Fiction Writing Demystified

by Thomas B. Sawyer

  Con-Artists and Other Appealing Rascals

  I have a theory about why so many of us love to read about or are otherwise fascinated by bullshitters, people who are trying to “beat the system.”

  I think it’s because most of us, deep-down — and some of us just beneath the surface — sometimes feel that that’s what we are doing.

  Faking it.

  Oh, I’m not suggesting that many of us are, or even believe we are, out-and-out frauds — but come on — what about those nagging little areas where we furtively feel we’re putting one over on them? Or — we wonder why they haven’t caught on that we’re not as good as the Big Guys at whatever we’re doing.

  When I first began writing for TV, for instance, and was summoned to the studio to be given notes on my story outlines or first-draft teleplays, I would come away from the meetings humbled, truly wondering why they had ever hired me, and worse, how long it would be before the Truth was discovered — that I had been misrepresenting myself — that I had absolutely no gift for scriptwriting.

  Understand that the staff writers were almost invariably polite, even gentle, with their criticisms and suggestions. But to me they were reminders of how little I knew. So painful were these experiences, in fact, that I needed a couple of days to recover before I could face making the edits and changes they’d requested. Because in playing the tape of the meeting, I was forced to relive the embarrassment — to hear once again about all the dumb mistakes my material contained. Mistakes that, in my mind, had I the faintest clue about what I was doing, would not have been there.

  Fortunately, they never found me out. Either that, or by the time they were on the verge, I had actually learned enough from them so that I was no longer faking.

  In any case, it’s one of the reasons why I have such a soft-spot for fictional characters — as well as for real people — who feel that way. But I have similar affection for those who are overt about it, the ones who are really conning their way through life. And I am convinced I’m far from alone in this, that it’s why the charming con-artist has such broad allure, from the PI whose profession it is to lie his way into someone’s confidence in order to get information, to the fun of a character who feels so inadequate that he has to lie to almost everyone. Think George Costanza in the Seinfeld TV series (Cr. Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld), and how George’s misrepresentations and evasions made you wince. Or the person — such as a spy or undercover cop — who must adopt another identity in order to accomplish a goal while escaping detection.

  Frequently, such types also have magnetism, flamboyance, an aura of showmanship, as with a P.T. Barnum, or the bigger-than-life politician, the real estate tycoon, TV preacher or used-car salesperson. Whether they’re the real thing, or really phony.

  We enjoy these characters because we identify with them. And, I suspect that many of us vicariously enjoy being taken in by them, caught in their spell.

  Adolph Hitler was a superstar con-man who bamboozled an entire nation. Film clips of his speeches, either silent or without understanding the words, reveal his amazing, almost hypnotic charisma.

  And again, a large part of why such characters fascinate us is because they lie, because they have secrets. Because they’re so flawed — such arresting, even perplexing mixtures of good and bad.

  Con-artists can be great protagonists, wonderful heavies, or attractive secondary characters. But be careful when you use them in non-leading roles — they’re liable to steal your show.

  Just such a situation arose during my early efforts with The Sixteenth Man. When I first conceived it, I discovered that I had a fundamental problem. The character who quickly, clearly emerged as (for me) the most interesting was Charlie Callan, a likable, fast-talkingbecause-he-was-usually-in-trouble private eye (a con-man, really). The trouble was, in the linear story I was laying out I had no choice but to kill him off after the first few chapters. There seemed to be no solution, so I set the project aside for several years. Then I happened to read Lily White, a wonderful novel by one of my favorite writers, Susan Isaacs. In Lily White, Ms. Isaacs tells two parallel, intertwined stories, in alternating chapters, one taking place in the present and the other 30 years earlier. And each of the two stories had its own distinctive typeface. A deceptively simple — yet obvious — device that worked beautifully. And suddenly I realized that by emulating Ms. Isaacs’ format for Lily White, I could keep my con-man alive till the end of my book.

  Character Arcs

  Another essential element of character creation is that of arcs. Unless you are Woody Allen, who often gets away with having his characters just as screwed up at fade-out as they were at fade-in, your characters — or at least the important ones — should be in a different place at the end of your story than they were at the beginning. They should, on some level, have undergone changes, profound or simple, small or large.

  The question of where your characters are coming from — and where they are headed — their arcs — is one that you, the writer, need to ask — and answer — in terms of your overall story. Is this one enroute to self-knowledge? Is that one out to find God? Is another in process of realizing that money — or love — is not everything? Or learning that being true to one’s self is what it’s all about?

  Moreover, in relation to their goals, you must decide upon which direction they’re moving within each scene. Where they are at the beginning of the scene, and at the end.

  Are they closer to finding what they’re after, or further away? Because a character’s movement need not always be forward. Frustration can be effective theater. As outlined earlier, it’s essential drama to provide a setback or two or three along the road to the goal-line. And in longer forms, a lot more than two or three, especially for your primary storyline and your major characters. Including some that threaten abject defeat.

