by Marge Piercy
Some years ago, before he became a well-known essayist, a friend had received what at that time in his career was a prestigious assignment. He had been hired by a national environmental organization to write the cover copy to accompany their annual Beaches of the World calendar and he was to be paid a very large stipend. I was excited for him and asked, every time I saw him, how it was going. The first time, he said he was doing his research, walking local beaches and driving down to Connecticut and up to Maine when time allowed. The next time I asked, he said he was considering a trip to Florida, stopping on the way to visit the beaches of Cape Hatteras. A couple of weeks later, he still hadn’t started the piece and when he said he was pondering a trip to the Pacific Northwest coast, I understood that under the weight of succeeding brilliantly, he had tied himself into a knot and was afraid to start.
“You just have to ask yourself one thing,” I told him. “Who the hell reads a calendar?”
Later, he told me he began the piece the next day and finished it soon after.
You have to remember not to take yourself too seriously. In this exercise, we’re asking you to make up a beginning that doesn’t necessarily lead to anything; hence, it may be the beginning of nothing. No beginning (especially something that is the beginning of nothing) is chiseled in stone. You can tear it up, rewrite it, place it in the middle of the piece, save it as something you might use later on. The trick is simply to begin. If you don’t begin, you will never finish. Moreover, be real; nothing you are likely to write will become as important as the Bill of Rights or the Magna Carta or even War and Peace. And even if it should become important, it wouldn’t have if you did not begin. Remember, you can always change what you write, but if you don’t write it, there’s nothing to improve upon. So now, begin!
Exercise: Beginning in a Different Place
Take a story you have already written. It can be the first chapter of a novel or a memoir; it can be a short story. This is an exercise most easily carried out on a computer. Try starting the story in various different places and print it out each time to see what you have. Did you find a better, more engaging beginning?
Exercise: Changing the Plan of Attack
Again, take a story you have already written. Try starting the story then in a completely different way. If you began with a general scene setting or narration, plunge us immediately into an ongoing situation. If you began in the middle of a situation, try starting with dialog, something striking or startling or intriguing that one of your characters says, and then launch into the scene or into the story. See with each choice what happens to your story. You may find you need things you did not include before or that, more likely, you can cut whole paragraphs and perhaps whole pages.
Where to Start the Story of Your Life
As we suggested earlier, you want to start a memoir with an event that was involving, intriguing, dramatic; something that arouses curiosity or surprise or amusement. But how do you choose one event out of all those that comprised a long life? It seems overwhelming. Remember that the place you start writing need not be what will become page one of the story. You can change it later on. Nor do you have to begin chronologically. You can start anyplace at all in your life. Here are some exercises that might get your engine going.
Exercise: Finding an Emotionally Moving Event
Perhaps you should start with an event that you found emotionally moving in some way. Maybe it was a traumatic event—a time in your life when you felt in danger or when what you cared for most was ripped from you or you were afraid it would be taken from you. Perhaps it was a sickness—your own, your partner’s, your mother’s, your brother’s. Or it was a death—a family member, a friend, a lover, even an enemy? Or a stranger whose death you witnessed?
Perhaps it was something that deeply shamed you—a party thrown for you to which no one came. A time you were caught publicly in a lie. Perhaps you had invented yourself a family that sounded more interesting than your own, and now your parents stand before your friends and you are unmasked. Perhaps you pretended to have attended a better school than you had or to have earned a degree, when in fact you dropped out before commencement. Maybe you lied to get a job. Or lied to impress a possible lover. Maybe you tried to make yourself important in some other social context.
Perhaps it was something that made you so happy you could not believe you had won that prize, that award; that the person you had been daydreaming about suddenly turned and indicated that they were aware of you, too, and interested. Perhaps you suddenly inherited or were given something you had always wanted but never expected to possess. Perhaps you were plucked from an insignificant role to take over the lead in a theater production or a business project.
It’s possible you came face to face with an old phobia or a latent fear—of a fierce guard dog suddenly loosed into your path, a feral animal such as a bear encountered on a trail. Or did you waken in the night to smoke and flames and only seconds to figure an escape route and grab a baby, wake your mother, grab your cat or dog? Perhaps your tire went flat late at night on a country road in the years before cell phones and you had to figure out what to do. Perhaps you woke up to sounds of an intruder.
Maybe a strong experience was that time you had a sudden and powerful breakthrough in your personal life, your work, your creativity, your understanding. A strong religious or mystical experience can work in this manner, although this sort of event is extremely hard to describe in a way that others can understand—but some writers have been able to do so successfully. A sudden move to a higher level in some manner of performance can feel magical and strongly empowering. Sometimes the Aha! moment, the click, is one that is political or philosophical. This is not as easy to render dramatically as many of the other types of experiences we have considered, but it can be done. Remember Helen Keller.
