And on the subject of secrets, or more precisely, things left unsaid, whenever I read a story or see a movie or play in which a character is able to articulately explain his or her motives — even about the simplest acts, I rarely believe. Why? Because in my experience I’ve almost never met anyone who can objectively, honestly, explain themselves. Or is willing to do so — even to themselves.
Have you?
Most people — in whatever passes for real-life — cannot cite the true reasons why they bought a particular automobile, or item of clothing, or their choice of a romantic mate. In some cases they may know subconsciously, but do not understand on any level they can, or are willing to verbalize. In other instances they may be lying to themselves. Essentially, however, a good thumb-rule is that — as with real people — fictional characters who understand themselves should be rare — and those who can explain themselves should be even rarer.
Better, if you need a character explained, to have another character do it, either directly to that individual, or to a third party. An added potential benefit is that the explanation can tell us something about the explainer — something about his or her filters — what’s being brought to the table.
In sum, fictional characters who have secrets — something they’re concealing — even unconsciously — tend to be far more interesting than those who do not. Discover the secrets in your characters’ lives — including those they withhold from themselves — and you will be that much closer to making them come alive.
Another way to accomplish that is to simply make them closemouthed. In the chapter on dialogue I’ll explore silences — as well as self-exposition — in greater depth.
Liars Play Better Than Saints
Along the same lines as the inability to explain themselves, people lie all the time. And that includes “honest” ones.
Often, as noted, they lie to themselves, usually because this or that truth is too painful to acknowledge.
Others are withholding, though not in a deceptive way. Sometimes we refer to it as being “guarded.”
People exaggerate. It does not necessarily make them “bad.” For the social animal, dishonesty — routine dishonesty — is an essential component of survival. We all lie.
A psychologist once told me that one of the most difficult challenges any of us face in our society is being able to lie to others while remaining honest with ourselves. This difficulty is partly due to the unrealities we’re fed daily — among them such fictions as America’s deep-seated national assumption that man — and his institutions — are perfectible. That somehow, if we simply introduce a regulation against objectionable behavior, citizens will stop doing it and therefore become better people. It’s what causes our legislators, over and over again, to pass unenforceable laws against activities that are part of human nature, such as drug use and gambling, and then pour billions of our tax dollars into futile attempts to enforce them. And that’s only part of it.
On a positive note, those same convictions — that we can be better, that we can make things better — have resulted in countless improvements in our society, from women becoming eligible to vote, to desegregation and other gains achieved by the Civil Rights movement, to Medicare, Social Security, and on and on.
Still, reality and Disneyland do not make comfortable bedfellows. Expressed another way, it is almost impossible to satirize something that is already a satire.
As a consumer society, we regularly buy into the advertising myths with which we’re bombarded — that by becoming thin — or purchasing a particular brand of flashlight batteries — or a certain automobile or item of clothing — we’ll have better sex lives.
We’re lied to all the time.
That’s usable fodder for the fiction writer.
Again, we lie to others about all sorts of small things. All the time. Call it getting by, or civilized behavior, it is nonetheless a form of lying.
Think of the material that can be gotten from the average person’s mundane, seemingly routine daily misrepresentations.
We do not for instance generally tell people we encounter that their hair looks wretched, even when it does. Or that their clothes are unattractive, or that we regard them as stupid individuals. Most of us engage in those little deceptions almost every day of our lives. They should form a component of the characters you create — including the very human tendency to deceive ourselves by allowing such lies to become truth in our minds. As when we begin to believe that those ugly clothing fashions in the magazine ads are really handsome. Or that that individual who mangles the language is, because he graduated from a prominent university, really a bright, articulate person. Bad art is really good because an “expert” says it is, or because it fetches a high price. How many acclaimed movies or shows have you seen, or celebrated books you’ve read which, afterward make you wonder if you’ve missed something? The odds are that you have not. Cats (Wr. Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats) and American Beauty (Scr. Alan Ball — Dir. Sam Mendes) leap to mind as exemplars of works consisting of less then met the eye.
The story material provided by varieties of dishonesty — and it’s wonderful grist for the fiction writer — comes as much from our buying into lies, and hype, as it does from the lies — and liars — themselves.
Then there are characters whose entire lives are lies, people who have become caught up in their own illusions about who they are — or wish they were — such as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Or Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Habits, Hang-ups, Hobbies and Hatreds
Other sources of conflict, of color and edge, can be found in the special interests your characters possess. What are their hobbies? Their little obsessions? And are those interests the result of their hang-ups, their neuroses and psychoses? Are they obsessive-compulsive? Are they paranoid? Are they anal-retentive? You can get a lot out of that one, above all if it’s a comic character.
