It's Eleven O'clock--Do You Know Where Your Characters Are?

A significant and often disappointing problem arising from using real people as characters is the discovery that they don't go far enough, are not as perfervid in their goals and attitudes as you want to generate dramatic traction with some tension to it.

This realization does not speak well for many about us; in constructing a character, we need to borrow from a number of sources in order to get the critical mass of an individual we can use in a story. Some time back, when I was still taking assignments to write in the old Nick Carter series, I though for the sake of fun to introduce a character modeled after my then department chairman. After a few scenes with this individual, it came to me that his fictional dealings with the fictional Nick Carter were pretty much of a piece with his real dealings with me. There was no way around it. If he were to become a worthy adversary for Nick Carter, I'd have to toughen him up a bit, invest him with stronger, clearer goals and the determination to accomplish them. In real life this individual was heard to say, No one gets his master's degree without publishing at least one poem. To a graduate student, particularly one with a specialty in film or drama or nonfiction, that might sound a bit daunting, but it is difficult to imagine most Nick Carter readers feeling anything like an unearthly trickle coursing up (if it were fear related) or down (if it were sexually inspired) his spine and so accordingly, in anticipation of future royalty payments, my character sneered openly at the lack of poetic discourse and language, used the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins as a vehicle for delivering his espionage information at poetry readings, not caring a fig should innocent lives be lost as a result of poetry.

Even a recurring character I strongly relate to as me has needed certain twitching and the occasional short circuit in moral wiring, this done in recognition that even as writers, we all of us want characters who are the literary equivalents of weight-bearing walls.

This opens two doors for investigation and absorption into the writerly psyche:

1) Characters should at all times have the capacity to surprise the reader, the writer, and some if not all the characters in a particular venture. When we are able to predict outcomes, we tend to skip ahead--I believe--to the parts where outcome is not so certain. One of the reasons we stay on is to see if we'd been correct, yet another reason is due to the suspicion that we were not. The name for this condition has been called suspense.

2) Writers need the strengthening exercise of being as much like characters as they can, which is not to say one-dimensional and certainly not derivative, both of which are neither genuine nor growth oriented. There, indeed, is the answer: a writer needs to keep pushing at as many of the available boundaries as possible, at all times. To put it another way, a character needs to be larger than life; so does a writer, taking sustenance from the surprise factor resident within but just as certainly taking nourishment from without.

In thanks, I've gratefully taken sustenance from Marta, who signs her blog Writing in the Water, and from Matt Cahill, each of whom you'll find listed in the Friendly Neighborhoods column. From Marta the reminder of the need to surprise myself and all I write about. From Matt, after a chat about the nature of satire, the decision to drop a satiric bomb framed on Rev. Smith's A Modest Proposal in which I suggest with professorial solemnity that the world is in such delicate states now in so many ways that we need more time to cope with them. Accordingly, I'm suggesting a world-wide cutback in holidays. If each major religion gave up one holiday, we'd have the time to devote to solutions rather than indulging ritual celebrations. I will propose that Christianity give up Easter, which makes it seem natural for Judaism to toss Passover into the pot; the Muslims could scratch Ramadan, the Hindus could easily spare Durga Puja, and on one day a year, secular humanists could give up either soccer or baseball. I could not hope to duplicate the uproar over The New Yorker cover of recent infamy, and the Rev. Swift has not been with us for a long time, giving him as it were opportunities to pick up readers. But what the hell, shoot high; aim for the stars. Aim for the characters you dare to create.

Random Notes on a Theme of Narrative Reliability

1. Not the start because who can say where such things really begin, rather the rallying point for a close look at narrative authority and reliability came from having finished for review J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year.

2. Several pages in, Coetzee reminds us of Barthes and Foucault, architects of deconstructionist critical theory, doing away with the author and drawing us toward the text as the be all and end all, reminding us of Diderot and Sterne.

3. I'm especially sensitive to Sterne and Tristram Shandy, which informs in tone a portion of my in progress Exit, Pursued by a Bear. I admire Dennis Diderot for his encyclopedia constructions, which inform my in the works Writer's Tool Kit, a kid of cross-referenced irreverence that speaks to construction and attitude.

4. Coetze literally tells three stories at once, all on the same page, each layer or level separated by a horizontal line. Thus we hear informal opinions on such things as politics, literature, music, the rule of law, morality, which we readers understand as being the very Strong Opinions one of the characters in the book (who bears certain similarities to Coetzee) was engaged to write by a German publisher. The middle section of the page relate to the author's relationship with a stunningly attractive woman he has hired to be his secretary, and the bottom section is the ongoing relationship between the secretary and her braggart, self-made-man live in boyfriend.

