Posts by Donald Maass
What makes the world of your story feel real? The way it looks? Sounds? Smells? Its society, rules, history, traditions, transportation, rites and rituals, celebrations? Its broad avenues and dark corners? Its landscape, commerce, power games, means of oppression, system of justice? Its dialect, dumplings, or dresses?
Worldbuilding is not just for spec fiction writers. All stories are set in some world or other and that’s just as true if the story world is our own. Every corner of our real world is a microcosm, an ecosystem, and a place that’s just a little bit different than others.
Just walk into a coffee shop anywhere and ask for a “regular” coffee. Do you drink “soda” or “pop”? Submarine, hoagie, hero, Italian, grinder, wedge or spuckie? (That’s in Boston, y’all.) Slight variations in ordinary things keep a story world from feeling homogenous, like we could be anywhere as is so often the case in manuscripts.
A story world is not necessarily a place, either. Families, professions, countries, regions, eras and more are all story worlds as well. Each world deserves to be as detailed and distinct as the worlds which each of us actually live in. Wherever we are, though, there’s one element of story worlds which I notice is more underutilized than any other: people.
Now, hold on, you may be thinking. There are plenty of people in my novel. Plus, I’ve done my character-building work. I’ve got backstories, buttons, beliefs, flaws, arcs, Meyers-Briggs personality profiles, you name it. How can my novel possibly be deficient in characters?
I have no doubt that you’ve done the work. Your major characters are complete, conflicted and as real as people can be, of course they are. You’ve got them down. However, the world of your story is made up not just of the landscape, weather and the many other factors we focus on in worldbuilding and it’s not populated with just your primary characters, either.
As much as anything, your story world is a world of people. Lots of people. What are they like?
Deep Character Dives
National Book Award-winner James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023), is a novel set in the 1930’s in a part of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, called Chicken Hill. The novel is frame-worked by the discovery in 1972 of a human skeleton in a well. How did it get there, and why is there a mezuzah pendant on a chain also in the well? McBride’s novel looks backward to answer that question and along the way brings vividly alive a forgotten world populated by Blacks and Jewish immigrants.
The main trusts of the story concern the efforts of the Chicken Hill synagogue to obtain water for its mikvah, its ritual bath, as well as a fatal attack on the overly-generous Jewish woman who operates Chicken Hill’s never profitable Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and the resulting unjust incarceration of a deaf Black boy in the state’s horrendous institution for the handicapped, Pennhurst State School and Hospital.
McBride’s novel has scores of characters: theatre owner Moshe Ludlow, his wife Chona, his wealthy brother Isaac, Doc Roberts, Addie Timblin, her husband Nate, Rev. Ed (“Snooks”) Spriggs, a baker of awful-tasting challah bread named Malachi, the deaf boy Dodo, the beautiful local gossip monger Paper, and other characters with […]
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There’s no real magic. Ask a stage magician. There is only the illusion of magic. Ladies in sparkly costumes do not float in the air. They are not sawn in half. Objects do not levitate. Elephants do not evaporate inside boxes rotating on wheels. Sorry.
There is, however, our willingness to believe or at least be amazed. We don’t even care how the illusion is created, sometimes, it’s enough to feel astonishment. But let’s be honest: Aren’t you a little bit curious?
There’s a magic trick in fiction, too. It’s an astonishing illusion which is hard to explain. Even its practitioners, unlike magicians, are oftentimes unable to explain how it’s done. It’s just there in the way of I-know-it-when-I-see-it, or perhaps when it is refined from raw writing ore in the white-hot forge of critique sessions at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
What I’m talking about is the effect of conjuring high meaning out of absolutely nothing. Its purest form can be found in short stories published in The New Yorker, or in other periodicals labeled Quarterly or Review. It works best in short form, which hinges on a single plot turn or, in The New Yorker manner, on a singular realization or the capture of a state of being that is both febrile and delicate, particular and universal, vividly real and yet spun out of air.
What’s captured is what I shorthand as the fragile beauty of being alive, or FBOBA. (Pronounced Fah-BOW-bah.) For a certain class of writers, and readers, it is as elusive and real as the Holy Grail. It’s also easy to make fun of it. An English professor of mine once summarized the last lines of all short stories in The New Yorker this way: “A fly crawled across the kitchen table, and then she understood.”
But hold on…there’s an audience for such writing, isn’t there? Some readers find the FBOBA effect astonishing and satisfying unto itself. Why? It must be that the effect pins down something important that we feel: a wonder for which words seem insufficient; a terrible and fleeting beauty that leaves us gob smacked; a sudden awareness of the reality—the right now—of our heroic but doomed existence.
