Know Your History = Know Your Character
By K. Allen McNamara
In order to assess how best to help a patient, doctors and nurses needed to know a patient’s health history, the history of her symptoms and the history or traits of the possible disease or ailment. Knowing the history of these items, taking the time to listen and to ask the questions is important for medical professionals. This skill set is also important for writers.
The history of your character - the personal history of the character: how they grew up, where they went when upset, what they're afraid of, their favorite book, their favorite color etc… these facts about your character are necessary for you to truly know your character. But you also need to know your character’s larger history too.
The larger history of your character is composed of the histories of the groups they identify with: nationality/country, community, racial identity, religion, socioeconomic class, education, gender identification, sexuality etc... These histories may be simultaneously broader and more specific aspects of your character but they are essential to know and the history of each aspect needs to be understood by you.
Large and small histories make your character round and they pop the character off the page. When writing a character who is not actually you, you MUST understand what makes up your character - the totality of your character’s history micro and macro needs to be understood. Without knowing the history: you cannot possibly know how or why the character will react a certain way. Nothing puts this more into perspective than when you place your character in a situation of urgency. Does his lip quiver ever so slightly or does her hand shake? If so, then why? Are he afraid of needles? Or did she have too much caffeine? Or are they merely a Capulet entering Montague territory?
To know history - your character’s history - means you must research. You research by: reading books by authors who are of a different ethnicity than your own, authors who are of a different gender, of a different economic and social means than you. You read and you learn. You know your character's history. And so your character grows extension.
For example, if you are writing about a boy who grew up in Prague in the 1980s you will need to use primary and secondary sources to get an idea of what your character experienced growing up in Prague. (primary source = the diary or memoir of a young boy living in Prague in 1980s, secondary source = the general history of Prague with a focus on the social climate of 1980s.) For more tips on writing about other cultures see: Writer’s Digest: 7 Tips For Writing About Other Cultures.
Consider, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as more practical, hands-on application of history embodied within character. O’Brien explores just this - the history of the images and their associations to the memories of the soldiers in Vietnam and of how the mind can drift back and flash forward forging connection to and extrapolating from what a character is seeing or experiencing in the present and the action elicited. According to O’Brien: "There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have, and all you may lose forever. Those things range, for O’Brien, from the “sublime, your parents, down to the petty — a Big Mac, and a cold Coke. When you're really really thirsty and you're drinking paddy water, the mind will lock on a can of cold Coke the way your mind might, you know, back in high school, have locked on a pretty girl."” Tobias Wolff’s short story Bullet in the Brain is also a classic for the need to know the history to create the character.
Additionally, you must read novels, short stories, poems, plays, and flash fiction written by: writers of color, LGBTQ writers, writers of the countries your character may be from, or the state or province they are from and writers if possible from of the same socio-economic backgrounds as the characters you are creating. You must read authors who have created round characters who are different from themselves, who have created successfully Other.
You do not want to create trope characters. As Lupita Nyong’o notes “[s]o often women of color are relegated to playing simple tropes: the sidekick, the best friend, the noble savage, or the clown. We are confined to being a simple and symbolic peripheral character — one who doesn't have her own journey or emotional landscape.” Nyong’o sees more freedom in genre fiction because it allows the character to do more and explore more without being so subject to a trope expectations because of race.
With regard to novels that are set in Other Worlds, you must give your reader signposts to help them navigate. You must imbed the familiar in the foreign and you do this by knowing your history. As Margaret Atwood states re: The Handmaid’s Tale “I didn’t put anything into the book that has not happened sometime, somewhere.”
Other items to consider when developing your character are:
What kind of art (paintings, murals, mosaics, sculpture) would your character see or know of? Look it up. Study it.
What was your character exposed to in the school she attended? Not all curriculums are the same.
What kind of music would your character listen to? Listen to it.
Or walk the landscape where your story is set if possible.
Remember it is in the Arts and often in place that the history of peoples and of characters are captured and crystallized; and it is how and where your character will bloom and grow.
Yes, it is a huge amount of work you will be doing but you need to do this. You need to know the large and the small histories of your character to properly assess them and to chart and shape their growth. You need to do this before they can be Real. Before they can be read as True. Know your history; know your character.
