Over the past few days I have spent a lot of time and many pixels thinking about characters (for purposes of this journal, Richard III is a character, because obviously I can only deal with the impression I get by reading.) I've described a character that doesn't work for me, and why. (I'm not patting myself on the back for my perceptiveness here--I would be extremely surprised if the inept vampire hero I was talking about appealed to anyone other than his creator.)

And obviously, since I write and have no plans to stop, I must think myself capable of creating characters who might potentially appeal to readers other than myself. So I'm going to take a post to specifically describe my thinking, and the choices I've been making, in developing my current protagonist.

Before I go any further let me state for the record that the character may not appeal to everyone--or indeed anyone except me--but I have hopes.

I'd also like to invite anyone who reads this thing, whether you're on the friends-list or not, to share specifics of what you've done to create your own would-be-likable characters. Or perhaps qualities that make characters appealing when you read. The more specific the better, okay?

Before I talk about what I did, let's just review for a moment exactly what I was trying to accomplish.

The plot for the Kowalski story is one I've been kicking around, in one form or another, for a number of years. But it didn't really come into focus until I had a character I could build the story around. Jordy was a character I planned to use as a minor character, possibly a sympathetic murder victim, in a completely different story. That is to say, I had a spot for such a character in something else I was thinking about, and when Jordy wandered into my head I thought I could use him there.

But the thing was, Jordy wandered into my head. I didn't really invent him, he was one of those characters who just comes to life inside my head and I really didn't make decisions regarding what he's like. I just sort of got to know him. You know what I mean, right? I'm pretty sure this happens with everyone--sometimes we have a whole story we need to tell, but other times we have this new person hanging around and we just need to figure out what his story is going to be.

I will say, and I suspect this is common, that the characters who come to me fully-formed tend to be ones I hang on to and experience as vivid.

I also suspect that some of the worst Mary Sues in existence strike their creators in exactly the same way, so I have to remember that just because Jordy is vivid to me doesn't mean he's equally alive to anyone else.

Still, a character like that is a lot of fun to work with because I know him so well. How well? In the course of thinking about the character, writing little sketches with him, figuring out who is important to him and what he wants out of life, I was actually able to not only fill out a detailed character profile form--I also did the Myers-Briggs personality sorter on him three different times and came up with the same personality type each time.

Which may be more than anyone needs to know about how my mind works, but again: knowing the character so well is really helpful when it comes to working out my plot. This is not a story that's going to end with Jordy going all Rambo on the killer's ass. It can't--the main character would be unable to behave that way. In the absence of a really well-worked-out plot to guide me, I'm grateful for a clear sense of the character.

This still leaves me with two questions. I've already expressed one of them: is this character likable to anyone but me?

I won't be able to tell until some more people get to read his story. But in the meantime I can work on the other question: how do I develop and express his personality so that readers will get to know him?

Which is the long way round to what I meant to write about in the first place: what exactly did I do with him?

I know there are guidelines and classic gambits and that whole business of Pet the Dog that we talked about related to the television tropes web site. I'm not that organized, and if I tried to insert tropes (I'm not even sure I know what a trope is, but that's my failing not your problem) on purpose I would surely end up trying and failing to manipulate readers.

So instead of that, I just tried to be very conscious of looking at the world through Jordy's eyes. When I ran the personality sorter on him and kept getting the same result, and it wasn't my personality type, I was encouraged. I felt like I had a handle on who he was, and since I'm writing in close-up third person his outlook permeates the reader's experience of the story. And what I'm trying to get across is a character who's unaggressive, interested in others and sensitive to their feelings, and essentially kind.

So how do I try to show this? Well, I've posted the opening here more than once, but I'm going to post a few lines of it again. It's Speak French Day in the van and nobody is saying much.

The loophole in Speak French Day was, you were allowed to read in English. Erica, for instance, had her nose in a biography of Neil Young, but Jordy always felt sort of guilty reading an English book on Speak French Day. And since he read French just about well enough to cope with the menus at McDonalds, at least if the cashier was patient with him, French books were not an option. Even if he’d owned any, which he didn’t, except for the copy of Le Petit Prince he’d struggled through in grade eleven. And he wasn’t bringing that out on the road with him because last summer he’d read the book in English, and now that he understood the ending he was pretty sure he’d cry over it, which he certainly didn’t need in front of his band mates. It’d be the Charlotte’s Web fiasco all over again.

That's probably chaotic and certainly suffers from my usual problem of wordiness. In this case the wordiness is necessary, because the character's thought processes are digressive and I'm trying to show that. It still could use some work to get the feeling across without boring the reader. But for now I'm just going to point out a few decisions I made for purposes of character revelation:

The loophole in Speak French Day was, you were allowed to read in English. Erica, for instance, had her nose in a biography of Neil Young, but Jordy always felt sort of guilty reading an English book on Speak French Day. [Jordy holds himself to the rule even when he has a technical out. If he thinks he should be doing something, he does it. But notice he's not making any judgement about Erica and her reading material.] And since he read French just about well enough to cope with the menus at McDonalds, at least if the cashier was patient with him, [Here he's automatically acknowledging that his success owes a lot to someone else being helpful] French books were not an option. Even if he’d owned any, which he didn’t, [Digressive and somewhat disorganized thinking] except for the copy of Le Petit Prince he’d struggled through in grade eleven. And he wasn’t bringing that out on the road with him because last summer he’d read the book in English, and now that he understood the ending he was pretty sure he’d cry over it, which he certainly didn’t need in front of his band mates. [He's willing to acknowledge an embarrassing weakness but not in a hurry to display it.] It’d be the Charlotte’s Web fiasco all over again. [No need to spell that out, but I wanted an example of an occasion when he did in fact display his embarrassing weakness in front of his friends.]

The impression I was going for here is: unaggressive, willing to give credit where it's due, nonjudgmental, sentimental.

A few lines later he's reflecting on roadkill:

Back home you mostly saw dead raccoons and that was bad enough, but the armadillos were so pitiful with their little shells all crushed that Jordy couldn’t stand to look at them.

Not something he's going to say out loud, but he's imaginative and sentimental enough that small dead things bother him.

A few pages later, when the band arrives at the festival site, Jordy thinks this about their surroundings:

Jordy had never seen such unfriendly-looking trees in his life. If he was a bird, he kind of thought he’d go live somewhere else.

This is anthropomorphic thinking in two different directions: he's investing the trees with human personality traits and also imagining what it would be like to be a bird, except that what he's really doing is thinking about what it would like to be himself in a bird's body. He does something similar much later in the story when he's talking to the detectives and watching a bug walk across his hand: he's seriously wondering what the bug is thinking about.

In other parts of the story I've got Jordy trying to imagine what other people are thinking or feeling. Because he is essentially charitable, he tends to assume their thoughts and feelings are mostly positive, and when they behave in a negative way he finds excuses for them. He isn't aware that he's giving them the benefit of the doubt, he just assumes good intent on the part of others and worries about their feelings. He likes other people and tends to trust them.

Which, as you can imagine, is a bit of an impediment to his effectiveness as a sleuth.

And this is probably enough for now, but what I find interesting is this: in many ways this is not a complicated character. And it turns out that writing someone like that can actually be kind of complicated.