Great characters are the heart and soul of every great novel. And even though I’ve published three novels, I struggle every time with how to make my characters real—rich, multi-dimensional, relatable. Recently, in the middle of my current WIP, I discovered something that has changed character writing for me forever: Obituaries.
I needed to write an obituary for one of my characters in this novel. I read obituaries online and in newspapers and even bought a book of collected obits. And I discovered that there’s no better way to get to know a character than writing a good obituary for him or her.
[pullquote]There’s no better way to get to know a character than writing a good obituary for him or her.[/pullquote]
I’ve never written character studies or worked my way through lists of questions I should be able to answer about each of my characters (“What is your character’s biggest fear?” “What is your character’s favorite food?”) That’s not my thing. But writing an obituary for a character—that’s story telling, and story telling is my thing. I’ve written obituaries for several of the main characters in my WIP now; not because I plan to use them in the book but because it helps me develop and understand them.
Start out by reading obituaries. They are a treasure-trove. Here are bits from a couple of my favorites:
“Harry Weathersby Stamps, ladies’ man, foodie, natty dresser, and accomplished traveler, died on Saturday, March 9, 2013. Harry was locally sourcing his food years before chefs in California starting using cilantro and arugula (both of which he hated). For his signature bacon and tomato sandwich, he procured 100% all white Bunny Bread from Georgia, Blue Plate mayonnaise from New Orleans, Sauer’s black pepper from Virginia, home grown tomatoes from outside Oxford, and Tennessee’s Benton bacon from his bacon-of-the-month subscription. … He fancied smart women. He married his main squeeze Ann Moore, a home economics teacher, almost 50 years ago, with whom he had two girls, Amanda and Alison. He taught them to fish, to select a quality hammer, to love nature, and to just be thankful. He took great pride in stocking their toolboxes.
He excelled at growing camellias, rebuilding houses after hurricanes, rocking, eradicating mole crickets from his front yard, composting pine needles, living within his means, outsmarting squirrels, never losing a game of competitive sickness, and reading any history book he could get his hands on…” (You can read the rest here: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sunherald/obituary.aspx?pid=163538353
“Mary A. ‘Pink’ Mullaney. … We were blessed to learn many valuable lessons from Pink during her 85 years, among them: Never throw away old pantyhose. Use the old ones to tie gutters, child-proof cabinets, tie toilet flappers, or hang Christmas ornaments. Also: If a possum takes up residence in your shed, grab a barbecue brush to coax him out. If he doesn’t leave, brush him for twenty minutes and let him stay. Let a dog (or two or three) share your bed. Say the rosary while you walk them. Go to church with a chicken sandwich in your purse. Cry at the consecration, every time. Give the chicken sandwich to your homeless friend after mass. Go to a nursing home and kiss everyone. … Invite new friends to Thanksgiving dinner. If they are from another country and you have trouble understanding them, learn to ‘listen with an accent.’ Never say mean things about anybody; they are ‘poor souls to pray for.’ Put picky-eating children in the box at the bottom of the laundry chute, tell them they are hungry lions in a cage, and feed them veggies through the slats. …” (http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/jsonline/obituary.aspx?pid=166788801)
Here’s what I’ve learned about character from reading and writing obituaries.
Small things matter. Pink Mullaney carried chicken sandwiches in her purse to church and gave them to a homeless friend after mass. That tells you worlds about who she was, in one small detail.
Let your freak flag fly. There is nothing you can make up about a character that someone, somewhere hasn’t done in real life. Let you characters be excessive and crazy about their BLTs, or obsessed with 1,001 ways to use old pantyhose. Those quirks make them memorable.
What someone does isn’t as important as how they spend their time. Harry’s career isn’t mentioned in the first line or paragraph of his obituary; it’s at the very end. Harry was a teacher and dean, but his job didn’t define him; his daily habits, his likes and dislikes, his family, his hobbies and his beliefs did.
