Jack Grapes, Artist, Writer, Author, Instructor: I saw another guy eat the white
without touching the yolk never touched the yolk until all he had was the yolk in the
center of the plate and then he took his fork and he slid it under the yolk picked it up.
Film Courage: We don't care about plot, we care about the human being in the story?
Jack: Yeah the human being is what matters. If the reader doesn't care about the human being, they
could care less about the plot. Everybody tries to come up with plot. I mean plot's important
and I could do a whole lecture on the difference between plot and story.
There is a difference. Story is the chronological sequence of the events. A plot
is how you arrange the sequences and sometimes you don't always start at the beginning go to the end.
Sometimes you start at the end and then you go to the beginning and then you go to the middle.
Then you have a flashback. Plot is much different than story but when you're writing a story or your
plot if the h an if the protagonist whether it's first person or third person if the reader doesn't
care about that character why would they care about the plot they they care about a
character and then they want to see what's going to happen to the character and that's the story so
character is most important every writer will tell you that it's almost a cliche grab any
writer any published writer off the street and say what's the most important thing in every character
now once you've got your character your character will lead you to your story and to your plot
even if you've already got it made up and figured out and outlined it characters change their mind
characters don't always do what you want them to do they will tell you what they want to do and
what they want to say and all of a sudden your character leaves for for tierra del fuego and
I didn't plan on that but now they're on a ship going to tierra del fuego and they're meeting a
tall dark woman with a long cigarette holder and a cigarette that has a long ash whoa where do
I go with that you don't know it's accidental so once you've got character then the character will
create your plot and where does character come from character comes from the voice if you're in
the deep voice and the character is narrating from the deep voice or the third person narrator is in
the deep voice that creates compelling character so voice creates character character creates plot
and it can be no other way right can't reverse I would never say it can't be any other way
what I'm saying is that in general if your story does not have a character that people relate to
your story isn't going to be enough and the way you get people to relate to a character is through
the authentic voice they hear that intimate voice and suddenly that character is real and is alive
but I'm not because it's the only way it's the way I think it should be because that will succeed for
you like I said I don't think there's a writer out there that will tell you character doesn't matter
they're going to tell you character matters
what are the steps to developing and building a character I actually teach a class in that
well one establishing the voice how does that character talk how do they see the world
what is their attitude toward the world and then you've got to collect a lot of details
that I have my students make a character checklist not for any one character but for
any character and you should be keeping this checklist for the rest of your life anytime
you see something that looks interesting about a character or you think about it or you see it in a
movie or you read it in the book make a note of it and then when you start developing your character
riffle through your your checklist and see what you got that's kind of interesting
so you want to find things that make the character compelling because of little little things what
do they keep in their refrigerator how do they wear their clothes how do they eat eggs
how do they eat sunny-side up eggs so you should be paying attention you know a lot of writers they
don't pay attention they've been to a coffee shop or cafe a hundred times and they've never
really looked at how people eat if you look at how people eat everybody eats a particular way
the way they hold a fork the way they cut their food sunny-side up eggs you should watch 10
different people eat sunny-side up eggs and every one of them will do it differently I saw one guy
he cut the white put it on the fork dipped it into the yolk okay and eat it and
the yolk would come up white you know so he would he kind of kept doing that
I saw another guy eat the white without touching the yolk never touched the yolk until all he had
was the yolk in the center of the plate and then he took his fork and he slid it under the yoke
picked it up and I tell you I get this to me there's I couldn't do that gets his fork under
the yoke and the whole thing like he'd been waiting the whole meal to get to that yoke
now to me yolk creeps me out i've got to mix it up when I was a kid my dad would have to cut it
all up for me because I didn't even want to dip it in the I wanted it all cut in little pieces
and all mixed together it would be a scrambled sunny-side up egg and I would eat it that way
dipping my toast into it if you look at people eat their food you'll find a lot so you could do
a checklist on hundreds of little things about people what does their refrigerator look like
everybody's refrigerator is looks differently and when I go visit a friend or anybody's house
even if it's a stranger you know someone says oh let's go over my friend's house or something
I look at their refrigerator and I look at their medicine cabinet oh and I look at their books oh
interesting I can tell more about a person by their medicine cabinet the refrigerator and
the books they have than anything else whatever they are acting like I know I'll know about them
by that now as a writer I'm going to make notes of things I find interesting so that I'll use
that in a in a book for a character you know people who have 10 day old milk in the back or
or they have lots of Tupperware and everything is in there and it's going it's already moldy you
know how do people arrange their refrigerator some are are you know obsessive-compulsive they've got
everything neat and perfect so same with the medicine cabinet boy cabinet tells you everything
oh like what you know someone's got a tube of cream that's been blick and the cream hasn't been
used in about a year but they've kept it because who knows that rash may come back and you can see
the top the cream that was squished out of the top is now brown and it's you know they didn't
even press it neatly or something one guy's got his toothpaste and he rolls it as he goes another
person is squishing it here and there and it's a mess so there's all sorts of little eccentricities
that you can find in a medicine chest make a note of them and keep it on your
checklist because one day you'll be writing a story and you'll have a minor character and
you'll have an opportunity to mention something in their medicine chest that will be interesting
what about books what does that tell you about well I always look at books see what people are