All of these “supposes” are dramatic places in which you might be able to enter your life and start writing about it. Any one of them might be page one, or might eventually be turned into a scene or two in the heart of your matter. But sometimes a time and place in our lives with a strong emotional resonance is a scene we can pry ourselves into and begin to write about.
A Fictional Version Of The Same Exercise:
Instead of mining your life for a traumatic or otherwise emotionally compelling scene, you can give entrance to a character who has been giving you difficulty by doing the same thing with him or her. You pick out an outstandingly powerful and emotional scene, a time that shook them for good or ill. You write that scene as a door into that character. Writing them in action and reaction at a pivotal point in their lives may give you a handle on the character and help make that person you are creating more real and far more vivid to you. Any of the events we suggested above are excellent for this exercise, or choose an event of your own that has equally powerful emotional resonance.
3
Characterization
It is easier to talk about some of the factors that make for unsuccessful characters than it is to say simply and straight out what makes characters work. You’ll discover that some people will tell you that a given character is excellent and believable and others will find the same character uninteresting or unbelievable. That is standard and you learn to accumulate many opinions before deciding for yourself. In fiction as in real life we find some people charming whom others find boring and are repelled by some people who, we notice with chagrin, others adore. There is a personal chemistry side to the characters in novels which it is folly to ignore and impossible to explain. It would be irrelevant in approaching Rodin’s statue The Thinker to feel that you would like to have dinner or take in a movie with him, but when we are dealing with characters we read about, that irrational chemistry side does matter. We have to be able to find Vronsky attractive to identify with Anna Karenina; if we take a violent dislike to Little Red Riding Hood, we will be rooting for the wolf, and the story will be quite different. Often, readers can only generalize when they try to tell you why a c
haracter worked for them—because the character is funny, they might say—and less than honest when a character displeases them—because the character may very well remind them of someone they don’t like or something they don’t like about themselves. (Ira got a very honest rejection letter once from an editor at a major New York publishing house, passing on his novel The Kitchen Man because, the editor said, she hated the main character, Gabriel Rose. He reminded her too much of herself.)
However, when several readers tell you that the same character is not believable or comprehensible, you are in trouble. Often in the work of apprentice and aspiring writers there are three kinds of characters that don’t work.
The first is a character based upon the writer herself, but one in which her self-hatred is in charge. Often young writers set up a piece of themselves to castigate and punish and perhaps kill off as if by that means they could get rid of the parts of themselves they most detest. Indeed, writing about some aspect of your life or yourself that you find traumatic or painful is often a way of dealing with that pain. But self-hatred can be a besetting sin or weakness to a novelist. The desire to punish yourself vicariously distorts the work. The writer is unable to differentiate himself or herself from the character, and therefore unable to create a character that is multi-dimensional and interesting. We wonder why we are supposed to want to read about this person. Often such a character is both boring and unpleasant. We may desire to step on him or her after a chapter or two as we might step on a large ant, but we have no desire to enter their experiences and live them.
At Leapfrog Press, we receive a manuscript about every two weeks in which the non-adventures of a young man are recounted in full—usually his failures to get laid, to find an interesting and glamorous job, to receive the recognition he feels himself entitled to. Usually such narratives are short on characterization as well as action. There is a lot of casual cool conversation, lots of going to bars and parties and not much else. The protagonist is a blank. His friends are hastily drawn caricatures. Females are characterized by how they put out or reject the protagonist and are otherwise simply collections of body parts. The writers always wonder why readers or listeners do not respond with enthusiasm.
Now, you could retort by pointing to the work of Philip Roth, for instance, whose characters may come right out and say, not only as far back as Portnoy’s Complaint, but in later works such as Sabbath’s Theater, something like, I am a crazy person, I do detestable things, but the difference is in the tone. The character doesn’t hate himself for it. Or, put another way, the character thinks it’s his only choice. In fact, acting so crazy is the right thing to do, the only thing he can do; he’ll tell you a hundred different reasons for it, reasons that you can even identify with. Roth’s Mickey Sabbath is a hostile, self-indulgent man who treats people badly and relishes weird sex ... but does so in response to his terror of dying. And he does it with a kind of manic energy you’re drawn to. This character is handled with a different tone than the twenty-something barfly with major complaints about the way life is treating him. Don’t overlook the fact that Roth’s character is an older man with many accomplishments and life experiences under his belt. This doesn’t give him moral license to be nasty and unpleasant, but since he’s lived a full life, and since he’s near death, the reader is more prone to accept his reflections. The reader might have less tolerance for the complaints of a twenty-something slacker still living at home.
