CHAPTER 2
CHARACTER: CASTING SHADOWS
BY BRANDI REISSENWEBER
When I taught creative writing on a pediatrics ward at a hospital I met a long-term patient, a thirteen-year-old girl who had been in and out of the hospital since she was two years old. She was sharp and witty but rarely ever wanted to write with me, no matter how enticing the writing project. She eyed me from the corner of the hospital playroom as I wrote with other young people, but every time I’d approach her she would send me away, telling me that, after all, the hospital wasn’t school.
One day, I found her reading a book in her room. I sat down and asked if she would read to me, which she did. That afternoon, I learned that she loved to read books, so we talked about some of our favorite stories. I asked, thinking it was a simple question: “Why do you enjoy reading?”
She looked at me, scratched her shortly cropped hair, and then opened her book again. I thought she was through with me as her eyes began to follow the lines on the pages. After a few minutes she looked up at me and said: “Because I get to meet lots of different people.”
We eventually wrote a story together. It was fantastical and full of the kinds of people she wanted to be around: those who could fly, aliens who would befriend her, people who were outrageous, graceful, and courageous, just like her. But what stuck with me most was her response to my question—that she read to meet people. That answer to what I thought was a simple inquiry lies at the heart of good storytelling.
When you read fiction, you are, first and foremost, meeting people. Characters are the core of a story and interact with or influence every other element of fiction. Characters are what drive a story, carrying the reader from the first to the last page, making readers care. How exciting would Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest be without Randle McMurphy, the rabble-rouser asylum patient who shakes up the system? Without Miss Amelia, the self-reliant and cross store owner who is unlucky in love, Carson McCullers’s “The Ballad of the Sad Café” would be about a dull, dusty town. And without the mysterious and glamorous Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby would be far from great.
Good writers create a sense that their characters are people—physical, emotional, living, breathing, thinking people. The more you manage to make your characters feel real, to create the illusion of an actual person on the page, the more likely your reader is to fall into the story, past the language and the words, letting the real world recede and be replaced by the fictional world you have created. As a writer, you want your reader to feel that your characters are substantial, authentic, dimensional. Real enough to cast shadows. Creating characters that seem dimensional and lifelike requires some artistry, to be sure, but with a little knowledge such a miraculous feat is entirely possible. Let’s examine the process.
THE BEAT OF DESIRE
Desire beats in the heart of every dimensional character. A character should want something. Desire is a driving force of human nature and, applied to characters, it creates a steam of momentum to drive a story forward. You may create a character with quirky habits and high intellect and vague tendencies toward adventure, but if all he does is sit on the couch and snack on lemon squares, the reader is going to find more excitement in thumb twiddling. Give that same character a desire to travel from Florida to Maine in a hot-air balloon and that begins to propel the story into motion, especially if the character doesn’t know how to acquire or pilot a hot-air balloon.
A character’s desire can be huge, looming, and intoxicating, like the desire to ease loneliness, to seek the revenge of a son’s death, or to climb to the peak of Mount Everest. Or the desire can be smaller and simpler: to find a wedge of stellar Brie, to escape the complaining of an ailing wife, or to coax the orchids into finally blooming in the backyard garden.
The grandness or simplicity of the desire is not important as long as the character wants it badly. In Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Theft,” the main character simply wants to retrieve her empty purse. However, this desire is rendered important to her and, therefore, it is important to the reader. A strong desire helps the reader identify and sympathize with the character, whereas a character without a strong desire will bore your readers, a great way to get them to abandon your story for good. After all, why should the reader care about a character retrieving a purse if she only kind of wants it back?
One of the benefits of spending time drawing a main character who has a strong desire is that the story line will grow organically from the character’s need. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, for example, the main character, Humbert Humbert, desires nymphets (his word for beautiful preteen girls), a category in which the youthful Lolita reigns queen. The story grows out of Humbert Humbert’s attempts to possess Lolita’s body and affections. If he didn’t crave Lolita with such fierceness, there would be no story.
What happens when characters don’t have desire? I once had a student who wrote a piece about two boys exploring their grandmother’s vast mansion. The reader followed the children up creaking stairs, into the dank attic, behind a false wall, and past steamer trunks filled with old photographs.
The description was wonderful, but the story fizzled out quickly. Why? Because the characters didn’t want anything. They were content with their adventures. Description, no matter how brilliantly crafted, cannot carry a story. What the piece needed was a driving force, a momentum to thrust the reader forward. If the boys found themselves trapped in the attic, the summer sun quickly heating up the small space to an unbearable degree, creating a desire for escape, that would have added some tension and interest. The gears of the story machine don’t start swirling into action until characters have a desire.
Desires, however, are not always as straightforward as they are in Porter’s “Theft” and Nabokov’s Lolita. For instance, in Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home,” Claire attempts to come to terms with her husband’s decision to continue with a fishing trip even after he and his buddies find a young woman’s dead body floating in the river. They secure the woman’s wrist to a tree trunk so her body won’t float away, and it is not until they are on their way home, when they can conveniently reach a phone, that they report the body to the police.
