Where do fictional characters come from?

By Prof Yasmine GOONERATNE

In The Practice of Writing, a series created especially for readers of MONTAGE, award-winning novelist, poet and critic Yasmine Gooneratne considers aspects of literary composition from a writer’s point of view.

Part VII

As writers of fiction, we would all like to create memorable works, stories that will live in our readers’ minds long after we ourselves are no more. What makes stories ‘live’? Ask ourselves what we remember best and value most in any fictional work – short story, novel or movie – and the chances are that we will focus immediately on a character, and on an incident which involves that character in some way that moves the action along in a ‘plot’. Nanda, forced to destroy Piyal’s letter in Gamperaliya, Darcy, turning down an invitation to dance with Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, the princess Draupadi, gambled away by her husband Yuddhisthira in the Mahabharata, Bagheera the Black Panther appealing to Kaa the python for help in Kipling’s Jungle Book, the running battle between a Catholic priest and a Communist mayor in The Little World of Don Camillo - where did these unforgettable characters, each so different from the others, come from? The answer is that they probably came from one of three principal sources: from their creators’ personal experience, from their imaginations, or from their memories.

A scene from Mahabhratha

Kipling first heard his jungle stories as a child, from his Indian ayah. R.K. Narayan regarded his daily morning walks as his ‘office-hours’. The conversations he overheard during those walks were jotted down for later use in his novels, and the personalities he met he would later fictionalize. Leaving day-to-day experience such as Narayan’s, and even the working of the creative imagination out of the discussion for the present, I would like to focus in this article on Memory – i.e., remembered occurrences in our own lives, or in the lives of persons we have known or read about.

Memory opens a treasure-trove to writers like ourselves, Sri Lankans writing here and now, in the Sri Lanka of 2010. The major ‘events’ of recent occurrence in our lives have been, of course, the tsunami of 2004 and the 30-year war that came to an end last year. We were all involved in them in one way or another, whether we lost relatives and friends in either of these tragic events, or not. We all have stories to tell that are associated with both. Looking further back in time, we have life-histories rooted in this country, peopled with personalities encountered in village or town, school or university, office or field. But memory does not concern itself only with events that actually occurred in our own lives, but also with what we have read and remembered. And it is the inexhaustible ‘memory-bank’, opened to writers by their reading, that I particularly want to discuss here.

In one of my favourite novels, The Vendor of Sweets, R.K. Narayan reflects on the writing of fiction. Informed by his son Mali that he wants to visit America in order to learn how to write stories, Jagan (a businessman living in small-town India) is genuinely puzzled. Why go all the way to America to learn how to write stories? he asks his son. Any village granny will tell you how to do that! Jagan is thinking here of India’s story-telling tradition, the sea of stories generated by the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which live in the folk tales and songs of rural India. Indeed, anyone who has read the Mahabharata in one of the English versions re-told for children – a good example is Elizabeth Seeger’s brilliant re-telling of the epic in The Five Brothers, but there are many others, and there are also versions available nowadays in the form of colourful ‘comics’ – would understand Jagan’s (and Narayan’s) point of view: there is no human-interest story in the world, no tale of love, hate, deception, jealousy, rivalry or loyalty, that the Mahabharata does not offer its enchanted reader. Embedded as they are in a great religious poem, part of which – the Bhagavadgita - is on the lips of everybody’s story-telling aunt or mother in Hindu India, these vivid tales are part of everybody’s memory-bank, and available for the use of every writer.

Alas, Mali doesn’t appreciate his father’s advice. Obsessed with the idea that Americans are experts in literary production as in every other business enterprise, Mali goes to the USA. He returns to his village home with a weird and wonderful story-telling ‘machine’, with the help of which he plans to make his fortune. The computer-literate reader recognizes Mali’s import as a computer equipped with a software ‘package’ of the type that claims to provide authors, at the click of a key, with millions of fictional plots in endless variations: a phenomenon that has remained popular since the 1970s, when Narayan wrote this novel.

Jagan, of course, is not computer-literate, and he allows Mali to convert the old family home into his business premises. Although the experiment is a sad failure from Mali’s point of view, it provides Jagan with a fresh understanding of life and its creative possibilities. Writers here may not be in a position to turn as naturally to the Mahabharata as Narayan or Rushdie have done in writing their fiction, but they have a wonderful equivalent to it, in the Jataka stories. In the 550 birth-tales of the Buddha, re-told and illustrated by many writers (including the late George Keyt), Sri Lanka has a rich memory-bank of its own, and many of our writers have already drawn upon it. We have only to think of Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s Mahasara and Chitra Fernando’s “The Grandfather”, among many other distinguished examples of literary works based upon birth-tales of the Buddha. Drawing upon folk traditions such as these, writers in English obtain an insight into local ways of speaking, thinking and acting that their ‘Western’ literary background may have obscured: a priceless gift for any one who wants to write of and for their homeland.

Also among the books that can become a valuable part of every Sri Lankan author’s personal library, whatever his or her religion, is that other Buddhist classic, the Dhammapada. Writers of non-Buddhist background, especially those who write in English as I do, might feel that this ancient compilation of the Buddha’s sayings would be unlikely to contribute much to their writing.

They are mistaken. The Buddha’s insights into human personality are remarkably up-to-date, they are not only wise but witty. A writer of my acquaintance, searching for a way of building a fictional character upon an instance of human behaviour that had disgusted him, happened to come across stanza 244 of the Dhammapada. He found there, as many writers have done for centuries, that with a single accurate, well-placed image, the Enlightened One frequently bestows immortality.

Emeritus Professor Yasmine Gooneratne directs The Guardian Angels, a literary editing service set up for the assistance of authors. She can be reached on Email at

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