Characters Can Never Remove Their Tattoos (or Can They?)
By Tom Bentley | May 24, 2016 |
photo by Flickr’s Jenavieve
In high school, I had a close-knit group of friends, many of whom remain good friends today. Except for one, a person with whom I was remarkably tight for an intense period, and then it all fell away. (Let’s call him X, because X is a fine name for something buried, though “treasure” doesn’t come to mind.) X probably had the most ranging intelligence of all my friends, the quickest wit and certainly the most ingenuity: he was the kind of a guy who would look at a dead radio, and in five minutes solder a spoon into its wiring and make its silence sing again.
But for all his charisma—and he had that—my friend had a sharp edge to him that impelled him to practical jokes, many of which seemed less than funny. He would put raw eggs in our beds that later made for soggy sleeping, soap our toothbrushes, surreptitiously tie some of our shoes together when in a group so when we got up we would stumble. He drove his Volkswagen van around a big tree in my tight backyard at mad speeds with my parents home and watching, so that it seemed like a demon’s visitation—what was that? He once dumped a full bowl of cereal and milk on me while I was sleeping, for no reason other than the feeling moved him. Because he worked in a pizza parlor, now and then he’d drive by, get out and throw entire pizzas on our roofs.
The moment that turned the corner for me was when he tied a string to our front door so that the bag of charcoal briquets that he’d tossed on the roof above would fall on one of us when the door was opened. The fact that it came down on my mother was the catalyst for what followed. All of my friends, my brother included, had some kind of grudge against him. “Remember when X spit in your drink and waited for you to swallow some before he told you?” “Yeah!”
We all had the stories. So we decided to humiliate him.
The Ambush
A couple of our group (also X’s victims) dropped out, leaving me, my brother, and two other friends, all of whom had suffered at X’s hands. Because all of them also worked part-time in that neighborhood pizza parlor (excepting me—I understood from an early age that work was unhealthy), they knew the routine: whoever was the assistant pizza “chef” would need, maybe an hour into the shift, to go to the refrigerated, locked storage shed out in the alley that flanked the shop, in order to bring in one of the five-gallon buckets of shredded cheese. We knew X’s work schedule, and we knew he would come out. We were waiting.
We were hidden in various places in the alley: behind dumpsters and the projecting side of a building. We had a dozen raw eggs and 10 water balloons. I was on top of the shed, hunching in silence, with two plastic buckets of tomato sauce. When he came out, we unleashed a fusillade of high-school-boys-mad-as-hornets hell on him, while howling imprecations.
Our work was effective. He was a miserable sight, soaked, stained, cowering. He didn’t say a word, but just stood blinking and defeated.
With that, everything changed.
He had been one of the mainstays of our group, in the way that kids can run in packs—friends for all time. But after the attack, he simply backed out. No calls came or went in either direction for a long time. After a while, we started to see him socially again, on the fringes of our group’s activities, but the tenor of our relationship had strongly shifted.
I felt the most sympathy for him, because I was closest to him, and admired many of his deep skills, but our relationship changed forever. I still hear from him every few years for some incidental reason, but from atop that storage shed, the deep comradeship fell to its death. We’ve never had a conversation about what happened.
But what happened after what happened is why I bring the incident up in a writing forum: I’d always thought that X would be the biggest achiever of our group, a senator, owner of a global yachting franchise, a motivational speaker a la Tony Robbins, a scientist entrepreneur a la Elon Musk. But he became (and is today) a real estate salesperson.
The Aftermath (for Friends, for Your Characters)
I make no judgement whatsoever on his chosen profession. What I’m prying into is whether the humiliation, whether the shaming from his allies, whether the absolute rejection implicit in the event—and its lasting consequences of losing his closest friends—affected the course of his life in any deep way. And here we—finally—get to what this has to do with writing. I don’t know what happened in my friend’s case, but I do know that you can certainly use a life event of reverberant consequence—and in this case, utter humiliation—as the fulcrum for a long arc of story that informs telling aspects of your characters.