When we are utterly and vividly present, that is FBOBA. Conjuring that experience for readers does not depend on plot. In fact, plot is almost antithetical to the effect. A story excites us with a situation; FBOBA says that it is not a situation that is exciting, it is our very existence. Story per se is less the point than conjuring the feeling of FBOBA, and to that end FBOBA stories generally are contemporary in setting, loaded with mundane action and concrete details, and frequently include the work “fuck” to, you know, keep it real.
Commercial fiction writers mostly disdain the FBOBA effect, but why should capturing the inchoate be reserved for highly literary fiction? Sometimes characters are aware of dwelling in a moment. Isn’t simply feeling alive an experience that is as valid and human as love, adventure, terror or healing? Don’t we also want readers to imagine that a story is intensely real?
Let’s take a look some ways in which FBOBA effect is created. Because sometimes just being alive is enough, and sometimes you just want to break readers’ […]
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Perhaps it is because I will see some of you next week in Salem? I have been thinking lately about old friends. I have several, treasured pals that go back to junior high and high school. One, still a close friend, was my high school girlfriend. They are the anchors of my life.
In fiction, longtime friendships lend a sense of the passage of time. They add a mellow richness to a tale. Old friends are easy to find in novels, no surprise, and such friendships may be the very foundation of a series, as in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, beginning with My Brilliant Friend (2011).
In such novels, friendships are elevated, unique, special. How is that effect achieved? What actually on the page provides that feeling of extraordinariness that makes a friendship matter? The method matters to us because heightening is one of the primary effects necessary to enduring fiction. Even when stories are about “ordinary” people, it’s not their ordinariness that grips us. It’s how their lives and experiences are elevated.
Previously in this space, I have asserted that what connects readers to stories across the barriers of time, distance, culture and language, are the small human experiences that all people have in common. (You can read about that HERE.) Paradoxically, we also identify with human lives and events when they are extraordinary. High drama magnifies our own struggles. Larger-than-life characters are scaled up versions of us mere mortals.
The heightening effect can be seen at work in the portrayal of long friendships, too. Let’s find out exactly how that works.
Old Friends Aren’t Just Anyone
Award-winning Canadian author Richard B. Wright turned to old friends in his 2007 novel, October, which begins with James Hillyer arriving in England to be with his grown daughter, who has been diagnosed with cancer. While there, he by chance runs into Gabriel Fontaine, whom he hasn’t seen in over sixty years. They met as adolescents on holiday on the Gaspé coast of Québec, overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence. From the outset, Gabriel was not any ordinary boy:
When I first saw Gabriel he was sixteen, an extravagantly handsome youth who might have passed for the younger brother of the matinee idol Tyrone Power. The dark hair, sleekly oiled in the fashion of the day, had a perfect parting. He was leaning forward, talking to a young couple who were on their honeymoon. Gabriel was saying something that made them laugh. I would soon discover that he was filled with salacious speculation about what they were getting up to in their room at night. Gabriel was wearing pleated slacks, an open-necked white shirt and a sleeveless sweater on which was a pattern of little marching elephants. White and brown saddle shoes. I remember what he was wearing so exactly because I had seen clothes just like them on the boys at Groveland School, and for reasons I can’t explain, even to myself, I despised this preppy garb, popular among a certain class of the 1940s. A class, I should add, of which I myself was a member.
Gabriel stands out. He immediately stirs in James a certain antipathy—tinged with envy. This is even before we learn that Gabriel is confined to a wheelchair, due to polio; or […]
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October! Halloween! What a wonderful time to have a terrible time. If Spring is the season of hope, Autumn is the season of fear. Up here in the northern hemisphere, it gets darker earlier. Leaves turn red and drop. People also drop dead in greater numbers. It’s gloomy, a graveyard time. On Halloween we dress in scary costumes to assert that we’re not afraid.
Truth is, we are. But afraid of what?
I enjoyed Julie Carrick Dalton’s post last week, “Transforming Fear into Fiction”. She’s dead right. I’ve written about fear, too. What you’re most afraid of and avoid is exactly what your fiction needs the most and what you should embrace. Fear is one of the two, diametrically opposed reasons that we are drawn to fiction in the first place. We read stories to experience either hope or fear. (I’ve previously posted about that dichotomy here.)
One thing that chills us are places. My daughter won’t go down into our basement. My son and his (dumbass) teenaged buddies are daring each other to go inside a certain abandoned barn on this coming Halloween night. Hospital operating rooms. Abandoned churches. Junkyards. Unlit country roads. Anyplace that makes us feel alone and/or that brings us close to the reality of death is a good location for bad things to happen.
Then again, is it the place? Or, what happens there? Or, our dread anticipation? Or, simply how we feel? The scariest places can be physical locations, yes, and the terrible things that happen there can be sickening, absolutely, but the most terrifying place of all—wouldn’t you agree—is right inside of our own heads.
Let’s take a look at exactly how that works.
The Many Faces of Unhappy Places
Horror master Tananarive Due’s upcoming The Reformatory (2023) is an unflinching depiction of racism set in a Florida juvenile detention facility, the Gracetown Boy’s Reformatory, where a Black boy, Robert Stephens, is sent after kicking a white boy (deemed “assault”) while defending his sister. It’s a fearsome place ruled by a sadistic Warden and haunted by the ghosts of boys who have died there. (Disclosure: Due is represented by my agency.)
Most fearsome of all is a shed on the grounds called The Funhouse where troublesome boys are whipped. Robert is taken there for the offense of wondering whether anyone has ever run away. In The Funhouse not only is there no escape, but it is drummed into Robert that no one is to blame for his punishment but himself.
Warden Haddock slowly wiped his strap. “You know what you did wrong?”
Robert longed to argue, but he remembered Crutcher’s warning. “Asking stupid questions, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
…
“Stupid questions?” Warden Haddock said. Exaggerated, the phrase seemed monstrous. “That what you call it?”
Boone made a chuffing sound, glaring at him. Robert didn’t know what to say, so he dared not speak until he learned his mistake.
“A ‘stupid’ question would be ‘Does the sun rise in the west?’” Warden Haddock said. “’Do pigs like slop’? Those are stupid questions. Way I hear it, ‘less you’re fixin’ to call Boone a liar, you were asking how to run away.”
In the corner of his eye, Robert noticed the men at the card table flexing their arms, exercising their fingers like Mama had before she taught […]
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What is the most important effect of fiction? Is it that it causes us to fall into the theta brain wave state in which we visualize a story and feel “as if” it is happening to us?
Of course, in that state we never completely cross the Reality Threshold, tumbling into the realm occupied by people with hyperphantasia, oneirataxia, or schizophrenia. We’re not hallucinating. We have books in our hands. We know that what we’re reading isn’t real. Nevertheless, it feels that way.
When fiction has lured us into its spell, we surrender and float. We walk alongside characters, seeming to become them. We are enchanted, connected, accepting, amazed or in other ways drawn into our hearts. We’re in a semi-conscious condition in which our imaginations run free. We detach from time. We relax. We gain empathy. We dream.
Or.
Is the most important effect of fiction to cause us to set down a book, stare at the ceiling and reflect? When we do, our brains rise through a theta state to a beta state in which we are comparing, contrasting, evaluating, judging…in other words, standing apart from what we’ve read to process and perhaps reconcile ourselves to what a tale is presenting to us.
When fiction has a provoking effect on us, we are intrigued, puzzled, challenged, confounded, affirmed or in other ways sent into our heads to sort out and make sense of the story. We may nod, frown, laugh, disagree, feel validated, or even reimagine events that we’ve just read. We’re in a state of awareness in which our minds are active. We are engaged. We have opinions. We think.
Making us dream. Causing us to think. Naturally, it would be great if the novel you’re writing now could have both effects. It can, but how? What are the mechanics that lull us into dreaming or shake us awake? Once you know what those mechanisms are and how they work, you can use them deliberately.
So, let’s go.
The Dream
What starts the dream? First and foremost, it is the voice of the storyteller: sonorous, assured, promising us adventure, not rushing or presuming our interest but crooking its finger to beckon us slowly forward.
Next, it is a person, place or circumstances that we can buy into. I don’t mean establishing the Ordinary World. When taken literally, that approach can lead to humdrum opening scenes in which characters are merely introduced. That’s static set up: laying out circumstances, sketching in a protagonist’s personal history, explaining relationships, and offering motivation before there is any problem to solve or action required.
What we buy into, instead, are people who are in some way familiar, feelings that we understand, an outlook that is surprising yet so persuasive that we immediately see things that way too. We walk into a story and, in a way, meet ourselves. The tale being told may be—we hope so anyway—elevated beyond our experience, even dangerous, yet nevertheless we are safe.
Perhaps it’s no accident that literary fiction—which aims to capture our condition—thrives in realistic, contemporary settings. Likewise, stories of return, healing and self-discovery usually don’t wander far from home. Such stories become vivid in our imaginations because they catch the rhythms of real life and paint with the textures of the known.
However, the same appeal can […]
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They seem like lucky accidents. Strikes of lightning. Once-in-a-career blessings. Or maybe they are unique products of their time, characters only possible in a particular era. Or maybe they spring from the unique makeup of an author. They must be a product of genius, obsession or an impossible to duplicate upbringing–right?
