by Marge Piercy
3. You work against the type. In Play It Again, Sam you have Woody Allen trying to be Humphrey Bogart, looking ridiculous in a trench coat and fedora, coughing when he lights up a cigarette. This is a standard device of comedy, also, the comedic character who longs to be a different type than he or she is: the shlemiel who wants to be Don Juan. The klutz who wants to be an athlete. The bookish librarian with wild sexual fantasies.
A variation would be Columbo, if you remember the show. Instead of a tight-lipped Joe Friday, you couldn’t shut the guy up. He was always interested. Drove his suspects crazy with his questions. “Oh, gee, Mr. Moneybags, is that how you use arsenic on your lawn to keep down the sowbugs, that’s absolutely fascinating.” A slob and a family man and always having a little trouble with his car instead of zooming around the LA streets in your standard car chase, Columbo acted so dumb the perps would sometimes condescend to him by answering his questions, and always find themselves in deeper trouble.
You can work farther against type altogether by having a high school girl as a vampire-slayer; or a sweet little old lady like Miss Marple as your detective. Agatha Christie, by working against type, created a type in itself, the apparently delicate but very bright spinster who seems like somebody’s maiden aunt till she traps the killer. A standard in today’s mystery novel is the “amateur sleuth,” an ordinary person drawn into a crime they must solve. Andrew Greeley’s Father Blackie Ryan is a priest detective, a Bishop, no less. Barbara Neely’s Blanche White is a street smart African-American domestic.
Exercise:
Think of some stock character or literary stereotype and figure out how to make it new, more engaging or more sinister. Strike, in Richard Price’s novel, Clockers, is a crack dealer in the projects. Not your typical rock-tough, fast-talking, inscrutable heavy, he has a nervous stomach, and instead of sitting on a park bench sipping malt liquor, he’s rarely without a bottle of Maalox. Zel, the dentist in William Goldman’s Marathon Man adds another dimension to a profession often typed as a self-important milquetoast: he’s a Nazi war criminal sadist. Figure out some of your own: the Jewish Mother assassin? The pro boxer whose passion is hybridizing day lilies? The male prostitute street hustler who is a serious student of zen?
Now when you are in your character, they experience emotions. Often that’s where writers lose their characters in clichés. “His heart was in his mouth.” “She thought she would die of shame.” “He was on top of the world.” “Her heart sank.” “His stomach clenched in terror.”
You have to make the fear, the terror, the joy, the shame, the anger, the desire happen, not tell us about it or feed us clichés. Find fresh metaphors. Find more accurate physiological responses. Describe what is producing the anger, the joy, the fear so that we can experience it, too. Build into what you are presenting the aspect of it or her or him or they that is producing the emotion. Make the fear happen, don’t tell us about it with abstractions. Maybe this event is calling up something in the past that is reinforcing the emotion. Explore the situation to see what you can pull from it that will help us understand your character.
In Maureen McCoy’s novel, Junebug, the narrator, seventeen year-old June Angel Host is visiting her mother, Tess, in prison, on Mother’s Day. Tess has been incarcerated for murder since June was five. In this excerpt, Tess stops an idyllic conversation with an unbearable confession:
From Junebug by Maureen McCoy:“Junie,” she said, and hearing my name broke the fantasy. It about killed me the way Tess could say it, the charge I got hearing my mother say, “Junie.”
Playtime’s over was the message in her eyes.
Shhh, no, Mama. Please, no.
I sat across from her, tables in a row, the room manic with sound, like the brain’s surprise when lightning hits. My arms stuck to the table’s graffiti scars, and I knew like the absolute end of childhood that Tess was going to mess up our world all over again and for good. I was her daughter and I knew this much. She’d been playing with me, and now ... she was finally going to answer the question no one asked. My heart was drumming the way hearts do on cue when terrified. I tried for a really mature thought: I can deal. But as my blood rushed through swells of sixty-eight percent water, girl life went down with the flood. And on she went, fast and creaturish. I heard my mother’s voice as if it came through the hand-held bullhorn used in the exercise yard off the nursery where little kids were allowed to run, where I used to giggle and clap my hands at flies and weeds and the tiny sky above.
Her voice was smoking, telling this story of death, reasoning it out left and right, which she had refused to do in court, or with any other human being all these years. I couldn’t look at her, I, her reason and love, as her voice faded into pure heat, like sex talk fanning my ear. I tried to shut it off. I can’t hear, I said; I am flooding, I am a current rushing away.
Now of course, the first thing we notice about somebody when we are approaching them from the outside is their physical appearance : size, style, coloration, race, age, what they are wearing, the way their voice sounds, the accent, the vocabulary, the sense of style.
