So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  What does your character do for a living and how does that person feel about working? What is their work history? What would be their fantasy job? What do they do for fun?

  What happens when they are thwarted or blocked? Do they show anger? Conceal it? Swallow it? Who do they blame for their troubles? Themselves? Their mother? Blacks? Jews? Asians? Native Americans? The rich? Women? A hated rival? Everybody else?

  Does your character identify more with their mother or their father? What kind of childhood did the character have? What do they tell themselves about their childhood (as opposed to how it was); how do they present it to others?

  What is the person’s relationship to objects? You might ask yourself what possessions they have and whether any of their possessions mean something particular—obsessive or simply enjoyable or prideful—to them. Do they hoard? Do they have certain beloved objects we associate with them? How do they relate to technology? What kind of relationship do they have with their vehicle?

  What discrepancies are interesting in the character between professed or even deeply held values and behavior? How honest is the person about those failures, to him- or herself? To others? It is in such contradictions and the way a character may handle them that we sometimes grasp their essence.

  Some of these questions will be useful and some will not and so you may generate your own lists. However, I will share with you one question I find extremely useful whenever I am having difficulty entering a character. Empathy is part of the necessary equipment of any novelist who aspires to more than rewriting their own early or current history. But sometimes empathy fails. One of my own ways is then to ask of my character what is asked in the next to last position of a Tarot reading: What is most hoped for and/or most feared? Often that is a key to a character.

  My last little trick for entry is to give the character some little piece of myself, some moment of my childhood or my adult life, to give it over and thus lose it. But often that little blood sacrifice works, and the character then can be entered and comes alive. Basically, you enter a character wherever and whenever you can so that you can look at the world as that person sees it and sees themselves. Fiction is preeminently the art that requires both empathy and imagination. Autobiography will only carry a writer so far, maybe one good novel of youth and one of middle age, unless she or he has a truly extraordinary life or mind. Once you grant that the novelist works out of other people’s lives as well as her own, you grant her a license to write about old age while in her thirties, about the loss of a child while hers are secure, or even unborn or never to be conceived, about passion out of tranquility, about ax murder and poison when she will not set a mouse trap.

  Fans of a particular novel may assume the author is the protagonist. Sometimes a reader will become incensed if you explain that a particular character is not literally yourself. Sometimes such a reader will assume you are attempting to fool them; that you are a hypocrite who lacks the courage to stand up and be revealed as an ex-mental patient or a lesbian mother or whatever. The second common reaction is annoyance and disillusionment. I thought it was true and now you tell me you just made it up. We still have a Puritan mistrust of the imagination as a vehicle of truth, an unwillingness to understand that the patterns and forms of art may be true in ways that are not literal, but profound. Successful fiction has been created out of the deeply felt stories of wolves, cats, dogs, horses, Neanderthals, intelligent arthropods, gods, beasts and robots. Sometimes the urge to fiction comes from exploring selves not lived out. I am aware of countless possibilities I did not choose, myriad alternate selves I might have become had I acted otherwise or had chance descended on me with a different leverage. The urge to fiction is, I suspect, partly the urge to explore those alternate universes of possibility. Every character I have created in every novel has some aspects of myself built in and I have lived that character while writing it. Thus even when we are writing about lives extremely different from our own, choices we will never have to make, events we will never in our own flesh experience, we can still learn a great deal about ourselves as we create and explore very different characters in fiction.

  One device for giving a sense of character I have not discussed is voice. Often when I am using various viewpoints in a novel, I take care that each one has a different voice. I want it to be the case that if you pick up the novel and turn at random to a page, even if there are ten different viewpoint characters, you will instantly be able to tell from the language and the style exactly which character’s mind you are in. I believe that even though I used ten viewpoints in Gone to Soldiers, if you read random pages in the novel, you can tell from the voice and diction in whose viewpoint I was writing.

  Often if you are writing in the first person in a character, characterization through choices of language and style, diction and word choice, are particularly important. But it is also a good idea to create this clear differentiation in the third person. Take another look at the work of some of the masters of creating voice: Grace Paley, in her short stories. All Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Barbara Kingsolver’s Taylor Greer in The Bean Trees. But the first person voice can be especially important if you are writing a memoir.

  Writing sex scenes is partly a matter of taste. Unless you’re writing pornography, the graphic description of body parts inserted into body parts is not the best way to go. One exception to that statement is when you are aiming for something cold. It is the description of a woman having sex with a man she loathes, going through with it for some reason other than desire. Then the bare physical description would work.

  The other extreme is to go all metaphorical. A few well-chosen metaphors are dandy, but too much reliance on metaphor can get ludicrous. You have to watch your language carefully. You want to infuse the scene with the emotions of your protagonist, if she or he has them. Sex can be a great door into character. How someone thinks about sex is a good clue to character. Is he making love, establishing possession, making a conquest, proving his superiority as a male, taking from another man? Is she submitting or making love or establishing her own desirability, taking from another woman, having or letting herself be taken? Is making love a pleasure or an investment? Is your protagonist sharing or spending?

