The Elegant Variation: Character

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April 13, 2010

Character - Part Two

How is it that fictional characters made of words typed on paper become real in a reader's mind? How does that alchemy happen? I'm always surprised each time it happens for me - when I realize that I have fully accepted a character I'm reading, that I've made that little leap of faith that allows me not to question the artifice that is fiction but to surrender to the invention. I know that fiction is not "real", that the characters I'm reading don't exist. But they have become real for me, and so are as real as my dreams are, as real as my thoughts.

It's hard for me to put into words how I work to convey character because, as I'm sure is true for many writers, the process of working is such a subconscious and associative one. Things just sort of "happen." Characters feel like they arrive on the page. But they don't simply arrive, they are arrived at, even if the journey towards them happens unconsciously, while you're asleep or driving in your car or thinking about a grocery list. I think about creating character much the same way I think about getting to know a person. At first, I might seize on some superficial information to try to get a grasp on who a person is - the way he wears his hair, the way she smokes her cigarette. I listen to speech, I listen for accents, I look a the lines on someone's face and try to guess at his age. There's a scar? I think, what's that about? I'm just grasping for things to hold on to as I begin to formulate an idea of who this new person is. Then, if I get to know the person better, I also get more information - personal history, emotional responses to given situations. I experience how that person behaves, how they respond in certain situations. And the more information I get, the more I reformulate my understanding of who this person might be.

It's the same with a character in a story. I start off with a tiny shred of a thing about a character - the texture of her hair, the way she walks across a street, a sense in my mind of how her voice might sound. Then I start writing scenes and I give her words to say. Sometimes the words feel wrong to me and I know that this is not what she would say and so I'm beginning to eliminate possible ways she might be. And when I give her words that feel right, I get a sense of her attitude, of what she wants to reveal about herself, what she's hiding, what she knows and doesn't know about the world.

It's an old trope that action is character. In some ways I agree with this, in that one of the sharpest ways to convey who a person is is to see how they respond to a situation. So, I throw action in the way of my character. I create problems for her that she has to work her way out of. What's maybe not true about the trope is that there is always the possibility that a person is acting uncharacteristically, that something has provoked her to behave in a way that is unnatural to her. And then when this is explored, character is revealed in yet another way.

The thing I always try to remind myself of is that people don't really know themselves perfectly, and that much of how we perceive of our own characters has to do with a certain mythology that we have created about ourselves and where we stand in the world. So I think about this as I construct a character, that there is no perfect "truth", no absolute definition of a person. And I remember that a person is only as she is perceived by another, and so, once again, there is a level of ambiguity.

Once I'm besetting my character with all sorts of problems and situations she has to behave in, I begin to focus on the tiny things. The way she moves her hands around a cup, the way she might feel about the rain, the way her skin might feel when she's standing next to another person. All these tiny details, the real existential experiences of her every moment, are, I think what finally drives a character home for a reader. The idea is to be as specific as possible, to realize that one person's taste of salt differs from another, that it might engender specific associations that tell us about who she is. Every single detail I use gives me a chance to create resonance, to engage with a character's history, with her emotional state, with her expectations. So I choose the particular details to focus on that will convey the most, that will round her out and make her flesh.

On another note:

Today is the official publication date of my new collection of stories, ALONE WITH YOU. In honor of this, I decided to find out the answer to a question I've always had but never bothered to explore: Why are books published on Tuesdays? Is this some quaint holdover from the late 19th Century when ladies and gentlemen did their book buying on that day of the week? Does it have to do with some ancient printing press schedule? Alas, no. Turns out the reason is rather more prosaic. This is what my publicist told me: "It has to do with how sales are counted toward bestseller lists. Sales are counted Mon-Sun, so we want to be sure books are on the shelves by Tuesday to make sales count for the week."

So, there you go.

Posted at 10:30 AM | Permalink

Comments

Do you ever define characters primarily in relation to other characters, rather than to themselves?

Posted by: Niall | April 13, 2010 at 02:56 PM

Yes.

Posted by: Serge Shoebottom | April 13, 2010 at 03:59 PM

Where is Part One?

Posted by: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman | April 14, 2010 at 01:30 AM

Just as characters are "arrived at" when they are written, so, I think, they are when they are read. As readers we approach a character knowing he or she is not real, but we are willing to invest in believing the character to be real. We approach the character with as much active imagination and willingness as the writer did.

Posted by: Paul Lamb | April 14, 2010 at 04:57 AM

On the subject of character, Olive Kitteridge is one of the strongest I've read, which probably sounds like a cliche since so many have. Less mentioned is "Six Stories" by Salinger, reread after years, the satire, still biting and funny.

Posted by: Ward | April 14, 2010 at 08:09 AM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
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April 13, 2010

Character - Part Two

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 13, 2010

Character - Part Two

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism