Follow the Character

Even though you are well informed about the life, career, and work of F.Scott Fitzgerald to the point where there is little possibility of you being surprised, you were nevertheless fascinated by the recent piece in New Yorker in which his career as a screenwriter is discussed.

Having met with actual pals of FSF, whence you learned of his disillusionment at the reception his Hollywood work got, you were surprised to learn from the New Yorker account that he wanted to be a great screenwriter as well as a great novelist.

Thinking about FSF's apparent difficulties to transfer written information to the visual, you began to review your own approach to story in general, concluding (with some wisdom, you thought) that there is indeed a difference in text for the page, for the stage, and for motion picture and TV versions of story, and no great need to revisit those differences nor to remind yourself of the logic gap inherent in mixing proverbial apples with proverbial oranges.  

The one thing the media have in common, however, is character.  The key to success in any of the media is to begin with the premise that all are dramatic, all involve characters who are goal oriented.  A striking example is Macbeth, who on the surface is a good soldier, much admired by his leader.  What follows this glowing resume from King Malcolm is the actual appearance of Macbeth and the slow revelation of his burning upward mobility.  Hector is no less a good soldier than was Macbeth, but it is not ambition that drives Hector, it is the all-too-vivid awareness of reputation, for which you may read "what other people think."  

Shakespeare has given Macbeth a wife who is supportive to an eerie degree of his ambition, the Homers provided Hector with Andromache, who pleads with Hector to forget the stupid battle and run away with her and their son.  In a moment of prescience, she understands that Hector will be killed in battle--true dat--and that she will be taken off as a slave or concubine and their son, Astynax, will be summarily killed.
  
These stories are of such wrenching moral choice that they can, could, and will be presented as staged drama, filmed drama, and written narrative, illustrating the point that the appearance, agenda, and behavior of the characters drive the story, suggesting to the composer in the various media moments of thought, introspection, behavior, dialogue, deviousness, subtext, and more.
  
The original text of DuBose Heyward's novel, Porgy, did not contain the recitative or arias of the eventual opera Porgy and Bess; indeed, although the setting was Charleston, S.C., the novel called it Cabbage Row, later changed in the operatic version to Cat Fish Row.  In all other ways, the motivational behavior of the characters was consistent, but it was displayed differently in accordance with the medium.

In the novel, as Friday evening descends on Cabbage Row, it would be an enhancement if we were told that the sounds of Jasbo playing barrelhouse piano could be heard coming from the juke joint, but it would entirely break the integrity of the novel if young Clara were described as "going into her baby's bedroom and singing 'Summertime' to her."  

We wouldn't be surprised if she sang a crying baby to sleep in a novel, but we would be surprised to move in on her and hear her lovely soprano run over the lyrics, and by the time we got to the set up of the crap game and heard Clara's husband, Jake, baritone out the Ira Gershwin lyrics to "A Woman Is a Sometime Thing," we'd probably want to know who had edited this book.
One of the great tropes in mystery fiction is "follow the money," which will offer the protagonist/detective and the readers sufficient clues to effect some form of solution.  Your own trope is "follow the character," which translates into learning how an actor becomes a character.  

A character has gestures, dialogue, motive, backstory; a character has come from doing something before being involved in a story, a character does not merely appear in a scene, he or she has come from another scene (which may or may not be included in the actual text).  We need to see characters as having particular relationships with all the other characters in a story, otherwise they will sound posturing and wooden, artificial platforms on which the author attempts to stand.

I want, some characters appear to be saying.

I won't, others appear to be demonstrating through their words and deeds.

You can't, yet others appear to be telling the characters who want.

Can, too, your characters insist, and with no further help from you, they're on their way.

A Call to Action

actioning--an interpretive concept for actors, also useful for providing writers with structural insights; a technique for establishing authentic spontaneity in a character's response to a stimulus, whether from another character, a dramatic condition, or an inanimate object.

Actioning implies finding an action for a particular event in a story. This means translating agenda or goal or perhaps fear or revulsion at every opportunity, resorting to mood as a secondary tool. Once this concept is understood by the writer to the point where it becomes muscle memory, the characters will emerge from a story with greater clarity and purpose. The concept involves knowing in addition to who the character is, what that character wants, what that character is willing to do or not do to attain the goal, and how the character feels about all the other characters in the story.

Hint: For writers, dialogue is also part of actioning.

This last attitude--how characters feel about each other-- is of particular importance when the character speaks to another. Does that character admire, distrust, resent, possibly even hate the other character? And what are the social boundaries surrounding their relationship. Suppose Mary can't stand her mother-in-law? How would she, in a family gathering, inquire if her mother-in-law wanted tea? And suppose the mother-in-law thinks her son could/should have done better in his choice of a wife. How would she respond? "What ever led you to think I drank tea?" Nice, maybe. What about, "This time, remember the lemon." Or, "I'll get it, myself."

Dialogue is not conversation, it is an exchange of dramatic action. A simple line of dialog such as "I'm not hungry" may be read in a number of contexts. Your character should not say "I'm not hungry" (a perfectly plausible thing to say under many circumstances) unless, being said, it hovers between the speaker and the hearer...and the reader with a meaning that extends well beyond,"I don't require food." For instance, suppose the speaker of that "I'm not hungry" line is met with the response, "But I went to great effort to make this for you." Ah, now the light is beginning to dawn.

Added hint: Think verbs at your characters. He wants. She lusts. He envies. She detests.