Or perhaps they can be recognized only after the passage of time, maturing in bottle-like literary Bordeaux wine. Whatever the case, iconic characters feel like they are somehow reserved for the elect, the ones with the VIP pass. They certainly are not conferred upon workaday scribes unless such scribes have a lucky night at the keyboard or live long enough for their creations to be rediscovered.
Iconic characters are born not made, that’s how it appears. Jo March. Sherlock Holmes. Peter Pan. Dorothy Gale. Jay Gatsby. Scarlet O’Hara. Mrs. de Winter. Phillip Marlowe. Holden Caufield. Tom Ripley. George Smiley. Atticus Finch. Holly Golightly. Carey White. Katniss Everdeen. Lisbeth Salander. To name a few. We should all be so lucky.
Except.
It’s not luck. Think about it. Once upon a time, those iconic characters were no different than the glimmer in your own imagination at the outset of a project. At first, they were nothing more than keystrokes. They had to be brought alive. They were not always universal. They were chess pieces in a story. Characters with a function. Their authors made certain choices, though, which made those characters ones whom we recognize even now; who resonate with us decades and even centuries later.
Choices. Choices which are available to every author. To you.
Iconic characters are made not born. But how? What are the elements that make iconic characters the ones that last? Let’s take a look.
Iconic Characters versus Archetypes
When we speak of enduring characters, we tend to revert to discussion of archetypes. That’s natural enough, and for sure archetypes have a durable utility. They are templates for character: mythic, pop culture or personality types from whom we can borrow or adapt certain qualities that trigger recognition in readers. That recognition value is a primary reason that we can relate to fictional people and why retellings, for instance, have such appeal.
There are many ways to sort and classify archetypes. Mythology. Fairy Tales. History. Comics and cartoons. Jungian. Meyers-Briggs. Biblical. Literary. Cinematic. Televisual. Heck, everything I needed to know about characterization I learned from Dr. Suess. Or Gilligan’s Island. It doesn’t sound ridiculous to say things like that, does it? You can make a case.
Angel. Prophet. Dreamer. Warrior. Fool. Trickster. Prisoner. Dark Lord. Black Widow. Orphan. Wanderer. Guardian. Girl Next Door. Bad Boy. Nice Guy. Good Citizen. Fugitive. Nurse. Rogue. Lion. Mouse. Fallen Hero. False Socialite. We could go on. But wait, what about archetypal pairings? Romeo-Juliet? Nick-Nora? Kirk-Spock? Brangelina? There’s a nearly infinite number of types to draw from and reference books, websites and card decks to help you locate and select them.
Here’s the thing, though: Not every archetype fits a character, and not every character is a derivative of an archetype. Some characters are just characters. Some are drawn from life, others defy classification, and still others are wholly modern people who don’t neatly match Campbell archetypes. Some are twists on archetypes called ectypes. Who knows?
Emo Girl. PTSD Veteran. Urban Lost Boy. […]
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Are you a people watcher? Silly question. This is a blog site for fiction writers. As people pass by, you undoubtedly imagine who they are. What they’re up to. The story that will follow. That’s how your mind works. Am I wrong? Probably not.
Now, everyone forms impressions of passersby. For most people that’s where it stops. Teen shoplifter. Mom in a hurry. Off duty cop. Lost deliveryman. Are those first impressions accurate? Perhaps, perhaps not. What’s important is that an impression is formed quickly. Science shows that first impressions are made within seven seconds, sometimes in as little as one tenth of a second. It doesn’t take long at all for us to decide what we might expect from a stranger.
The same is true for the opening lines of a novel. Very quickly, readers form an impression of the tale ahead. They rapidly know what to expect. They have a solid expectation of the experience that they are about to undergo. So, lacking an actual person walking past, what is the basis of for the reader’s first impression? What triggers its formulation? There’s only one thing that can do that: the words on the page.
There is of course the jacket or cover. Plus, the flap copy or back cover copy. Not to mention the novel’s category, shelving, blurbs, and so on. Packaging has gotten the consumer as far as opening the volume, but then the consumer begins to read and that’s where the rubber—as it were—hits the road.
Have you ever read a few lines of a novel and put it straight back onto the bookstore shelf? It’s not your thing. But wait…how do you know? You could be wrong. Nevertheless, there are certain words on that opening page that send signals that light you up, turn you off or, if nothing else, cause you to judge a tale’s nature and relative appeal. Certain words tell you what to expect.
Those words are what I call a novel’s promise words.
Promise Words and Their Signals
What are the promise words in your WIP’s opening? To understand what they are and how they work, let’s take a look at some key words from the opening lines of some published fiction.
Here’s a list of promise words from one opening:
Grief…solitary…islands…graves…alone…avoid…waving from a distance…hurrying away…ghosts exist…the ghost of myself…
What kind of novel do you think that is going to be? A rom-com? Hardly. A ghost story? A sad story? A memory piece? What kind of protagonist will we meet? The life of the party? Um, no. The words suggest it will be a main character who is grieving, solitary, alone.
