Character Traits

iconic characters--memorable individuals in dramatic narratives; presences in stories whose attitudes and bearing outweigh the plot of the narrative.

A significant test by which to assess the memorability of a character is to determine what that character wants--really wants, then decide what that character will to to achieve the goal. Why is Hedda Gabler so memorable and what did she want. Why is Lady Macbeth so memorable? Perhaps for her insistent urge for power, but just as likely because of the first words out of her mouth when Macbeth returns to her, having already had one change of heart before screwing up the courage to murder Malcolm. "My husband!" she affirms.

Consider this list of characters culled from the ages:

Antigone: she was willing to put her life on the line for insisting on doing what she believed to be right.
Anton Chigurh: not just an enforcer or a hired killer but as well a control freak of epic proportions.
Becky Sharp: known for her bigger-than-life opportunism.
Captain Ahab: at the very least, he was so bent on revenge that he overrode his religious tradition and risked damnation to achieve it.
Captain Spaulding: with more than his greasepaint eyebrows to call him to our attention, his every act flies in the face of comfortable tradition and convention, and wouldn't we just like to get away with that?
Florentino Ariza: from Love in a Time of Cholera, his aching, unrequited love for Fermina Daza sends him through intimate encounters with over six hundred substitute lovers.
Fleur: this haunting presence of many a Louise Erdrich short story and some novels is incarnate a stunningly attractive Native American woman who years for a return to the old ways; she has the will and, seemingly, the magic to back up her presence.
Lewis and Clark: two military men who set forth on an assignment and in the process discovered a continent.
Jane Eyre: she rode plainness and intelligence and love into an archetype who spoke to Rochester across the Moors and to us across the eras.
Joan of Arc: a teen-age girl who hears voices and leads armies.
Omar Little: an impressive presence from the recent TV series The Wire, he made his living by robbing drug dealers. He had a code of honor, an ethos. The mere thought of him evokes memories of the sounds when he took to the Baltimore streets: "Yo! Omar commin! Here come Omar."
Sisyphus; from the Greek myths, a man who drew as punishment an eternity of the frustration of performing a meaningless task.
The Wife of Bath: an epitome of womanly force, spirit, and earthy intelligence. She would not be denied. Compare her to Erdrich's Fleur.
Wile E. Coyote: character write huge. Armed with Acme Products, Coyote is the patron saint of characters with established goals.

We must not forget the specific things these estimable icons want. To want something as abstract as freedom, independence, even love is to miss the point entirely and to miss the thrust of the true Valhalla of Characters: a specific something or someone; none had the time nor patience for abstractions.

The Opening Pages of a Hard-Luck Story

opening pages--the first three or four pages of a novel manuscript, usually the first page of a short story manuscript; the opening velocity of a story; archaic references: hook, narrative hook.

Before a novel or short story has any hope of finding its way into book, electronic, or periodical publication, it must pass the watchful eye of the literary agent and/or the acquisition editor. To accomplish this goal, the narrative must present an interesting character in a situation of confrontation, danger, discovery, or emotional quandary of significant enough degree to trigger some measure of concern. The writer who refuses to consider this calculus or who feels unable to execute it is at high risk of receiving a note declining the manuscript on the grounds that the reader had not been sufficiently made to care.

As observed by such plot-driven writers as Louis L'Amour, Frank Gruber, and Elmore Leonard, many novels and short stories, sent forth into the world as eagerly as hand-waving students wanting to impress their teacher with their knowledge of the right answer, do not always begin at the right place. Ideally, the opening pages plunk a character into a spot where the character is physically vulnerable--sometimes emotionally vulnerable as well. The opening pages also include some implicit agreement that the character will get back up and try again.

Often the true opening pages of a story are buried within backstory or other explanations which come forth more as unwanted-but-necessary descriptions rather than emotion-based circumstances. The net result is to present the reader with text book narrative rather than dramatic engagement. 

 The solution is often found in the revision process, wherein the true opening pages present themselves. How are these pages to be recognized? They are spare on description and backstory, sparer still on auxiliary verbs such as had, which yank the chronology from the present to the past.

Wherever opening pages are in the story's chronology, they are more effective if they appear to be happening in the immediate present. If they actually took place, say, ten or twelve years earlier, the reader will quickly adopt to the manipulation of the time frame. No convention requires fiction to be in strict chronology; chiropractic adjustments to chronology add to the senses of tension, suspense, and reality.


hard-luck story--a narrative which intends through its telling to evoke sympathy and compassion for the teller; a story in which one or more characters collide with an ever worsening pattern of setback and misfortune.


All stories have some kind of end-game goal, some intended effect on the hearer/reader. Is it laughter? Perhaps the author's intent is education, or irony, or reversal. Perhaps the narrative is offered in self-defense, or the adjunct of self-defense, excuse. As long as we're dwelling on the conditional perhaps, might be the intent of a story is to make the teller sound modest--moi?--or resourceful.

Surely one of the more plentiful among dramatic narratives is the hard-luck story or its close relative, the sob story. The purpose is to evoke or elicit sympathy for the teller, both in the nature of troubles piled on and in the way the load is borne by the forces of Nature and natural disaster.

You could say--and probably will, once you think about it--that The Book of Job is the classic hard-luck story, not only because of the trials visited upon Job but as well because of the capricious nature of the way the visitation was set in motion. Job happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when those polar representations of The Cosmic Forces got into a bragging and betting mood.

In more modern times, you could argue that an archetypal hard-luck story is found in a heavy contributor to Republican politics, being given a chance to go hunting with the forty-third Vice President of the United States. We all know how that turned out. That poor man will be known throughout history as the man who went bird hunting with the Veep. In Texas, where the incident took place, Republican school children will be allowed to stay home from school on the anniversary of that day, and boys with aggressive cases of facial zits will be able to say, "I went dove hunting with Dick Cheney."


You could also, if you wanted, put the majority of Americans of voting age as players in a hard-luck story because it was our hard luck to have at the helm of the ship of state a man more like Captain Ahab than the President of the United States, although there are those who would disagree with my literary analogy, reminding me of Mary Shelley's archetypal Frankenstein as the more appropriate fit. Dr. Frankenstein represents the force behind the Vice President of the United States, a man who once was more benign than he now is, having created a monster who has attached some seven hundred fifty signing statements to bills acted into law by the Congress. Mrs. Shelley's point was a moral one, in which hubris could create a monster.

It's our hard luck story that the forty-third President of the United States, with graduate work in hubris, was in over his head and the best we could think to do in the name of conventional wisdom was to wait his term of office out.

We will nationally remain at the wrong end of a hard-luck story as long as we continue to accept our status as victim.  

Description: Rhetorical Strategy or Cock-and-Bull Story

description--the salient qualities of a character, place, or thing; the briefest gloss without distracting from story on how an organization or tradition works; relevant details in a story; a series of adjectives, adverbs and evocations that convey personality, sense of place or sense of atmosphere.

When you choose words to describe a character, a locale, an institution, even a room at a Motel 6, they should come from a menu of emotion-friendly words, words that help transport the feeling of being in Character A's presence, the patience needed to overcome the ambient awfulness of Locale B, the fussy bureaucratic wrangling within Institution C, the no-holds-barred torture to the back and neck experienced while sleeping or otherwise on a Motel 6 bed.

And yet.

Words of description are not like the words of political conventions, intent on mobilizing crowds to cut back on thought and open up the spending of rabid emotion. Words of description are like the evocations of champagne, rascally pinot noirs, single malt whiskey, the hoppy promise of a pale ale, the piquancy of a homemade pesto; they lead us to the experience then turn us loose to experience it rather than lock us in the closet with it. If it is important enough to the story to include the breakfast menu at a particular meeting, we should be able to have our impression of each character enhanced by what he or she orders, and how it is eaten.