The story revolves around Claire, who wants to understand what has happened on this weekend, and why her husband and his friends dealt with the body so insensitively. Out of Claire’s intense desire to seek understanding, she questions her husband, which leads to arguments between them. She scours the newspapers for information and travels to attend the young woman’s funeral. She begins to sleep in the guest bedroom and is awakened one night to her husband breaking the lock on the bedroom door, simply to prove that he can do so. Claire’s desire to understand and come to terms with the decision her husband made is complex and circuitous, but no less compelling.
YOUR TURN:
Think of a character. If that’s too vague, make this character some kind of performer—actor, singer, magician—who has hit middle age and is finding that his or her career is now mostly faded glory. Or use a parent or child who is having difficulty with his or her own parent or child. Then think of a specific desire for this character. One driving desire. Make the desire something concrete—money, a career break, the touch of a certain person—instead of an abstract desire like love or personal growth. Once you find the character and desire, jot them down. We’ll be coming back to this character shortly.
HUMAN COMPLEXITY
Nothing is less compelling in a story than a character who acts like a million other characters you’ve encountered, exhibiting only one facet: the kindly grandma, the sinister janitor, the heroic patient. It’s easy enough to fall into this trap because it’s so easy to see people as types, at first. For example, the well-situated investment banker—are you picturing formal suits and a furrowed forehead? Long hours, lots of technical gadgets like handheld palm pilots and cellular phones, and a whole lot of excess cash? That’s a good place to start with this character, but your specific character should transcend this type. Richard, an investment banker, might have a lot of excess cash and work long hours, but maybe he also makes anonymous donations to the local Humane Society. On evenings when he’s had too much imported beer, he calls his sister’s last known number, even though she hasn’t lived there for at least a year.
Such distinctiveness makes Richard different from any other person who might fall into his type. When you create characters, explore the specific and unique details that will make them complex; not a type but a real person. We carry with us our histories, our experiences, our memories, each of our bundles distinctly different from anyone else’s. Craft characters in the same fashion.
In Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Connie, the main character, is a fifteen-year-old girl who is self-absorbed and insecure. Yet Oates didn’t stop there. She gave Connie qualities that raise her beyond this type. Connie has a “high, breathless, amused voice which made everything she said sound a little forced, whether it was sincere or not.” She easily abandons her friend when a popular guy comes along. She has disdain for her sister for still living at home at twenty-four years old and for not being as beautiful as Connie. She is convinced that her mother likes her better because of her beauty and that their arguments are just a front, “a pretense of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of little value to either one of them.” In the end, when her family is away at a barbecue and the sinister Arnold Friend pulls up and threatens to harm her family if she doesn’t submit to him, Connie eventually relents, sacrificing herself by walking toward Arnold, toward what she “did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.”
From the small details, like the sound of her voice, to the larger details of the ultimate decision she makes, Connie is revealed as a complex character. Not every fifteen-year-old teenager possesses this combination of traits. Not every fifteen-year-old would make the decision to walk out that door at the end of the story. Connie is not a type. She is a dimensional character, substantial enough to cast a shadow.
Writers are sometimes drawn specifically to the allure of the all-good or all-evil character, which is another version of the typecast character. Unless you’re writing a fairy tale, you’ll want to avoid these extremes. Aristotle once wrote that a character should be one “whose misfortune is brought about by some error or frailty.” Whether your characters meet misfortune or not, flaws will make them more interesting and authentic.
Frankie Machine, the main character in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, a card dealer in the nighttime circuit of Chicago’s bars, is a predominantly good character but certainly not without flaws. The most obvious flaw is his frantic struggle with drug addiction. Also, he seeks solace in an affair with Molly-O, avoiding his wife, who is cooped up at home in a wheelchair. And the crushing guilt Frankie feels over his wife’s immobility eventually causes him to leave her.
Those characters who are not fundamentally good should also be rendered with multiple facets. Bad guys aren’t bad every single second of the day. Sometimes, they’re just hanging out eating their take-out Chinese food, or waiting in line with their car at the car wash, or even doing something kindly, like helping an old lady pick up apples that have fallen from her grocery bag.
Lolita stirred a lot of controversy when it was published and Nabokov spent quite a bit of time insisting that his own knowledge of nymphets was purely scholarly, unlike the fictional Humbert Humbert, who molested young girls. In Lolita, Nabokov committed one of the toughest acts of the fiction writer: staying true to the humanness of a reprehensible character. Humbert Humbert is as disgusting and deplorable a character as any ever written and it would be easy to cast him in a light that shows him as only horrid. Yet Nabokov allows him some appealing traits: decided charm, dazzling intelligence, a sense of shame for his weakness, and, ultimately, a genuine love for Lolita.
Literature is filled with great villains. Part of what makes them so compelling is the tiny bit of ourselves we can see in them. Usually there is something, however small, that a reader can relate to. In Lolita, the reader can relate to Humbert Humbert’s inability to resist a desire he knows is wrong. Although Humbert’s desire is extreme, that basic idea of wanting and indulging in what you shouldn’t—be it greasy foods, cigarettes, or too much mind-numbing television—is a very human trait. In showing Humbert Humbert as something more than an inhuman monster, the impact of his misdeeds is much more powerful.