Do you agree? The impression that you’ve already formed sets your expectations for the novel. You know what kind of experience you’re in for. It’s either an experience that you want for your weekend reading or one that you’re going to return to the bookstore shelf. All on the basis of a few words.
Here’s a second set of promise words:
Shaker Heights…summer…children…burned the house down…gossip…sensational…fire engines…lunatic…something off…hopeless cause…
Well, now. What kind of tale is this going to be? A quest fantasy? Probably not. A suburban story? A tragedy? Involving madness, fire and fate? If that’s your guess then you could be right—but are you? Actually, you don’t know. You’re […]
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When stories reach across time and still speak to us, something important is happening. We are connecting. No matter how different the era, place or events are from our own we nevertheless recognize that the story that we’re reading is our story too. It is the story of our fears, hopes and dreams. It’s the story of us.
As we’ve discussed in the first two parts of this series, simply put the universal element that creates story timelessness is human experience. That’s what makes the connection. Whether it is a princess locked in a castle tower, a social climbing bootlegger trying to win a woman above his station, or an airman trapped in a war impossible to escape, we see ourselves. We get it. In one way or another, we’ve been there. Or might be. Or fear to be. Or hope to be.
That’s true whether the intent of a story is high adventure or literary realism. Heightened events and ineluctable authenticity are flip sides of the same coin. They are the context for the melting and melding of ourselves and the story that we’re reading. We project ourselves into protagonists; protagonists are our mirror. They are whom we dread, whom we wish to be, and whom we really are. Play it any way that you like, but if we your readers are going to connect then in some way, heightened or humble, we will have to discover ourselves in your story.
Genre stories enact our experience of mystery, romance, adventure, fear and journey. Literary fiction captures our living in ways beautiful, breathtaking, sad and splendid. Both purposes can fuse—as I discuss at length in Writing 21st Century Fiction—but neither is by itself what causes connection. The human experience that I’m talking about is independent of the type of story that you’re writing.
Certain experiences are common to us all and that is because they are emotional. We’ve all been challenged. We’ve all be disappointed. We’ve all been unfairly judged. We’ve all been overjoyed. There are hundreds—thousands—of specific ways in which universal human experience can be conjured. That is why so many different kinds of story can connect. However, there are a couple of experiences that are utterly fundamental to human existence and yet in manuscripts I run across them only rarely.
What I’m talking about are experiences that are intangible and yet real. They are sensations: of a state, of a place, and of a longing. Loss. Home. Hope. We all go through one, have a sense of the other, and cannot live without the third. We may avoid loss, leave home, or be without hope but those conditions are temporary. Loss is inescapable. Home is where we are from and to where we hope to return, perhaps, but more than that it represents safety. Hope is the air that we breathe; without it we are suffocating, if only inside.
To create connection for readers, it is worth creating these experiences on the page. But how?
Practical Universality
I’m not a believer in formulas. Not for writing fiction. However, today I’m going to break my rule and invite you to use three templates. Create three paragraphs. Each is designed to capture one of the intangibles that are our topic today. I’ve presented versions of these templates […]
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Here’s something great about great fiction: a made-up story becomes our story. Whatever the main character is going through is what we’ve been through. The struggle is our struggle. The world of the story is our world.
When you think about it, that’s weird. It’s illogical, too. The characters we’re reading about aren’t real. What happens in the story isn’t actually happening. The story world can be far removed from our own world, as well. Despite that, we connect to Elizabeth Bennet, working a tedious desk job in the Ministry of Truth, and Oz.
Are we nuts? Hypnotized? Daydreaming? Imagining ourselves to be more brainy, capable, self-actualized, suffering or just plain alive than we are? Do we seek heroes? Do we want representation? To feel understood? To understand others? To escape our lives and problems and enjoy the better, more exciting or more fulfilling times that someone else is having?
In reading fiction are we secretly projecting ourselves into tales more heroic, romantic, adventurous, suspenseful, tragic or beautiful than our own? Are we living by proxy? Are our hopes and fears being affirmed? Do we want answers and paths out of our conundrums and traps? Do we turn to novels for comfort and caution, as people once read the Bible? Does the meaning embedded in novels assure us that our own lives have meaning too?
When we visit Hogsmeade, Amity Island or Mayfield are we tourists in places that we hope—or fear—could exist? Are we fascinated by a world more heightened and dramatic than our suburban street? Is a story journey like a Technicolor adaptation of our gray and featureless daily commute? A relief from it? Do story worlds mirror our world? Do they capture our world’s realities and truths in code, accurately but safely?