I don’t know what happened in my friend’s case, but I do know that you can certainly use a life event of reverberant consequence—and in this case, utter humiliation—as the fulcrum for a long arc of story that informs telling aspects of your characters.
The main character in my first novel is humiliated when his high school best friend sleeps with the girl he is dying to be with. He makes some bad, perverse decisions after that that violently shake his sense of himself. But those betrayal/mistake events happen fairly close in time. The kind of humiliation (and in my next example, ugly abuse) I’m getting at, which carries looming, evolving emotional power is something you see in the movie Mystic River, where the Tim Robbins character, abducted and abused as a youth, carries deep scars that devastatingly surface many years later.
In the collaborative novel I’m working on now, the lead character shows all the signs of having been humiliated, shamed or attacked in his past: low self-esteem, lack of trust, unreliability, withdrawal, and impulsive behavior that he puzzles over later. However, my co-author and I haven’t given enough hints or openings into his backstory that will provide the “so that’s it!” understanding for the reader. Of course, you wouldn’t want that backstory spelled out in some neatly packaged explanation: one person’s humiliation could be more motivation than morbidity. You’d never want the variant ramifications of dark events to be rendered as a psychology class.
Backstory: Less Effective Dumped as Tomato Sauce
You’d also never want your readers to see the backstory of some engulfing event from the past unswervingly directing the course of the character’s life, like a Calvinistic kind of predestination (more of a “you pay for what you get” rather than the opposite). And the revelation of such an event needn’t be given a flashy flashback scene, so that its crux is magnified and its consequences thus made to seem inevitable. For me, those backstory elements, even big ones, are best woven in, so there is buildup and reader recognition through a glass (page), darkly. Unless the event IS the launching and core of story, such as in a novel like The Lovely Bones.
There have been some great posts on backstory on WU; here are a couple from Lisa Cron that examine its use and implications much better than I can:
What We’ve Been Taught About Backstory . . . and Why It’s Wrong
The Shocking Truth About Info Dumps
Psychic injuries, especially when we are young, seem to keep their talons sunk in our flesh, even if the attacking harpy is long gone. Something to do with that sick way our brains hew to the negative memories of a time when the cowl of darkness has descended—we seem to so freely forget the bright moments. But of course, your characters shouldn’t just overcome, by rote, that shattering event. Some stories are built on characters having to continually stare down the darkness—or abide in it.
There probably would have been a better way to deal with X. But I was stupider back then, and didn’t draw on rational resources. But now, there’s a chessboard of characters—beware, pawns!—available in which to play out my all my past pathologies. Maybe one will even apologize.
So, ever dumped buckets of tomato sauce on one of your best friends? Can the fact that we humans are also red in tooth and claw make for a significant current in your tales? Speak, or forever have eggs in your bed.
Tom Bentley is a novelist, essayist, and business and travel writer. (He does not play banjo.) He’s published hundreds of freelance pieces in newspapers, magazines, and online. He is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, a how-to book on finding and cultivating your writing voice and a memoir of his sordid teenage criminality. His singing is known to frighten the horses. See his lurid website confessions at tombentley.com.
No, my mistakes have been less dramatic and, mostly, harder to fit into a narrative. So far, none of my characters have been motivated by the complex of feelings you describe–usually if they have “issues” from the past driving them it’s either some form of loneliness or some form of tragedy. It’s interesting to consider these patterns, how certain motivations pop up in a fiction writer’s work again and again while others remain missing.
Caroline, I don’t think it’s mandatory (as if any gambit is “mandatory” in fiction) for the lead characters(s) to have suffered some engulfing event that touches all that follows for the work to have merit. There are scads of great books where the past is just a dusting rather than a scar.
But some works can carry a deep river from an old event that can flow underground for a long while, and then surface again to sharp effect
I would never waste pizza toppings like that. But I have come into contact (thanks to Facebook) with a childhood friend who drifted into a hard life involving drugs and alcohol. He was a good friend, and as far as I know, I was his only friend who wasn’t trying to lead him astray. I often wonder how things might have turned out for him if I’d tried harder to steer him in the right direction. For our study here, I suppose my example is one of non-action. My friend’s life could have taken a new direction based on one moment. A word spoken. An invitation to go fishing. I know many people who say that their lives were changed “in a single moment.” True or not, this is what they believe. That makes it a bit easier for us, as authors, to capture the backstory. Better than retelling their entire childhood.