YOUR TURN:
Recall the worst person you’ve ever met. A psychotic boss, a back-stabbing friend, a playground bully. Or make someone up. Next, assign one redeeming quality to this character—kindness, courtesy, sympathy, a fondness for animals. Then write a passage with this person in action. Perhaps you show a sadistic ex-spouse helping a homeless person find shelter, or a bank robber arranging a baby-sitter on behalf of a woman he’s just tied up. The result? A fully dimensional villain.
CONTRASTING TRAITS
A fascinating element of human nature is that we all possess contrasting traits, sometimes subtle, other times greatly conflicting. These contrasts provide endless opportunity to make your characters complex.
We see this very clearly in Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” where Connie behaves one way with her family and another way when she’s out with her friends:
Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk that could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head, her mouth which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright pink on these evenings out, her laugh which was cynical and drawling at home—”Ha, ha, very funny”—but high-pitched and nervous anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.
Details such as her girlish walk at home and her fluid saunter outside of home show the reader Connie’s dual personality, which hints at both her childlike innocence and her devious, secretive side. This contrast in Connie’s actions helps to reveal the complexity of her character, to show the struggle with her own identities—who she was as a young girl and who she will become as a woman.
You might think of contrasting qualities as places where the characterization is unexpected or not quite matching up. A college football hero bravely battling leukemia need not be cowardly in order to exhibit contrasting qualities. A more subtle option would be preferable. His pride could be wounded by a bad call in the game, or he could drive recklessly while his younger brother is in the passenger seat, or betray a friend’s secret. Any of these would add a level of complexity to the character without being too predictable.
Regardless of what kind of contrasting traits you give your characters, keep in mind that contrasts do not leap forward and say, Here I am, a contrast! Revel in my humanity! The best contrasts are so seamlessly sewn with the characterization that they’re not easy to spot; they seep into the characterization. The reader should experience the tension, not be spotting contrasts like stop signs along the road.
YOUR TURN:
Return to the character for whom you created a desire. Now give this person two contrasting traits. Let’s say you chose an actress hoping to win an audition. Maybe she’s overly considerate to people but turns into a witch if she feels slighted by someone. Jot down the contrasting traits. We’ll be coming back to this character again soon.
CONSISTENCY
Unless your character swallows some kind of Jekyll/Hyde potion, you don’t want to have him or her behave one way for most of the story and then change with just a snap at the end. All actions and behaviors should seem authentic and true to the character based on what you have established. Contrasting qualities are important, but your characterizations should still be consistent. Hmm … That seems like a contradiction: our characters should have contrasting qualities, but should be consistent.
Here’s the difference. Contrasting qualities are moments of humanness. Keeping a character consistent is a general issue of good characterization. Rod may be a cocky, angry guy, defensive when someone asks the time, a person who cuts to the front of a long line at the convenience store when he has only one item. But perhaps he also stops to look, with interest, at a poster for a carnival. Something is going on there. Maybe he’s putting on airs with his defensiveness and he really does like the fun, carefree things in life. Or maybe the poster reminds him of something he did with his own son before he divorced his wife and they moved to another state. Either way, it’s a contrast in action: he projects an angry persona but shows interest in a carnival, a happy and rather playful event. It’s believable that he could have these conflicting traits. However, if we see Rod as self-assured, gruff, and dismissive for the first nine pages of a story and then, on page ten, he starts wandering around a carnival, excited to ride the Ferris wheel for no reason at all, then the character has not stayed consistent.
Characters can do something “out of character” as long as you show the reader a glimmer of that tendency ahead of time. If a shy character who usually plays it safe does something courageous or risky, the reader needs to see where this is in his realm of capability before it happens.
Nothing is worse than walking away from a story thinking there is no way that character would have done that action. Even if readers are very surprised by what your character does (which is a good thing), the characterization should still be consistent.
In “Queen Devil” by Kathy Hepinstall, Nick, the narrator’s brother, does something utterly surprising—he shoots and (presumably) kills his wife. Quite a shock. Nick, up to that point, had been crafted as a man who deeply missed his wife and children, who recently left him. He’s the kind of guy who, seeing his daughter’s pink hair comb in his fishing tackle box, has this reaction: ‘“My baby,’ he says. ‘My sweet girl.’”
What makes Nick’s character consistent and believable? Despite Nick’s genuine affection for his family, the intensity of his anger is apparent throughout the story. He talks about his wife and his resentment toward her. He drinks a great deal. Both of these indications of instability make Nick a volatile character and show the angry energy that simmers below the surface.
Some of his dialogue with his sister, Jill, betrays what he is capable of. For example, when his wife leaves, Nick calls Jill: “When Nick’s wife told him she was leaving him, he called me up and was not my brother, suddenly. He said, ‘Remember, I’m a hunter. Remember, I have a closet full of guns.’”
Later, he says of his wife: “She won’t get away with this.” He then quickly backtracks when Jill questions him: ‘“All I mean,’ he says, the sweet tone in his voice back, ‘is that she’ll miss old Nick someday.’”
So these desperate ideas have been, in one way or another, roaming around in Nick’s mind and the writer makes sure that the reader senses that. His motivations for his final, violent action are clear.
You do want a sense of surprise in your characterizations; it’s part of what creates a satisfying sense of journey and discovery in a story. We see this kind of thing often in fiction: the humble and submissive Chief Bromden escapes from the oppressive ward at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest; the hardened, bitter Joy in Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” removes her wooden leg, making herself feel completely vulnerable to the Bible salesman she at first disdains. You want your characters to be consistent, but you don’t want characters who are completely straightforward and predictable, so much so that they are incapable of discrepancy or change.
THE ABILITY TO CHANGE
Characters should possess the ability to change, and the reader should see this potential. Change is particularly important for a story’s main character. Just as the desire of a main character drives the story, the character’s change is often the story’s culmination. While a main character usually does change to some degree, either dramatically or in the more gentle form of a realization, this does not mean your character actually has to make a change at the end of the story or that the change has to be whole and complete. However, the reader should see that the character is capable of doing so throughout the story—the choice should be there. If you don’t create the potential for change, the character will feel predictable and the reader will quickly lose interest. That puts you back on the couch with the character who has no desire, just hanging out and eating lemon squares.
In Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” the main character, Dmitry, changes drastically. At the beginning of the story, his attitude toward women, who he deems “the inferior race,” is dismal, although he recognizes his inability to spend more than two days without them. He finds his wife of “limited intelligence” but is fearful of her and has many fleeting affairs. The story centers around Dmitry’s desire for Anna, a desire that starts out calmly, when he first hears about the buzz of the new woman in Yalta, “the lady with the pet dog,” and builds in intensity through their affair. By the end of the story, Dmitry feels he is truly in love for the first time in his life. The story ends with Dmitry holding his head in frustration, wondering how he and Anna will be together. His attitude changes from women being expendable to finding this one woman absolutely necessary.
Going back to Lolita, the reader knows that Humbert Humbert is capable of not pursuing nymphets—not that it would be easy or desirable to him to change his ways. However, the reader sees that he is capable. He holds back and resists during times when he must, such as when Lolita’s mother is around. He laments his own desire for nymphets and wishes that he could resist more often. In the end, he returns to Lolita when she is seventeen and pregnant, nowhere close to her former nymphet self, and he finds he is still in love with her. He’s changed in that he loves Lolita beyond her nymphet status, but there’s little doubt that, left alone with another young nymphet, he would likely try to quench his desire. So, Humbert Humbert does change, but not entirely.
YOUR TURN:
Return to the character for whom you have created a desire and contrasting traits. Time to bring this person to life. Write a passage where this character is pursuing his or her desire in some way. For example, perhaps the actress is traveling to an audition to which she was not invited. (Oh, yes, it’ll help tremendously if you put some obstacles in the character’s path.) You don’t have to bring this “quest” to a conclusion, but have something happen that allows both contrasting traits to emerge and also try to include some hint that the character is capable of change. That’s a lot of juggling, so don’t worry if it comes out a little clumsy. Dimension doesn’t always happen overnight.
WHERE CHARACTERS COME FROM
To craft fascinating and memorable characters, you will need a starting point. So where will your characters come from? Look around you, and into your memory and mind. Your characters will emerge from people you know and see and even imagine. Inspiration for characters is everywhere.
Writers often construct characters by beginning with interesting people or characteristics of people they know. Some writers even start with their own personality as a basis for a character and build from there. Nelson Algren immersed himself in the downtrodden of the Chicago he wrote about in The Man with the Golden Arm. He likely based the main character, Frankie Machine, on a man named Doc who dealt at the poker games Algren played in on Division Street. Parts of Algren went into Frankie too.
Like Frankie, Algren served in the army during World War II, and when he was discharged he came home with very little in his pockets. Starting with people you know, including yourself, lets you create characters that spring from a strong foundation of knowledge and intimacy.
However, keep in mind that when you deal with real people, you have to leave room for creative invention. I’ve worked with writers who say their character is based on someone they know, and then they spend all their time making sure the character’s actions stick to fact. Instead of wondering What would my character do in this situation? they’re wondering What would my real-life brother (or aunt, or best friend) do in this situation? You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out if you’re writing the story “right” or if the actual person would do what you have them doing. Much better to let yourself fictionalize these people, transform them into characters that suit the needs of your story.
You can also draw inspiration from people you don’t know. People watching is a great activity for developing characters. Observe people in action and then take it a step further by imagining what kind of situation they are in. See that young girl on the bench at the bus stop wiping her eyes and trying to hold back her tears? Why might she be doing that? See the group at the bar, flight attendants on a layover? How do they get along? What is going on between the redheaded man who seems so self-conscious and the woman who’s avoiding talking to him?
You can take this all a step further and introduce the question What if? What if someone tried to sit down by the weeping girl and console her? What would the girl do? What if one of the other men put his hand on the knee of the woman avoiding conversation with the redheaded man? How would each react?
Of course, you might find that characters people your imagination constantly. You don’t need to investigate where they come from. Just pluck one out who seems particularly evocative to you and get to the task of getting acquainted.
GETTING TO KNOW THEM
Take the time to get to know your characters as if they were good friends, even the unpleasant characters whom you would probably not befriend in real life. Investing time during the developmental stages helps you understand your characters more intimately, which allows you to put them on the page with more authenticity.
Put your characters in different scenarios and imagine how they would get themselves out of or even deeper into those situations. For instance, what would your character do after accidentally walking out of a department store with an item she had tried on, like a bracelet or a hat, but didn’t pay for? Characters do not exist in a vacuum, so imagine how they act and react in the world. Chris, born and raised in Brooklyn, is likely to react differently on a subway in New York City than on a bus in Atlanta, Georgia. In New York City, he’s on his home turf, knows the stops by memory. In Atlanta, he might be watching out the window with anticipation, looking for street signs to see if he’s reached his stop. He might be more inclined to put his bag on the seat next to him, something he’d never consider doing in the busy subways of the city.
While fleshing out your characters, you should consider the following categories:
Appearance: You can’t judge a book by its cover, but a cover can be informative and set up expectations. How your character holds herself, what she chooses to wear, or what kind of expression she has when she walks down the street are meaningful. Think of your character in three dimensions, taking up space. The style and presence with which characters inhabit the world reveal a great deal about their attitude and personality.
Background: A woman who grew up in a family with seventeen kids is going to have a much different experience from a woman who grew up as an only child. While we certainly can’t make sweeping value judgments about characters’ backgrounds, the characters will undoubtedly be impacted by their previous experiences. How they grew up, how they loved, lost, learned … all these things will help to shape them.
Personality: This is shaped largely by the previous two categories, the end result of everything the person is and has been. What is your character really like? How does her mind work? What are his inclinations? Disposition? Outlook? Hopes? Fears? A character’s personality contains the larger truths of the person, which will indicate how she will act and react in a story.
Primary Identity: What is your character’s primary definition of herself? Ask several people to respond to this question: Who are you? Some will answer by occupation or ethnicity, others by gender or age. The answer to that question is usually what the person identifies with most strongly, how he defines himself. A person who answers “I am a lawyer” has a much different primary identity than the one who answers “I am Hindu.” They may both be lawyers, they may both be Hindu, but they identify more strongly with different parts of their identity.
QUESTIONS
Ask yourself all sorts of questions about your characters to get a better idea of who they are. Many writers like to make lists of questions which they answer in writing. This type of “homework” helps you gain a wellspring of knowledge about your characters.
You might start with questions that address the basics about a character:
Then dig deeper by asking more unconventional questions:
For a downloadable version of these and many other “character questions,” go to the Writer’s Toolbox area of the Gotham Writers’ Workshop Web site—www.writingclasses.com.
You certainly won’t end up using all the information you gather from these question—as a matter of fact, you shouldn’t—but the more you know your characters, the better you will be able to draw them on the page in a believable way. The novelist E. M. Forster, in his classic book Aspects of the Novel, wrote that a character is real when the writer knows everything about him: “He may not choose to tell all he knows—many of the facts, even of the kind we call obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable …”
YOUR TURN:
Go out into the world and find a character.
Observe someone you don’t know, like a fellow diner in a restaurant, or someone you know only a little, like the bank cashier you see once a week. Talk to him or her, if you like, though you don’t have to. Make some notes, mental or written. Then fill in the unknown blanks of this person by answering all or most of the suggested questions on the preceding pages. You’ll be making up most of the details, but that’s okay. This is fiction.
KINDS OF CHARACTERS
Not all characters must be developed with the same depth. Your main concern with characterization falls on the most prominent characters in your story. They, of course, should be developed the most fully.
This is particularly vital for the main character of the story, often referred to as the protagonist. All of the dimensional aspects we’ve discussed—desire, complexity, contrast, consistency, change—invariably come into play with a story’s protagonist. Stories tend to have one protagonist, although you will find that some novels have two or more protagonists. Jay Gatsby is the protagonist of The Great Gatsby, a man shrouded in mystery who devotes his life to winning back the elusive Daisy. The protagonist of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is an unnamed fellow who unexpectedly sees in a new way with the help of a blind man.
Stories sometimes include an antagonist, a person who poses a formidable obstacle to the protagonist’s desire. Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, is the antagonist of The Great Gatsby because he actively stands in the way of Gatsby winning Daisy. Tom may be considered a “bad guy” because he is a philanderer and is sometimes rough with Daisy, but antagonists don’t have to be “bad.” Robert, the blind man who comes to visit in “Cathedral,” is the story’s antagonist but he’s a perfectly nice fellow. Of course, there are often numerous major characters, aside from the protagonist and antagonist, especially in novels. In The Great Gatsby, for example, Daisy and Nick are certainly major and fully dimensional characters.
Secondary characters are the supporting cast. Some of the secondary characters will go through a bit of development, but not of the same intensity as the main characters. The trick with the lesser players in your story is to find a few defining details that really capture their essence. Jordan is a secondary character in The Great Gatsby, defined by her stature as a golf pro and her gossipy tendencies, as is Meyer Wolfsheim, who is defined as a shadowy figure of the business underworld. In “Cathedral,” the wife is a secondary character, kind to Robert, irritated by her husband, but mostly in the background.
Extras are the characters who populate the fictional world but don’t have a significant impact on the story. They appear but don’t achieve any dimension beyond their limited role. The waitress who makes an appearance for one scene need not be thoroughly examined, nor the ex-husband who doesn’t play a central role but occasionally takes the kids for a weekend. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s servants are extras, as are many of the lively attendees at his parties. “Cathedral,” on the other hand, does not have any extras.
