Explanation vs. Fascination–And a Woman in the Corner Opposite
By David Corbett | February 11, 2022 |
Where do our desires come from? Put differently, how much control do we exert over what we want?
This question has been haunting me lately, not just in my own life but in the lives of my characters.
We’re so often told that the principle question to pose in the depiction of a character, is: What does she want? All well and good. But it’s in answering the follow-up question—Why that and not something else?—that a great many characters flatten out, reduced to a small, simplistic, reductionist set of circumstances, often grounded in the past, that “explain” them.
The more I’ve thought about this, the less satisfying that approach has seemed to me. Our hope is to create characters who are fascinating. But fascination and explanation don’t mix well. Even if the explanation is surprising, paradoxical, shocking, unless it suggests there is “more to explain,” it likely will soon lose that ineffable quality that intrigues us.
Take a moment to observe your own thoughts—the Stream of Consciousness as it is typically and somewhat flatteringly referred to. (I prefer to call if the Firehouse of WTF?) Although I recognize these thoughts as my own—if not, hoo boy—why do they arise in the manner and at the time they do? Whose hand stirs the cauldron where they simmer and bubble up?
Ask the same questions of our desires. Consider, for example, who steals our heart—and who doesn’t. My life changed when a therapist suggested I seek relationships with women more resembling my dad in temperament than my mom. (Long story, I won’t bore you, but the point is that before this revelation I was, to put it mildly, choosing unwisely.) So is my idea of who is capable of loving and worthy of being loved grounded solely in the impression my father had on me? unlikely. But if not, who or what created the complex combination of factors that melded into The One?
I’m reminded of something Jim Harrison wrote in The Man Who Gave Up His Name to the effect that any reasonably intelligent person has reflected on the role of chance in meeting the person we fall in love with. But it’s not purely accident, or we’d be capable of loving anyone who happens by.
At every step of this process, taking a step back to ask the next question or round of questions, we encounter a curtain, and pulling back that curtain sooner or later leads us to another. Is there a final curtain, behind which lies the bedrock of our character? If you believe in an individual essence or a genuine self, your answer is likely yes. But the seemingly bottomless reservoir of personal accounts and fictional stories premised on the difficulty of finding oneself suggest that even if I possess an essence it’s not within easy reacy.
But if I lack such an essence, if the Real Me doesn’t lie buried somewhere deep within, how is it possible to answer the question: Who am I? Is the answer always provisional? (“Based on the latest data …”) Is it perhaps instead the case that we create our personas bit by bit as experience offers opportunities and shuts down others? But if that’s true, why do some choices feel wrong—”out of character?” Perhaps we’re constantly working both sides of this question, creating ourselves to a certain extent while being held in check by guardrails that remain largely unconscious. If so, are the impulses to create and control in balance? (Hint: recent neurobiological research suggests that the conscious miond has as much control over the unconsciouos mind as a stowaway on an ocean liner.)
This may seem like just another iteration of the old nature-versus-nurture question. In the realm of characterization, however, attempts to identify the character’s “nature” often fall flat. In contrast, nurture is reasonably straightforward—explore the character’s past, the people and events that molded her. But the other thing, the thing that can’t be readily explained—it attracts us by eluding us. The more we try to pin the character’s “nature” down, the less convincing she seems. We want that sense of endless curtains. We want, as they say, “layers.”
Last week, in commenting on Don Maass’s wonderful post (“Back Story Versus the Past”), I mentioned a New Yorker article by Parul Seghal titled, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot.” That piece includes the following observation:
The experience of uncertainty and partial knowledge is one of the great, unheralded pleasures of fiction. Why does Hedda Gabler haunt us? Who does Jean Brodie think she is? What does Sula Peace want?
In making her case for characters who keep us guessing, Ms. Seghal refers back to a famous lecture by Virginia Woolf titled, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” You can find a transcription of that lecture here. In it, Woolf says the following:
One night some weeks ago … I was late for the train and jumped into the first carriage I came to. As I sat down I had the strange and uncomfortable feeling that I was interrupting a conversation between two people who were already sitting there … They were both elderly, the woman over sixty, the man well over forty. They were sitting opposite each other, and the man, who had been leaning over and talking emphatically to judge by his attitude and the flush on his face, sat back and became silent. I had disturbed him, and he was annoyed. The elderly lady, however, whom I will call Mrs. Brown, seemed rather relieved. She was one of those clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness—everything buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up—suggests more extreme poverty than rags and dirt. There was something pinched about her—a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the floor. I felt that she had nobody to support her; that she had to make up her mind for herself; that, having been deserted, or left a widow, years ago, she had led an anxious, harried life, bringing up an only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by this time beginning to go to the bad. All this shot through my mind as I sat down … Then I looked at the man. He was no relation of Mrs. Brown’s I felt sure; he was of a bigger, burlier, less refined type. He was a man of business I imagined, very likely a respectable corn-chandler from the North, dressed in good blue serge with a pocket-knife and a silk handkerchief and a stout leather bag. Obviously, however, he had an unpleasant business to settle with Mrs. Brown; a secret, perhaps sinister business, which they did not intend to discuss in my presence …
[Later] Mrs. Brown and I were left alone together. She sat in her corner opposite, very clean, very small, rather queer, and suffering intensely. The impression she made was overwhelming. It came pouring out like a draught, like a smell of burning. What was it composed of—that overwhelming and peculiar impression? Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas crowd into one’s head on such occasions; one sees the person, one sees Mrs. Brown, in the centre of all sorts of different scenes. I thought of her in a seaside house, among queer ornaments: sea-urchins, models of ships in glass cases. Her husband’s medals were on the mantelpiece. She popped in and out of the room, perching on the edges of chairs, picking meals out of saucers, indulging in long, silent stares.
Here is a character imposing itself upon another person. Here is Mrs. Brown making someone almost automatically begin writing a novel about her. I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.
Now, how does the novelist avail herself of such insight into “an old lady in the corner opposite?” Woolf says the age and country in which one is born are primary factors (a Russian, French, and English writer would create utterly different version of Mrs. Brown), though the unique temperament of the novelist also will be the decisive factor.
Not terribly helpful, if one lacks Virginia Woolf’s gifts of observation, intuition, and imagination.
Returning to the New Yorker article, Parul Seghal notes this:
Stephen Greenblatt has used the term ‘strategic opacity’ to describe Shakespeare’s excision of causal explanation to create a more complex character. Shakespeare’s source texts for “King Lear” and “Hamlet” include neatly legible motivations; lopping them off from the story releases an energy obstructed by the conventional explanation.
That energy isn’t just released by the play. It is the audience’s own, the force of our imagination rushing to fill the gap.
As a technique for depiction, this is useful: do all the background work then leave it out. But how does one go about “all the background work?”
More to the point, how can we be sure we don’t revert to the limitation identified earlier, of creating a hobgoblin out of “concrete, readily identifiable factors” that in the end, even with this information omitted, nonetheless creates a flat, unconvincing depiction? How do we create that sense of a series of curtains leading us deeper into the character but never really reaching the end?
We want a sense of something remaining out of reach, unknown and possibly unknowable. We want a sense of opacity, to use the term used by James Wood in his How Fiction Works.
May I humbly submit a few techniques I’ve found useful.
The first is to give a character a secret. This automatically conjures a sense of depth as there is now an “inside” and an “outside” to the character—what she reveals, what she keeps hidden.
The problem, of course, is that the urge to reveal the secret and thus explain the character is often hard to resist. That temptation only increases if the secret plays an important part in how the character behaves in the story and why. Once, however, when I found a protagonist falling flat before my eyes, I gave him a secret that I did not reveal—one that gave him a sense of agency, even cruelty, at odds with his otherwise easy going come-what-may nature. And, I think, it worked. There now seemed more to him than met the eye.
Given that the secret was at odds with what was otherwise apparent about him suggests a second technique: give the character a contradiction. I could (and will) write a post about balancing contradiction with coherence, because contradictory traits can sometime make us thing a character is doing something “out of character.” But the milquetoast who suddenly explodes in a violent rage; the virginal spinster who throws herself at a young stranger; the pompous windbag who grows strangely silent in the presence of an African nun—these contradictions suggest that there is more to the character than we at first surmised, that there is something under the surface that connects their seemingly incompatible traits.
Again, however, the temptation remains—too many of us feel a need to explain what that connection is.
Finally, the third technique I have devised (i.e., stumbled upon, thanks to the guidance of screenwriter Gill Dennis) relies on thinking of the two aspects of the character not as surface or depth, revealed and concealed of conscious and subconscious—but as constructed and unconstructed.
The constructed self is the one we’ve have developed though the influence of others and the effects of circumstance, the one generated by our interaction with the world, living our lives. The unconstructed self lies behind the curtain.
How do we draw that curtain back?
The key lies in moments of helplessness.
When we are helpless—usually in the thrall of an intense, unexpected emotion—the constructed self gives way to something deeper, something surprising, unexpected, even shocking, perhaps life-changing. We react reflexively, on the basis of an impulse we most likely will not understand until later, if then. We get a glimpse of that part of us that lies behind the curtain.
One way to explore these moments of helplessness is to ask, “What was my character’s moment of greatest …?” Or, “When did she most forcibly experience …?” To complete the question, fill in the blank with:
Fear Courage
Shame Pride
Guilt Forgiveness
Betrayal Trust
Rejection Acceptance
Death Love
These are merely suggestions—you might envision her worst fight, her most memorable kiss, and so on—but I’ve found these particular prompts to be useful. I don’t necessarily explore all of them with any given character—often, after exploring only three or so, the character begins to quicken in my imagination in that compelling way that makes me see her as a real person. She intrigues me—like Mrs. Brown.
I think of the left-hand column above as the source for the character’s sense of the pain of life, the right-hand column as her sense of the promise of life. And the tension between those two forces—avoidance of pain, pursuit of promise—creates her core inner conflict. They form the fundamental, creative, underlying duality that generates everything else she wants. But they are so amorphous, so fluid, so protean that they resist simple explanation—as elusive as conscious and unconscious themselves—though that won’t stop some writers from trying.
These techniques help me gain an intuitive impression of the character without being overly reductionist. I retain a sense of her that remains incomplete—which will permit me the luxury of surprise. In that way, both my reader and I will benefit from the one thing every compelling character must possess—the ability to create a desire to know more about her.
Have you ever had a woman in the corner opposite, whether in the real world or your imagination, imposer herself on you, making you “almost automatically” write a novel about her? (If it was a man instead, that too qualifies.) What was the fascination? How did it turn out? How did you go about exploring her without explaining her?
How might exploring secrets, contradictions, or moments of helplessness in your characters create a sense there is more to them than meets the eye—a sense of something deeper, beyond the curtain? Have you used this technique in the past? What happened?
If you don’t use secrets or contradictions or moments of helpless, how do you conjure that sense of opacity in your characters, that there is always more to learn about them?
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
As usual, an amazing post. Thanks for sharing these insights and ideas.
You’re more than welcome, Carol. It is, as they say, my reason for being.
Thank you for this David.
I’ve not used Moments of Exploring Weakness, not in an intentional manner. Another great color to add to my painter’s palette! I looked at the arcs of my 2 protagonists and listed their weak moments. Now it’s time to sort how I might strengthen those pieces of the story so a reader can get a sense of the layers of these 2 women.
But…a question. Do you find that exploring weakness and its unexpected ramification upon the character works better at certain plot points in the book?
Get ready for a long answer, Lisa. I cover this is considerable depth and detail in THE COMPASS OF CHARACTER, and I’m going to rely on some of the text (i.e. plagiarize myself) to respond to your question.
I use the moments of helplessness BEFORE I even begin writing the story. I often discover that those moments actually provide the story, at least as it applies to that character.
I first learned this approach from the late Gill Dennis, a marvelous screenwriter who taught his “Finding the Story” workshop at the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference for many years.
Once, during an interview in the aftermath of his work on the Johnny Cash biopic, Walking the Line, Dennis explained how he went about questioning his subject for the script. He asked Cash what his moment of greatest sorrow was. Cash replied it was his brother’s death when he was nine years old. Dennis then asked the singer’s moment of greatest shame. Cash replied that it was an incident when he hit his wife, June Carter, in front of their children. Dennis then asked for the moment of greatest joy, and that concerned an appearance at the Grand Ole Opry where the entire extended Cash-Carter clan performed together onstage.
Dennis explained that this approach not only suggested a story arc, from crippling sorrow to triumphant joy, but revealed a theme connecting the various incidents together: the importance of family to Johnny Cash, and the haunting effect of loneliness, the misbegotten attempt to fill that void through fame, the descent into drugs and alcohol that came with the music business, the erratic change of behavior that created, the turn to Christ that June’s example offered, and the reconnection with his loved ones this offered.
Another takeaway, however, was the reasoning Dennis provided for the questions he asked.
He said he wanted to explore moments of helplessness, when emotion or action arose from within the individual but outside his conscious control, revealing a deeper strata of his character.
Dennis believed such moments were the true signposts along an individual’s life path. They revealed not just that deeper level of character; they also exposed the superficial persona the individual assumed to get through his days but which failed him in these moments of sudden nakedness.
One of the most curious and mysterious aspects of this methodology is the way these critical moments in an individual’s past share a certain thematic quality that points to the core problem the person is trying to solve in his life. This can sound a bit like psychobabble—or at least wishful thinking—and yet the number of times it has borne out has made a believer of me.
One shouldn’t really be all that surprised by this. It echoes Freud’s theory of the repetition compulsion, whereby individuals continue placing themselves in certain circumstances that cause them to revisit past incidents of pain or trauma; they do this in order to better understand their psychic wounds and overcome their negative effects in an unconscious effort to heal.
From a dramatic perspective, this also points us toward the character’s main problem, and thus the core of the story they have to tell.
The risk of this approach is a retreat into reductionist simplicity, i.e., condensing a character’s existential crisis into a pat phrase or concept.
This aspect of characterization is more art than science, more reliant on intuition than some step-by-step method. It requires us to look at the various moments we’ve created and try to see how they reveal not a random jumble of episodes in the character’s past but form part of an unconscious journey toward fulfilling the promise of life as they understand it while avoiding as much of the pain of life as possible.
If you can see this pattern upon finishing the work on key backstory moments, fine. But don’t despair if you don’t. You may find that a great deal of writing needs to be completed, building from this backstory foundation you’ve built, before that resonant theme reveals itself.
In the absence of a technique to offer, let me provide instead an example from my own writing of how this worked.
In The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, I used two key scenes to construct the core of my character’s backstory.
The first concerned a disastrous senior prom. Lisa Balamaro, the middle child in a family of extreme overachievers, is preparing herself for the evening. Observing herself in the mirror, she feels more beautiful than she’s ever been. She wants to show her family, but her socialite mother is upstairs on the phone with her brother, who clerks for a Supreme Court justice. Her father, an internationally renowned jurist, is out on the tennis court behind the house with her more beautiful younger sister, who is home from an internship with NATO in Brussels. It takes several moments of trying to get either her father or sister to notice her on the porch in her gown, and even then they merely wave back before resuming their game. Feeling invisible, she goes off to the prom and joins several friends in getting drunk, then partying in a suite at a downtown hotel. When she wakes, she is naked, and vaguely remembers having sex with at least two of her friends, possibly three, both male and female. When she finds her dress it is spackled with someone’s vomit, possibly her own. She has no money for a cab, and so calls her sister, pleads with her to come pick her up, and begs as well that she not tell their parents. When the family car arrives at the hotel, however, it is not her sister but her father behind the wheel. He never really talks to her in any meaningful way after that.
This extended scene combines betrayal, not just by her sister but her friends who take advantage of her drunk state for sex, with shame at being so reckless, and loss because she knows her father’s respect is gone for good.
Once she goes to college, she begins to drink even more heavily, until one night, thoughtlessly choosing to drive home when loaded, falls asleep at the wheel, crosses the center line into oncoming traffic, nearly misses an airporter van, and crashes into a tree, suffering numerous severe injuries. Waking in her hospital bed, she feels overwhelmed with fear that she may have hurt or even killed someone, and then guilt when she realizes how close she came to doing so. She never drinks again.
As her moment of greatest pride, I envisioned her graduation from law school—not in a prestigious area that might earn back her father’s respect, but in art law, which she has come to love. None of her family members attend the ceremony.
I did not fully realize it at the time I moved from this exploration of backstory to writing the actual novel, but not long after the actual chapters began to take shape I realized Lisa had a crush on a client who is more than a decade older than she is, and my theme began to materialize. I realized Lisa was drawn to older, inaccessible men out of need for validation, harking back to her father’s stinging rejection of her. Although she now had sufficient confidence to try to prove her worth on her own terms, the need for acceptance, approval, and affection from a male authority figure remained—and it would lead her once again into disaster.
Now, as I’ve indicated, this process of discovery began in largely blind fashion. I had no idea where I was headed as I fleshed out Lisa’s past—or, rather, no conscious idea. I’m inclined to believe that as I explored Lisa’s past and my conception of her materialized, this thematic pattern was forming of its own accord as I wove together the various aspects of her nature into a credible, coherent whole.
