Write a story telling one anecdote about a memorable character. People you’ve met are a rich source for your fiction. However, writing about your saints or monsters, clowns or heroes, turns out to be much harder than you might expect. You keep thinking, This is a terrific character, but I can’t figure out how to tell the story.

Knowing too many incidents creates problems. There’s the time Hubert climbed to the top of the Little River suspension bridge and did King Kong imitations, and the time he drove his MG into the Greyhound bus station lobby, and the time he put a smoke bomb in the teachers’ lounge. But many incidents don’t necessarily form a satisfying story. The story needs a shape.

Choose (or invent) a single incident that is particularly revelatory, a Specimen. It should dramatize not just what the character does, but who he is—what could be going on inside him. You might tell a particularly hair-raising anecdote, like the time Hubert tried to get into the bank through the sewer system, but if the story stays on the surface of the action, what will readers come away with except the sense that this was a very wild guy? It might be better to tell about the time Hubert stole a major chemistry exam for a friend, but wouldn’t look at the exam himself, even though he was weak in chemistry too. That incident seems more evocative, and indicates a character of some complexity. The bank incident seems more exciting, of course, but it has to be told in a way that is similarly revealing.

You have to ask: What kind of understanding do I have of this character? Do I know enough about Hubert’s family and background to say more than he did this and he did that? Do I have the empathy to guess what went on in his head, how he thought and felt about what he did, and what he believed he was doing? And, how do I get that into the story?

A character comes out of a dense cultural, social, and psychological matrix. The more richly this is suggested, the more resonant the portrait. Evocative details about the person’s family, childhood incidents, intimate moments—all are clues that help us understand the character. And remember, too, that you’re writing fiction; you’re creating art. Actual facts are your raw material, not your boundaries.

The story will focus on a single main action that will provide tension, immediacy, and feeling. That means creating a setting, inventing dialogue, describing action, and rendering thoughts. While Hubert’s stealing the exam, he’s remembering last year, when his history teacher told him he’d probably end up in a state penitentiary.

Point of view makes a difference. For example, if you wanted to tell about an elderly woman who tried to convert the next-door family to her faith in Baha’i by bringing over wild strawberry jam and pictures of foreign children, the point of view is everything. To a busy parent, the story might be about an interfering, spooky old lady. To the child, the story could be of a fascinating, kindly eccentric. To the believer in Baha’i, it might be a story of her attempt to bring some life to a sad, sterile household.

If you write the story from the point of view of the memorable character, it forces you into imagining and rendering her thoughts and emotions rather than simply saying what the character did and said. A third-person central consciousness works well. Even more radical is doing it in first person, so that you must totally assume the voice and outlook of the character.

If you create a narrator character who tells about the memorable character, you can show their relationship, and their effect on each other. But the story must be about both of them. If the narrator isn’t developed enough, he’ll seem an unnecessary character. And if the narrator is overdeveloped, he can take over the story like a garrulous guide who won’t let visitors experience firsthand what they came for.

Specimen has multiple meanings. Colloquially it’s a person who’s different—”He’s a real specimen.” Biologically it’s an example of a genus, a species, a type. And the medical sense is important too. The sample in the test tube is significant; the specimen reveals what’s going on, unseen, inside a person.

See Character, Point of View, Scene, Stories within Stories.