Characters

There are two authors a writer should study if that writer wants good characters: Charles Dickens and Terry Pratchett.

I’ll lean heavily on Pratchett for most of this post, as it’s Pratchett I’m currently reading. I’ve read Dickens, of course, but it’s been about a year since we finished reading/listening to his “A Tale of Two Cities,” so it’s not as fresh on my mind.

Both Pratchett and Dickens remind me of one very important thing: Characters should be real.

That sounds odd considering both wrote fiction, but it’s true. Fictional characters should feel so real you have pictures of them in your head and you’re disappointed when the pictures others create, either for book covers or films, don’t match what you’ve got in your head because they don’t look like the picture in your head.

Take Esme Weatherwax, for one.

When I picture Mistress Weatherwax, I get Anne Ramsey. Kind of a mix between the “Goonies” Ramsey, all dressed in black and forceful in appearance, and the” Scrooged” Ramsey, disheveled, a little tipsy.

So it’s rather discomfiting to see her like this.

So when she drops in – briefly – for a visit in Pratchett’s “Wintersmith,” it’s a familiar face, because I’ve read her stories and know her ways and have a picture of her in my head.

Thing is, with Dickens and Pratchett, even the minor characters get into your head. Take Annagramma, from “Wintersmith.” If you’re not familiar with her, she’s a young, rather supercilious witch who thinks she knows everything but is rather going into things over her head. To mar my age, I picture her as an amalgam of Jan Brady from “The Brady Bunch” for the innocence, and Alex P. Keaton from “Family Ties” for the supercilious knowitalism.

No matter how I picture them, these characters all have one thing in common: Spend fifteen minutes with them, and it feels like you’ve known them your whole life (thank you, Nanny Ogg).

Dickens has this way with characters, from the Cratchitt family in A Christmas Carol to Jerry Cruncher and Miss Pross in “A Tale of Two Cities.” In these characters, we discover a depth of dedication and deviousness (loyalty, I suppose, is the nicer thing to say about Miss Pross) neither we nor their employers suspect.

I know what I’m writing isn’t revelatory. Both Pratchett and Dickens are well known for their vivid characters. I am writing this for me, as a writer struggling with characterization. I need to be able to picture my characters in my head and be disappointed if the image I have isn’t the one that comes out in the wash.