All of the above can be true. Our relationship to novels can be symbiotic. Affirming. Therapeutic. Both testing and satisfying, making us feel smart like crossword puzzles. None of that is bad but boiled down, what connects us to fiction is what is human.
Timeless fiction tells the stories of exciting people but it’s also about plain old, ordinary us. However unreal are a novel’s events, what connects us is the amazing discovery that what it is like for heroes is what it is like for us. Timeless fiction may sweep us away to far flung times and lands but when it lasts in our hearts it is also carrying us home.
If the secret of connection, then, is a human connection, how is that connection made in stories which are far—or at least somewhat—removed from our real experience? If the colorful characters, dramatic events and story worlds of dread and delight aren’t what fundamentally connects us, what does?
The answer is a lot simpler and smaller than we might think.
Simple Human Connection
It doesn’t matter how different are the people, happenings or places in your novel, if there are people in it—and I’m counting in that characters who are demi-gods, cyborgs, vampires, rabbits or who in any way sound and act like humans—then there are opportunities to include in a novel the experiences that are common to us all. Moments we’ve all had. The ones that let us know that we’re human.
In capturing these moments, it’s important to build them in detail. […]
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At some point you may have received a decline from an editor or agent which went something like this:
“While there’s much to admire here, I didn’t connect to the main character as strongly as I wanted to.”
Sound familiar? I’m not surprised. It’s a common shorthand in rejections and one that is supremely frustrating. What does that phrase “I didn’t connect” really mean? It sounds personal, as if the editor or agent was looking for a protagonist who is a polished mirror of themselves, or perhaps a projection of the selves they would somehow like to be.
Is that true? Is making a connection to a gatekeeping reader—or any reader—purely a matter of luck? I don’t think so. That secret fear, though, does point toward two of the main misunderstandings about the connection between stories and readers. The first is that readers connect to characters whose lives and circumstances are like their own. The second is that readers connect to characters who are heroic, or at least living lives larger than the reader’s own.
Let’s call these the fallacies of the Humdrum Hero and the Above Average Joe or Jane. The Humdrum Hero fallacy is founded in the old and misleading principle of creating “sympathetic” main characters. When characters’ daily grind and budget problems are like anyone’s, readers can see themselves in those characters, or so goes the theory. But the theory is wrong. It misses two things.
First, Humdrum Heroes are in some sense suffering and that causes readers not to bond but to turn away, or at least approach warily. Second, the theory of “sympathetic” characters ignores a primary reason that people read fiction at all, which is not to re-experience their own reality—that’s what tire shops and dentist’s offices are for—but to be transported into someone else’s experience.
Escape may sound to you like the catnip of cheap thrillers and beach reads, but look beyond the fear of writing trashy. (And BTW, there’s considerable skill in those thrillers and beach reads.) Think instead of how stories lend us wings, lifting us and carrying us thrillingly above the ordinary. With our imaginations in the sky, our hearts can soar.
Realism is fine and has its place in literature, but stories have endured through human history because of their transporting effect. That being true, it would seem that the answer is to embrace the Above Average Joe or Jane. Heroes! Cheering! Don’t we want to be inspired? Isn’t it called the Hero’s Journey and not the Slob’s Slog?
Well, maybe. The fallacy of the Above Average Joe or Jane has its points but it also misses a deeper truth underlying the story-reader connection: To want to read about a character, we have to care. A hero or heroine—sorry, is that term okay?—is a fine thing but high qualities are admired from afar. We cheer from the stands. We may be excited and entertained by heroic protagonists, but do we project ourselves into them? Not automatically.
We snap to characters who display, in some way, what is strong or good. Even that, however, carries us only so far. The initial connection to a character is only the start. There are hundreds of pages of novel left to go. Once established, connection needs to be maintained if not […]
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When I was a small child, I had a Jack-in-the-Box. It was a colorful metal container, circus-themed, with a round lid on the top and a small crank handle protruding from the side. When I turned the crank, a tinkling rhythm would play and I knew the lyrics:
All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel
The monkey thought ’twas all in fun
POP! Goes the Weasel!
At the point at which the word “pop” would be sung, the lid of the container would blast open and out would leap a little clown, leering grin on his face and arms spread wide. Inside his cloth body was a coiled spring. I suppose his name was Jack.
From this remove I do not recall, but I’m certain that my reaction to Jack leaping from the box was a squeal of mixed terror, surprise and delight. I’m also certain that I quickly learned to stuff Jack back into the box, thus to crank the handle and once again be surprised. And once again. And once again.
Which brings up an interesting point: When I knew exactly what was going to happen, and when, why did I then keep squishing Jack back into the box? Why, every time, did I squeal with terror, surprise and delight? It makes no sense. The surprise part was over the first time. Delight must have quickly waned. The terror surely wore off?
