October has always been my favorite time of year, what with the vibrant contrasts of azure skies and yellow-orange leaves, a mix of weather from rainy mornings to mild afternoons to brisk evenings, and, of course, the pleasures and antics of Halloween.
I was thinking this past week about how many Halloween costume parties I’ve attended or hosted, and while it’s not a huge number, I just about ran out of fingers while counting — and when I included floating through the streets in costume while going house to house trick-or-treating, or the number of times I dressed for the holiday to go to work, too, I realized I’ve altered my appearance, and even character, a few dozen times during my lifetime.
"Masked Ball" - WIX Stock Photo
I admit it; I like creating personas. And not just for myself.
I bet it’s a parallel to inventing fictional characters. I was a fan of paperdolls, as a kid, to the extent of spreading them into separate families all about my bedroom, where I made up personalities for them, and stories about each one. I was so into this process that I hid my obsession with paperdolls from my friends, once I crept past the age of 12. I never did play with other types of dolls, but most of my friends thought any kinds of dolls were childish, by that time. But they didn’t know that my “play” was a cerebral fascination with the details of characterization. (By the time I was 14, I couldn’t get away with hiding the paperdolls anymore, as I always had someone over to my room visiting me, so I started using the “dolls” as model templates to design fashionable clothing illustrations . . . and that’s another phase of my life.) Gradually, this playing with pieces of cut-out paper instead became a shuffling of paper lists that noted my invented people and their character traits.
I do still make such notes, even now, when working on characters, although today’s notes are more fluid — they consist of stream-of-consciousness phrasing rather than being linear grocery-style lists of concrete and abstract attributes.
What about you? Do you have a system for creating fictional or point-of-view characters? Do you make attribute lists?
Solid characters need solid development. There are as many ways to build characters as there are writers, but one aspect of characterization needs to remain consistent. And that’s the desire to deeply explore personality with imagination.
For me, this is always more treat than trick.
Have a happy Halloween, dear Readers.