reading you know I mean you never know what people read and and you always you'll find anomalies too
you'll you'll find all their books about one subject and then they got one book on Aristotle
and you go hmm what are they reading Aristotle for but then they'll have another book on
how to make a million dollars in the stock market or or something you know you just oh this person's
got one of their books that they must have read in first grade and they've Jimmy Potts
gets a haircut and you open it and it's got little illustrations in it and it's a story about a kid
who gets a haircut and the barber made a bad cut and some woman thinks he was hit by a truck it's
you know it's a story for like a third grader and he still got it I wonder why gee I'll use that
in the novel one day so you make notes of things that you think are are interesting and you put it
on your checklist and you have hundreds of things on your checklist all sorts of things just their
emotional truth and just their anything and then when you start writing a short story and you got a
character you think all right what have I got on my checklist maybe I can use some of this stuff
you know the way they clean their glasses the way they wear their glasses the inside of their car
well that's another thing like a medicine chest the inside of the car I mean I knew
one guy every time i'd get in his car i'd say why don't you grab a shovel and dust up
you know it was that you know it looked like what he called the junkyard or the ones with the serial
killer clean where you're like whoa this thing's been get in the car that's absolutely pristine
yeah wow a little freaky well I don't know I think I admire this person oh okay they really
worked hard I'll have a penny on the mat on the you know not the driver's seat but over
there it's been down there for like months and I just don't feel like picking it up
and I kind of got used to being it down there I figure I'm not going to pick it up let's see
if someone else picks it up and if someone else does pick it up I'll go okay character interesting
some people won't let sleeping dogs lie and some people won't let lying penny sit so you know
you find out little little things that that are interesting I read a a detective novel a few
years ago a few years ago 30-40 years ago and it was about a character who's the main character in
all his detective novels who is a detective and a crooked sheriff in a small town in Florida throws
him in jail for something so he's in jail for like two days and he's just trying to keep his sanity
and figure out who did the murder but in order to keep himself occupied he thinks of things
and one of the things he thinks about and it's a two-page essay you're not old enough
to remember this but when I was a kid and you had skates nowadays skates are attached to shoes
you just put your foot in the shoe that's got the the roller skates attached to it but when I
was a boy you had the metal skates that had little clamps on it and it hooked your shoes not tennis
shoes you had to have shoes that had you know rims on them that you could hook it on and then the way
you would tighten it would be with a little thing that looked like a little wrench called the skate
key and you always had to have the skate key with you because you never knew when it would
change and the skate would fall off and you'd have to unscrew it put it back on your shoe and
then screw it again so where did you keep that skate key well 90 of the kids who skated took
the skate key there was a little hole in it and they put a string in it and then they would tie
the string around their head and this skate key would hang here he wrote two pages on a skate key
I don't remember anything about that novel except that essay on a skate key has nothing to
do with the story totally irrelevant to the story except it tells you something about his character
and it became interesting so little things can be very fascinating in books even a detective novel
where I remember that and i've forgotten everything else right
or latchkey kids used to have the the string you know you could always tell in the 80s the
latchkey kids yeah you know and the latchkey kids would have a string with the key right exactly and
you they we were told to hide them so that people didn't know that you'd be going home alone right
yeah my observations yeah and an extra quarter in your pocket in case you had to call your mom
right for a payphone now every kid's got an iPhone sure sure I remember driving around
somewhere where I was because I had to call my wife or maybe the person I was living with I
had to call him to tell him I was going to be late and you're looking for you know a little pay phone
sometime in a movie when that happens I'll think to myself
why don't they just call them on their iPhone and I go oh it's 1972. there is no iPhone
yeah I remember being on the phone trying to call my grandmother letting her know quote everything
was okay it was in a little bit of a rough part of town and somebody was making a nefarious deal
and yelling about it the paper next to me and I'll never forget he was really angry and I'm thinking
and my grandma was like is everything okay oh yeah everything's fine but that's la you know
at that time with the pay phones I don't know it could be anywhere but you see what just happened
I talked about a skate about stuff in a medicine chest how you eat eggs a skate key and then you
thought about the latchkey and then we got into the calling on the phone and you remembered
how you had to call your grandmother to say everything's fine and someone is yelling over
there doing some kind of drug deal or something it was bad yeah there's a scene from a novel yeah and
and which has nothing to do with the story but it might be the the event that the reader never
forgets don't forget your plot sure but they'll not they'll never forget that moment where you're
on the phone trying to tell your grandmother you're fine and there's a drug deal going on
there and somebody's yelling and screaming and you're not exactly in the best part of town right
because a phone is a phone yeah oh yeah you found the phone go make the call they used
to have three in a row you know you'd go and then this person came after I already got on the call
and right I'll bet you a hundred dollars that if I give a young person today a quarter and say
there's a pay phone I want you to make a call on the pay phone okay they put the quarter in
and then dial the number hi hi bill yeah I'm I'm calling from a pay phone I just
I'm I'm we have a bet going here okay all right I just yeah I'm fine I'm fine okay hang up
None of them will check the little coin thing to see if the quarter came back right
but when we did it when we were young you did it because sometimes
the quarter would drop back into that little thing and you'd get your quarterback right
it was such a treat but they wouldn't do that because it wouldn't even occur to them sure.
But those are little details too that
details everybody every writing teacher will tell you details.
Question
For The Viewers:
What are the best ways to develop a character?