by which we understand our own lives; as such, they are as real to us as we are to ourselves. I understand Sossity very well, and it is warming and satisfying  to deal with her when I write her stories.

Challenges:  You can get tired of an ongoing character. You can get bored with him or her. You’ve got to be careful, too, that you closely follow his biography and don’t mess up the details of her life from story to story. And sometimes you have to hurt your character. You don’t want to, but often doing so is a must for a story to succeed.

Consider creating an ongoing character. I may have more to say on this subject in the future.  And, if you want to read a little bit about Sossity Elisabeth Chandler from Big Rapids, Michigan, here are some links:

The Loss of Good

The Texas/Illinois Motel

Qualities of Light

Norwegian Wood