Step Three: Characters, Characters, Characters

For this step I'm going to share parts of an article I wrote several years ago for the Outreacher, a newsletter once published by the Outreach Chapter of Romance Writers of America.

What My Dogs Taught Me About Story Characters
Ginger Hanson
© 2003


We have two adopted dogs, Toffy and Bandit. We found Toffy at the animal shelter and the note pinned to her kennel said: thrown over the fence at Thanksgiving. She was only a year old, but that first year of her life scarred her in numerous ways. Within a few weeks, we knew she had been locked for hours in a small bathroom, she had been severely punished for going to the bathroom in the house and she had belonged to a man.

We have owned Toffy for eight years, but all the love in the world cannot eradicate her early experiences. To this day, she will not enter a small room that has a door. In fact, she will forgo a treat rather than enter the laundry room where the dog biscuits are kept.

An unfortunate side effect of her punishment as a young puppy means she will go hours without relieving herself. We had to retrain her to perform a normal function. And when we leave her in a kennel, she reverts to her primary learning.

As for the assumption she belonged to a man, her reaction to my husband supplied that answer. The first time he disciplined her in a stern voice, she became a trembling wreck for several days. Since she didn’t react as strongly to my stern voice, we decided her first owner was a man. Needless to say, my husband doesn’t use a stern voice with this dog.

Toffy’s only child status was changed within the year by the introduction into our family of a puppy someone left beside a four-lane highway. Bandit was six weeks old when my husband rescued him.

Bandit never knew anyone threw him away. And no one locked him alone in a bathroom for endless hours, no one denied him the opportunity to go outside when he was being housebroken, and he benefited from the “no stern voice” rule by never having anyone speak sternly to him. Plus, he had baskets of toys to play with, doting parents and a reluctant new sister.

Sixty-five pounds later, we owned an affectionate, good natured hound dog who believes everyone loves him and he can do no wrong. If you insist he did something wrong, he will press his ears back against his head and look guilty for a nanosecond. Then, he comes over for the hug he deserves and he forgives you for scolding him.

As you can see, Toffy and Bandit experienced two different childhoods. And by now, you’re probably wondering what my dogs taught me about story characters. Well, it has to do with psychological baggage.

What is psychological baggage? To me, it is the sum of all the events that occur during a person’s life. Each of us drags our own version of this baggage through life and it shapes how we act and react. Early life events are often the most significant and have the most profound effect on us. For example, it only took Toffy’s previous owner a matter of months to alter her life forever. Therefore, it behooves us to search our character’s childhood (birth to adolescence) and find their psychological baggage. One of the rewards of finding psychological baggage is the discovery of internal conflict which leads to character growth.

Now I’m not suggesting you overload your characters with crippling psychological baggage, but you do need to search their lives for major events that have shaped them into the persons they are when your story begins. These character forming moments should be the linchpin of their motivation throughout your story.

If we look again at the story I'm putting together, my theme is based on abandonment. Thus I have to look into my heroine's background to find the answer to why she fears abandonment. Why does it color her life with such intensity?

The answer to that question will color the way I write this story.