Often you’ll hear the terms round and flat characters. Round characters are fully developed and lifelike, possessing the qualities we’ve discussed in this chapter. E. M. Forster notes that a round character is capable of surprising a reader in a convincing way, which echoes the need for contrast and consistency in characterization. Flat characters are those who are characterized only by their role or a minor action. Flat characters are not necessarily a bad thing; it’s important to let very small characters be flat. Fleshing them out too much gives them an emotional weight that will mislead the readers or steal focus from the stars of the story.
SHOWING AND TELLING
A key question remains: how do we put seemingly real people on the page, conveying a sense of their total humanity using not blood, flesh, and muscle but merely words?
There are two basic methods of revealing a character in fiction: showing and telling. Sometimes it is most efficient for the narrator just to tell the reader about a character. For example, in The Man with the Golden Arm, the narrator simply tells the reader about Frankie Machine and his friend, Sparrow, as they sit in jail:
The tranquil, square-faced, shagheaded little buffalo-eyed blond called Frankie Machine and the ruffled, jittery punk called Sparrow felt they were about as sharp as the next pair of hustlers. These walls, that had held them both before, had never held either long.
The characters aren’t shown with specific actions that reveal their physical traits or their hustling. The writer just tells us what he wants us to know. Here telling is appropriate because it makes a quick distinction between Frankie and Sparrow and it introduces their racket as hustlers, in and out of jail.
But do not overrely on telling. Writing instructors frequently proclaim Show don’t tell in the margins of student manuscripts, often adorning the advice with an exclamation point. For very good reason. Revealing information through showing is generally more interesting than telling about it, because showing gives the reader more with which to engage actively. The bulk of characterization should come through showing characters to the reader.
For example:
Greta is a twenty-three-year-old artist and interior designer who dislikes having a roommate.
Now the basic information about Greta is out in the open and you can get on with things. In this telling example about Greta the reader learns her name, her age, her occupations, and her dislike of having a roommate. However, in most cases it would be stronger to show Greta’s character rather than just tell about it.
The trick in showing instead of telling is to find the specific details that will convey the necessary information while the reader’s attention stays on the character’s emotion and actions—the interesting stuff. For example:
After a stressful week at Mr. Feίnmen’s, experimenting with materials that might transform their front foyer into a low-ceilinged cave, Greta sat at a secluded corner of the café, sipping tea. Maybe once her roommate left for the night, she could have a little time to experiement with molding the wire mesh into skeleton marionettes.
The basic facts are still in this version—you get an idea of Greta’s age, and learn about her job as an interior designer and her dislike of having a roommate. But in this version there’s even more information. You get a sense of Greta’s eccentric, even macabre, artistic taste. Also the nature of her roommate difficulty begins to appear: Greta doesn’t feel like she has her own space to do her art at home. You also see how Greta handles stress: she chooses to hide in a café instead of confronting the problem. Interestingly, she seems to favor cavelike surroundings in both her artistic and her personal life. She drinks tea, which tells the reader something different than if she were drinking a beer. A martini would say something else.
And, best of all, the second version is much more interesting to read because it gives the reader an opportunity to interact more with the story. The reader’s attention stays focused on the action and on Greta’s desire, which creates momentum and tension while also conveying bits of characterization.
Showing also allows you to slow down and reveal the character’s intricacies gradually. In real life you don’t sit down and lay out all the beautiful and ugly things about yourself at once. You don’t fess up to everything right away. Instead, those things about you that make you human and individual reveal themselves gradually over time to the people around you. This same thing happens in fiction, only it doesn’t take a lifetime.
There are four ways to show a character’s traits:
These four methods allow you to reveal characters in all their dimensional glory.
ACTION
You know the clichés: Actions speak louder than words and I’ll believe it when I see it. Action is in demand in stories because it reveals so much to the reader. A character’s personality comes through in the way she handles the next-door neighbor who leaves his garbage outside his apartment until someone else takes it out, the ways she spends her Tuesday nights, the way she copes with the screaming man on the train. Action is usually the strongest method of revealing a character.
In The Great Gatsby, Daisy is revealed very distinctly by her actions when she sees Nick, the narrator and Daisy’s cousin, for the first time in years:
She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was the way she had.
Daisy treats Nick with earnest attention. She grabs hold of his hand and looks into his face, as if he’s the only person in the world at that moment. This action helps to characterize Daisy’s charm and her background as a Southern belle.
While all actions are revealing, the actions a character takes in the time of crisis often cut to the core of the character’s true self and intentions. After Daisy admits to her husband, Tom, that she loves Gatsby and will be leaving Tom for him—showing her romantic longing—Daisy and Gatsby drive back from the city. Daisy, at the wheel, strikes and accidentally kills a woman (Tom’s lover, no less) then drives away—showing her nervousness under pressure. Gatsby offers to say he was driving to protect Daisy and drops her off at home. He waits outside, thinking she’s locked up in her room, as they had agreed to a code she could make with the lights should Tom give her any trouble. Nick, however, sees her downstairs with Tom:
Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.
They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.