People are inconsistent. Good people have bad habits, or do annoying (or even awful) things. It might not have been easy to live with Harry’s “competitive sickness” or to wait around while Pink kissed everyone in every nursing home and handed out chicken sandwiches. Don’t forget to let those inconsistencies show.
There’s something wonderful about seeing the entire arc of a life as presented in an obituary. Obituaries make you think; they make you appreciate the enormous diversity of human nature, the twists and turns of fate, the joys and sorrows that bind us. AND they improve your fiction.
Give it a try with one of your characters and feel free to share in the comments below.
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About Kathleen McCleary
Kathleen McCleary is the author of three novels—House and Home, A Simple Thing, and Leaving Haven—and has worked as a bookseller, bartender, and barista (all great jobs for gathering material for fiction). A Simple Thing (HarperCollins 2012) was nominated for the Library of Virginia Literary Awards. She was a journalist for many years before turning to fiction, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and USA Weekend, as well as HGTV.com, where she was a regular columnist. She taught writing as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and teaches creative writing to kids ages 8-18 as an instructor with Writopia Labs, a non-profit. She also offers college essay coaching (http://thenobleapp.com), because she believes that life is stressful enough and telling stories of any kind should be exciting and fun. When she's not writing or coaching writing, she looks for any excuse to get out into the woods or mountains or onto a lake. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and two daughters and Jinx the cat.
This is terrific. Will have to try it!
Hope it works for you. And hope you’ll let me know how it turns out.
Kathleen, the Economist posts the most wonderful obituaries. That was the first section I read when we had a subscription.
My husband loves the Economist. I’ll have to look at the obits. Thanks for the tip!
My husband is an avid Economist reader. Thanks for the tip, Vijaya. I’ll start checking out the obits there.
Obituaries and memorial notices in smaller newspapers can be a treasure trove. In major publications, the obituaries tend to be written about notable people and the paid notices for regular folks run shorter because the space is expensive.
I’ve run across many inspiring stories and sad lines in my hometown newspaper.
Also look beyond the individual stories and read at 10,000 feet over time. You’ll see the character of a community, where families came from, where they went to church, what industries have come and gone.
Obituary listings are also a wonderful source of names. I’ve learned no name is too unusual to be true.
Excellent point about mining obituaries for names for characters. And it’s true, obits reveal a lot about communities, eras, values, etc. Such a wonderful resource on so many levels!
Several great ideas here. Someone assigned to these obituary desks obviously had a sense of humor (not to mention writing skills). You’re right, it’s those little quirks that make a character stand out for the reader. And I also like the idea of using it as a source for names. Good tips all around. Thanks
Glad it was helpful, Maggie. Thanks for the comment.
I’ve never read any like yours. I’m amazed at the humor. They reveal more about the character of the person than the basic obits that include education, jobs and family survivors. You’ve inspired me to search.
I’m writing a new book about five adult siblings and the youngest escapes me, so I’ll write an obit for him.
Now I want to write my own! Ha!
I just read an excellent obit about the founder of Burt’s Bees in The Economist online. Thanks for the tip!
The range in obituaries is mind-boggling, as you mention. Some are just the facts and very cut and dried; others are filled with vivid details. They fascinate me.
I LOVE this idea. I’m just in the beginning stages of my book and got so stuck on my antagonist that I couldn’t move forward. This is so timely I feel like it’s divine intervention. ;) Thank you.
I hope it helps! Good luck.
What a creative idea! I just finished the very rough first draft of my first novel, and I really need to shore up those characters. I will give this a try. Thank you!
Congrats on finishing a first draft. That’s a huge accomplishment. Hope your revisions go well.
Kathleen,
A great mind-freeing technique. Will put it in the mix from now on.
It works for me. Hope it works for you, too.
Love this idea! I’m an obsessive obit reader – but like susielindau I rarely read obits like these, although the Globe and Mail (Canada) usually has one daily extended obit for ‘ordinary [i.e., non famous] people’ which is often fascinating. Thanks to Vijaya for recommending the Economist.
