George Bernard Shaw was a very successful playwright. (He was also a failure as a novelist, but that’s another story.) One criticism that was leveled at Shaw, and with considerable justification, was that all his characters spoke like Shaw. They were all articulate.
The fact that Shaw’s voice and views were engaging made him a success. But I’m pretty sure most authors of fiction, be it prose or script, are in danger of suffering from this malady. Certainly I suffer from it. Not that my characters all sound alike — they don’t. (My dialog is pretty diverse, actually.) The deeper problem is that I find it hard to imagine the thoughts and feelings of people whose experiences and views are different from my own.
My characters, that is, tend to reflect my own view of the world.
The best fiction writers, I’m sure, have an ability to understand and feel sympathy for a wide variety of people, even their villains. The worst fiction writers (one thinks, for example, of Ayn Rand) have no sympathy for anyone but themselves and people who agree with them. As a result, their work is filled with cardboard stereotypes.
If you care nothing for money and can’t imagine why anybody would, then a rich man in your story is likely to be a stereotype. If you’re a free spirit, you may have trouble sympathizing with a character who is a by-the-book police officer. If you’ve never had children, you may have trouble imagining the tender feelings of a mother and how they will inevitably affect her actions. And so it goes.
I got to thinking about this because I’m a 68-year-old man trying to write an effective story about a 17-year-old girl. Also, I’m an atheist and have very little sympathy for people who are religious, yet my heroine has some direct contact with a god, who seems to want her to be his high priest. I haven’t written any scenes in which she is praying, because I personally have no use for prayer. She often worries that her mad quest will get her killed — because old men think about death. Teenagers think they’ll live forever! And when my editor says, “Why is she attracted to this boy?”, I have not the faintest clue. I don’t know what it is about boys that teen girls are attracted to. I can’t even imagine being attracted to a boy. Yuck! So I’ve got the character all wrong.
And this after a couple of years of hard work on the story. You’d think I would have figured it out long ago, but I didn’t. I’m a perfectly decent writer, but I’m not a natural storyteller, and this is a vivid example for you of why (or how) I’m not.
Learn from my mistakes, children.
Jim Aikin's Oblong Blob 