Nonetheless, the most important thing about your characters is seldom how they look. There are characters who are incredibly real to us, and we cannot begin to say really what they look like. What does K. in Kafka’s The Trial look like? Is he tall or short, blond or dark? Who cares? One of the total clichés of fiction is to have your viewpoint character look in the mirror right off so that they can tell the reader exactly what they look like. Action stops, the story stops and we get a meaningless description. You may well want the reader to know what your character looks like, but often in apprentice writing, that’s all we find out. What does their size mean to them? Do they think of themselves as normal size, when you would look at them and think, What a little guy? Do they think of themselves as oversized? You might judge such a person handsome or merely passable, but how do they feel about themselves? People’s self images are often at odds with what other people observe. A woman who appears to you very attractive may think of herself as that fat kid who wore braces and had acne. Think how that might affect her behavior. Would she walk proudly into a party or enter quietly? Would she tend to stay in a bad relationship, despite everyone who observes her wondering why? When the reader observes her buying clothing for herself, is she opting for large sizes that hide her body? Will she never go to the beach when her friends ask? Your characters might be stuck back in high school popularity contests, still trying to make the team or join the ruling clique, while they are in reality astronauts or congressmen.
Similarly, we have all known people who were raised by doting parents and who truly believe themselves to be devastating and act accordingly, no matter how the world may fail to agree. Their self-confidence and their pleasure in the mirror never falters; it is the world that is wrong. If a man fails to accord her the value she places on herself, she thinks him afraid of a strong competent woman. If a woman fails to respond to such a character’s advances, she is frigid or scared of sex and can’t handle a real man. If you are over forty, you know former athletes now gone to flab who still have that confidence that came from being the best at something that was widely admired, even though those glory days are long gone. So if you describe such a person as a fifty-two year-old flabby man with a big belly, you are missing the essence of that character, who still sees himself as the basketball star, the quarterback, the ace pitcher. Remember Inspector Clouseau of the “Pink Panther” movies. He runs into a wall and blames the wall. “Stee-u-pid Architect! What a ridiculous place for a wall!” Writing prose allows you the freedom to wander around in your character’s mind and to exploit and develop their arrogance, their fears and insecurities, their great narcissism—traits that can bring your character alive for the reader.
Each character must be given a name. That name can suggest ethnicity, can define or not define the sex of the character. The name can suggest character. We all can remember names of the characters of Charles Dicken
s that define a type perfectly. Ebenezer Scrooge. Uriah Heep. Tiny Tim. Madame Defarge. Harold Skim-pole. Mrs. Jellyby. Wackford Squeers. Basically, you must believe you have chosen the true name of your character. Sometimes you will find that after a draft, you may change the names of one of your important characters because, as you have come to know them, the name is no longer appropriate. When you are writing a memoir, you have a decision whether to call a particular character Charlie Browne, or just C. or whether to tell us you have changed the names to protect the privacy of the people with whom you are dealing. In the latter case and in all fiction, when you are inventing a name, you might as well make up one that does a little of the work of characterization. Think even of the most commonly used names in English. Each has its own flow—Michael versus Mike. The prideful, multi-syllabic “Elizabeth” versus the tight, more controlled “Beth.” The formal use of the name “John” versus the free-wheeling “Jack.” Who uses each form of the name to call the character? What does the character prefer? How do they introduce themselves? Do they have a nickname? Is it flattering or derogatory? Who uses it?
How do they smell? Of sweat? Of lily of the valley? Of that ghastly stuff they spray on you in department stores if you can’t run fast enough? Of coal dust or wood smoke? Of sweat and sugar icing after working in the bakery?
And what is the quality of the person’s voice? How do they laugh? How do they move? How do they sit and stand and walk? How much space do they occupy? Some people contract to occupy minimal space and some, who are physically no larger, expand to occupy the entire back seat of a luxury car. The difference may depend on how much space they believe they are worth, or, how they react to others touching them. As a writer, that’s your raw material. You can mine it.
You might have a character that would go through four hundred pages without your ever describing a single piece of clothing, and you might have another character for whom what he or she wore would be an important element in characterization. Similarly there are certain characters who are evoked in our minds by some items of clothing, such as Sherlock Holmes’s deerstalker hat or Robin Hood’s green tunic.
When you are entering a character, you have to feel how they move. Do they move in spurts, in long fluid motions, rapidly, mechanically, carefully? Think of a dancer; think of an old lady making her way across an icy street. What is their natural speed of action and reaction?
What senses are most important to them? When they enter a room, do they respond first to sight, sound, smell, to abstract characteristics of the space, or to the social dimension of what is in the room? Some characters will be very observant. Their heads will be full of colors, of sensations; others will interpret the world in terms of sounds, rhythms. What work a person does will affect their perception of the world. A doctor will see cases, diseases; a dentist will look at people’s teeth and bite; an accountant will consider someone’s financial stability; a model will look at everyone else as being fit to be photographed or not. An aging stage actor may pay attention to who recognizes him and who treats him as a nonentity.
In dealing with the nonphysical characterization devices, one set includes the shallow devices of tics, hobby horses, tags, obvious habits of speech, running jokes. Deep characterization methods include fears, anxiety, desires, passions, attachments to things and to people, friendships and antipathies, real beliefs. It’s a good idea to combine both methods of characterization with any of your reasonably prominent characters.
The most important thing of all to know about your protagonist or any other very important character is this: What does that character want? It is what the protagonist wants and does not want that can set the plot in motion and certainly should be one of the chief mainsprings of the action. Wanting is not always positive. A character’s chief passion could be to avoid pain, rather than to achieve pleasure. A character may just want to stay alive, to continue to exist. Jack London’s famous story, “To Build a Fire,” has, as the primary motivation of the only character, not to freeze to death. A character may desire to escape from a prison, a relationship, a danger. When a character wants something that another character wants also, or wants to prevent the first one from having, we have the beginnings of action. Character A wants to leave a marriage; Character B, the partner, wants the marriage to continue. But as I have tried to suggest, most important characters in fiction cannot be so simply defined. A’s cannot simply be the desire to divorce. A must have a past, an inner life, fears and desires, relationships, fantasies, preferences, tastes, habits.
Minor characters have many uses in a book besides setting the major characters in a social context. But without that social context, we may not believe. Why is this woman totally alone and totally dependent on this guy she has just met? Where are her women friends? Where’s her family? If she has no friends, why not? What’s wrong with her or her situation? That social context helps us understand the major characters. Why would a young girl of eleven roam the cold city streets at night—because we’ve given her a mother, a minor character, who is always out drinking and desperately trying to pick up a man. A character’s friends and family can say a lot about a character. And something else again if she has no real friends at all.
Minor characters may also help to shade something in, represent alternatives the protagonist did not take, represent different choices or opinions or alternate fates. Sometimes minor characters represent other aspects of the major character, the darker or lighter side, if you will, their youth or their old age. Sometimes minor characters give local color, help to make a place real, alive, vivid. In The Kitchen Man, minor characters are extremely important. The protagonist, Gabriel Rose, is an aspiring playwright and a waiter in a pretentious restaurant. His friends, all fellow waiters, represent choices he does not make—Geller marries and has children; Matthew, a gay man, sleeps with his famous customers—and they also comment, freely and sarcastically, about Gabriel’s choices. Besides helping to create the back-biting, late-night, gossip-fueled world of the restaurant business, one of their important functions is to help portray Gabriel as a young man who is still very dependent on other people’s opinions. A lot of the shading in fiction depends on skillful use of minor characters. There are also the joys of the bizarre minor characters, sometimes named as in Dickens for their grotesquerie. On occasion, the sharply drawn or amusingly caricatured minor folk are what we most fondly remember from a book. Sancho Panza. Dr. Watson. Queequog. Merlin. Tinker Bell.
Another function of characters, whether major or minor, is to give an alternative view of each other. In Three Women, Suzanne, a law school professor and an appeals lawyer, sees herself as a bird of prey going after the rats of the system. Her estranged daughter, Elena, sees Suzanne as a fussy, tight-assed control freak compelled to micromanage everything in her life. Her best friend, Marta, sees Suzanne as someone who is too generous with herself. We begin to understand a person when we not only comprehend how that person sees herself, but how others see her, both positively and negatively.
When you can’t tell the minor characters apart without going back repeatedly to check their names, the story is in real trouble. In a novel, that might conceivably happen with some very minor character, although it’s best to be careful in dealing with the little guys that you do inform the reader each time in some reasonably subtle way just who that character is. You can do it simply in passing, in ways such as: “Susan saw Charles coming up the steps of the porch. Loretta nodded at him and looked away. It seemed to Susan that Loretta was not pleased to see her brother coming to the house.”
Sometimes, of course, you just have to bite the bullet and make a chart. In City of Darkness, City of Light, a novel about the French revolution, there are six viewpoint characters and a cast of thousands. The publisher asked for a Cast of Characters, a little guide, so that if you don’t happen to remember as you are going along who the Bishop of Arras is, or Collot d’Herbois, the handy dandy list will remind you.
Your minor characters can be
catalysts that draw out the different and sometimes conflicting emotions of your characters. Through the main character’s interplay with minor characters, we get to see the protagonist in action: How she acts in relation to an authority like a boss. How she treats a homeless guy on the street. Does she fight back when a stranger in a bar paws at her? Does she empty her bank account for a boyfriend who’s been hitting her up for months? Or for a family down the street who’s about to be evicted? Minor characters can serve as devices that spin your main characters into action—by making demands, by drawing them into trouble, by presenting temptations—that force your main characters to make a revealing choice or challenge them or force them to react under pressure.
When you’re working with your major characters before you really begin to write your story, you might want to accumulate dossiers on them. You’ll want to answer many deep questions about these major characters, beside the obvious questions of age, sex, and physical description. You’ll want to imagine them doing some characteristic action such as dancing, playing tennis; some kind of physical or mental work; you’ll need to know their family and education and class and ethnic background; and of course their name.
You might ask yourself whether they have close friends and how many. Who are their acquaintances? Their enemies? What do they seek in friends? Yes-men, siblings who mix rivalry and affection, mommas and daddies, challenges, supporters, networkers, someone who is primarily interesting because useful? What do they do when they’re lonely? Turn on the TV? Call up Mom? Go down to the corner bar and have a drink? Try to pick someone up? Get stoned? Eat? Meditate? Pray? If so, to whom and for what?