Characters with Character

We call oddball eccentrics “characters.” Yet character is also the possession of attributes, often moral, and characters are the individuals enacting a plot. Compile all these definitions, and you get—story.

Story harnesses entertainment to make morality easier to swallow. Based on that, your characters need equal parts moral fiber and zany individuality.  Those are the building blocks for making characters more “real” than real people.

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner reminds us that “The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.”  The more your plot delivers that, then the more complex emotions your readers will experience. So you need conflict—big conflict, even the danger is exclusively psychological.

Adversity tests a character’s character. Will you answer the quest? Continue despite seemingly insurmountable odds? Earn the love, happiness, respect, honor, or victory that the antagonist mercilessly struggles to rip from you?

Robert McKee has said that the pressure the antagonist exerts brings out the best in a character. It also brings out the best in the reader, who begins wondering, “Would I fight that hard?” “Are my own struggles as weighty as those the protagonist faces?” “How can I not feel empathy for a battle of this magnitude?” How come the great human issues never change?

Your readers respond that way because of the emotional, causal, and moral nature of fiction. As Robert McKee put it in Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting:

A character is no more a human being than the Venus de Milo is a real woman. A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they're superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift - just when we think we understand them, we don't.

Creating characters who are metaphorical works of art is a tall order. What makes that happen?

~ Breed empathy.

Your antagonist(s) can help.

~ Emphasize resilience.

            Who loves a whiner?

~ Celebrate morality.

Life is unfair. Should fiction be?

~ Liberate your characters.

            Unless you set them free, how can they surprise you or anyone else?

Tip: Don’t just incorporate tension. Use it to reveal and build character.

Winter Light

Chanukah, the festival of light, commemorates the miracle of a scarce supply of oil burning for eight days. What better time than now to revere light? Many of us fade at least a little during winter, missing what fosters happiness, not to mention inspiration.

The symbolism of light is rich and ancient. Shakespeare’s Juliet has this to say of her lover:

When he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

This tragedy complicates dark and light, as all insightful fiction does. But no matter what your faith or lack of it, light represents goodness and illumination; it’s a gift from and to the gods or God. Light’s presence has always protected us from animals, spirits, and fear of the unknown.

What’s that got to do with your novel? A great novel offers subtle and surprising enlightenment. In that sense, isn’t every novel a festival of enduring light?

Festival. The word originally described religious gatherings and social bonding, later adding group entertainment and celebration of the arts. The novel encompasses all of that: a good time, a cultural expression, and both strengthening and questioning of norms.

Tip: Incorporate all the elements of festival into your novel.

As a writer, you’re in the fortunate position of gathering and distributing all the “available light.”

~ Find the light.

Whether with candles, fireplace, imagery and the prose you create or enjoy, gather all the light you can. Unless you collect the light, how can you possibly share it?

~ Study the characteristics of light.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. ― Truman Capote

           

How recently have you questioned light and dark, good and evil in your novel?

~ Revere the intrinsic symbolism of light.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. ― Martin Luther King Jr.

What better time than right now to revisit this relationship? Can you do that in your own novel?

Use your fiction to reveal the light that represents our hopes—and burns beyond our expectations.

The Moral of the Story

Do stories deliver morals, or is story itself—at its very core—a dramatization of morality? Is story in fact the human method for articulating and sustaining beliefs? After all, in The Storytelling Animal Jonathan Gottschall points out:

people are willing to imagine almost anything in a story: that wolves can blow down houses; that a man can become a vile cockroach in his sleep (Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis); that donkeys can fly, speak and sing R&B songs (Shrek), that “a dead-but-living fatherless god-man [Jesus] has the super-powers to grant utopian immortality”; that a white whale might really be evil incarnate; that time travelers can visit the past, kill a butterfly, and lay the future waste (Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”).