It is often said that writers have no idea what they intended to say until well after they’ve said it. This paradox is very much evident in the search for the thematic thread in your character’s backstory. It is probably wisest to let your unconscious guide you. That is no guarantee against cliched conception, but neither is trying to decide the matter before you’ve allowed your subconscious to wander at will. Besides, when it comes to human themes, there are only so many to choose from, and what may seem cliched at first blush—or when worded too bluntly—may reveal itself to be far more subtle given your execution on the page.
And this is why I bought the Compass of Character. Your posts are always so thorough, giving much to ponder for our stories. Thank you, David.
Thank you for this post. The ‘moments of helplessness’ really struck a chord with me, as did the columns, Pain of Life and Promise of Life. I do think your suggestions will help me craft more interesting, surprising and deep characters. Actually LOL’d at “The Firehouse of WTF?” That’s me exactly. I’m printing this post to keep at my writing table:)
Thanks so much, Beverly.
Patricia Fox. A client of mine when I was a self-employed illustrator and single mother. We were polar opposites. I was hustling for every dollar and she was rich. I wore jeans and boots. She wore clothes that came from the pages of Vogue. She was fine-boned, perfectly groomed, always in control, but behind her eyes I saw desperation. Years later, I leaned why…Awesome post. Thank you, David.
And did the patrician Ms. Fox smuggle her way into a story?
Several times
Excellent.
As usual an awesome post, with teachable moments. I am just at a point in my rewrite, when my MC gets important information related to her dead mother’s actions and words. But the information comes from a fellow medical person at the hospital where she works, who she is also attracted to. How will I blend his scientific explanation of something her mother did in the past (that profoundly affected her) with her now inclination to see him as a possible lover? And there are bumps in her marriage and then…I believe I have work to do, thanks, David.
You’re very kind, Elizabeth, as always. See my answer to Lisa’s comment above for an elaboration of how I used this method in my own work, and why. I often use it in creating the character, and it often points me toward a core problem in the character’s life — but making it “the thing” that defines the character is the trap we must avoid.
What a rich post! Thank you. I love that excerpt from V. Woolf. From childhood I’ve imagined stories about the interesting people I’ve met or simply watched. But I learned very quickly it’s not nice to make up tales, so kept at it anyway, privately. It’s lovely to being grown up! I love the use of secrets in character development because we all have them.
Thanks, Vijaya. I did an event via Zoom with Rachel Howzell Hall this past week, and I applauded her ability to use secrets in all of her novels without diminishing the fascinating nature of her protagonists. In the past she’s used various aspects of herself to begin the process of developing a character, but in this latest novel (THESE TOXIC THINGS) she began with a composite of her daughter and one of her nieces. I think using real people we know as the raw material for characters can anchor us in a sense of emotional truth that can be extremely valuable. It also reminds us that we can’t know everything about those other people — precisely because we all have secrets.
David, you are quite the philosopher! My sister sent the link for that Case Against Trauma piece in the New Yorker and now that you reminded me, I’ll go read it. Your comment about “explaining” a character is interesting. It’s a pervasive problem in manuscripts I see and yet I think there’s a role for it in drafting, when you are first “telling” yourself the story. The trick is being firm with your self to remove it, because explaining will ruin the reading experience, for sure—and further damn the writer by convincing him/her writer that they need not show it. Character must be revealed through the story’s pressures—that pulling back of the curtain you described. You gave me a lot to think about here, thank you! But the idea of “constructed self vs unconstructed self” was exactly the set of words I needed today—off and running with new thoughts about the protagonist iin my WIP, so thanks again!
Thanks, Katherine. From the Irony Department: When I was studying math, I once scored 2nd from the top in the theoretical exam and 5th from the bottom in the practical application exam. My favorite professor drew me aside and said in his usual smiling, kind, avuncular way, “You want to be a philosopher, not a mathematician.” I ended up being neither.
Glad this is helpful. And enjoy the New Yorker piece — but don’t neglect the Virginia Woolf lecture it refers to (the link is in my post). It’s a real gem.
Opacity.
Just yesterday I was having this conversation with a writer friend. He is against origins stories. It takes icons and flattens them, he feels, revealing their backstories and reducing them to–as Parul Sehgal said–a set of symptoms, as if story is psychoanalysis. Better is if we don’t know everything. That’s what fires readers’ imaginations. We have to fill in.