The best descriptions of a character come from the way he or she does things; a locale has a particular personality that is conveyed by the way things within it appear and behave; organizations reflect the personality of a leader or of individuals trying to imitate said leader; rooms in any given Motel 6 smell like mass-produced disinfectant, cheap furniture, and indifferent pizzas delivered by indifferent drivers who despair of reasonable tips. To inhale the atmosphere of a Motel 6 is to breathe in the pathology of the American dream and perhaps be numbed by the experience.

We should be using description to convey personality; at all costs we should not use description to display our ability as a writer.


cock-and-bull story, a--any narrative or story which on its face becomes of doubtful provenance; a narrative suspected of being contrived, embellished, or a deliberate fabrication; thus a deliberate attempt at deception.

Talking animals have held a significant place in the literature of the ages, seemingly well suited to illustrate fables, satires, and tales. Grendel comes quickly to mind, she of Beowulf and the eponymous novel by John Gardener. Aesop put words into the mouths of animals; so did George Orwell, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Dragons, wolves, unicorns all have had their say, some prescient and others hysterical (see Henny-Penny).

A cock-and-bull story is built in the first place to deceive, divert, or delay. A cock-and-bull story is the dog ate my homework writ large. If the deception has as its purpose an amusing payoff and/or a moral purpose, such as those told by Mark Twain, we are often the better for it, refreshed, our critical senses laundered and hung out to dry in the sunshine of reason and self-examination. If the deception is to tighten the grip of fear and control, the believer becomes in time as much at fault as the perpetrator.

For those of us who are book oriented, it becomes pleasing to think of an anthology, perhaps even a lofty Oxford Companion to the Cock and Bull Story. Imagine the fun and clamor. The anthology is to be divided into two parts; no not Cock and Bull, but rather For Fun and For Real.

The aforementioned Mr. Twain would be a welcomed addition to the fun side, as well as one of his modern embodiments, Kurt Vonnegut.

Imagine the mischief and consternation and competition for inclusion in the For Real side, those men and women who promulgate C & B as though they had come down from the mountain top, bearing an engraved slab of granite:

Phyllis Schlaffly
The Rev. Falwell
The Rev. Robertson
Number Forty-three and his Vice-president
Charles Krauthammer
Ann Coulter
William Krystol
Jean Schmidt (the GOP wingnut rep from Ohio)

and, as the late, lamented Mr. Vonnegut would have said, so it goes.


The cock-and-bull story can be a lovely learning experience, or a one-way ticket to the worst kind of convention of all. My personal belief of it is that it is the forerunner of the tall tale in the grand tradition of the American West. One place to look for its origins is in that remarkable novel about origins and reality, Tristram Shandy,
in which a character says, "It is a story about a Cock and a Bull--and the best of its kind that I have ever heard."

Cool Hand Sisyphus

Sisyphus--a figure from Greek mythology, variously a king or prince, but in every version of the myth a devious, self-aggrandizing individual who eventually pushed the envelope too far and was condemned by Zeus to an eternity of meaningless work; a prototype for a character who is doomed to repetitive behavior; according to Albert Camus in his essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," a happy man.

As with so many bigger-than-life characters, Sisyphus is defined more by his fate than the events leading to it. Now forged in our collective memory as a man who must push a large rock to a steep hill to its crest, whereupon it will roll down the other side, Sisyphus makes us think of the tedium of tasks we abhor, ways of avoiding the tedium, including the karma yoga approach of work,however meaningless, as worship. 

Suppose, however, that Sisyphus were an atheist. Would the karma yoga concept cause him to engage in the inevitable transformative change that is imposed on protagonists in longform fiction--change?

However his plight is seen--karmic justice done, for instance--he is an embodiment of story, as an action and as an active concept. Whatever myth you follow that led to his ultimate fate, the constant application of force to move the rock to the top of a hill, only to see it tumble, suggests story orbit, a path that may be interrupted at any point as a beginning. 