Yes, the Economist is a terrific source. So are some of the British newspapers.
Hi, Kathleen:
Although the obituaries you’ve chosen do have very vivid bits, I have to admit that this sort of thing is exactly what didn’t work for me, which only serves, perhaps, to emphasize that every writer must choose what works best for him or her.
If writing obituaries enhances your characterization, by all means proceed. But my own experience, and what I normally advise my students and clients, is that writing an encyclopedia entry about your character — which is essentially what an obituary is — provides you with mere information.
Stories are not information, they are drama, and are thus comprised of scenes. Answering “What is my character’s greatest fear?” with a merely informational answer, I agree, does little more than recounting that someone was “a natty dresser and accomplished traveler,” which is both vague and cliched.
However, if you answer that question by envisioning the scene of greatest fear, fleshing out the time and place, who else was present, how the fear rendered the character helpless — because moments of helplessness most dramatically reveal character — then you have a key transformative moment in the character’s life, one that has created aftershocks every day since. That’s the stuff of stories.
Creative use of pantyhose and novel sandwich-making techniques provide the colorful quirks that can provide a vivid image of the character, and that of course is no small matter. But by themselves they tend to be the kind of images that lend themselves most suitably to the creation of a type, not a character.
Such is my experience, as I say, and every writer’s first task is to discover what works, what doesn’t, on her own terms. If, from a purse full of used pantyhose, you can create a Blanche Dubois, have at it. If instead you wind up merely with Auntie Oddball, you may need additional tools in your kit.
Finally, the one thing I’ve noticed to be most true of obituaries — having read several of people I’ve known well — is how much they leave out that truly made the person unique. A death notice is for public consumption, and therefore goes nowhere near the truly devastating, fascinating secrets that make a person inimitable. One might almost think of obits as “omits,” for the truly telling revelations have all been left out.
Feel free to fire back. I think this could make for a rousing debate, of the kind WU is so uniquely wonderful at. If I don’t respond, it’s only because I’m overseas at the moment, and have to parcel out my internet time in tiny bits.
Thanks for the fun, thought-provoking post.
Here’s the obit I’d just read when I posted the other day…. Hell of a story.
http://www.startribune.com/obituary-audun-fredriksen-saved-uncounted-lives-from-the-nazis/322230711/
Thanks for the link. It IS a hell of a story. Loved the detail about his ability to read people and saving the German soldier and his family. Great obit. Great life!
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. What I love about obituaries is that they tell the life-tales of people who are great with a lower case “g” or are distinctive in meaningful or unusual ways, whose uniqueness is lost in these days of reality TV and celebutantes. Real novels involve just such people. I agree with your point that much is left out in obituaries (as T.S. Eliot wrote, “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender, which an age of prudence can never retract, by this and this only have we existed, which is not to be found in our obituaries.”) But I still would argue that if you are trying to learn a character, writing an obituary is a good way to better understand who that character is to the world, and a good entryway for digging deeper into who he is to himself, which is where it gets really interesting.
This is great! What a good idea. :)
This rather late comment comes from someone catching up on her email after vacation. I write all the obits for the alumni mag for the college I attended, and I really enjoy it: life stories of people in 350 words, and we all shared four years at the same college, in the same classrooms and with the same professors and traditions and milieu, albeit over a large spread of years. I find it fascinating to see the range of directions that the graduates of this small college scatter to after they complete their degrees, the variety of careers they forge, the lives they chose.
What I don’t like is the growing tendency of newspapers to allow families to write the obituaries for family members themselves rather than having a funeral home structure it for them. These family member obits tend to be flowery and full of phrases meant to be wept over by family members, not to be read as part of a news story, which is what an obituary is. Save the flowery stuff and weepy stuff for the funeral! Sure, maybe he went to be with his Savior who maybe he adored all his life, and his 12 grandchildren mighta worshiped him, but that ain’t news!