Look at Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, or Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern, same schtick: they transcend self-hatred because they take it to its ridiculous limits (turning into a large cockroach; a grand metaphor for how one is treated in the world) or find themselves in situations that are pathetic (being terrified of your suburban neighbor), but with which you are able to identify. It is not that you can’t write about unsympathetic characters. The problem is to give the reader something about them with which identify, or to be fascinated by, or curious about. It can be their humorous take on the world, or their very strange world view. You’re attempting to give the reader a reason to spend time with them.
The second common problem, and this is especially relevant for memoir writing, arises with characters drawn directly from life. Often they do not work, especially if you do not know or cannot bring yourself to imagine the person intimately enough. It is not that you cannot use someone you know as a model for a character—you can, as long as you understand that you may only be dealing with a piece of them. The grandmother you adore and admire is also a person in her own right. Concentrating only on the kindness you have known from her (and neglecting, for instance, her early life, or her ornery side, or her heated feuds with members of the family) will make her less interesting than a more fully imagined eighty year-old woman. And the opposite situation: you can certainly write about a person who has done you wrong, as long as you are not exercising your ambivalent feelings towards them in a way that interferes with the creation of a believable character in a believable plot. Revenge is not the best motive for writing a story. It distorts too often.
Many times you will hear a story in a workshop and criticize the behavior of a character only to be told, but that’s the way it happened. Too bad. If you do not understand a character, then you will not be able to write well about that character. If someone provoked you in real life too much for you to empathize with them or to grasp their motivation, then you will not do any better with them in print. The reader will not understand them either, and that’s a problem.
Often, in real life, we do not really know what a character means the first time we encounter such a person. It is only the third or fourth time we meet a particular constellation of characteristics, of traits, that we can understand what is true strength and true weakness. How often have you admitted to a friend that in the beginning, you were wary of them; you really didn’t like them? As we get older, we find out how a lot of stories turn out in real life, and what motivates a person’s behavior, and that enables us to understand our characters better and to build richer ones. After we have come to understand the characters of those around us by watching them in action under stress, in good and bad times, over many years, we can build better and more convincing characters in our stories and novels. One way to do this is to show your character acting differently in various situations, with different people. In college I had a beloved teacher, one I admired for his insight and humor. However, walking across the street from his house one day I saw him in a temper, kicking his dog in the stomach. I never again saw this kindly man in the same light because I had glimpsed a piece of his character I had never imagined. Try to imagine your characters interacting in different situations. To whom are they kind? Impatient? To whom do they prostrate themselves? How do they treat animals? Children? The elderly? Allowing the reader to observe your characters in interactions with others is an excellent way of showing the diversity of their personalities.
The problem may be that you saw only one aspect of a character, and that was an aspect you disliked. Let’s say it is a racist school teacher. Or a high school drug dealer who hangs out in the mall. It is not that you cannot use someone you dislike as a model for a character, but if you’re going to concentrate only on the parts you dislike, and not imagine them more fully, it’s best that that character function only as a walk-on in your story. If you have malevolent or ambiguous feelings about someone, you may not be able to allow yourself to fully imagine them as a person with an interior life as well as outward behavior. If you do not intimately understand a character, that is, take the time and make the effort to imagine all their contradictions—the good in them as well as the bad, the people they treat with kindness as well as the people they hurt—then you will not be able to write well about that character. As writers we’re fascinated with the ambiguity of human behavior. Life is not simple; motivation is complex. People act out of a variety of motives. We may kill out of intense love; we may compliment someone because we strongly dislike them. A mass murderer may be very kind
to his elderly parents. The reason the legend of Robin Hood has lasted for more than five centuries is that he was a mugger with sympathy for the poor.
The third type of character that tends to be less than successful is the character type drawn not from knowledge, not from observation, not from musing about people you have known and your own reactions and motivations, your weird little foibles, your personal superstitions, but from other writers, or commonly, TV and movies. With each imitation, such types are farther from reality, more plastic, and a reader feels that diminution. Such characters are made of words, not from information or observation or insight that informs those words. What are some types? The tough guy detective. The Jewish mother. The proper librarian. The dumb blonde secretary. The Valley girl. The stoned-out surfer dude. The pistol-toting drug dealer from the projects wearing a baseball cap and heavy gold jewelry.
It is not that we cannot work in types. Much comedy involves types and often, so does genre writing. Most writing involves some use of types. But for stock character types to work, they must be entered and made to come alive.
Let’s take an example: the tough guy detective. How do we make this tired old type interesting?1. You can write a parody by exaggerating the type. He keeps whiskey in his desk and when he wants a drink he bites the neck off the bottle. He speaks in mono-syllables only; wears his shoulder holster in the shower; keeps a gun behind every door in his house, including the refrigerator and one taped under the toilet seat.
2. You keep the type but humanize it. He is a tough guy detective but all those years of drinking have nearly done him in, and he is a vociferous member of AA. He takes vitamin pills by the handful and is concerned with food additives. How many detectives in mysteries today love to cook?