How to Bring Your Characters to Life by Writing in Three Dimensions
By Guest | February 22, 2023 |
Far more than an art and a genre, true literary fiction is a field of scholarly exploration and debate. Who better to lead such a discussion than an author who honed his craft as a professor of literature? Today I’m pleased to introduce former Harvard literature professor and Guggenheim fellow Thomas Richards, whose second novel, Mrs. Sinden, was published last month by Global Collective Publishers.
Jane Austen’s Emma, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway — all have one thing in common that makes them feel so alive: characters with three dimensionality.
Less a matter of a writer’s style than a function of the fictional means by which we perceive human character in all its fullness, these means are perception, emotion, and cognition, or, to use the plainer words I prefer, seeing, feeling, and thinking.
But how does one put together a character in all three of these dimensions?
Character in fiction is really a series of clusters of these three-dimensional portraits placed in a story in series. In my most recent novel, Mrs Sinden, I still clearly remember the process of layering by which most of my characters were created. Many readers have told me that I definitely crossed the threshold into thereness in the novel with Jessica Sinden: at a certain point they began to feel that she really existed. That is, she became fully present to them as a human being. Readers also found that this presence deepened as the narrative proceeded.
Consider the following passage:
That afternoon she was waiting for him [her son, Tristan] in the dining room. A fire was going in the fireplace. They had one of the few real fireplaces in Hong Kong and she was very proud of it.Even in December it made the room uncomfortably hot.
Thankfully, the fire had died down a bit by the time he came out from his bedroom. His mother was frugal with wood and sat next to the fire, poking it from time to time, as though to remind the flames that they did not quite measure up. Her eyes lit up when the gutted logs crumbled into the embers. It seemed to confirm her opinion of the fire.
It demonstrates five core characteristics of three dimensional writing:
A passing detail becomes—nothing less than everything
Jessica Sinden is stirring the logs in her fireplace. But how much more is going on! In fact, her entire attitude not just toward life, but toward its people and its larger process, is perfectly summed up in this one detail—stirring a fire.
Why? You first learn that Jessica has one of the few “real” fireplaces in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is subtropical, so a British household with a hearth is an act of defiance; British properties will be maintained no matter what the surrounding climate is. No matter, too, that it actually makes the room too hot in a hot climate. Jessica is already shown as actually liking, not just her discomfort, but the discomfort of those immediately around her. It shows how aggressive she can be in what is essentially a defensive position—and really, quite a bad one, considering that she is increasing the heat in a hot room on a hot day. Other defensive positions she has adopted, such as being a leftover British colonist in a city now controlled by China, will come up on us soon.
This is not all. Having lit the fire, Jessica is clearly disappointed in it. Note: not in herself, for having lit it, but in the fire, for crumbling simply since, as a fire, it is on fire. She looks down on the fire for consuming its logs—as though the logs should survive even more stoically that they do. She even goes so far as to taunt the fire, jabbing it from time to time as it burns down. The emotion here is one of scorn for ordinary processes, one of which will of course be the subject of the chapter, where her son tries to talk to her about his girlfriend, who Jessica of course does not see as measuring up to—well, whatever her standard is. That she cannot articulate her standard for feeling scorn is of course her plight at this point in the book. She is still fairly unconscious of what makes her own mind work.
The seeing, feeling, and thinking are wound up into a tightly strung, three-strand rope
Jessica sees the fire falling apart, she feels a barely-concealed contempt for its weakness, and she thinks it has not survived as long as it should have. This process is made all the more powerful by being implicitly observed by her son, Tristan, who from long experience well knows what his mother is seeing, feeling, and thinking. So really, added to everything else, we get two points of view at once: Jessica’s, and her son’s. Between the two of them, we infer a kind of stereoscopic picture of Jessica, which adds to the interpenetration of seeing, feeling and thinking. Two complete pictures of Jessica Sinden, set side by side for the reader to take in.
“Showing not telling’ takes on a new, more robust meaning
If I had just written something like, “she felt a contempt for everything around her,” the effect would have been flat. Telling means nothing without showing, but it is also worth remembering showing means very little if it does not take in the three dimensions of seeing, feeling, and thinking.
Even a vivid description of a particular fireplace would not do either, even something as interesting as: The fireplace was a Hong Kong fire place, wet and dry at the same time. The bricks lining the firebox, always damp with tropical humidity, hissed more steam up the chimney than smoke. This is perceptive but not specific, for it could be any old fireplace in Hong Kong. I prefer the images I use to function as a projection of character. Mrs. Sinden sees those logs as only she would see them. In this way, few of my images, if any, have a neutral valence. They are always showing how someone or other is seeing the world.
Nothing is stylized or forced
Literature excels at this kind of offhand dimensionality. It can come and go so quickly that you almost lose a sense of how wonderful it is. Note how the passage does not strive for any particular stylistic effect. In itself it seems almost styleless. Absent the calling cards of style, a reader simply starts to feel the real presence of Jessica Sinden in three dimensions.