            I should say that people are willing to imagine almost anything. This flexibility does not extend to the moral realm. Shrewd thinkers going back as far as the philosopher David Hume have noted a tendency toward “imaginative resistance”: we won’t go along if someone tries to tell us that bad is good, and good is bad.

Gottschall goes on to observe that “Story runs on poetic justice, or at least on our hopes for it” and cites others who agree. As John Gardner puts it, fiction “is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.”

Since 1021 (The Tale of Genji), novelists have possessed a powerful opportunity, to use as weapon, tool, propaganda device, or source of social good. But has fiction remained a moral force, or does that notion seem antiquated as reading books printed on paper?

Probably both. People, including novel readers, are less susceptible to didactic preaching than they presumably were when Samuel Richardson rewarded chastity in Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) or Henry Fielding lauded lofty ideals (instead of promiscuity) in The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling (1749). Today’s readers enjoy a spoonful of voice, plot, and originality to help the morality go down.

Yet in every genre, novel readers still crave moral questions. Will she overcome her snootiness in order to deserve the man she loves? Will squandering earth’s resources yield the fate of The Dead Planet? Will the self-important detectives ignore the lady who gobbles mysteries, collects stray cats, and is the only one who can solve the crime?

Consider the moral center of your own novel. Can you enrich it?

• Does your novel have a layer or texture beyond the entertainment component?
• Does the plot somehow illuminate human psychology or society?
• If the novel ends happily, did the protagonist change enough to deserve that?
• Do you ever resort to oversimplified solutions for resolving moral conflict?
• Do you polarize good versus evil, or reflect the gray area between them?
• Do you free readers to reach their own conclusions about your story?
• If you could leave your readers with just one thought when they finish your novel, what would that be? Does your plot convey that?

Tip: Memorable novels are equal parts fun and poetic justice.

Born Toxic?

Jellyfish (jellies) are. They die that way, too. Try stepping on a desiccating one, or, rather—do so at your peril. Antagonists? That’s a matter of nature and nurture, and one of crucial importance to fiction. In Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, Donald Maass reminds us that a multi-dimensional opponent is not only more intriguing, but “more dangerous.”

And as Robert McKee puts it in Story, “All other factors of talent, craft, and knowledge being equal, greatness is found in the writer’s treatment of the negative side.” Why? Because without a worthy antagonist, a protagonist has no compulsion to defeat inertia. The status quo seems less exhausting. Why not just …

Tip: The antagonist is the source of change—and growth—in the protagonist.

Two kinds of worthy antagonist can motivate your protagonist. The first is doomed. But your antagonist obviously needs greater complexity than a creature with only a nerve net. Maybe your antagonist yearns to be good, cursing the universe that makes some of its inhabitants unable to conquer their worst foibles.  These villains fill Shakespeare’s plays—because such antagonists offer credibility and inspire empathy.

As a novelist, it’s your job to make us grasp that level of pain. What would it be like to envy the impulse toward morality? Challenge yourself to understand that notion, so your readers can.

Other antagonists haven’t the slightest desire to change. They rationalize lust, greed, arrogance, or violence so skillfully that the audience wonders whether there’s something valid about those arguments. The compelling antagonist has mastered self-justification: “It’s absolutely okay for me to murder or starve or rape these people because I…”

It’s your job to complete that thought. The source is backstory, not on the page, but in your grasp of character. Which sociological and psychological factors formed this person? This requires viewing your antagonist as a person—not a creature.  Again, the answers probably come from your worst secrets. What stories do you tell to legitimize moments of selfishness or deceit? On a much uglier magnitude, the antagonist’s mind works the same way. The darkest, dirtiest parts of you long ago familiarized you with the storytelling that lets us do what we want instead of what we know we should. There’s a little antagonist in most of us.

Jellies come in hundreds of species. They’ve been around practically forever. Antagonists, born toxic or otherwise, are at least as old as Greek tragedy. Despite pollution, jellyfish still thrive. So do antagonists, every time you reveal what makes such individuals as real and complex as everyone else.