The Devil’s in the Details
By Dave King | May 16, 2023 |
Our “blue” tray
Not long ago, Ruth asked me to bring her something, I forget what. I asked if she wanted me to use our blue tray. She said we don’t have a blue tray. What we have is a turquoise tray.
The details we notice from day to day are rooted in our interests, our histories, our sense of what’s important in the world. Ruth grew up with the 64-crayon Crayola box. I was more the basic, eight-crayon set, so she can see colors I’m blind to. To me, puce, magenta, crimson, and terra cotta are all red. And we have a blue tray.
When you’re imagining your characters to life, you’ve got to stay aware of just how much other people see the world differently than you do. As I’ve written before, it’s natural to assume that you’re seeing the world in the only reasonable way there is. You know what’s important and what’s not. It takes some humility to admit that we all have blind spots, that other people see things that we can’t, or won’t. Ruth’s world is more colorful than mine. If I needed to create a character with Ruth’s sense of color – an artist, for instance — I would have to learn to see the difference between scarlet and crimson, teal and robin’s egg. It would be work for me, but it would make my artist a lot more plausible and interesting.
Of course, you can’t be aware of all the nuances of how all of your characters see the world – novels are only so long, and there’s only so much you can imagine. But if you can weave one or two main interests into each character to drive their perception of the world, your story will feel more like it’s populated with real people.
You’ll also be able to create more layered dramatic tension. The most interesting conflicts between characters are the ones rooted deeply in differences between their worldviews – where readers can see both sides, both sides have a point, and each side has good reasons to stick with their position. Conflicts where one side is obviously right and the other obviously wrong just aren’t as interesting.
So how do you develop characters who look at the world so differently? In that earlier article on getting into characters’ heads, I mentioned talking to people who genuinely disagree with you and learning how they see the world, reading well-written books centered on characters who see the world in unique ways, and reading books written in the past, when people thought and worried about different things.
To that, I’d add developing new interests of your own that might expand your own sense of the world.
Decades ago, just for fun, I took an introductory course in Newtonian Mechanics – the science of forces, vectors, and acceleration. While I can’t calculate the angular momentum of a hollow cylinder rolling down a hill any more (the sort of thing we did), when I’m felling a tree for firewood, I can still see where the stresses are, how the weight’s distributed, envision the center of gravity, and guess how the tree will drop. Even that brief introduction to Newton changed how I see the world.
Back in the 1930’s and 40’s, a film producer named Henry Jamison “Jam” Handy created a series of promotional films for Chevrolet. I understand that local Chevy dealers would sponsor “Chevrolet Nights” at local theaters, where they would pay for the feature in return for having their newsreels shown. A surprising number of the Jam Handy films are clear explanations for the layman of the engineering behind various car components – the differential, the transmission, the carburetor. Chevrolet assumed that the people who drove cars would have enough interest in how they worked to make the films central to their advertising.
I’ve sometimes feel like we’ve lost that sense that learning more about our world is an end in itself. But end in itself or no, seeing the world in new, deeper ways, is a gift that you can pass on to your characters.
So what interests inform your characters’ view of the world? What have you learned for the sake of your characters. What have you learned for your own sake? I suspect a lot of writers are autodidacts. Are you?
Dave King has been editing for nearly 40 years now. He is co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a former contributing editor to Writer’s Digest, and has contributed more than 100 articles over the last 12 years to Writer Unboxed. He lives on 25 acres in rural Massachusetts with his business partner and wife, Ruth Julian, who also edits his work. His other day job, at least on Sundays, is as the organist at a Lutheran church in Greenfield, Mass.
[coffee]
I laughed out loud at your first line , Dave. It could have been me telling my husband that the tray is turquoise and not blue. But it could as easily have been him telling me that its a soffit and not a roof-thingy because I write and paint and he’s a carpenter. I write about magic, but in world-building for my stories, I began to refine that vision to a specific set of rules. To learn more about those rules, I took three trips out to WA State to attend a school that teaches a blend of spirituality and quantum physics. And I agree, many writers, including myself, are autodidacts. My father was my inspiration, always reading, exploring, discovering.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Some years ago, I wrote about how writing can make you a better person, whether you publish or not. One of the ways it does this is that it gives you an excuse to learn things that make your world larger.
What a wonderful post! What you’ve expressed relates so well to my own experience. And since you asked …
When I began work on my recent novel, for instance, which is framed around a woman’s encounter with a glassblower and the art of glassblowing, I knew nothing at all about glassblowing. But the more I learned, the more the craft itself showed me who my characters needed to be and how the story needed to proceed. To give an examples: glass is molten, pliable, always in movement, always changing, as the artist works with it; for further change to take place, it has to be heated and softened again. And when the piece is finished, it has to break free from the punti rod on which it was formed in order to survive. (Sounds like a character arc, no? That was exactly what happened for me … )
And in my previous novel, framed around music—which I did know a bit about, but not enough, when I started to write the story—it was my own deeper study of the piano that revealed what was wrong with the way I’d depicted the protagonist. The “improvement” that transformed her, and the entire novel ,didn’t come from a writing workshop, webinar, guidebook, critique group, or developmental editor. It came from outside the world of language—from my own direct experience at the piano. There was no other way I could have understood.
So, yup. We have to go outside the realm of words and let other modalities teach us!
Yes, yes, yes. And remember, by delving into music or glassblowing yourself, you not only learn about the yourself, you introduce your readers to them. Part of the fun of reading is that it opens up your world a bit.
My protagonist is used to deprivation and dissociating, so he does not notice particularly much in the way of sensory detail beyond the barest necessities of sight and sound. On the other hand, because he grew up in a house with a narcissist, he is hypersensitive to conflict between anyone that’s nearby, and so he’ll give lengthy passages on whatever it was that bystanders were disagreeing on, with notes as to how acrimonious it got.
It’s a good way to note his process of healing, because the better he feels, the more he’s able to interface with his environment, and shrug off other people. I don’t call attention to it, but hopefully those changes are one of those things that comes across in the reader’s subconscious.
That is an excellent use of viewpoint to move your story forward. You’re right, readers get to see his healing happening in real time, probably without being consciously aware of it. They’ll just feel lighter as the story progresses.
Autodidacts forever!
On a solid base of education, of course.
You have to keep asking the logical questions. “Can you see the Pacific Ocean from a house with an infinity pool in the Hollywood Hills above Los Angeles?” “Where did I read that many Victorian and Edwardian movies are filmed in places like the Czech Republic because London is too busy, but these cities have buildings from the same era, untouched?” “What size, exactly, is a twelve week fetus, and at what age is it possible to survive outside the womb, and what are the consequences to being born too soon?”
We are blessed/cursed to live in an age when there is an enormous amount of information (and misinformation) online that is still real (AI is about to make chasma in that concept) – which is why research can be a hazard and a consumer of many happy hours.
I didn’t have to find a book or go to a library to find out about that house and pool: Zillow supplied ones I could walk through.
Oh, the internet is an autodidact’s dream. I’ve been able to dig into original sources that would have been impossible to find in the dark ages before Google and the WWW. It also gives me a chance to be a curmudgeon — “In my day, the Periodical Index filled a room, and we had to burn our eyes out with microfilm machines.”
Of course, one of the joys of digging through reference sources is that you often stumble across things you weren’t looking for. That can be half the fun.
Hi Dave, my husband is red/green colorblind. When we were first dating…wow the combos he could come up with. Now he has me to guide him. Writing allows us to bring to our work the knowledge we might already have. Having been a Maternity RN allows me to write about hospitals, medicine with knowledge behind me. My friendship with a burn victim, also an RN, fueled another work. As Alice writes, we can always become more certain by doing the research that in our world today is usually available. But there is nothing better than having been there…better than any medical TV show that often makes mistakes.
This is why “Write what you know” has become a truism. It lets you create authentic worldviews for your characters and take your readers to new places.
Dave, the take away from your great post today— “The most interesting conflicts between characters are the ones rooted deeply in differences between their worldviews – where readers can see both sides, both sides have a point, and each side has good reasons to stick with their position.” The sequel in progress has conflict and tension, but more opposing! I’m going to look at the differences from now on. It’s more like a fiesty debate. Remember college debates on certain subjects? In a story it could be the same thing. Each character having valid good points. Maybe one character (side) wins, maybe not. The characters might drop it and create more tension. This will be fun! But, I’m sure, debatable to some. Thanks, Dave! 📚🎶 Christine
Thanks. I’ve long thought that the best conflicts between characters are those where the readers want both sides to win and can see how both sides might lose. And if you can resolve those conflicts in a surprising, plausible, satisfying way, you’ve got yourself a story.
Dave, great post. As a nonfiction writer, I’ve often followed my curiosity (perhaps my muse as well). And ooh boy, the internet has taken me down some strange paths. I find fascinating bits in endnotes and footnotes of books as well. I think the point of education is to learn to learn! Autodidacts forever! as Alicia says :) Different disciplines teach you how to think differently as well. And this comes in handy in character development.
Since most of my fiction arises from a character in a pickle, discovering who they are and what got them into the mess is part of the fun. For my novel BOUND, I learned all I could about burn survivors (my cousin is a miracle child and I borrowed her circumstances). I often give my own interests and longings to characters but often they come with their own deep desires. In my historical (still a wip)I changed the religion of one character (Muslim to Sikh) because I really didn’t want to deal with Hindu-Muslim conflict but Sikhs have a different worldview so I had to redo his entire arc. Having opposing world-views is such an organic way to generate conflict.
Lovely examples, Vijaya. And I really support the autodidact impulse. My own interest in the engineering of vintage cars is why I was aware of the Jam Handy videos.
In the cozy mystery coming out this summer, my MC spends a lot of time in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District, a place I knew a little but not well. I got to learn about the importance of the residential hotels to the Chinese laborers, the Exclusion Acts, the destructive impact of I-5, the attempted suppression of Chinese medicine, and so much more, by reading histories, biographies, and novels, visiting museums, and looking through photos, online and in person. So very cool. I hope I can show my readers a fascinating part of the city — echoed in Chinatowns elsewhere. Every book has some element of discovery for me, whether of a place, a social group, a social problem, or a recurrent conflict between people. Sharing that is the fun of writing.
Absolutely. There are a lot of reasons to write that have nothing to do with publishing. The opportunity to learn more about the wider world is one of them.