Well, clowns are scary. Perhaps that part of the experience was more durable. Regardless, I know that I went back to Jack and his box again and again. All kids do. So do adults, in a way, when they’re reading fiction. Same goes for watching movies and TV.
Another illustration of this principle is embodied in my wife, Lisa, whose nickname is “The Spoiler”. Watch any TV drama with her and she will—annoyingly—call the plot turns before they happen. “He’s going to give her the money.” “She’s the long-lost daughter.” Like I say, annoying. I swat her on the arm and she grins. However, Lisa is only exhibiting behavior common to all readers and audiences. We can sum it up in one word.
Anticipation.
Readers are not passive recipients of story. They do not sit dumbly, reading without guile, wholly innocent and surprised by everything that happens. Readers are active. They leap ahead of the plot. They guess what will happen. This is clearly the case with readers of mystery fiction but it’s true of readers of all fiction. It’s natural. It’s one aspect of imagination at work.
It’s not only mystery or suspense that stirs that keen expectation of what will happen. There is emotional anticipation, too. When we yearn for characters to kiss or cheer them on to success, we are hoping for a certain outcome. When a character leaps from a plane without a parachute, or opens the door to the cellar, or heads to the bank with a gun, we have a strong expectation for what’s coming. Our senses tingle. We get ready. We hope to be surprised, terrified or delighted. Maybe all three.
There are four fundamental forces that govern physics: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force. What moves the imaginations of readers as invariably is a longer list, but one with many […]
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Here’s what I Iike the least about superhero movies: In order for the hero to be affirmed as heroic, and for justice to prevail and the plot to resolve, in the end there must be a fight.
Not just any fight, mind you, but a gigantic, loud and massively destructive battle. You’re not truly a hero until you prove it, not with weapons but with your fists. (Or perhaps energy bolts shooting from your upraised palms.) That’s what a hero is. Violent. A fighter. Same goes for female superheroes.
Is that what it takes to elevate a mere protagonist or main character to the level of hero? Is that what makes heroes super? No fists, no hero?
I’ve posted in this space before about writing heroes and heroines. There’s a lot to say about that. My thought on that topic today began with Porter Anderson’s recent post “Another Diversity”, a look at Richard V. Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It. Reeves’s book bemoans the condition of men today. The post occasioned a slew of richly deserved, sneering, oh-boo-hoo comments from women, no wonder.
However, it was Keith Cronin’s string of impatient (with men) comments that started me thinking. He wrote, “It’s time for boys to try harder and become better men” and “It’s time for them to find out what it REALLY means to ‘man up.’” I immediately pumped my fist in the air, but then began to consider why our first idea of what it means to become a man is that it must be hard and can only happen with supreme effort.
Questions occurred to me. In story construction, to become a hero must the hero necessarily start out as a louse? Certainly, change is inspiring but when we wish to make a male character a hero, does that mean that being male is being, de facto, flawed, or that the status of hero cannot be awarded without some kind of personal correction? More broadly, is heroism never innate and only earned?
Further questions. In another way, is being a hero always about exhibiting the qualities traditionally associated with manliness: toughness, stoicism, action? Is the only way to become a hero to go through a physical test, to fail, to be humbled, to face oneself squarely, and finally succeed? What are a hero’s qualities, but more importantly what are a hero’s values?
To be sure, we can ponder similar questions in constructing heroines. We can face the same presumptions that underlie our idea of what a heroine is or how she gets there. In creating characters, we are subject to our cultural biases and swayed by literary traditions, no way around it, but I think it’s important that we can look critically and deeper into what raises characters to the highest status.
The Making of a Hero
A hero or heroine is someone with whom we don’t just identify, it’s someone for whom we cheer. Heroes and heroines inspire us. That’s their function. That’s why they have long been part of literature, and not just popular fiction but enduring classics. It’s how dark and tragic characters sometimes become iconic: not because they are suffering and supine but because […]
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Some fiction manuscripts read as if they follow something that in mathematics is called a linear equation. A linear equation describes a situation that is ordered and predictable. Cause leads to effect. One thing follows another. One or more elements in a linear equation (X or Y) may be unknown but they are discoverable. Just follow the steps.
In a linear equation, the outcome is pleasing but not a surprise. The answer sought was embedded in the equation all along. Once you’re locked into a linear equation, there’s only one way in which things can go. Getting through the problem is a mechanical exercise. You know that your effort will be rewarded. In the end, you will be satisfied but no more than that.
Chaos Theory is different. It’s nonlinear. It deals with randomness. Most of nature and pretty much all human activity is chaotic. Everything from crowds to cotton prices to water wheels to organic chemistry to fish populations to migration patterns to political revolutions are chaotic in nature. They are unpredictable but also—thanks to the massive data crunching now made possible by computers—at least mathematically describable. We know a lot about how chaos works.