Thanks for the post.
Ron, yes, the “single moment” trope (just reminded me of the “magic bullet” theory in the Kennedy assassination)—that is a compelling thing, and as you suggest, whether true or not, something that makes you ponder the course of a person’s days.
I like that you bring up non-action too, because of course that’s an action, and one that can have huge consequences. That brought to mind the misery of the Catholic church (I’m a Catholic, if a lapsed one) over the non-action of authorities who kept pedophile priests in their posts when their crimes were known. The repercussions for those children reverberate for their difficult lives.
Brilliant, it’s a short story already, thanks Tom. My past mistakes were much more petty, but I think the quality of shame you feel when you don’t know yet who you are is just a kind of Frankenstein switch. The embarrassment/regret level is either “Off”, or Boom-Flash-Zzrapp- and the monster is getting up off the table, no middle ground. Tapping that, yeah, that would be something.
Will, you’ve just invented a literary device: The Frankenstein Switch. I like it better than the Deus ex Machina. Thanks for bringing up the “when you don’t know who you are” idea—so true, when we’re still those waxy objects being formed, and something or someone presses a key into that wax, and leaves some lasting impression.
My own adolescence—yikes! Let’s just say I was an adventurous kid, and I managed to keep many of my beyond-the-pale incidents from my parents until years later; I can still give my mother the fantods (as Twain would say), by recounting my crimes to her, “You did WHAT?”
I agree with Will. You have a ripping tale here, Tom, with a Lord-of-the-Flies edge to it. I mean, if they had had water balloons on that island, would things have gone any differently? The things we do or have done to us surely do reverberate down the years. I got left out of my childhood bestie’s birthday party. I saw them from my bedroom window playing pin-the-tail on the apple tree, wondering what was wrong with me. And guess what? I still feel like the odd girl out. Always. So our characters have these wounds that color what they do, and we get to decide how to pay that out to greatest effect. I’ve been dealing with this in the chapter I’m working on now. I just deleted a big fat chunk of backstory after two days of writing it. The question is always pacing, the space between the bread crumbs. Oi vey, you know?
Susan, it’s so great how stories work: I saw you in that bedroom window, fretting, turning away, turning back, the desolation … such rich stuff!
Yeah, HOW to work in the backstory, so that the staples don’t show—something that I don’t quite have down yet. I love how skilled writers can put in the shadows of backstory, so that you aren’t fully conscious that something’s in the background, but when its depth comes out, you felt the shadows there all along.
Humiliation. Oh yes. Very useful in life and in story. It can change the path of rivers.
The worst humiliations, I think, are those that we inflict upon ourselves. The protagonist of my WIP did that. He once had a horrible thing done to him (no spoilers here, sorry), but then later on did something terrible to the woman he loved…and still loves.
Eight years later he must face his own self-humiliation. Not easy, especially since the paths of both their lives were altered in enormous ways.
We all have things to be ashamed of. What you’ve highlighted here, Tom, are the consequences of our mistakes for others.
Great post. Cron-worthy. Carrie-true. Thanks.
Benjamin, “Carrie-like”—yes! That’s a great example, in that you have the primary (and damn bloody) humiliation at the high school, but it’s leavened—or better, thickened—by the crazed religious zealotry of Carrie’s mother, that’s put a hard hand on her shoulder for years.
Consequences reach out their long arms, sometimes years later, as you suggest.
Strong post!
Thank you.
Hey Tom (stellar name), thanks right back!
What great story fodder. It’s amazing how what seems like little moments in the grand scheme of life can provide such impetus for stories. Also interesting when you realize you can look at it in two ways–the side of regret, for doing something you wish you hadn’t done. But there’s the flip side if viewed from a character with a harsher viewpoint, ie. ‘he can dish it out but can’t take it.” There’s a world of difference in those 2 points of view.
