Richard Bausch
CHARACTER IS FATE. CHARACTER IS ACTION. CHARACTER IS nature. Character is nurture. Character is the sound of a voice, a gesture, the color of the eyes, the hair, the texture of the skin. It is a matter of imagining, even when you are using a model, and it involves the marvelous reasonableness of the world's fictional people—that is, we understand Jay Gatsby's behavior, we are privy to his “romantic readiness,” and we have full knowledge of what he felt standing at the end of his dock, his fantastic mansion rising behind him in the night, while he gazed, arms outstretched, across the sound, at Daisy's green light; we know why Quentin Compson commits suicide, and why Emma Bovary does, and Anna Karenina, too. We know these people, therefore, better than we ever really know anyone in life.
And so one of the first things to learn is that fiction has more to do with itself than it does with life. You are not putting life on the page, because life is confusing and random and constructed of a mess of unknowable and conflicting forces, and fiction is organized and shapely, and arises out of a passion to make sense out of experience. A fictional man or woman has no more substance than a painted man or woman. The shapes and shades of color, or light, are used by the artist to deceive the eye into believing that what it is seeing is flesh and blood—but of course it is not flesh and blood; it is paint.
You are making a picture out of words, a portrait. And fiction is a magic act.
Obvious enough—even elemental—but you'd be surprised how many inexperienced writers forget that.
How do you create characters? By refusing ever to think about people as types. By imagining yourself into the body of a character, into the senses, that is, of a created someone in context.
Context is situation. And situation involves that most elemental part of the fictive world: conflict.
If you think of conflict merely as an argument, you're badly limiting yourself; but even an argument is preferable to the indefatigable rendering of dailiness that I often get from inexperienced students, aiming to put life down on that page as it really, really is. Life as it really is turns out to be boring on the page. (It is even, to some extent, boring in the reliving of it: notice, those of you who have video cameras and record family celebrations, how much of the time, during replay, you have your finger pressed on the fast-forward button.)
If one of the elemental ways to deliver conflict is through an argument, there are also many ways to deliver a sense of tension—an argument that may or may not happen. In any case—in every case—you must, while considering the facets of your conflict or about-to-happen argument, work into your portrayal all the other aspects of the art. That is, while delivering a scene that presents one character in conflict with another, one also has to pay attention to characterization, plot, theme (the aboutness of the story), increasing complication, history, setting—all of it.
No matter what element of the writing of fiction you are concerning yourself with, all of the elements of it must eventually come into play in any given scene.
I have concocted an exercise using dialogue, by itself, to demonstrate this to students, and to help them teach themselves about the use of dialogue in fiction—which is, in fact, far different from the use of it in movies or films. (In movies and films it's the camera telling the story, and the dialogue is quite often secondary, or even rather dull. Quentin Tarantino has a reputation for writing “realistic” dialogue in his films, but the fact is, it's awfully dull to read: two men discussing laundry in the front seat of a car, after having blown the head off a man sitting in the back seat of that same car.) In a story, the dialogue is never there for space, or for any rendition of “reality.” You have two people waiting for a train on a station platform, and your instincts may tell you that they would talk about the weather or whatever's in the news—but if their talk is not about the story's central matter, then they say nothing that you bother to report.
This exercise is limiting in the way most exercises are. And it is also simple in the same way virtue is simple—which is to say that it is extremely difficult, too. The idea is to concoct a circumstance where two voices are to be heard. And to allow yourself no lines of summary, no attribution, no descriptions of tone, no characterizing of voice or the words. Just the two voices.
Now, it would be easy enough to produce the circumstance and plenty of tension:
Suppose you open that cash drawer, bub.
Don't shoot. Please. I have a family.
But it is another thing altogether to produce character, and all the other requirements of a good story, simply through what the two people say, what words they use. That is, you must give the reader a sense of the character of the two people, along with whatever is at issue between them, along with something of their history and their motivations, and all the rest.
Because you have no attribution, no “he said” or “she said,” you must portray those silences and pauses by the use of ellipses. So when one person fails to respond to the other and there's a pause, you put an ellipsis on the following line, thus:
That was good. Mmmm.
So good.
…
I've been so miserable lately.
And it is understood that the person who said, “So good” also said, after a silence, “I've been so miserable lately.”
With only their exchanges, then, you must deliver who they are, what sort of people they are, the nature of their trouble, and where they are in time and place, without ever letting it seem forced or contrived. Remember that the first three letters of the word artificial are ART. It's a magic show, and this is just teaching yourself one of the tricks. One way to help yourself in revision of such a piece—actually, in revision of any story you write—is to read through and try to make sure that every single line of it is accomplishing more than one thing: it's giving character while advancing the plot while enhancing the reader's sensual experience of the whole while foreshadowing the eventual outcome. All that. Remember that writing a good story is at least as hard as learning how to play a musical instrument. If it feels overly difficult and complicated to you, then you are probably a writer.