It’s funny, though. True chaos is a crazier ride than you will get on even the most maniacal roller coaster. It’s disorienting. Undergoing chaos, we feel helpless. Yet it turns out that chaos is not completely disorderly. Chaos is subject to its starting conditions. It has unpredictable outcomes but arrives at those according to certain influences. When looked at up close, chaos is a mess. When viewed from afar, however, the mess comes into focus. Think fractals and coastlines. Chaos, it turns out, can be quite pleasing and strangely beautiful.
I mention all that because fiction reflects life. As John Truby asserts in his latest book The Anatomy of Genres, story formulas work because they mirror human experience. Love. Mystery. Wonder. Terror. Tricks. Healing. Seeking. Finding self. That said, as durable and comforting as the patterns of plot can be, even in well-crafted manuscripts there is often a sense that something is missing. When things turn out the way that they are supposed to we cheer and yet, strangely, we may also feel vaguely unsatisfied.
When we feel somehow cheated by a well-constructed story, chaos can help. Without that element, the story deck is stacked. A novel becomes more like a linear equation. A bit of randomness not only wakes up us readers, it also makes the progress of a story both more realistic and more satisfying.
When chaos is at work, the protagonist’s positive outcome is not a foregone conclusion. Success must be truly earned and the random, playing-by-its-own-rules universe isn’t going to make that easy.
Practical Chaos
To make the application of chaos to fiction a practical matter, I’m going to spring off some things that mathematics has shown us. [Mathematicians give me a break here, okay? I’m not trying to accurately render Chaos Theory, but rather to adapt it to writing fiction.]
Chaos Attribute: In a chaotic system, small changes at the start lead to gigantic changes later on. (Think of the “Butterfly Effect”*.)
Chaos Story Tool: At the end of your novel, something big is going to be different, yes? Work backwards to your story’s beginning: Set the change […]
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As you can imagine, I’ve read a lot of manuscripts. How many? Many thousands, certainly. Generally, they are good, just not ready. Why not? There are eight common lacks but the last one is the hardest to pin down. It’s not so much a craft technique as it is a quality.
The missing quality is one that falls somewhere between insouciance and recklessness. It has aspects of courage and authority. It’s easier to say what it’s not. It’s not safe. It’s not careful. Few writers believe themselves to be writing timidly but like I say, I’ve read a lot of manuscripts. Most are quite readable or, looked at another way, unobjectionable. Not that a novel should offend readers, but neither should it make few ripples in readers’ minds.
In writing fiction, the learning curve is long and the bar to leap over to print publication is high. It’s understandable that over time many writers bend toward getting their fiction “right”. Maybe not a slavish fit for a given market sector but at least one that will smoothly please finicky gatekeepers. Not without art, no-no, and definitely with an original premise and solid craft but, in the reading, a product that dutifully shows high respect for everything from characters’ sensitivities to marketability.
It’s paradoxical, but the very values that would seem to make a manuscript acceptable can be the same values that produce a novel that isn’t particularly memorable. The quality of being memorable or—let’s be ambitious—timeless, doesn’t come about by writing safe. I don’t mean breaking rules, although there’s a lot to be said for that. What I mean is writing without regard to “don’t”.
Timeless stories are written with high authority. It’s authors who don’t apologize or wonder if they are worthy. They assume that they are and not only that, they have been appointed to tell us who’s who, what’s what, and to do that in their own quirky way and if you don’t like it then go jump in a lake. It’s as if those authors don’t care a damn who approves their novels but care like hell about the ache and joy of the human condition.
Proust, Woolf, Faulkner and Vonnegut did not write timidly. Tolkein did not think small. Bridget Jones, let’s be honest, is a drunk. Neil Gaiman doesn’t give a damn if you think he’s borrowing heavily from myth or fairy tale. Neither J.K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins care if you find their novels of derivative of others’ stuff. Angie Thomas tells it like it is, so take that. Mary Gaitskill, by no means alone, has no problem making you blush. And then there’s that fattest of middle fingers to middle brow literature, Lolita, a jaw dropper first published in 1955.
I’m talking about fearlessness, being recklessly independent of all expectations and at the same time utterly bonded to all of us. A lot of things get in the way of that, not just the intimidating standards of publishing—whatever those are—but authors’ inhibitions and influences.
Influences? Wait, aren’t those a good thing? If by influence you mean inspiration, then yes, but influence is inescapably coupled with constraint. Constraints can be crippling, inner constraints most of all. Fearing to err. Worrying about sounding cocky. The terror of feeling naked. To […]
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