  Forward or backward are good. Sidewise — not usually.

  Remember, They Had Lives Before Page One

  It is crucial to good writing — and good characterization — to keep in mind that your characters’ lives did not start on the first page of your story, and, unless you kill them off, they won’t end at the final page. They’ve been going on for years. They’ve got baggage — the type of hang-ups, prejudices, neuroses cited earlier. Stuff that you can — and should — invent, and dramatize. And some that you may add during the course of telling their stories.

  You are in control — at least up to that wonderful point when you have realized your characters so thoroughly, when you’ve endowed them with all these attributes, with enough humanity, that they take on lives of their own. That magical moment when they begin to tell you how to write the story.

  You’d better be prepared to hear what they have to say.

  Discovering, and Then Listening to Your Characters

  As fiction writers we frequently use people we know as models for our characters, or, as suggested earlier, we might base one or more of them on real-life public figures. The following example of my own search for the character of a real, historical figure may be one you’ll never encounter on a one-to-one basis, but it is all about discovering, and listening to your characters. And though I learned it while writing for the stage rather than TV, it will, I promise, give you something to chew on — something you can use, no matter your medium or style.

  A number of years ago, I had a vision for an opera about John F. Kennedy. I decided to try to write it, and began researching his life, reading biographies and recollections of the man and his times, both critical and admiring. I took on a collaborator, lyricist/composer Will Holt, and together we started to build on what I had begun. Will, too, immersed himself in books about JFK, and it soon became apparent to him, as it already had to me, that despite everything that was known about Jack Kennedy — all the stuff that was a matter of record about his public persona, as well as the anecdotes of people who knew him, the real person was maddeningly elusive.

  Oh, we had facts. Lots of them, but in total, they were sur
face. Particularly when it came to putting words — other than his recorded public utterances — into his mouth. Our Jack — the equivalent of a fictional creation for whom we would have to write invented- but-true-to-character lyrics — was a mystery.

  We knew that Jack was the second of nine children, that his older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. was, almost from birth, the Anointed One, designated by their father to someday become the first Catholic President of the U.S. The books also told us that in Jack’s early years he was chronically ill, that as he grew, he became something of a playboy, that unlike Joe, who was a bit of a grind, he was an indifferent student. And of course, the womanizing by all four boys, urged on by their father. There was Jack’s romance with a married woman while he was stationed in Washington, D.C. during WWII, a liaison reputedly broken up by the father, who feared that if it leaked to the press, it might damage Joe’s future political career.

  Along with all of that, there were the historical contradictions and anomalies: After Joe was killed in action in WWII, Jack entered politics — apparently at his father’s behest — and eventually became President, the Jack Kennedy we came to know as charismatic, focused and highly intelligent.

  But ironically, the way we, as writers, finally discovered who John F. Kennedy was, and what the show was about, was from something that is left out of every biography ever written about him.

  This anecdote, by the way, is also about tenacity, about hanging onto your dream. Because the time that passed from starting JACK, until we made this key revelation was eight years.

  Here’s how it happened.

  Will and I had worked our way through much of the first act, covering the drama, the conflicts of Jack’s life from about age 17 through his early 20’s. Early scenes moved back-and-forth through time, dealing with Jack’s relationship with brother Joe, flashing back to the father’s days at Harvard, and then, prior to WWII, when FDR appointed Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the family’s move to England. We addressed the brothers’ participation in the war, Jack in the Pacific, Joe, Jr. in the European Theater, where he was killed while flying a bombing mission. The Ambassador receives the devastating news and it tears him apart.

  We were then at the point in our story — chronicled in all of the books — when the father, still devastated by Joe, Jr.’s death, tells Jack that he wants the young veteran to run for Congress. The 11th Congressional District seat that, according to the father’s plan, Joe would have sought.

  We knew that for our show, we had to play that scene. It was too pivotal a moment in Jack’s life to finesse, to simply gloss over.

  And yet, in none of the history books is there a record, or even a description, of the scene — where it took place, the specifics of what was said. Only an arm’s length, basically one-line statement: Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. tells Jack he wants him to run. Followed, in all of the books, by descriptions of Jack on the campaign trail.

  The historians and biographers all made the same logical assumption — Jack said okay, and then ran for the House of Representatives.

  In all of the books.

  And that’s when it happened for us as writers.

  Because our Jack Kennedy said “No.”

  That’s right. Jack — the Jack whom we had been positing from all the little bits and clues in our years of research — told us that he had flat-out refused to obey his father.

  Our Jack had, almost without our realizing it, taken on a life. We had found the character.

  The same thing that happens when one is writing fiction.

  The pieces. They’d been there all along.

  Jack’s frequent childhood illnesses. One doesn’t have to be Jung or Freud to recognize that as a classic plea for love and attention from a kid for whom it was made clear from the getgo that he was number two.