Brenda, those variant points of view are so key; you brought to mind Rashomon, the great story (and great Kurosawa film) that examines the elusive nature of truth through different points of view over the same incident. Showing one character’s polar take on a situation next to another’s can pull out the tough questions, rather than the easy answers. Thanks!
I’ve always been fascinated by this idea of a single moment changing the course of a life. I think it appeals to the Robert Frost analogy of two paths diverging in a wood. Not only are characters (and real people) forced to deal with the path they took (or a humiliating event that was dealt to them), but must deal with the loss of the path they didn’t take. Regret ties in so nicely with humiliation.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder if your friend was quiet about the incident because he realized rather starkly how it was tied to his own behavior. Before the incident, had he thought his friends liked him in part because of his sense of humor and the practical jokes he played? The reason I ask is that, I could see the schooling of your friend (or characters in your book) as a positive event, a wake-up call when he realized friends don’t see him as he imagines they see him. Perhaps if you hadn’t schooled him, he would have pulled a reckless prank that would have landed him in jail (ie. a bag of briquets breaks your mother’s neck). So I think it cuts both ways. When necessary, a writer could frame this as a sobering and maturing event for their character, rather than as a humiliating one.
Thanks for the enlightening post!
Matt, yes, “what could have been” is another strong backstory (and if worked well, present experience) element for characters. I have a couple of hauntings, and no exaggeration on that word, from the past over something I didn’t do. I can’t remember the source, but paraphrasing, “You’ll regret more the things you didn’t do than the things you did.” And that regret can be a clinging albatross.
Good of you to point out that one of those dumbfounding moments like I described might set someone on a more humane path rather than an injured one—thanks.
Tom–
You tell your story of adolescence really well, thank you. The proof is this: when I came to your question at the end–have YOU ever dumped buckets of tomato sauce on a best friend–an answer came to me instantly. It’s been there all this time, remembered over the years, and waiting to jump out today from the crowded thousands of petty cruelties and misdeeds I wish I could take back. No one was probably hurt, not even the victim. But the memory still shames me, so much so that I won’t share it here.
I imagine Lisa Cron could shed light on why it is we give so much more weight and meaning to such moments than we do to what’s sunny and positive. My guess is it has to do with natural selection. Something devastating–not just to our bodies but also to our minds–threatens our survival. It’s important to our sense of self-preservation to value such moments. To not forget, and to remember them in precise detail. Or something like that.
Thanks again.
Well dang, Barry, here was your chance to cleanse yourself of that tomato-sauce moment—you didn’t want to avail yourself of my ten-cent therapy session?
I think you’re right on the survival instinct issue of giving such grip to those harsh moments in our memory, and letting the high kites of fun fly away. We must cling to those injuries to remind ourselves of the settings, so we won’t get ourselves in those settings again. (My therapy session has now gone up to fifteen cents.) But my, aren’t we authors powerful: we can put those characters in those settings over and over, the poor things.
Comrades, I have to jaunt away for a bit: have to feel the bite of the dentist’s drill on what I hope will be the resolution of a complex problem. And then there’s today’s deadline on a biz book edit. So I’ll be in and out here in a scattershot fashion, but I will be here. Thanks!
Tom, I really enjoyed your story. Reminds me of my husband, who is now a solid engineer, very dependable, meticulous. You could trust him with your life.
What most interested me is how the relationship cooled after the gangup on X. I did not expect that. It’s as if X couldn’t handle the shift in power.
I’ve done many a rotten thing, best left unsaid :) but who knows, maybe they’ll work themselves into my fiction.
Vijaya, thank you—I hadn’t thought of it from a power angle, but you’re on to something there. He really was a dynamic guy, and he did hold sway in some ways over a lot of us. We did drain a lot of his power away in that act.
As for working out those incidents in fiction, I do use some of my antics from way back, but they are invariably colored with different pens, so that fact and fiction and their mixing—and considering that we’re talking about 45 years ago, so damaged memory too—all have different hues.
Thoroughly enjoyed your story. And yes, powerful incidents in my characters lives are still affecting their actions and choices. Fiction reflects reality and if we examine our own choices, we will find something that points to why we do what we do, live where we live. Nothing is total happenstance. Great post.