Let the rock equal the goal (which is always to keep the rock moving). Now the story may begin at any point in the circuit of Sisyphus addressing the rock or watching the rock fall or rushing to the other side of the hill to be in place when the rock comes to a halt, in order to begin pushing it to the top once more. 

Given Sisyphys' devious nature, he may be working on a plan, either to get out of this meaningless work altogether or to turn it into something with meaning. Thus the story could begin at the point where Sisyphus would ordinarily begin to push the rock up the hill, but this time he does not; he storms into Zeus office, where he quits, refuses to push the rock any longer. 

As a potential for reversal or antagonistic force, Zeus nods, then directs his underlings to assign Sisyphus to the Prometheus Treatment.

"Wait," Prometheus protests. "What's that?" Whereupon he hears the fate of Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire from Zeus and pass it along to humans. As payment for this misadventure, Prometheus is bound to a mountain side every day, in time for his liver to be an afternoon snack for a vulture. By nightfall, a new liver is regenerated, and the following day--back to the mountainside and the hungry vulture.

Hearing this tale of eternal high choler and higher cholesterol, Sisyphus quickly decides, "Excuse me. Got to get back to my rock."

Epic characters such as Sisyphus, Captain Ahab, Captain Spaulding, and Joan of Arc are resonant because of their own focus on task and because of the ways in which their behavior reminds us of other characters, those more accessible to our lives. Notable within this panoply is Luke Jackson, from Donn Pearce's novel, Cool Hand Luke, in which Jackson, after a drunken prank, is sent to a prison where his days are spent performing increasingly meaningless tasks.

Thinking it Over, Family Matters

retrospect--a vision of a character, place, or situation from a later point in time; a revisit to a person, place, or situation with the implicit promise that at the very least the reader will learn something not known before, and possibly one or more characters will similarly profit.

Returning to a past event is a springboard to an emotional revelation; a character who revisits a situation will now have awareness to see what had not been visible before, to understand the implications of responses or treatment not understandable before. In such retrospect it is possible for a character to recognize lost opportunities or behavior that will cause time-released humiliation.


family--a group of characters related by blood and/or adoption, conventionally considered a mother, father, and one or more children, but easily taking grandparents into the equation or, in contemporary times, a single mother and her children, a single father and his children; a potentially diverse group involving one or both spouses having remarried, bringing step-children into the family equation; a parental pairing of a gay couple with children from a previous heterosexual marriage; a parental paring of a gay couple with adopted or artificially inseminated children.

By their very individual nature, families may be supportive, neglectful, abusive, eccentric; they supply energy through direct action or backstory that has direct influence on all who live within their borders. Families are believed by some to have procreation as their primary goal, followed by the raising of young to the point of their own independence. This view is dramatic in itself since there are substantial numbers who see the function of family as entirely different.

Family gatherings, whether to celebrate holidays, indulge such rituals as funerals, weddings, and anniversaries, are frequent sources of story, suggesting that plots are not necessary; there is already ample story within every family.

Right of Way: Behaving with Intent

being right-- an existential sense of certainty of decision and goals expressed by a character in a story; a belief supported by relevant actions exercised by an individual or group; a conviction of moral certainty.

One of the few exceptions to the rule of all characters believing in the moral high ground their actions occupy is the absolute sense of their inability to restrain themselves from acting toward a particular goal they know to be wrong. Example: "I knew it was wrong to compromise my position, but I was desperate for the money." Another example: "I knew it was wrong not to tell her the truth about my past, but I so much wanted the relationship with her that I remained silent."

For writers who claim to have trouble with plot, the formula of each character arriving on stage with an absolute sense of being right is formula enough; it insures a clash of agendas. Characters in stories want in addition to their dramatic goals to inhabit the moral high ground of being right, especially in matters related to the arc of the story; they will go to great lengths to support their decisions and the rightness of their cause, using imaginative stratagems to avoid awareness of any responsibility for wrong-headedness, much less wrongful behavior. The great rallying cry of the tyrant, whether a household, organizational, or national tyrant is, "I did what I did for your own good."