  Also, the way someone makes love can demonstrate character. Does he always make love in the same way? Would it make him nervous to change position? Does she always want to be a bottom or a top? Is she orgasmic? Does he make love brutally, slam bang, or is he conscious of the woman’s reactions and interested in giving her maximum pleasure? Is she knowledgeable about the male body or ignorant? Does she think about what she is going to wear tomorrow as the act continues? Is she making To Do lists in her head? Is he fantasizing about someone he saw on television or his old girlfriend? Is there role playing involved? Some lovers make animal noises. Some wail or scream. Some are silent. Some speak words they consider dirty. Others say they love the partner, over and over again, whether or not in fact they do.

  You have to consider how to reveal character; you have to consider what effect you want your scene to have. Is it romantic? Is it sensuous? Is it boring? Is it distressful in some way to one or the other participants? Is it painful for one of them? Is it disillusioning? Is it startling in some way? Is it some kind of breakthrough for your characters or just the usual? Is it sex for money without involvement? Is the woman faking an orgasm or the man faking emotion?

  Don’t, unless you are writing romance or pornography, have your characters achieve instant simultaneous ecstasy when they tumble into bed. Sex is as complicated as anything else in our lives, one reason it is useful for characterization. If the sex is too perfect, we won’t believe you.

  Some writers put in too many sex scenes, as if afraid the action will bog down and the reader will lose interest. Such writers do not trust their own storytelling and think they need to seduce the reader into continuing with one sex event after another. But repetitive sex scenes are as boring as any other
kind of scene that is repeated too often.

  Other writers are too embarrassed or prudish or proper to write sex scenes at all. If you are writing about two people flirting for forty pages and then getting it on, mostly we do not want to skip that part. We want to find out what really happens between them in that bedroom. It need not go on for pages, but mostly we do need to be present. We’ve been waiting for them to get together, and we cannot be cheated of that moment.

  Now, if you are writing about your own life, whether you give yourself a new name or write in an openly autobiographical memoir, you may think there’s no problem creating characters—and certainly not in depicting yourself. Think again. Often people who are writing directly out of their own lives have more trouble trying to characterize themselves or their intimates in a sharp and memorable manner than do writers who are making up the inhabitants of Dodge City or the Orion Nebula. Whether you are writing fiction or a memoir, the means of characterization available to you are the same. Much of what I have written about characterization in fiction applies to writing personal narrative just as strongly. Once again, deep characterization methods include the uses of a character’s fears, anxiety, desires, passions, attachments to things and to people, friendships and antipathies, real beliefs. It’s a problem when someone writing about themselves fails to imagine themselves as a character; that kind of writing makes the assumption that character development is not important, that the reader knows all about them because, of course, the writer does.

  It is a problem, too, when you are writing about your life if you do not understand the other characters you are presenting to us and their motives for acting as they did, but it is not insurmountable. Mary Gordon’s memoir about her father, The Shadow Man, is a piece of detective work, an account of trying to understand who he was. She attempted to discover his family background, the forces that distorted him, who he really was. It is the quest to understand her father, whom she did not easily understand, that is the moving force of her story.

  In many ways it does not matter whether you are writing a novel or short story or memoir: the devices of characterization are pretty much the same. The characters must be vivid and differentiated whether they are invented or your own Aunt Sharon and Uncle Jack. In one case, you must turn your imagination loose; in the other, you must mine memory for the richest scraps of observation and recollection, ways of speaking, ways of being in the room and in the world. When you’re writing a memoir, you might want to accumulate a simpler dossier on each of your major characters than you need in fiction, a dossier that consists of everything you can remember about the person, and what other family members and friends may remember, if you ask.

  Although we’ll address the implications of writing about families and relatives in the chapter “A Scandal in the Family,” it is quite true that in some cases, especially if information on them is not available to you, you may have to re-imagine family members (attempting to be true to your recollections as well as your knowledge of their motivations, desires, etc.:) before they become successful characters. Since you don’t know all about them (remembering them, for example, from the vantage point of childhood, how could you?), you’ll have to re-invent them at different stages in their lives. You’ll have to ask some of the same questions about your great grandfather when he was twenty years old that you’d ask about any character.

  There are in any life a great many minor characters, major of course in their own lives, but minor in the one you are writing about. Sometimes it is necessary to meld some of these people together into one person for the sake of simplicity and to avoid introducing too many characters and confusing the reader. You could make your two best friends in college into one confidant. I remember reading a memoir about a stroke survivor in which she explained she had turned several of the friends who had helped her while she was recovering into one person, for clarity and in order to better focus her story.

  One important way of characterizing your people is by the language a character speaks, the way they use words, their use of jargon or inflated or rough language, what they say and do not say. Often you remember someone as much by the way they spoke as by any other salient point about them. If you can give that flavor to their speech, or mine your memory for particular phrases they used often, you are a good way toward creating a person the reader will believe in.