  And the dropout/playboy business? Totally consistent with a young man who, recognizing that there was no gain in trying to compete with his Crown Prince older-brother-the-grind, chose the opposite path.

  The books, as mentioned above, also described Jack’s romance with the married woman while he was a young Naval Officer in D.C. And some depicted in detail the father’s enlisting the help of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in order to break up the affair (including the bugging of their hotel room). Could it be that Jack knew — or at least suspected — what his dad had done?

  And there was Jack’s avowed ambition to become a journalist after the war. Again, a way to avoid comparison with Joe, Jr.

  There were other clues that began snapping into place. We’d reached that stage where we were hitting ourselves upside the head, those “Why didn’t we see that before?” moments — I think of it as the buzzing of the fiction-writer’s shit-detector. The totality of which only cemented our certainty that there was no way that Jack would have agreed to run.

  And yet — he did. And he won the election. And went on to the Presidency.

  So, we asked ourselves, what actually happened?

  Our answer yielded two vital, powerful scenes. The first of them, truly gut-wrenching, follows the Ambassador’s touching solo lament about his son’s death. Jack, one-on-one with his father, tries to cheer him up — and is rudely rebuffed. Then, the older man’s eyes narrow, and he tells Jack (keep in mind that this is entirely sung) to run. Jack rejects the idea, and in a truly operatic duet — the father demands to know why. Jack replies: “Dad, I’m not Joe.” They argue. The tension — and passion — rises, till finally Jack flatly, unequivocally refuses. His father regards him for a moment, then says, with disappointment and contempt: “I know — you’re not Joe...”

  And with that, the older man exits, leaving Jack alone on the stage, crushed. And the audience wiped out along with him.

  Of course, we had to play the resolution. What or who changed Jack’s mind, convinced him to run for office? From what we knew of the family, it could only have been one person. His mother, Rose. Which gave us our next moment in the show — Rose persuading her son that it’s his duty to make peoples’ lives better, a responsibility that goes with being a Kennedy. The First Act concludes with Jack campaigning.

  No one will ever know for certain what actually took place back then — none of the long-dead players left any public, known account. But I’m convinced that we got it very close to right.

  Closer than any of the biographies and history books...

  More than that, however, it gave us the spine for the whole show — the conflict between Jack Kennedy and his father. And it demonstrates the importance of listening, of hearing subtext, of digging beneath the surfaces of your characters, whether fictional or real, no matter what you’re writing.

  Character Traps

  One of the keys to writing any kind of gripping fiction, which I’m sure is elementary to most of you, is this: catch one or more of your characters at a crisis point — a life-changing moment. They’re on the verge of something. Good or bad. Positive or not. Or something momentous has just occurred. That’s pretty much the classic approach.

  But in heightening your drama or comedy in those ways, be on guard against falling into the trap of creating cliché characters. The dumb cop, the sympathetic bartender, the aged-but-kindly stage-doorman, the seething nerd, the ambitious, stage-struck wannabe actress, the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. And on and on. You know the types. You know them because they are hackneyed, because you’ve seen them repeatedly. And worse than simply having started with a cliché, such characters will usually only take you in the direction of more clichés. Story-clichés. Predictability.

  The Obvious.

  Traps.

  Of course, true originality is almost impossible to achieve — but freshness is both possible — and — not just desirable — it is essential.

  In television we have a phrase for the Obvious: “on-the-nose” (in marking-up scripts we abbreviate it to “OTN,” and we use it to describe obvious dialogue as well — more on that later).

  It’s worth rem
embering, however, that every cliché was once someone’s original creation. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade is the prototype for virtually every private eye that has followed. Before Spade, it was Sherlock Holmes. The Godfather is an example of an innovative take on familiar stereotypes that have since become, themselves, cliché. Until David Chase gave them a fresh spin in The Sopranos. Emily Bronte’s Jane Eyre is the basis for the Gothic Heroine, and the novel itself the blueprint for those written since, from Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca to countless potboilers.

  Admittedly, an element of cliché is sometimes desirable, a kind of shorthand for the audience. It used to be said of Rogers & Hammerstein’s incredibly popular string of Broadway musicals — as a kind of left-handed compliment — that they were “not only original, but familiar.” This can also apply to creating characters who will only appear in a single episode of a television series. There is usually not enough time to give them much more than one or two dimensions, so we try to achieve a spin that renders them fresh, though not too difficult to recognize. But in longer-forms, such as novels, even your most minor characters should be fleshed-out — and, if only in small ways, surprising — inventively designed.

  Again, even if you don’t use all of it.

  In any case, stereotypes are something every writer should think about, be aware of. And when you recognize that you’re creating a cliché character, ask yourself if it’s really what you want to do. Does the familiar character add to your story, or cheapen it? If it isn’t adding anything, change it.

  One way to approach that kind of change is to stand the familiar on its ear.