Even though most serial killers tend to see themselves somehow as victims, they nevertheless justify taking lives by an elaborately argued sense of being right, a position one hundred eighty degrees away from the course of the heroic man or woman who uses a refined version of The Social Contract as a pole star.

Hint to the writer: Major characters want major things, are defined by them, wanting the objects of their desire to the point of initiating rituals such as homa fires, novenas, fasts, charms, and spells to enlist supernatural agencies in the rightness of their cause; they also invent rules or bend already invented ones. Macbeth was blown off course a few times, troubled by his conscience, but the mood passed, and Macbeth reasserted his rightness at the expense of Malcolm and, of course, his own conscience.


intent--one of three things a character comes onto the page with, a desire to cause something to happen or not to happen; the most important tool in the a character's toolkit, the others being backstory, and what the character was doing immediately preceding entry into the scene; a character's action relative to bringing to fruition his goal; an implicit sense of what the character will do to achieve his goal.

Equally important in the character- and plot-driven story, more likely to be overt in the latter.

The Things "They" Carry

tool kit--an assembly of abilities, skills, and talents a character carries; an actual collection of tools, implements, and/or weapons a specific character may use in furtherance of his/her agenda (as in the character Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.)

Many characters have few tangible tools or implements, relying instead on such interior qualities as persistence, dignity, honor, which they use as tools to effect their coping with the problems they encounter. Such antihero characters as Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) use a healthy cynicism or pragmatism to define their activities.

Similarly, the more or less independent contractor, the samurai warrior, an interesting comparison to the legendary knights of Arthur's Round Table, and American gunfighter of the legendary Old West, emerges with a different toolkit than twenty-first century century of fortune. The "toolkit" of the samurai, taken from a thirteenth-century text:

I make the heavens and earth my parents
I have no home.
I make awareness my home
I have no life and death.
I make the tides of breathing my life and death
I have no divine power.
I make honesty my divine power
I have no means.

I make adaptability to all circumstances my principles
I have no tactics
I make my mind my friend
I have no enemy
I make carelessness my enemy
I have no armor
I make benevolence and righteousness my armour
I have no castle
I make immovable mind my castle
I have no sword
I make absence of self-interest my sword.


Captain Ahab--the fictional captain of the fictional whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville's epic Moby-Dick; by implication, owner of a monomaniacal focus on a particular target or goal; the embodiment of a character with an ends-justifies-the-means agenda.

Ahab was not the first sea-going tyrant nor will he be the last, but of all the William Blighs and Philip Francis Queegs, Ahab calls out to the writer as an example of character-driven purpose precisely because his quest pushed him past the tipping point, from which he had no hope of recovery. Born into the Quaker faith (which is notable for its ethical pacifism), Ahab seeks revenge against the whale that destroyed an earlier ship and bit off his leg. With virtually his last breath, he curses the whale "...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." Ahab thereupon throws a harpoon at the whale, which act becomes Ahab's undoing. Despite the majesty of Ahab's language, lofty and booming with the cadences of unrhymed iambic pentameter, Ahab brings us moderns to a comparison with his cartoon doppelganger, Wile E. Coyote, as the exemplar of how we must invest our protagonists and antagonists with desire, purpose, steadfastness.

Nor is it fanciful to see Kenneth Starr, the former judge, lawyer, and solicitor general who saw in Bill Clinton the apotheosis of the great whale in Bill Clinton and perhaps again in California's notorious 2008 ballot measure, Proposition 8, which weighed in its outcome the right of gays to marry.

Somewhere in the middle, between Ahab and Coyote, stands Florentino, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, so convinced that his youthful love for Fermina is "the real thing" that he is willing to wait fifty years to prove his point. In spite of his having counted some six hundred sexual partners in the interim, Florentino tells Fermina he has remained a virgin for her.

All three of these characters are patently larger than life, which is no small clue but rather a nudge to the writer in considering which men and women to cast for the stories to come.


Ken Starr