Here Daisy’s true nature is revealed. In this moment, when she’s pledged her love for Gatsby, then killed a woman with her reckless driving, she follows her husband and stays in the safety of her marriage, leaving Gatsby to take the fall. This reveals a great deal about Daisy: her duplicity, submissiveness, cowardice, and inability to withstand social pressure. She’s come a long way from the charming belle we first meet in the beginning.
Flannery O’Connor, in her book Mystery and Manners, describes how she once gave a few of her early stories to a lady who lived down the street. The woman returned them saying, “Them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.” To this, O’Connor commented: “I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there—showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.” Place fourteen characters in the exact same circumstances and you should get fourteen very different courses of action and approaches to the situation—fourteen different illustrations of what each character will do.
SPEECH
Characters are also revealed through their speech. What people say, how they say it, and what they don’t say are all very illuminating. If you want to get to know someone, what do you do? You talk to them.
In The Great Gatsby, Daisy talks with a childlike giddiness, as seen in these three snippets of dialogue:
“Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.”
“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
Daisy’s questions and confidences and blanket statements show the reader her wide-eyed wonder and naïve nature. As the story progresses, however, we begin to glean that there is tension beneath the gaiety.
APPEARANCE
A glimpse of someone can give you a lot of information about his personality. You can draw conclusions from physical looks, clothing style, gait, and facial expression. The way a character appears gives the reader information about how this person presents himself and occupies space in the world.
In The Great Gatsby, the reader first meets Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, this way:
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening hoots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
Tom’s aggression and confidence are apparent in the way he stands with his legs apart on the front porch. The description of his mouth, his eyes, and the way he inhabits his clothing gives the impression of a strong and unrelenting man.
Don’t just go for the obvious when focusing on your character’s appearance. Sometimes oddball details, like the description of Meyer Wolfsheim’s cufflinks made of human teeth and the “two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril,” can be particularly revealing.
THOUGHT
Fiction has the pliancy to get inside characters’ minds, often with more grace and depth than other forms of storytelling. In movies and plays thought is not as easily conveyed, but in fiction the character’s thoughts can be bared directly to the reader.
In The Great Gatsby, the reader has direct access to Nick’s thoughts since the story is told from his point of view. Here is a glimpse inside his mind:
I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into the warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight, I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in the others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the poignant moments of night and life.
This moment of thought shows Nick’s loneliness in the way he fantasizes about entering into women’s lives, getting smiles from them before they move on, a moment of acknowledgment. The reader sees a very secret side of Nick, something he likely wouldn’t share with anyone.
A SYMPHONY OF METHODS
Use these four methods—action, speech, appearance, thought—in concert to create a sense of depth in the moment-to-moment experience of the story. In real life, we experience people in a variety of ways, often simultaneously, and mixing the methods re-creates this sense of reality.
In “Cathedral,” the narrator’s wife is expecting a visitor: a blind man, Robert, whom she once worked for and continued to keep in touch with over the years. The narrator isn’t thrilled about his visit and is uncomfortable about the fact that the man is blind. Here’s what happens when the narrator first meets Robert:
This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full heard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say. The blind man reached into the back seat and dragged out a suitcase. My wife took his arm, shut the car door, and, talking all the way, moved him down the drive and then up the steps to the front porch. I turned off the TV. I finished my drink, rinsed the glass, dried my hands. Then I went to the door.
My wife said, “I want you to meet Robert. Robert, this is my husband. I’ve told you all about him.” She was beaming. She had this blind man by his coat sleeve.
The blind man let go of his suitcase and up came his hand.
I took it. He squeezed hard, held my hand, and then he let it go.
“I feel like we’ve already met,” he boomed.
“Likewise,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I said, “Welcome. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Notice how the different methods of showing are used in combination to capture these three characters in this particular moment. With the narrator, we get his thoughts that the beard on the blind man is “too much” and his somewhat nervous actions of finishing up his drink and preparing to answer the door as well as his dialogue, which is mostly pleasantries he should say rather than genuine welcoming. The moment isn’t limited to characterizing the narrator, either. The reader sees Robert’s appearance, his speech, which is confident, and his actions, which are genial. The narrator’s wife is also characterized through her attentive actions, her beaming face, and the excitement with which she introduces Robert to her husband. A tremendous amount of character information is portrayed in just this brief passage.
The four methods of showing can also work in opposition with one another to interesting effect. Do you always say exactly what you’re thinking in an argument? Can you act like you’re having a good time at your wife’s important but stuffy work banquet when you would rather be out sailing on your cousin’s keelboat? Might your body language give you away?
Often a truth is revealed about a person when there is a discrepancy between two or more of the four methods of showing: action, speech, appearance, and thought. For example, George may tell his sister over the phone that the Ye Haw Singles Sock Hop she’s urging him to go to sounds ridiculous and desperate, but at the same time he might be writing down the date, time, and location of that very sock hop. George’s speech (“Are you crazy? What a stupid ideal”) says something much different than his actions (“Well, maybe I’ll want to go”)
In The Great Gatsby, Daisy shows a discrepancy shortly after we first meet her. Tom leaves the dinner table to take a phone call from his mistress and Daisy suddenly excuses herself and follows Tom. The dinner guests can hear their rising voices as they argue. When Daisy returns to the room with Tom, she says about the phone call, “It couldn’t be helped,” then she begins babbling blithely about a bird outside. However, her actions—abruptly leaving the dining room and having an argument with Tom—contradict her carefree speech. Even though Daisy acts as if everything is fine, her actions tell the reader, and the guests, otherwise.
Effective fiction makes use of all four methods of showing characters, whether the methods are supporting or contradicting each other. The idea is to blend them, rather like the balance of instruments in a symphony. Think of these four methods as the strings, winds, brass, and percussion of an orchestra, and yourself as the composer who must unite these sounds into a harmonious—or purposefully discordant—whole.
YOUR TURN:
Return to the character for whom you filled out the questionnaire. You’re going to put this (now fictional) person into the world and let him reveal himself. Imagine this person is entering the waiting room of a therapist’s office for the first time. The type of therapy is up to you (it may even involve bringing a spouse or a pet), but chances are this person will be feeling a little stressed. Keeping the character in the waiting room, write a passage where he is revealed through all four of these “showing” methods—action, speech, appearance, and thought. For a bonus round, you can put this character in an even more stressful situation, like observing someone being held at gunpoint. What will your character do then?
ONLY RELEVANT DETAILS
Once you create fully realized characters, there is really no limit to how much you can know or show or tell about them. But when you shape your characters into the context of a story, make sure to pick and choose carefully what details you include. In other words, resist the urge to stuff in everything.
The fact that your character, Lance, spent a year and a half at Harvard might not be relevant in a story about Lance and Addie, a couple married for forty-three years who are now dealing with the recent death of their longtime pet, a Doberman pinscher named Eugene. However, the detail about Harvard might become important if, instead of being about the dog’s death, the story is about how Lance is now regretting the decisions he made in the past to drop out of school and go to Paris with a woman he met at the student union. But do you need these details in the story about the dog’s death? No, the Harvard education (or lack of it) likely isn’t necessary. Every character detail included in your fiction should work to advance or enhance the story you are telling.
Don’t let extraneous details sit around cluttering up your characterization. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor, Julian and his mother are about to leave for her Wednesday night weight-loss class at the Y:
She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror, putting on her hat, while he, his hands behind him, appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrow to begin piercing him. The hat was new and had cost her seven dollars and a half She kept saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t have paid that for it. No, I shouldn’t have. I’ll take it off and return it tomorrow. I shouldn’t have bought it.”
Julian raised his eyes to heaven. “Yes, you should have bought it,” he said. “Put it on and let’s go.” It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed to him.
She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her head.
Julian’s mother frets over this elaborate-looking hat—deciding to wear it, then deciding not to—regretting her decision to buy it and needing to hear from her son that it was fine for her to do so. These details show her insecurity, vanity, and slow pace. And perhaps most importantly we see that her behavior is a constant source of aggravation to her son. At first glance, this scene with the hat might not seem particularly important, but the hat, as well as the traits illustrated, plays an important role in the story’s unfolding when they meet up with a woman on the bus who has the same hat!
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Last, names are not trivial; they should feel right for the character. Granted, your parents likely named you before they even met you, and certainly before you developed a significant personality, but as an author, you have the opportunity to let the name of a character play a role in the characterization.
So avoid wishy-washy names that don’t say much about the character, such as Joe Smith or Jane Jones. And avoid giving all of your characters similar names, like Mike, Mark, Mick, and Mary, as that only serves to confuse the reader. Instead, look for ways to reveal something about your characters through their names.
Some writers favor names that seem to make a literal statement about the character. Dickens used such pointed and colorful names, as in Nicholas Nickleby (a story largely about money), where you’ll find such characters as Wackford Squeers, Sir Mulberry Hawk, and Miss Snevellicci. Lolita’s narrator takes on the appropriately lumbering name of Humbert Humbert.
But names can also be revealing in more subtle ways. In Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the name Antonapoulos is appropriate for that character’s fussy and persnickety nature, while his friend’s name, Singer, echoes his more toned-down simplicity. And don’t neglect nicknames. Frankie Machine’s nickname comes from the sound of his real last name—Majcinek—and his ability to deal cards so flawlessly (his arm seemed like a machine).
YOUR TURN:
Go to the phone book. Open it up and point to a name, any name. That person is your character. Think about who that person might really be. Or what character would live well with that particular name. Let a picture form in your mind. if you like, jot down random details about this character. If you’re so inspired, you may apply this character to any of the previous exercises in this chapter. And there’s nothing stopping you from doing this exercise anytime you feel like finding a character. There are plenty of names in the phone book!
Sometimes characters go nameless, as is the case with the unnamed protagonist of “Cathedral.” Some characters are known only by such names as “the man” or “the girl,” as in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” In these instances the writers may have wanted the characters to have a certain anonymity, but you should be sparing with this device as it can run the risk of seeming pretentious and, worse, it can deprive you of a great way to characterize.
Indeed, in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald managed to characterize a whole group of people mostly by their names alone, as Nick recalls some of the guests at Gatsby’s parties:
… I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came there at least once and the Baedecker girls and young Brewer who had his nose shot off in the way and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters, and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something whom we called Duke, and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
Names are like the wrapping on a present, offering just a hint of what may be inside the person.