There have been some memorable fictional characters.
Sherlock Holmes,
James Bond,
Hercule Poirot, and
Harry Potter to name a few.
(I’d like
Steve Dancy to climb into this group, but I need a few million more
sales. A little help, please.) The above names are make-believe people, but
known the world over. How does a branded character come about? They must be
difficult to create because there are so few of them. Strong characters are not
rare. Think of
Elizabeth Bennet,
Tom Sawyer,
Captain Ahab,
Rhett Butler, or
Hannibal Lecter. But for the most part, these were one-offs, while a branded
character returns time and again, frequently leaping from the printed page to
screen and stage.
The inventors of Holmes, Bond, Poirot, and Potter didn’t
want for material things. Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed on screen more
than any other character, and that excludes the
House television series. Spanning
54 years, James Bond is the longest running film series with a human
protagonist. (Godzilla is the longest and most prolific film series.) Agatha
Christie used Poirot to propel herself to the #1 Bestselling author of all time,
while Harry Potter is the #1 bestselling book series.
These are worldwide icons. Yet they’re fictional. They
sprang from the imagination of authors. How in the world do you do that? One
author has told us.
I recently reread
Killing Floor by Lee Child. In a new introduction, Child describes how he developed the Jack Reacher character, who was introduced in this novel back in 1997.
“I liked some things, and disliked other things. I had
always been drawn to outlaws. I liked cleverness and ingenuity. I liked the
promise of intriguing revelations. I disliked a hero who was generally smart
but did something stupid three-quarters of the way through the book, merely to
set up the last part of the action.
Detectives on the trail who walked into rooms and got hit over the head
from behind didn’t do it for me. And I liked winners. I was vaguely uneasy with
the normal story arc that has a guy lose, lose before he wins in the end. I
liked to see something done spectacularly well. In sports, I liked crushing
victories rather than ninth-inning nail-biters.
To me, entertainment was a transaction. You do it, they
watch it, then it exists … for me the audience mattered from the start.
G. K. Chesterton once said of Charles Dickens, 'Dickens didn’t
write what people wanted. Dickens wanted what people wanted.'"
Child sat down and came up with three specific conclusions.
"First: Character is king. There are probably fewer than six
books every century remembered specifically for their plots. People remember
characters … so my main character had to carry the whole weight.
Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late
to get on … it’s a crowded field. Why do what everyone else is doing? … The
series that were well under way … lead characters were primus inter pares in a
repertory cast, locations were fixed and significant employment was fixed and
significant. I was going to have to avoid all that stuff.
But the third conclusion, and the most confounding
conclusion: You can’t design a character too specifically … a laundry list of
imagined qualities and virtues would result in a flat, boring, cardboard
character … I decided to relax and see what would come along. Jack Reacher came along.”
Child goes on to explain that Reacher has the following
characteristics:
- Fish-out-of-water because he had previously only known
military life
- He’s huge, utterly sure of himself, with intimidating presence
(opposite of flawed protagonist)
- Old-fashioned hero: no problems, no navel-gazing
- Owns nothing but the clothes on his back—literally
- No ties to family, friends or location
- Ex-military cop to give him plausibility with investigative
techniques
- Rootless and alienated in a giant country (Child is British)
- Reacher as Medieval knight-errant
- First name is simple, ordinary, blunt, and straightforward
- Certain nobility based on rank of major in military
Child wrote: “I wanted the kind of vicarious
satisfaction that comes from seeing bad guys getting their heads handed to them
by a wrong-righter even bigger and harder than them … so Reacher always wins.”
I started by asking, “How does a branded character come
about?” It appears by creating a character unlike all the other series
protagonists. Not a unique trait, but opposite in every detail. At least it
worked for Reacher. A Forbes study discovered that Jack Reacher is the
strongest branded character in fiction, and Lee Child has the strongest reader
loyalty of any bestselling author.