The writer has the advantage over the actor of being able to use mood in narrative, but to action-ize narrative, imagine the character thinking thoughts at as well as to a particular character or group. I should tell them all, she thought, to take their offer of a vice-presidency and shove it. Thinking that, what does she do next? That's actioning. That's also story.

In much of today's modern theatrical productions, the director and cast meet early in rehearsal to action the script, creating the bonding chemistry among the cast that will inform their interpretations of the lines before them, and making it easier for the director to block out each scene, defining where each character should be. Even for writers who like to proceed with no game plan, detailing the feelings for each character to all the others is a floatation jacked for a sea of chaos.

The Writer as Actor, Part I of an Ongoing Investigation

A major moment arrives early in Uta Hagen's transformative Respect for Acting. She cites the example of the nineteenth-century French actor Coquelin. "One night," Hagen writes, "after having received accolades for his performance from the audience...Coquelin called his fellow actors together backstage and said: 'I cried real tears on stage tonight. I apologize. It will never happen again.' His approach to acting was obviously Representational. For him, a genuine experience on stage was rejected in the belief that it would muddy or blur the acting."

Hagen describes the two types of acting as Representational, wherein the actor finds a form based on objective result for the character, which he then carefully watches as he executes it. The Presentational actor trusts that a form will result from the identification with the character and the discovery of his character's actions. Said Presentational actor works on stage for a moment-to-moment subjective experience, which is presented as it were from the interior.

What grand advice for the writer, who after all is creating characters from the depth of his or her own experiences. Anything else seems mannered, perhaps even over-the-top, indeed nineteenth-century because of the remoteness of the creator from the character.

One way to digest and use this in-the-moment approach is to recall that the writer's task is made more original and genuine by using the movements and words of character to evoke rather than describe. Think of it this way: the best outer description has already been done in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Time now for the inner description that comes when the writer puts the character through each relevant moment in the story, allowing the character's gestures or lack, words or lack to stand as the response to the moment. This is not merely to remove adjectives or adverbs, which are, after all, valuable tools of the language. This approach is to remove the author's stage directions, the author's judgement, allowing all to come forth from the character.

Put another way, the shout, the loud voice, even the exclamation point are the tracer bullets of defensiveness, they light the way to the target which needs no lighting in the first place.

A Test of Character

What do we most remember from reading a story or hearing a story read or, for that matter, of seeing and hearing a story performed?

Possible answers are:
plot
authorial voice
characters
a particular scene
setting
descriptive qualities
metaphor/simile
surprise turn/reversal of fortune.

Although I did not always do so, I chose characters as the answer. My choice is not based on my observation that most readers make this selection; my choice is grounded in my own recognition of my own sense/feeling that characters are the things I am most likely to recall over time from stories and novels I have read. 

 Indeed, I cannot always remember the plots of some of the novels and stories I have written, but I can remember the characters, because of their very names--I once had a Germanic film director named Bert Schadenfreude, and I had as a pseudonym Craig Barstow and assumed his persona in order to write Westerns--or because of some tic of personality.

To defend my thesis that readers are more likely to remember characters than they are likely to remember plots, I cite the train of thought that characters embody the message, the theme and goals of the stories. 

 I don't remember many of the details in Vanity Fair, but I do know that Miss Becky Sharp was one opportunistic cookie, a personification of self-aggrandizement, a forerunner of contemporary novelist Candace Bushnell's Trading Up, in which wives are on the look out for a promotion to a better provider. I also argue that the choice of characters informs the theme of the story, confessing in the process that this recognition is my means of bringing some plot into my stories.

Characters, my argument continues, are by necessity bigger than life; no one wants to read about a character who is smaller. In his own wonderful way, Melville's Bartelby, for all his seeming passivity, was passively larger than passive-in-life; he became through his commitment to life a stronger force than his opponent; he was the protagonist; he and his vigorous choosing not to became the driving force of the story.

When we create such individuals, we put premium on what they want and what they are willing to do in order to achieve their goal. In some cases, we even show the effects on them of having got what they wanted then having experienced buyer's remorse.

Such individuals certainly have some point of origin in persons we see about us, as archetypes as well as actual individuals. They become armatures about which we wrap the details of our own imagination, allowing for the things they will say, think, do, and feel. They are prisms in that they refract the results of qualities with which we endow them, casting forth a spectrum of feelings and responses that speak directly to us and in the coded colors of the emotions.

We must treat these individuals with respect regardless of their origins or their place in our sensitivities, certainly in recognition of their places in our stories. We must not kick them when they are down nor heap adulation on them for all their accomplishments. They are, after all, born of our fantasies, which are, in fact, spectra of our own feelings. In a lovely calculus, writing about all our characters with respect, even the most despicable of them, sends the message to our own sense of self that the component parts of ourselves are worthy of respect.

For some time, I have made the additional argument that the writer is best served by respecting and adopting the techniques many of the so-called method actors employ, exercises by which we learn to be a particular individual on a moment-to-moment basis (see the Meisner Technique) as opposed to merely memorizing a script and giving it various attitudinal colors. 

There is a connection between how you would, for instance, portray Ahab, or The Wife of Bath and the way you would pull all your characters out of the shadows of cliche and derivativness and into the spectacular light of your own creation.

In summary: characters are your doorway to the kinds of discovery resident within memorable fiction, the qualities you most remember about your own favorite characters.