  In writing about ourselves, there is something that we shouldn’t forget. It is not uncommon that someone will be a lively talker, full of anecdotes and lively language and comparisons that startle you or make you smile. But sometimes when that very person sits down to write about her life, instead of writing with flavor and energy, she writes in a flat boring manner. She leaves out all the juicy details and the local color and gives us a sort of abstract summing up that has no life to it. It’s not clear why this happens. It may be that a certain inner censor comes into play, which says to the writer, “Oh, you can’t include that!” Or, “Get on with the story. That detail isn’t important. Who are you to take up so many pages, anyhow?” Or perhaps the situation is so real to the writer that she feels her reader will somehow automatically see what she sees, hear what she hears because, of course, it’s all there so vividly in her mind. Maybe it’s pure embarrassment. “My God! I can’t really tell people my father’s nickname for lecherous Uncle Richard.” Whatever the reason, the writing lacks all flavor and originality. It sounds like the kind of writing you find in a local newspaper. Check out the chapter on Dialog and remember, your character’s language is an important tool in making him or her alive for the reader.

  CREATING CHARACTERS: THE DOSSIER

  We fill out this questionnaire with every major character we create. We suggest you key it in to your computer or make photocopies for later use. Answering these questions in full (and adding any more that are helpful to you or more specific to your project) leads to the creation of a rich and useful record of physical, emotional, and historical information, information that the reader may never see but that will send your imagination digging into surprisingly fertile new places. For minor characters, you might want to answer only some of these questions. For people in your memoirs, people you assume you know well, you’ll be impressed how creative speculation can make a familiar person come to life on the page.

  NAME:

  WHAT DO THEY MOST LIKE TO BE CALLED:

  DO THEY HAVE A NAME THAT THEY MOST RESENT BEING CALLED? WHO HAS CALLED THEM BY THIS NAME:

  AGE:

  PHYSICAL APPEARANCE:

  WAY OF DRESSING:

  HOW DOES YOUR CHARACTER FEEL ABOUT HIS OR HER FACE AND BODY?

  WHEN YOUR CHARACTER THINKS ABOUT HIS OR HER BODY OR FACE, WHAT ARE THEY MOST VAIN ABOUT?

  WHAT WOULD THEY MOST LIKE TO CHANGE ABOUT THEIR PHYSICAL APPEARANCE?

  VOICE AND/OR ACCENT:

  KIND OF LAUGH:

  DO THEY SING? WITH OTHERS? ALONE? IN THE SHOWER? WHAT DO THEY SING?

  WHERE WERE THEY BORN? WHAT CITY?

  WHERE DO THEY LIVE NOW? WHY? DO THEY LIKE IT?

  WHAT EVENTS GOING ON IN THE WORLD WHEN THEY WERE LITTLE WERE ADULTS MOST LIKELY TO TALK ABOUT WHEN THEY SAT HAVING COFFEE?

  WHERE AND HOW EDUCATED?

  ARE THEY PROUD OR ASHAMED OF THEIR EDUCATION? HAVE THEY EVER LIED ABOUT IT?

  OCCUPATION?

  IS THAT WHAT THE PERSON EXPECTED TO BE DOING AT THIS POINT IN HIS OR HER LIFE? BETTER OR WORSE?

  IS THAT WHAT THEIR PARENTS’ EXPECTED OF THEM?

  WHAT DID THEIR PARENTS URGE THEM / INFLUENCE THEM TO DO?

  AT WHAT AGE DID THE PERSON FIRST WORK? WHAT WAS THE JOB?

  WHAT WERE THE BEST AND WORST JOBS THE PERSON EVER HELD? WHY?

  WHAT WOULD BE THEIR FANTASY JOB?

  WHAT KIND OF VEHICLE IF ANY DOES THE PERSON DRIVE?

  MARRIED? LIVING WITH SOMEONE? WHO?

  CHILDREN? WITH THEM OR NOT?

  WERE THEIR PARENTS HAPPY TOGETHER WHEN THEY WERE BORN? LATER?

  WHEN THEY WERE GROWING UP, DID THEIR
PARENTS ARGUE? ABOUT WHAT?

  SIBLINGS?

  CURRENT RELATIONSHIP WITH PARENTS AND/OR SIBLINGS?

  OTHER IMPORTANT RELATIVES (AUNTS, UNCLES, COUSINS, GRANDPARENTS):

  WHICH OF THESE RELATIVES WERE THE MOST IMPORTANT FOR GOOD OR ILL?

  WHICH RELATIVE DID THE CHILD HEAR THAT HE OR SHE LOOKED LIKE, AND HOW DID HE OR SHE FEEL ABOUT THAT COMPARISON?

  FIRST EXPERIENCE OF DEATH IN OR OUT OF THE FAMILY:

  SOMETHING HAPPENED TO YOUR CHARACTER WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG, PERHAPS IN GRADE SCHOOL THAT THEY ARE EMBARRASSED ABOUT TO THIS DAY. WHAT OCCURRED?

  WHO IS YOUR CHARACTER’S BEST FRIEND, IF THEY HAVE ONE?

  IF THEY WERE TO CONFIDE IN SOMEONE, WHO WOULD IT BE? A FRIEND? BARTENDER? FAMILY MEMBER? RELIGIOUS LEADER? DOCTOR? THERAPIST? STRANGER?

  IF YOU SURPRISED YOUR CHARACTER IN THE STREET, WHERE MIGHT THEY BE GOING THAT THEY WOULD LEAST WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT?