Hold That Thought

For the second time in just under a month, I had occasion to listen to three actors I much admire, being on one way or another interviewed. The first actor was Idris Elba, who did such a layered portrayal of the Baltimore drug underlord, Stringer Bell, in the HBO novel-as-TV-series, The Wire. Not long after, in another setting, I heard Dominic West, who portrayed a Type-A-personality Baltimore cop, Jimmy McNulty, on the same show. Just yesterday, I heard Hugh Laurie, star of the long-running TV series, House, in which he is the eponymous near-genius M.D. with a board certification in infectious disease and street cred for his diagnosis abilities. House also gobbles pain killers by the handful to alleviate chronic pain. His venue is a teaching hospital near Princeton, N.J. I don't know his cv, but I believe he is supposed to be a product of American schools.

This is important to me because all three actors, when not in character, speak with their native English accents and cadences as opposed to their character's native American English accents and cadences. A ham at heart, I am always on the lookout for an accent to grab onto, twist around a finger or two, perhaps even work into a story. The importance of language and its effects had its conscious effect on me back in the day when, watching another splendid actor, Derek Jacobi, portray the Roman Emperor Claudius, I became aware that his guards all had a deliberatly British accent but were said to be from German-speaking backgrounds, an effect that "allowed" or "caused" me to hear their dialogue as the Latin spoken at the time.

Actors have numerous ways of absorbing a regional dialect, including tapes and CDs of speech samples, living among their desired target group, consulting vocal coaches, even consulting books, and the always satisfying all-the-above choices. Actors have also the options of some of the more popular acting school techniques, including but not limited to that of Sanford Meisner, a staunch advocate of "being there," being the character while sending the real self to the principal's office or some other such exile.

Works the same for the writer; being the characters allows them to speak and be heard or, appropriately, not heard. Like an iron-on transfer for a t-shirt, being the character brings another presence to the front, often a presence at some odds from the reality of the actor. Being infused with the reality of the character allows the actor to experience the potential for the character's responses, sponteneity, and yes, even language. True enough, each actor brings his toolkit of the character's sponteneity. (I have often in recent years pondered what I, for instance, could bring to Lear, things that would nevertheless allow me to project a plausible Lear instead of a Shelly at a party doing a parody of Lear.)

At every moment in a story, the writer copes with the multifarious question of what a given character would do in such a situation, then copes with the techniques to bring that character's response to plausible life. Thus has the writer taken on all the parts in a play, making it at once more daunting a task to "be" so many characters. This multifarious quality has the blessing of distracting the writer from being herself or himself, allowing said generic writer to concentrate entirely on "being there," of "being in the moment."

The key to all of this starts with listening to the characters, listening as the particular point of view character of the moment, then responding via the instinctive response of that character, based on what the goals of the story are.

Whether it's the first draft, the tenth, or the last, the antagonist--your antagonist--is thought. The moment you start thinking is the moment your antennae are out searching for signals from other readers, literary agents, editors, the reading public, rlatives who will be horrified by your portrayal of them, various exes in your life who will see your work as an elaborate revenge fantasy.

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.