Beth, yep, nothing is total happenstance, and there are some things that can seem definitive: “So THAT’S why he acts that way.” But our best authors can stitch in those circumstances so there’s rarely anything obvious or so heavily weighted toward a certain judgment.
It’s a great talent to tell a story without trying to force a point of view, but yet provokes curiosity, speculation and sheer bogglement for the things we humans do.
So many great ‘Why’s’
I loved your post because I was engaged in the story about your friend, X, and really wanted to know (actually engaged enough to want to know thus read further) WHY … why did he become a Real Estate agent… but even more provocative was WHY did he dish so much crap on your friends and family, and when it came back around … did it change him so? My vote: the retaliation saved us all from X becoming a serial killer, but hey, that’s my tomato sauce talkin’.
For me this really brings up the important concept of ‘why’ as in why do I want to read more. So many writers put us in situations like these and no one could care less. Your story wasn’t mugged down by pretty language or other distracting crap, you were telling us a ‘real’ story about an interesting friend whose eyes for the world forever shifted in this one event. It was unexpected and now as a reader I expect a great and nuanced story because the guy deserved it and yet we felt sorry for him. Love it.
I think this is the difference between characters that move us versus kill your F’ing darlings already because no-one-but-your-mother-really-cares. If a character in your story is important enough, they need to have an iceberg of specifics that the writer must know and draw upon when needed because this stuff just can’t be faked on the page. If someone is hollow, it shows. If someone doesn’t know what they want in life, it shows. They are boring, take them out or better yet, give them life. Look at Dan Brown’s cardboard cast of characters (yes he’s rich, yes I read a couple books, and yes if you’re thinking he’s rich and so I’m wrong, I guarantee your work is sitting on your mother’s shelf collecting dust … oh wait, never mind. It’s lost in the Amazon jungle of self-published works). Ouch, that had a bite to it. Sigh, this is why I should be finishing my next chapter and not reading great posts!
At the end of the day, my take is that you can’t magically weave a character’s past in, if you don’t have it down somewhere… If you don’t know it, it will show on the page. Info dump is the Writer’s brain naturally trying to figure this out for themselves. If the writer knows the specifics of a character in their bones, it will weave out on the page naturally (well … after many drafts and a lot of learning and hard work :)
I spoke, please don’t put eggs in my bed, my farts smell bad enough as it is.
Why do some of the bests posts not let me buy coffee? Mr. Bentley, go to the WU conference and I will buy you and Lisa Cron a cup of coffee, I promise. You don’t even have to talk to me to get it (we’ll figure the logistics of that one out later).
Chris, I forgot to put in that coffee code, and it would have gone so well with the eggs—thanks. I dig what you’re planting here about knowing about all the little ridges and hollows of a character so that when they are on the page they don’t sit in bland silence.
It does take some effort (at least from this wielder of hammers rather than scalpels) to really know a character as well as, say, a vivid boyhood friend. Thus my suggestion that I took some shortcuts on backstory in works of mine that could use some more ridges and hollows.
Your “the guy deserved it and yet we felt sorry for him” made me pause because indeed I felt that way afterward, and still do now—the echoes from our past still ring in our heads.
Hey Tom:
Adolescence, i.e., every writer’s bottomless well of material.
I like the point about making sure you don’t create one incident that serves as a kind of machine that cranks out the character’s problem. That’s the stuff of after-school TV.
Rather, explore shame and loss and fear and guilt in scenes (like the wonderful one you presented), then also explore the more positive moments of pride and connection and courage and forgiveness. They may not be as dramatic as the bad moments, but they show the character at least has some of the wherewithal to endure the storm your story is going to present.
And that story will likely be the proving ground to show, finally, whether the character has what it takes to muster their strengths and not just succumb to their faults.
BTW: my favorite part of your post was the part about what happened long after the retaliation, the career as real estate agent, not master of the universe. There’s the dark heart of the story. The why, not just the what. And it’s invisible, meaning as writers we would have to create it from our own understanding. We may have access to people’s contradictions, but not their secrets.
Thanks for the great post.
David, right—I’d never want to read a book that was scene glued to scene of misery, loss and guilt, no matter how vivid and well turned. Give me some apple pie with my bile (though package each with trimmin’s that don’t give all the suggestion and mystery away).
We really don’t have access to people’s secrets—man, some of my own behaviors I have no explanation for. But as you say, as writers we have the power (and now I’ll say, with a profoundly manly angle to my jaw) and the responsibility to get the understanding right.
Perfect timing for this post. I’m working on a story that weaves together a number of those defining moments of childhood friendship (especially friendship lost, friends betrayed) and having to make sense of the tendrils of effect that reach out from events that could have been different, if only a person had made a different choice here or there. The backstory of this character is vital, but cannot be revealed until long past the halfway point of the book and should cause readers to completely change their viewpoint of the antagonist. I want a deep sense of those regrets we have as adults when we haven’t adequately talked out an incident, asked for forgiveness, or offered forgiveness–and how we move on when it’s too late to ask.
Thanks, Tom.
Erin, all those choices we have—this free-will crap is really a burden. Speaking of burdens, your hard turn in viewpoint and judgment is a tough challenge for both writers and readers. Sounds like a worthy goal, and one that could really get under a reader’s skin.
And wow, “… how we move on when it’s too late to ask” for forgiveness. That too happens a lot in life, and it’s something that you can’t just shower off. (Kind of the tattoo theme I was getting at, from another angle.) Thanks for the thoughts.
Tom, I was struck by how cruelly insensitive your friend was in a narcissistic bid for attention. Apparently, he didn’t care that these “pranks” went terribly awry and were never funny or appreciated. He always wanted to be the perpetrator, never on the receiving end. Sure, someone or everyone in the group could have sat him down and said, “Dude! Not cool!” But when do teen boys ever have a heart-to-heart with their friends?
This behavior was so hostile and potentially dangerous, that it’s no wonder the group became fed up and struck back. You remember how stunned he looked (and the guilt you felt) when you carried off the retaliation, but consider what drove you to it. It appears that X’s real intention was to control his “friends” by keeping them off balance and retaining the upper hand. He must have had a very compelling personality for you to have thought he was going to achieve loftier goals, but aren’t the most successful con men the biggest charmers?
From what you’ve related, I don’t feel this is an instance of when the course of X’s life trajectory changed, nor that you had anything to feel a regret over. It appeared to me that the die was cast in this one. Are you sure he’s a real estate agent? I’m thinking it could be good cover for a mob cleaner.
A mob cleaner? Deborah, that’s a good one! I’m sure X would have done that, if he’d figured out the angle (or the vig, as the mobbed-up guys say). I have no doubt narcissism played its thick cello strings in some of those behaviors, but I have to push back a bit on my pal being wholly boorish. I didn’t have the space to emphasize that this was a thoroughly entertaining person, who could regale a crowd with stories, a great mimic, and a hilarious physical comedian as well.
He was also so far ahead of all of us in how he could make money. The pizza job was just a side gig. He had bunches of income-producing schemes in high school. Here’s one among many: on weekends, he’d go out with 3X5 cards that said just this: “If you want to sell this car for $50, call XXX-XXXX.”
He’d put those on, say, 75 unwashed, dumpy (maybe they had a flat tire or some other indicator of little use) cars; that might take him an hour or two. Maybe 25 people would call back, giving enough info over the phone for him to look at 5 of them. He’d buy two, and because he could fix anything, get them running in an hour, wash them, and sell them for $200-$300.
He did that a LOT. Here I was returning Coke bottles for candy money, and he was pulling in hundreds in 1970s high school without doing any real work.
And a lot of the time in our group, he was just one of us, not tormenting anyone (excepting perhaps the general public), just hanging out and having fun. But then his perversity would emerge, and the evil manifest.
Anyway, not to excuse what he did, but just to fill out the picture a bit more. Thanks for commenting!
Thanks for the rounding out of the picture. I do see that he was far more than just the cruel prankster, and that you miss the person X was to you. It’s really a shame that it couldn’t have turned out differently.