Granted, the urge to explain is strong. Hundreds of Sherlock Holmes novels and stories attest to that. Starting with The Seven Percent Solution (Nicholas Meyer, 1974), writers have been unable to resist the temptation to explain Holmes and reconcile his contradictions. Conan Doyle, though, did not bother to explain why the smartest detective is also a morphine addict. He left it to us to imagine.
Secrets will inevitably be revealed, I think, but contradictions and helplessness are great clues to what makes characters fascinating. “Fascinating” really means mysterious. Mysterious comes from not telling the reader everything. We are all mysteries, to others and ourselves. It makes us interesting. Same with characters.
“Even to ourselves.” Exactly. It’s why I opened the post with questions about who is it that’s really in control of what I want? Anyone who has had the spooky experience of suddenly recognizing that their behavior is following a subconscious pattern — like my choosing women like my mother in my dating life, and thus blindly recreating the marriage I swore consciously I would never repeat — understands that we are indeed mysteries to ourselves. The temptation is to try to recreate this in characters by standing in for their unconscious — but this is a recipe for a plot puppet. Either, as Kathryn and Shakespeare suggest, we do all that work and then leave it out, or we teach ourselves to trust our intuition, not our logical mind, in conjuring this deeper, mysterious self.
IGNORE THE ABOVE COMMENT. IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A REPLY TO KATHERINE’S COMMENT, BUT I FLUBBED ITS PLACEMENT. IT’S UP WHERE IT BELONGS NOW. SORRY FOR THIS REPETITION.
I’m a bit late to WU this morning, so others have already reflected on many of the points that struck me. But of course I can’t resist adding a few reflections to the stew … so here goes.
You wrote: “The more we try to pin the character’s ‘nature’ down, the less convincing she seems.” Ah, yes. When I write, it’s easy to get seduced by the idea that each primary character has to have a goal, motive, passion, arc, etc. in order to fill his/her place in the narrative. But are real people like that? I’m not convinced. To me, we’re full of conflicting desires, the interplay of choice and chance, reaction and resignation, randomness and will. As you say, the response to the question “Who am I?” is always provisional and circumstance-dependent—and I use the word “response” deliberately here, rather than “answer.”
Do we need to simplify and clean up that messiness for the sake of telling a good (coherent) story? Maybe. Maybe not.
I do think we discover our characters as we go, and have to let them teach us who they are. One of the best exercises I ever did was an exercise offered by Don (who else?) of having my protagonist sit down across from me (in my imagination) and ask me a series of provocative questions. She let me have it, in fact, accusing me of imposing my hang-ups on her and all sorts of other devious and unflattering things (All true). Whew.
So who was pulling away the curtain, and who was that curtain really covering?
Anyway, thanks for such a meaty, thought-provoking post, as always!
“I do think we discover our characters as we go”
I once asked Kate Atkinson how she develops her characters. Her answer: “With my fingertips.”
David:
As usual, your post knocked my socks off. I’ve started, and sometimes gone deeply into, short stories that die on the vine because my characters fall flat. I’ll try to bring them to life by them out by giving them logical, predictable reasons for who they are and what they do, but it sounds forced and contrived, which it is. The idea of picturing them in their most helpless, vulnerable experience sounds like it might be a key to understanding and developing them, to the degree that they can, or need to be, understood. As you said, mystery attracts us. Trying to answer all the questions leads me back to my original problem. Thanks!
Thank you so much, David. The questions you’ve posed and the answers you’ve offered have opened some windows and let in some light.
Not sure if you will see this but I’ve just read Pathological Maneuvers and this one, A Woman in the Corner Opposite, with great attention! They are superb posts, thank you! I am always delighted to read your pieces and see how you weave my favorite authors: Jim Harrison and Virginia Woolf into the lessons. My other favorite, James Salter, must also be in your mind somewhere, too. Thank you for the link to the PDF of Mr. & Mrs Brown which I downloaded! Congrats on your move to Hudson! I’m now mostly in New York City, too. I’ve just finished my third round of proof read after many edits since beginning in 2017! I should be publishing this new book in October!
Now I see what you mean about these moments of helplessness. I’ve read your book, The Compass of Character, and mistook the idea behind these moments as simple backstory. But I see now that they give a brief glimpse of what’s happening inside and “beneath” the character. They’re much more powerful than I first thought.