Since I'm not a novelist, just a person who reads and analyzes novels, I have more questions than answers about creating characters in a novel...
In discussions about novels (with students and in book clubs) I find most people seem to prefer characters who are fully fleshed out (complex, real, recognizable, teachable, e.t.c.). Those preferred characters are the ones--good or bad--we could either identify with at some level, or characters whose responses to situations teach us something about the human condition in places we live or places unknown to us.
Huge mouthful, I know. But, if you think about the characters you've encountered in novels and enjoyed or can't forget, you know exactly what I mean.
Question for budding novelists: So, for those of you contemplating the task of writing a novel, or those of you in the process of writing a novel, how do you plan on fleshing out a character(s)? And is it important to reveal everything about that character(s)?
Many authors, in order to flesh out a character, will give us several perspectives of that character--from the view of other characters in the novel, or by placing him or her in several situations where he or she has to react to something--which reveal things about him or her and give the reader a sense of discovery. We are led to believe ultimately that we know him or her quite well. Tricks of the fiction trade or the creative arts, some say. Cause, can you really ever truly know a person? Inside out? Completely?
While you think about that, here's an outer view of Fred (Winifred) Belair, the main character in E.A. Markham's series of stories in The Three Suitors of Fred Belair. The viewer gives us a look at Fred Belair with a tongue-in-cheek take on "small-town/small-island" gossip, and its possible correlation to a larger world view:
No one on the island escaped the rumour mill, so why should she? Winifred Belair was always going to take a beating. Because she was good-looking. Because she spoke French with thin lips, and encouraged others, whose lips weren't thin, to speak the language, to their embarrassment; they hated her. Because of her family, too: she was from one of those families that people used to associate with ruling the islands, though hers had never ruled--they didn't even have land to talk of--and lived off-island for long periods when her father was alive and worked in Martinique. But the trouble with Fred, they said, was with her wilfulness, which had made the break-up of her marriage a certainty.
There were, as you would expect the experts who knew the details of this, and said they would never talk if you paid them. Among those who would never talk were an ex-maid in the house, and a boy who used to help with the garden.
What they related was how Miss Fred had mocked the husband's churchgoing even in front of their young son, the boy down in Martinique, till the poor man, the husband, couldn't take it any more and went off abroad to wherever the girlfriend was living in one of the American Virgin Islands (though no one knew about the girlfriend then).
Now, as everyone knows, it's rare for the man to take the child when the marriage goes wrong. Unheard of in those days. Even if the man had a little lady waiting in the background, she would want to have a go at making her own family, her own children, rather than taking on the child of the previous wife. So everything said of Fred was to be believed. It was said that she preferred her garden to the man she was married to, and to the child of her womb; and that she considered her plants that she cared for and grafted and watered as something more holy than the writ of the holy book. It was said that she mocked the husband and his church. Not in a crude way, of course, but mocking is mocking. That's why no one blamed the man, the night before he went off to the alternative life, taking the boy with him--no one blamed him when he went out into the prized garden with a cutlass or garden shears, or maybe with a hatchet or axe, and caused havoc?
Fred replanted her garden; and then the hurricane came and wrecked it a second time, and the volcano soon completed the job. Something biblical, you might say. Now, if the most sophisticated warplanes from you-know-where can't hit their far-off target without collateral damage, what chances do you give a blind thing of a hurricane, like an army of men full of lust; or a volcano, to silt up Fred Belair's garden without taking out the rest of island life with it! There are some, to this day, who blame the whole devastation of the region on the wilfulness and godlessness of Winifred Belair.
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