5. The writer is called Senor C and has won a slew of awards; he also has enough money that the secretary's boyfriend, an investment counsellor, is interested in appropriating.

6. Although Coetzee, a Nobel Laureate, has migrated to Adelaide, in south central Australia, this small ensemble cast lives in a high-rise on Sydney's ocean front.

7. Is this novel a roman a clef? Is it a complete fantasy?

8. Doesn't matter. What matters is that it kicks format for a field goal, blurring lines between real and invention, making the invention seem plausible, making the plausible seem somehow like the very confessions tortuously wrung from prisoners of war that Coetzee so firmly resents .

9. How much has the concept of a reliable narrator shifted since the tail end of last century? What constitutes reliability in 2008?

10. The kinds of novels and stories that provoke the most thought are the ones that stray in one way or another from conventional narrative format.

11. Used to be, the most significant ingredient to be found in fiction was suspense, and if you could not manufacture suspense, you were obliged to infuse the next best thing which was tension, and we all know that racial, political, artistic, and sexual tensions are powerful primary causes.

12. Now the ingredient is ambiguity, which can be made to contain tension and perhaps even suspense.

13. What do identities mean? What are motives? What is reality? We had at one point to memorize the names of the Nine Muses. 2008 we can replace them with the nine ambiguities.

14. I think I will be spending more time with Coetzee, especially this one, and looking for ways to tear Exit, Pursued by a Bear farther away from the satire I'd intended and more into a moral ambiguity that seems to be hanging about like the coastal fogs or marine layers that sit off shore here during June and July.

15. I wanted to get this down before it got away.

Missing from the List

One of the assignments I'm fond of inflicting on myself and on students is the one in which we attempt to list as many of the essential ingredients of story as we can. My fondness extends to the point where some students invariably come forth with an element I have either not considered at all ever, or one I'd allowed to slip into the dusty drawers of forgetfulness .

Thus we have such elements as character and lot, voice, dialogue, narrative, point-of-view, suspense, reversal, tension, suspicion, hidden agenda, scene, backstory. All in all, I reckon between twenty and thirty building blocks.

My purpose in embarking on such a list and inflicting it on students is resident in the next portion of the assignment. Now that you have your list, give it a hierarchy, starting with the most important element and trailing down to the least important (to you) or the one you feel most estranged from.

This list, set in an order of importance, provides an intimate portrait of the writing personality; it is at once a clue to how you define story and which elements you find either the least useful or with which you are most uncomfortable. At this point I jump in with the confession that plot is invariably at the bottom of my list, to which I add, perhaps even projecting a certain perverse pride, that this is so because I am not very accomplished with plotting.

How then, someone will ask, do you get stories?

And I reply, Why, through characters, of course. My characters all think they are right. Whenever they enter a scene, they expect this rightness to be validated, observed by other characters, perhaps even characters who are strangers.

It is a lovely kind of conversation/therapy session/confessional/shop talk; it gets them thinking and it keeps me thinking. For some considerable time, I'd had characters at the top of my list. In more recent times I'd leaned toward voice, arguing to myself that the tone or attitude I brought forth would influence the characters. That approach lasted for quite a while. We often wish to hear a particular story or reminiscence repeated because of the tone of the teller. I think I have heard all Barnaby Conrad's stories about the time he spent as a younger man serving as secretary to Sinclair Lewis, but somehow the story of how Conrad, showing off with a bow and arrow, let one fly only to fatally and unintentionally impale a toad sends me into paroxysms of mirth. Ditto the story Lewis told Conrad about the attractive woman on a neighboring deck chair on the Queen Elizabeth, reading a copy of Lewis' latest novel. Thinking he was about to make serious romantic time with the woman once he revealed to her who he was--"Are you enjoying that book?"--he was stunned when she stood, advanced to the deck railing, and dropped the book over the side. I know these stories but they are made more memorable by Conrad's obvious pleasure at telling them.

Which brings me to the deck railing as it were; the moment of truth. Character was a good thing to have considered number one. Voice was an excellent thing to have replaced it with. My current favorite is subtext, which is something I describe as the trough between what a character says and what the character does. Implication, if you will. Actually, I've been quite pleased with myself for having seen that lovely distinction and because I've been on such a nonfiction vector these last several months, I've only had one opportunity to try a story in which subtext was deliberately elevated to the top.

But there is something important I have forgotten, not just for the moment but for all these years of trying to move my craft along some line of progress. It is the thing every successful story has in abundant measure. Indeed, it is the thing the creator must carry about as though it were the most advanced iPod, listening to it, using it, being aware of it.

My bad for having forgotten it or for merely having taken it so much for granted that I may have on occasion obviated it.

It.

Enthusiasm.