Characters in Motion (Keep Readers in Motion)
By Tom Bentley | November 29, 2021 |
I’ll be fine as soon as I get to Vegas.
With apologies to Isaac Newton, who I’m sure had polished off a great deal of hard cider before being bonked by that apple pulled earthward, I’ll paraphrase his first law of motion: most fictional characters in their conventional orbits aren’t intriguing unless they are acted upon by an external force. And a fine way to force that force is to put them on the road, meeting people and places that tilt their gravity and pull their thoughts and actions a sharp tug from their safe routines.
Joseph Campbell’s oft-cited Hero’s Journey is likely the most circulated exposition of this notion, outlining a series of stages by which a person is compelled from their ordinary world into an adventure they first resist, then are mentored in preparation for the quest, meet allies and enemies, must overcome a supreme challenge, and get home in time to do laundry.
My first self-pubbed novel (which feels like a lifetime ago), All Roads Are Circles, pulls a dipstick from that tank, though considering my main character’s disposition, the Stooge’s Journey might be more apt. That book was loosely based on a 6-week period when I was 17 and hitchhiked from Vancouver to a small town in Ontario and back, a jaunt of fun, madness and peril.
To draw on: Drivers driving stolen cars, drivers who tell you that they are JUST coming on to their first hits of acid (and smiling at you in that special way as they accelerate to lunatic speed), drivers pulling out guns “just to show you that there won’t be any problems,” a van full of people ALL on acid, playing Blue Oyster Cult at ear-bleeding volume, and insisting, and I mean insisting, that you ride with them for HOURS, drivers who wept, cursed and wanted so much to share their tiny chewed rag of earthly experience expressed so succinctly … in seventy-seven chapters, blow-by-blow as you weakly nod.
It’s hard to forget the individually hitchhiking strangers in the back of a pickup on the return ride to Vancouver, who surrounded by other hitchhikers, had sex under a tarp. After they’d known each other for two hours.
The actual trip was fodder (sliced, diced and spiced) for many of the character-revealing escapades for the novel’s two protagonists, who have secrets from one another that vividly color their behavior. Those secrets are only revealed when they vie for the attentions of a worldly young woman—a wholly invented Circe not met on the real trip—they take up with on the road, leading to their collective Supreme Ordeal.
Clearly, writers can’t just fling characters all over a map and just hope fortune’s tumbleweeds scratch their shins in a reader-pleasing way. But picaresque adventures that don’t rely on a crutch of 1-2-3 episodic challenges can be satisfying stories of trial and growth. A few examples from novels I’ve read, some long ago, some fresh:
Books to Inspire Your Traveling Hooks
Think of Huck Finn and Jim rolling down the Mississippi, bumping into liars, cheats, stalwarts and good souls in a chain of fits and starts. The broader and more fulfilling story—despite the tangents of their fortunes—is the deepening connection between the two and the evolution of how Huck perceives himself.
Kerouac’s On the Road has a great deal of energy and mayhem in its city-skipping and country tripping full-throttle odyssey, but it also invites the reader to share a philosophy of engagement with life, an openness to opportunity, contact and friendship.
A different kind of road is the one in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a highway of bleak threat and potential death. The father and son have episodic encounters with withered but lethal strangers that are dramatic, but it’s the love between the two leads that supplies the higher electricity of the tale.
Consider another journey of pursuit and threat, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, where Cora is a runaway slave who is unceasingly vigilant (and increasingly menaced) as she moves toward the free states. The piled-on perils she faces are chilling, but the story’s heart seems to be in her growing capability, mixed with her musings on her bitter past and opaque future, changing her sense of self.
On the nonfiction side, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley has the “at every turn a new object encountered” trope on the road with the writer and his dog, but it’s the dipping deeper and deeper into the well of what America and its folks are all about that animates the book, not just the changing vistas and the vagaries of its various vagrants.
One of my more recent reads is Rachel Joyce’s Mrs. Benson’s Beetle, another tale of an improbable friendship that develops on a crazy quest from Britain to New Caledonia to find a rare beetle. The escapades are enveloping, but it’s the developing and wholly unlikely friendship that stirs the pot.
And if you want to read of a road trip that’s really a head trip, read the other Joyce’s course-of-a-single-day-manic dive in Ulysses. I read it more than 20 years ago, and can barely remember its Dublinesque depth, other than some vivid ruminations on Leopold Bloom’s digestive patterns.
As a counterpoint, there are also great novels where characters are in some kind of stasis, like the Count and Nina in Amor Toles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, and Roxanne, Katsumi and Gen in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto: trapped in narrow circumstances that tighten and tighten—it’s the closed door, not the open road that forces their hands.
I want to circle back (all roads are circles, after all) to the belief that it’s the expansion of the character’s perspectives and possibilities, external and internal that makes their motion meaningful. A story of episodic encounters, even with charmers like Blue Oyster Cult acid-heads, holds only entertainment (?) value if the plot doesn’t thicken.
Use Sol’s Paved Roads to Supply Character Bumps
I have on my desk a narrow, brochure-like document titled “Sol Stein’s Reference Card for Writers,” a kind of cheat sheet from the author that’s broken up into categories with multiple entries. Here are a few cherry-picked for this piece.
- Under Keep in Mind While Writing: “Don’t mark time; move the story relentlessly,”
- As well as: “Are the obstacles facing the protagonist getting tougher as the story progresses?”
- And under If You Get Stuck: “Have your next paragraph reveal an unexpected turn of events.”
All that gives some bulwark to how road tales can structure a story, if the tales have development and consequence and aren’t merely a hurly-burly. Indulge me for this small aside: I have two memoirs in progress about mad acts and consequences in my scalawag youth, and one of them is about the charming, eccentric, and in some cases cuckoo exchange of letters (and weird objects) between me and the Jack Daniel’s distillery, 30+ years worth.
I recently listened to a tape I made of a pilgrimage from California I took in a rented car in the early 90s to the JD distillery and beyond. The spew I put on that tape is a mix of bravado and blather, but something I’d forgotten is that my car was towed in New Orleans and for a while I thought it had been stolen, which put my hamster brain into spin-the-wheel overdrive.
But I’d likely not seen the polite “Y’all best not park here” sign, and soon my chariot was restored, and I was on my way. But it occurred to me anew that someone in a writerly way could make that little contretemps into a story pivot, where the road goes out from underneath your rambling protagonist.
Back to the hitchhiking saga that leads this story: Likely some other law of Newtonian physics, but one consequence of riding for three full days in the back of that return-to-whence-we-came pickup was that when I arrived in Vancouver, and released my hair (which at that time was a combination of Jimi Hendrix by way of Albert Einstein, but longer), it stayed in its beaver-tail-like ponytail.
It had become a thing unto itself on the road, a wide, flat integrated object (not in motion), not a mane of individual hairs. My friend’s mom had to chop the whole thing off, because no conditioner could untangle it. I’m sure the Department of Defense could have used it for weapons research.
Those Unboxed, in your work have you used a road-trip structure to deepen and stretch the emotional map of your characters?
Any other books that are instructive in this sense, and how?
And now that my face resembles a constantly folded/unfolded map of yore, will anyone ever pick me up hitchhiking again?
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.
Tom, all I can say is I wish I knew you back then. I had some wild times in my youth, but none compare to the road trip you describe. Your post hits on a point that is easy to overlook–the need for action and motion. I struggle with putting characters in motion because my stories tend to be ‘quiet’ novels involving family dynamics. My scenes are imbued with a lot of micro tension as well as subtext, but I must always be mindful that the reader can get bored when characters are not doing something in pursuit of a goal. I love Sol Stein’s advice to “move the story relentlessly” and I must keep that in mind. Thanks for this thoughtful post and best wishes for a happy holiday season.
Hey CG, internal motion can be just as tumultuous and consequential as external. And family dynamics–that can be a rushing roller coaster! I chose the road trip metaphor because of my own thoughts lately on my old trips in considering the memoirs. Thank you, and happy holidays back at you.
Hey Tom – Talk about trippin’! This fun piece offers great glimpses into your work–and life!–that certainly provide for the enhancement of our craft.
One of my favorite story journeys comes in book two of my trilogy. After my protagonists venture in conquest to the “civilized world” of the northern coast of my fictional version of the Black Sea, a favorite secondary character travels to the “big city” in their wake. He arrives not just to stunning new sights and experiences–new foods, music, architecture, etc–but to a hostile conquered populace, basically besieging his fellows in a palace keep on the highest hill in town. It’s not just the stranger in a strange land scenario, but he achieves a unique perspective on his own people that he’d never even imagined (even though he disapproves of the conquest).
I think the fun thing for me was forcing myself to the new viewpoint. I first wrote it years ago, but it was an unboxing, for sure. One I sort of cherish, if that makes sense. The memory of it has served me well throughout this sprawling tale.
Thanks for keeping it real (surreal?) and fun, and very useful. Keep on truckin’, friend.
Vaughn, the “stranger in a strange land” structure can bring in so many possibilities: of emotion, physical discomfort and disorientation, reassessing of beliefs—good story stuff, particularly if it takes characters to places that can surprise and enlighten the readers. (Sometimes the characters can remain in the dark though.)
I like that it was a secondary character that had his “big city” disruption perception–so many textures of a novel (and in your case, multiple novels) are rewoven and strengthened (or torn) by important secondary folks. My trucking is hampered by a cane at the moment, but I lurch pretty well.
I’ve always thought road trips were fascinating writing, because they have no baggage. –Or to unscramble the metaphor, the characters are so cut off from their neighbors and their daily lives that they *notice* every bit of baggage they still lug around.
Normal life –especially village life where the “hero’s journey” tales got the most traction– has a sense that “it’s already happened.” You’ve met the people, decided where you stand with each of them, so it takes a bit of work for anything to change. In a fixed-place story that’s an “inciting incident,” and it might take some work to twist up an accident or just convey that people who’ve known each other for years still have that relationship changing.
On the road, everyone you meet is a new inciting incident, and a blank slate. Usually a minor moment, but each gets its chance to be eye-openingly different, or beautiful, dangerous, hilarious, or anything else. Every. Single. One, just because they’re *new* to you. And those episodes still play off the ongoing changes in how you see who you’re traveling with, and just how the road changes you.
Liberating stuff to write, and a bit scary.
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Ken, yessir, the away lands are a yeasty medium (hmm, does that metaphoric bread rise?) for all kinds of “damn, I thought there was a last step on this staircase” perceptions by our fictional pawns. I have had the luck to house-sit in many places all over the world for a month or two at a time, with my first thoughts, of course, being, “Man, they do things oddly here.”
But naturally, I was carrying my own oddness, as you suggest, so familiar to me as the norm, to the table. Getting out and about can change perspective for both folks of this world and of the page. Or they can dig in even harder to protect their conventions, which can be a stimulating character response as well. Thanks for reading.
Interesting piece for me to read as I’m half-way through writing a sequel to my novel Leaving Freedom (Freedom is a fictional town in Massachusetts). At the end of that novel my character was 40 and traveling across the U.S. to find out what happened to a long-lost uncle. In the sequel, Finding Freedom, she’s 80 and traveling in the opposite direction from Oregon to Massachusetts. No wild youth encounters in this one, but it’s fun developing the landscape and the characters she encounters. Your piece gives me courage to keep her on the road.
Sharon, I admire the anatomy of the sequel: 40 years is a lot of seasoning for a character, with all the consequent loss, growth, regret and perhaps redemption. Or at least reckoning. Good plan. (Though I think you might throw in one or two “wild elder” encounters for her, just to keep things lively.) Hope your own road for the novel is good and true.
Tom, Your great story reminds me of when I moved from Ottawa to Edmonton in the summer of 1980, picking up a young couple (younger than me anyway) outside of Sault Ste. Marie. They were going from PEI/Nova Scotia, heading out west to start a new life (while he was waiting trial for a being ensnared in a massive East Coast drug bust; too long a tale to elaborate on here). They seemed like good kids and I let them stay overnight with me in the next motel I stayed in, near Thunder Bay, and finally dropped them off in Winnipeg. I’ve always wondered what happened to them.
Anyway, loved the post and its premise. As they say, It’s the journey, not the getting there.
CS, traveling to start a new life is a good story premise too, one that could be fraught with unfulfilled expectation as well as promise. Of course, the stuff I mentioned on my real trip, while all accurate, tells that I picked the most alarming of the episodes—many of our rides, across the prairies, were calm and uneventful.
Although we were stuck for a full 28 hours on the outskirts of a Manitoba town, where no one would pick us up. At one point, we were hitching with our middle fingers, rather than thumbs, upraised, because the outcomes were no different. I won’t claim we were rational. And indeed, it is the journey.
Tom, this post was fun for me, because it generated a round of mostly good memories of my own youthful journeys in that same era. “Well, so long, it was good traveling with you…. And now that we’re here, I guess I can tell you that we had two kilos of weed strapped under the car.” It also has me thinking about the present, though, because I have a rather unadventurous MC who has been dragged through two stories without leaving town, and it would be fun (there are foreign elements) to put him on the road in this one. However, it would mean leaving behind some rather important secondary characters such as (ahem) his pregnant wife. So … thinking.
Hey Michael, I’m certain you could mess with that character in an intriguing way (meaning with big guilt, recriminations, suspicions) by him leaving his pregnant wife, even for a short while. If we don’t torture our characters, who will?
…have you used a road-trip structure to deepen and stretch the emotional map of your characters?
Yes. Chuckling here, because in a half hour trip by a very calm woman, I found a way to insert: almost running out of gas – and having to go a different way because of that – with the gas station uncharacteristically busy; a minor road-rage like incident at an intersection in a small town; a slow line getting into the state park where she was to meet someone important; no easy way to communicate; worrying about her directions to that VIP; short flashbacks; and the fact that every one of these contretemps made her later and later… After she set out with a few minutes margin of safety.
It’s the only road-trip scene in a mainstream trilogy (so far), and I knew instinctively it would be skimmed if it weren’t packed with interesting crucial tidbits.
It was a lot of fun to write.
Alicia, that’s a great example, of something seemingly simple on the road that spirals out of control; sounds like a great scene and that it was fun to write is gravy.
I had a boring long drive back from Seattle to Southern California years ago, where we had a hard deadline to return. It became less boring when he fell asleep at the wheel (and I was already asleep) and we plowed into the broad median at high speed on a big highway. We were saved, though stuck, by the median being full of ice plant rather than trees. It did wake us up.
I’ve learned never to leave an opportunity for microtension unused – from the great Donald Maass! Every single one – even if it only leads to a better adverb somewhere.
My reviewers have commented things like: ‘…By contrast, the tension is considerable, and the reader is kept in suspense all the way to the disappointing end. I have to call it disappointing because Ms. Ehrhardt has clearly planned the whole story across a trilogy, and this is therefore only the first part. Disappointing, because by the time one reaches the end of this first book, one is aching for resolution…’
And my beta reader calls me an evil woman.
I am satisfied.
Wow, Alicia, if I had those kind of comments, I’d have a glow too. Better keep those folks running out of gas.
Tom, you mentioned Amor Towles above. Have you read his newest novel, The Lincoln Highway? A great example of the road trip novel with a plot that thickens. Well worth the read.
Hi Jelsh. I have heard great things about that novel (and I truly loved Gentleman), but haven’t checked it out. I have too many unread books on the shelf at the moment, but keeping that one in mind. Thanks!
Tom , the link to your website comes up dry. Are you sure you exist? In case you do, I’ll just mention that the MC in my research-based narrative NF WIP does make road trips: by dogteam. Does that count? I believe it does.
Anna
Anna, that your MC has gone to the dogs is likely a fine thing: there are all kinds of snowy escapades (and accidents) that could happen to prove his/her/their mettle, though you might not want to go as far as the character in Jack London’s classic “To Build a Fire.”
As to whether I exist, better ask Descartes, because many are the times I don’t think at all. But the website’s there–if I click on the bio link or my name link in the comments, it comes up. Or perhaps it’s all a dream…
And let’s not forget the character development that can occur while two or more people are en route to various adventures. Being trapped in a closed environment for hours at a time can occasion some interesting conversation and revelations that are important to the plot as more physical actions.
Oh yeah, Christine: plane, train or automobile, people confined together for stretches of time, even confined willingly, can encounter all kinds of disagreements about routes, times, meals, morals. Throw in dangerous or attractive (or both) strangers, and things can get even stranger. And potentially better for the reader.
Your essay today brought back many memories of my own road-trips and (mis)adventures in my youth. It’s strange not to have that wanderlust anymore. Enjoying being rooted, so much so that at times I wonder if I’ll end up as a Benedictine oblate. Thanks for reminding me how powerful journeys can be, what great stories they contain.
Vijaya, I still do have some wanderlust, though current events (and a bum hip) have curtailed that for the moment. But I hope to have some good trouble on roads to come. Of course, if you actually became an oblate in a monastic community, you would have spiritual travels to write about, and they have their own sparkle.
Every book I’ve ever written has been a road trip. I mean, I theoretically grasp that things can happen without you going somewhere, but when it comes to writing a novel, it just never happens that way. (I’ve written a non-travelling play, but never a novel.)
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I was 14 before I’d lived 12 consecutive months in one house, and now, in my mid-30s, my record is still about 5 years. Unfortunately my memory tends to be structured around “where we were living when X happened” and so the last five years have become a bit of a formless blur.
Deborah, that’s a lot of roaming, and likely a lot of travel encounters from which to shape stories. As simple as you state it: go somewhere and things happen. The fiction trick is to shape those happenings into character/plot/story arc material, and those tricks ain’t that easy. At least not for me.
Here’s to fruitful travels and good writing to come.
Where is the top vast desert picture above from?
Hi Neu. It’s a long way from Vegas: I bought it from iStock for my cover of my All Roads Are Circles book and their caption reads, “Man hitchhiking the car on deserted road, Bolivia”—not quite grammatical, but gives you the essence.
You were an adventurous youth, Tom! Good for you. I’m glad you survived it intact. Mostly, anyway. ;)
This post reminds me of the adage that all stories are about a stranger coming to town or someone leaving town.
Thus far, all my novels have fallen into the latter category. I’m fond of milieu stories, where I trap a character in an unfamiliar setting and apply various assaultive forces. The advantage is, since I usually am writing romance, there’s an implicit ticking clock. i.e. Will these two people be a solid couple by story’s end? Also, they’re dealing with the unfamiliar in most everything in the environment, from food, to shelter, to clothing, to relationships.
Jan, I love the sense of applying various assaultive forces to your characters. I hope there aren’t any glue guns or grenades (unless absolutely necessary, of course).
But with your romances, does the genre insist without qualification that the protagonist couple MUST get together in the end? Or is there wiggle room to either have the romance fizzle or show potential to be engaged again in the future?
To qualify as a romance, the conclusion must include a happy-for-now or happily-ever-after ending. That could happen after they leave the milieu for sure, but in some stories you can set it up so that’s not really possible–hence the implicit ticking clock.
A love story, on the other hand, does not require a happy ending of any kind.
Well, probably the highest-level romance I’ve read was “The Dot and the Line,” so I’m not qualified to comment at length.
If you’d like to try one, I always recommend Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me. I suspect you’d enjoy her wit.
I am a hundred miles backed up with “to reads,” but I’ll put that cruisin’ Jennifer on the list.
And for some reason, the site has decided that I can’t “Like” comments any more, despite me changing my WordPress password a couple of times in order to establish that I am a human, not an insect. (Though some days, I’m unsure.)
Anyway, consider all your comments liked, you likable commenter you.
Hi Tom, well since more than a few other people have used this comment section as an opportunity to plug their books…. My novel under the pen-name Evi Kammer (Amazon) might be dropped into the “road trip” bin, but since it’s sci-fi perhaps “air trip” is better, and there’s also a “space trip” towards the end, or is it a “time trip”? Well maybe I was tripping and that’s the truth. But also, I can’t help feeling that all of this road/spacetime/air tripping was a kind of primordial response to not really knowing where the story was going combined with the need to wrap it all up somehow? In other words, an act of desperation. Lo and behold: a novel! Take care.