First, a note of caution. To slice up fiction into categories such as "plot", "voice", "point of view" or "character" is to risk presenting it in a way that neither writer nor reader normally experiences it. The suggestion might seem to be that the writing of a story or a novel is a strongly segmented or layered activity, something orderly, dry and technical. But stories, when they come, come in organic gobs, as though gouged out of the living fabric of world – character tangled with plot, plot with setting, setting with scraps of language embedded and so on. But laying that aside, that large proviso, there are a few remarks that might be usefully attempted under the heading of "character".
First off (and at the risk of being punched in the face by some follower of the nouveau roman school), let it be loudly asserted that character, strong characters, are at the heart of all great literature and always will be. Plot, even in detective fiction, is a very secondary matter. Not many readers could outline the plot of The Sign of the Four but no one has any difficulty bringing Holmes and Watson to mind.
A writer who does not create convincing characters will fail. A writer who creates thrilling, troubling, seductive, insistent characters need not worry too much about any other aspect of writing. You do not need to know how to spell. You do not need to know much about grammar. You do not even need any huge sensitivity to language, though this is the other quality that really matters in writing; it is also, perhaps, the most resistant to any kind of formal teaching.
So having insisted so immoderately on the central importance of character, how in God's name is it done? Luckily, the raw material is close to hand. For every writer, it is his own enigmatic being that constitutes the focus of his research. Year after year, he sits on a kind of umpire's chair watching the antics of his body, listening to the bubbling of his thoughts, sifting the material of his dreams. And when he wants more – other bodies, other thoughts – he simply looks up at those around him.
Think, for a moment, of your own family. Almost everybody has one. You might never need to go beyond them. You could keep them all in a kind of mental aquarium, sketching them into stories all your writing life. Change their names, of course, their hair colour, their tattoos; move them from that little town in the south you grew up in to a little town in the north you once drove through and wondered about …
But a writer is not confined to such a tactic. It may even be that such a tactic is not particularly common. In my own work I have very rarely set out to present a character who is knowingly based on someone familiar to me, someone whose name I might find in my address book. The great majority of my characters – and I would guess this is true for most writers of fiction – are "inventions". They emerge, quickly or slowly, shyly or boisterously, in the writing. They are members of that shifting population of men, women and children (not to mention cats, horses, etc) who inhabit our inner worlds. Where they come from, whether they are curious versions of ourselves, figures out of the collective unconscious, reconfigurings of those we did indeed once know but have now forgotten, or a mix of all such, no one, to my knowledge, has ever convincingly answered.
It does not matter. No one writes for long without understanding that they are entering mystery and will never leave it. What matters is that we can, through unnamed processes, secrete these figures who will loom and mouth off in our fictions. It is not, I think, too much to say that it is a "natural" process, that we are, all of us, geared up for it, and that without this propensity, writing would be impossibly complex. We could not do it.
There is, of course, another great reservoir of characters: those ready-made for us in books. It is not that we intend to steal Mr Tulkinghorn from Dickens or Ursula Brangwen from Lawrence, but that such characters show us the dimensions of the possible. A painter who wants to paint a tree needs to do two things: look at trees and look at paintings of trees. The first task shows what trees are like, the second shows the possibilities of the medium. Likewise, as a writer, it is by reading that you learn how, in language, a character can be presented – through dialogue, through action, through physical attributes, interior monologue etc – a process that continues until you have absorbed these methods, and they have become a reflex so embedded in your apprehending of the world that you will never notice anything about anybody without secretly assessing its potential for fiction writing. And this, indeed, we could call "technique", though we should not confuse the method with the task.
At its simplest, its barest, characterisation is about a writer's grasp of what a human being is. When we set out to write, we do not do so out of a sense of certainty but out of a kind of radical uncertainty. We do not set out saying: "The world is like this." But asking: "How is the world?" In creating characters we are posing to ourselves large, honest questions about our nature and the nature of those about us. Our answers are the characters themselves, those talking spirits we conjure up by a kind of organised dreaming. And when we finish, we are immediately dissatisfied with them, these "answers", and we set out again, bemused, frustrated, excited. An odd use of time! An odd use of a life. But there's a courage to it. Even, perhaps, a type of beauty.
Andrew Miller will be teaching a nine-month UEA-Guardian Masterclass Level Three: How to Complete a Work of Fiction, beginning January 2012
Andrew Miller is the author of six novels including Casanova, a fictional portrait of its titular subject, and Oxygen, which was shortlisted for both the Booker prize and the Whitbread novel award. To order his latest novel, Pure (Sceptre), for £12.99 (RRP £17.99) visit Guardian Bookshop
The complete How to Write Fiction series is available as a Kindle ebook, including writing exercises by Kate Grenville, for £2.86. iBook version coming soon.