Great writers do this habitually; less-than-great writers work hard to call attention to what they are doing, and in so doing, make their seeing seem artificial. When I was younger I used to like this artifice, seen in so many writers of undoubted power. But when was the last time you really felt something for a character in a novel by Thomas Pynchon, or in quite a number of the chapters of Ulysses, where character is drowned out by style and a highly-wrought literary self-consciousness?
The meaning is infused only semi-intentionally
It could well be asked in the end: did you really, consciously, pack that passage with all that meaning? The answer is no. I was not fully conscious of everything I was doing as I was writing. That would be as though I were deliberately adjusting some meter of seeing, feeling, and thinking to get the balance just right. The truth is I am only partly aware of what I am doing as I am writing. I am not even aware of some combination of seeing, feeling, and thinking as a particular aim or end. Rather, I am looking for sharply impacted moments in life. Moments when a character’s response to the world starts growing around itself tightly like a crystal. The result is a series of facets that catch a reader’s eye, but at no point in the process am I deliberately trying to construct a particular kind of crystal. Rather, I am thinking about who Mrs. Jessica Sinden is, and trying to imagine her fullest possible response to each moment in her life. This is often what we admire about great characters in fiction: how much they see in themselves, and how much they see around them, and how well that image is thrown back at us by how other characters see them, too. But the fact is, that if I tried to map it out according to some formula, the book I was writing would be dead on arrival.
Writers always have to be somewhat unconscious of what they are doing. Their ideas, like mine, are often after the fact. An idea before the fact weakens the writing, as can be seen in almost any literary writing with a remotely political intent. I think the only idea I had in writing Mrs. Sinden was to create as complete a portrait of a single human being as I possibly could. Unquestionably the fact that Jessica Sinden is a leftover British colonist in Hong Kong deepens that portrait, but it is just one of the aspects of her character I was after. The picturing of Jessica is not a one-time event, but a process of seeing, feeling, and thinking layered into a sequence of sentences, and organized, more largely, into a story. It accrues, supplemented by other small pictures strung in series, and in so doing, acquires dimension and fullness. I was trying for nothing more than that, but certainly nothing less.
How do you express the simultaneous seeing, feeling, and thinking that makes characters most palpable? How conscious – or unconscious – are of your intentions and choices while you write?
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
How? By channeling the character before attempting to write any words in a new scene. I have a whole process by which I become each character (of three main characters), including reading the previous scene from that pov, and steeping myself in all the specific quirks and details through which this character will see the events of the scene.
I like to say I write from right behind the eyeballs – but it is a prepared set of circumstances and feelings and thoughts – and then the surprises seem to come, and the words and the details of the setting are in the character’s pov, I know I AM that character until the scene finishes itself. Extreme plotting followed by just being the character.
It has been surprising to see the characters take their subset of mine – and run with them.
Thanks for the thought-provoking piece, Thomas. Three dimensionality is something I’ve never considered. As for how conscious (or not) I am of my intentions while writing…. I’m not sure I’m conscious of the answer! Great questions.
Hello Thomas. This post certainly struck me, and your points are fascinating. Your comment about writing unconsciously is familiar. I sometimes reread my work at the end of the day and don’t recall writing a line or a paragraph. Kind of like not recalling when you fall asleep, but you know when you wake up, you did sleep. I have a question I hope you can elaborate on. What threw me was the switch to the son’s POV in the same paragraph: ‘His mother was frugal with wood and sat next to the fire, poking it from time to time, as though to remind the flames that they did not quite measure up.’ We were clearly in Jessica’s head but then in the son’s head within the same paragraph, then back to Jessica’s thoughts (Or was it all the son’s thoughts in that paragraph? Because Jessica would not be able to see her own eyes light up). Was that switch something you consciously wrote or did that sentence happen organically (or unconsciously as you say)? Thanks for a thought-provoking post.
Hi Paula,
Great question! This quotation is from chapter 7 of Mrs. SInden, where the chapter is mostly in close third, following Tristan’s thoughts. Even “It seemed to confirm her opinion of the fire” is prefaced with “it seemed.” At this point in the chapter, though, the reader is beginning to trust Tristan’s view of his mother, which squares with other views of her the reader has already been given. So really, there is a multiple mirrring effect that is underway. Each time a character sees Jessica, another plane of vision is offered!
So, this is the omniscient POV in this novel? And you intentionally are mirroring characters?
The point of view shifts. Mostly, we see things as Jessica Sinden sees them, but there are 5 chapters that are told from the perspective of friends or members of her family. The effect is of her being circled by perspectives, all of which add something to the readers understanding of her character.
Hello, Thomas Richards. Thank you for your exhaustive but not exhausting analysis of methods and intentions in a scene taken from your novel, Mrs. Sinden. As one who taught undergraduates, I’m schooled in the ways of holding literary artifacts under this or that microscope du jour. Yours here would seem to be the (old) New Criticism. We know we “murder to dissect,” but how else does the lit major learn what’s in there?