Self-destructiveness is another fertile area. Winners and losers. The truth, I suspect, is that most people are ambivalent about success, that the difference between a winner and a loser is so narrow that in a winner, perhaps only 49% of him or her wants to lose (possibly less, but 1% percent or so is really all it takes). This is expanded upon further along, in the section on Fatally Flawed Protagonists (page 94).
Anyway, the foregoing is a far-from-comprehensive sampling of interestingly-drawn, multilayered individuals that hopefully resonate for you. And you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to create characters like them. All you need to do is look at yourself and the people you know. Because not only are we walking compendia of psychological problems, so are our friends. Use them. Examine them. That’s what friends are for.
What are their passions? What are their hates? Are they closet bigots? Are they elitists? Do they lack patience with people of a lower social station? Even heroes can — and often do — embody these imperfections, these contradictions. And they should. Because then they’ll breathe. Because living people are almost never all one way or another.
And while these are things you should think about in creating your characters, understand that you won’t necessarily use everything you give them.
But — everything you do know about them will inform the way you write them — will make them more fascinating — and make you a better writer.
Further, you may find that though you’ve written pages and pages of biographical notes, you’ll only employ a fraction of it in your story. Maybe it’s because you realize as you get into your narrative that one or more of the attributes you’ve chosen makes this-or-thatone too unwieldy, or unattractive, or too unsympathetic to be, say, your heroine. That’s okay. From the top of the show, most of us aren’t going to get it right anywhere close to a hundred percent of the time. Almost certainly not early on in your fiction writing career.
Just don’t shy away from those edges. Fight that natural or conditione
d reluctance to deal head-on with drama in your own life. Let your characters express their emotions. Or let them harm themselves by suppressing them.
Find the Permutations of Conflict
Another take on the same theme: in conceiving your character-mix, in constructing your players so that this one conflicts with that one, because of, say, jealousy, or greed, or some other attitude about this or that: leave yourself open to how those same attributes will cause him or her to interact with the other characters in your story — and vice-versa. Allow yourself to imagine all of the possible crosscurrents that can exist between them, the contrasts. Take the time to explore ways in which each of their goals and/or agendas may conflict with the other, more minor characters.
I find it helpful to note for myself, in each of the biographical sketches, just how that character conflicts with several others. It reminds me to think about it when I get into the story.
Say you’ve got a classic triangle, a man, a woman and the other woman. You can probably design the conflicts for that group standing on your head, but — the setup has been done to death. It needs some extra dimension. So — say you add the other woman’s father? Now, he probably has an attitude about his daughter fooling around with a married man. That’s additional conflict. But take it a step further. Suppose that the married man, your errant husband, works for the other woman’s father. Perhaps the younger man is the father’s protégé. Suddenly the mix begins to vibrate with story possibilities, with potential scenes and twists, doesn’t it? It begins to offer opportunities for all sorts of interesting permutations. The husband might “have something” on the other woman’s father. The father might want the man to get a divorce and marry his daughter, so he confides to the wife about her husband’s infidelity — but — she doesn’t believe him. And-so-on-and-so-on.
My mentor, incidentally, referred to this sort of business with an expression that has become one of my favorites: muzhi-muzhi. Intrigue. Lurking-and-skulking. Moves and countermoves, their purposes not always immediately apparent.
Stuff going on.
Whether you’re writing romance or action-adventure or mystery or sci-fi, play those relationships, those conflicts and problems. Keep up the muzhi-muzhi.
As stated, restated and now repeated again, conflicts can grow from events that happened in the past, they can result from the awkwardness of new relationships, the clash of people with differing goals.
The essence of any story is people whose desires are thwarted. One of your characters wants something and another intends to prevent him or her from achieving it. That’s all.
But the second character doesn’t have to be a person. It could be the first one’s situation, environment, or alter-ego. It can be an animal.
A caveat: don’t make your conflicts too similar. Vary them. If you’ve got a revenge motif between two characters, don’t repeat the same problem between your other players. Mix them up, unless of course their resemblance is intended to make a point in your story.
Character-types: More About Heroines and Heroes
Again, give ‘em colors. Give ‘em dimension. As mentioned, even if you’re writing fantasy or magic-realism or an allegory about good-versus-evil or some other symbolic situation, make your important characters complicated. That means including-but-not-limited-to your leading men and women. Give them weaknesses as well as strengths. Conflicts. Both internal and external. Don’t make them perfect. Give them those tics, eccentricities. Don’t be afraid to give them prejudices and/or other problems that might make them — at first glance — unattractive — and/or politically incorrect. Remember Scarlett O’Hara, who was as irritating as she was fascinating.
Perfection is boring. And difficult to believe. It’s the stuff of Fairy Tales.
But again — mysterious is good. Holding stuff back is good. Enigmatic is good.
Don’t necessarily spell it all out.
Make Your Audience Cheer For Your Protagonist
Even if you’re writing an anti-hero, there must be something about that individual to make your audience care about the outcome.
And whatever you do, remember that heroes and heroines do not feel sorry for themselves. Oh, sometimes they might for a moment, but then they should quickly pull themselves out of it — as in the previously-referenced episode of The Law & Harry McGraw.
Or to put it another way, when was the last time you rooted for a whiny, self-pitying protagonist?
Angry — over injustices done to them? Yes. Determined to avenge a wrong? Yes. Scarlett O’Hara felt sorry for herself for maybe five minutes. And even that was arguably part of her manipulation-act. After that it was pure “I’m not gonna take this shit anymore.”
We root for people who are doing something to change their lives, to achieve their goals. Even someone as self-absorbed as Scarlett.
The Fatally Flawed Protagonist
The fatal flaw is a wonderful, writer-friendly, totally believable human problem that exists in people we all know. It is a device that’s been employed by writers for as far back as there have been stories — effective but somewhat overworked in parables, including but not limited to characters such as Icarus and most of the major players in the Bible. In more recent times it has been used with great success by, among others, Will Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, and my favorite specialist in that type of character, John O’Hara.
Near the top of many of his novels, O’Hara would set up a tiny defect or weakness in the personality of his protagonist — and pay it off by the end, when it either destroyed his or her life, or changed it profoundly, usually not in good ways. I don’t mean that they were all down endings, but they had a weight, an inevitability, that is for me very satisfying. That may also be why so few of his novels have been translated into movies. As mentioned, American audiences like sunny endings.
Eddie Felson and Julian English are another pair of such classically flawed fictional characters whose model hang-ups and psychoses are worth our study.
Eddie Felson is a paradigm winner/loser whose inconsistencies are eminently stealable. Eddie, beautifully realized by Paul Newman, was the title character in The Hustler (Scr. Sidney Carroll & Robert Rossen, based on the novel by Walter Tevis — Dir. Robert Rossen). It’s a marvelous film in many ways, but especially in its delineation of this unique, complex, very human guy. Eddie Felson was this great pool player whose fatal flaw was nailed in a line of dialogue delivered by an observer: “You’re a wonderful pool player, Eddie, but you got no character.” This, as mentioned earlier, is the right way to handle verbal exposition.
At the beginning of the film, Eddie is arrogant, super-cool, a smartass punk who challenges the reigning pool champion, Minnesota Fats, and beats him. But instead of walking away a winner, Eddie keeps on playing Fats, trying to rub it in — and at the end of their marathon, all-night match, Eddie has lost — everything. And piece-bypiece we start to realize there’s a lot more to Eddie Felson than was obvious. As Eddie’s layers are revealed, we begin to understand that Eddie doesn’t really believe he deserves success. Which of course is why, however uncomfortably, we identify with him. As with Melville’s Captain Ahab and so many other great fictional creations, Eddie is to a greater or lesser degree all of us.
By the end of this memorable film, however, Eddie has become a different guy. He has experienced a rite of passage. Eddie Felson has acquired “character.” That’s a wonderful arc.
Julian English is the protagonist of what I regard as one of the five-or-ten best American novels, the most perfect novel I have ever read. The author is John O’Hara, one of the truly great American fiction writers — and Appointment in Samarra was his first of many novels. He also wrote extraordinary novellas and a prodigious number of superb short stories. I’ve read Samarra probably five times (Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is the only title I’ve revisited more). Julian English was indeed a character with a fatal flaw, a genuinely tragic figure about whom I’ll say no more. Instead, I really urge you
to read the novel, and to learn. And if you’ve never sampled O’Hara, you’re in for some very nice surprises, among them his gifts for economical, energetic writing — and wonderful, character-defining dialogue.
Create a character like Richard Nixon. We cheer his success, and then we’re touched by his self-imposed downfall — and along the way we feel involuntary, even slightly reluctant compassion for him. Mixed emotions. Why? Because he is so universal. Because, I suspect, there’s a little-to-a-lot of him in most of us.
Or perhaps, as with Budd Schulberg’s Sammy Glick (What Makes Sammy Run?), the flaw is more one-dimensional but no less believable — boundless, ruthless ambition.
Other fatal flaws — faith in some other false hope that ultimately destroys the believer. A romantic, perhaps? A dream-chaser? A moralist? The political activist who perhaps sacrifices personal relationships — or his life — in pursuit of impossible or unrealistic or even worthless goals. Doomed to disappointment, yet never recognizing the problem. Never learning the lesson. Or, in denial — refusing to accept it.
Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Melville’s Captain Ahab.
But beware of the last two. In today’s somewhat jaded world, they present a difficult challenge for the writer. While the character who pursues an impossible dream — or sacrifices for an ideal — has an undeniably romantic cachet, the downside is convincing your audience to buy into the romance. To not lose patience with the character despite the fact that he may arguably be a schmuck — to say “there but for good fortune go I.”
Fiction Writing Demystified Page 11