Everything you say is clear and convincing, in part because of your three-part division for creating and studying character development. I especially like the interplay between a son’s understanding of his mother, and the woman herself. I appreciate how the scene relates crumbling logs in a fireplace to the collapse of colonial control in HongKong.
I also think you are right in seeing what you’ve done in terms of canon classics: Emma, Anna Karenina, Mrs. Dalloway. Great writers somehow manage to expose more of character than others. But when you say that all the seeing/feeling/thinking in your passage isn’t a conscious process, what you need to add is that you’ve been steeped in such elements as a professional academic.
I will risk being charged with philistinism or even apostasy by noting the following. Your analysis is meant for writers and readers of literary fiction. Full stop.
For the great majority of writers who aspire to improving their work on the way to being good or even very good writers, the literary mindset reflected in your self-analysis can be daunting. The question isn’t just how we learn as writers, and from whom, but who we’re writing for. If we aspire to write for highly sophisticated readers, nothing will do but to emulate the canon. If we seek to be read by the dwindling number of people who still read, but who aren’t steeped in the canon, that’s something different. To me, the great challenge today for fiction writers is to create something popular that manages to subvert the marketplace emphasis on the familiar and the simple.
All of us stand to gain from reading classic literary fiction. The effect can be seen in the best works of popular or upmarket storytelling. But for the writer who wants to be widely read, that influence needs to understood in terms of the reading public. Thanks again for your post. I was happy to take a stroll down Memory Lane.
This submission really helped me. I feel as if my writing lacks something and now, BAM! I understand what’s missing. Thank you!
Y’know, Barry, I kinda disagree with your assessment here. There are writers in commercial genre who can pull this off. For Romance, take a look at Beverly Jenkins, for example. In SFF, Jo Walton, J.R.R. Tolkien, N.K. Jemisin. Mystery, Craig Johnson. Horror, Stephen Graham Jones. Paranormal romance, Nalini Singh.
Making it work for commercial genre simply means that the writer needs to work on their craft to make it flow and be readable to the general public. Do this in tight third rather than omniscient.
It all comes down to craft. I like to think that I’m doing this as a writer, but again, it’s in the smallest of details that make the character relatable to the everyday reader. And that level of craft is not limited to the literary genre.
Make that “needs to be understood.”
Thank you, Barry, for your very insightful post. I was in fact trained as a reader by New Critics (at Carleton College in Minnesota in the 1970s)! I enjoy reading them still for the point-by-point precision of their analysis. I hope it’s not too daunting, though. The New Critics are actually fairly straightforward compared to some of the more theoretical criticism out there today!
What I love about this career is that there are always new perspectives and facets of whatever you think you already know.
As an editor I love your insights on creating complex, vivid characters through these three dimensions. I love the organic approach of how it ties in to how we actually observe the world and people around us. And I especially love your thoughts about not doing any of this intentionally, but internalizing concepts like this so that when we write they become a part of us.
Thanks for sharing this, Thomas. You’ve got my wheels turning, which I always love, and have cast some light on a project I’m working on. I’ll be sharing this with authors in my newsletter.
Thank you, Tiffany, for your sense that it is organic. I think that’s exactly right, and it goes always to our close observation of the world. I look forward to hearing from your authors as well!
Benjamin wandered to the window, wondering if the writing advice he’d just read was worth a nickel or a C-note. Outside, a road crew in yellow safety vests was laying down fresh tarmac. A steamroller ironed down a smooth, smoking black surface.
Benjamin lived on the main route—the only route—off the Peninsula, but he hadn’t left it in four years, roughly as long as his manuscript was late to his publisher. He thought the road looked good.
He felt a tug, maybe the same one that had pulled Kerouac onto the Road. Maybe he would crank up his Chevy and head for the bridge. Yeah, maybe. There was something about the road outside that felt right. Calling him.
Something.
Thank you, Thomas. I enjoyed your points. Can you explain if and how your process of editing after a first draft impacts your character descriptions? Is that a point where you refine or layer more deeply into seeing, feeling, thinking?
Hi Dave. After a first draft I usually have too much. So it’s then that I go through and think explicitly about what I am doing in terms of seeing, feeling, and thinking. Really I use it to edit out descriptions that just don’t cut it. Like the fireplace description I put in the essay. I could well have writtten that in a draft, but then I would go and take it out. And if I didn’t have anything in its place, I’d just try again, trying to see how my character would see, down to the smallest details.
Even without all the discussion around them, I feel like the two versions of spotlighting the fireplace — the first, as seen the finished novel, and the second, a more straightforward description that could have been a placeholder in a draft — speak for themselves. The latter is adequate, but the former is full of specificity, and personality. Thanks for this post. I can feel it sparking in my head, pushing me to think about how I can bring this to bear in my own work.
Dear Kristan, You’re absolutely right about having placeholders in novels! Sometimes when I’m writing and I can’t quite get the right details, I’ll put down, “She went to X and Y, saw A and B.” I’m very aware I often don’t get the right details right away. But that way I know to work on them. Other times I’ll use the underline function to remind myself that this is a placeholder, and that I need to keep thinking about it.
Kind regards,
Thomas