Characters: Heroes, Villains,
& Victims

3} THE LIGHTS ARE ON, BUT NOBODY’S HOME:
FICTION’S ONLY SUBJECT

Good fiction—as Henry Ford might have put it²—can have any subject, so long as that subject is people.

A student submits the first pages of a six-hundred-plus-page novel on which he has spent the past five years. The novel is based on a highly complex computer game at which the author is expert, and the “action” consists of the two main characters, Quest and Mortimer, facing off from adjacent computer terminals, locked in a battle of cyber-wits.

The entire six-hundred-plus-page opus is, in a word, static.

In this case, the author’s passion for computer games has blinkered him to the fact that not everyone is engaged in that world, and those who are would rather play computer games than read a novel about them. The author’s blind love for his subject made it impossible for him to see its inadequacy as a subject for fiction.

Another student writes a different kind of war story, one in which the characters are engaged in literal combat.

The entire Second Mechanized Corps climbed into their cockpits, strapped themselves tight and flipped ignition switches. The wide range of Archons, from the light, fifteen-ton Corsair Renaissance Archon to the thirty-ton Berserker Artillery Archon, made their way to the docking bays of the Albatross Titan Military Dropships. Deployment crews attached the Archons to the deployment clamps of the Albatrosses, checking the drop mechanism and retro-boosters. …The pilots gave the thumbs-up to the crewmen and hung tight to their controls as front hatches sealed themselves shut.

This war takes place several hundred years in the future and is therefore wholly fictional, but that doesn’t matter. It could be World War II or the Civil War or the War of the Roses; its battles and skirmishes could be rendered as vividly as any in Tolstoy; it could be the most detailed and authentic document yet produced on the subject of war.

But as fiction it would lie dead on the page. There are no people in it: not people of flesh and blood and bones; not people with thoughts and feelings; not people of wit or cunning or cowardice, who suffer or worry or laugh or cower or cry.

Fiction succeeds only when it confronts us with—or better yet, immerses us in—the experiences of seemingly real human beings.

Beginning writers don’t always understand this. They think because they give their characters names and dialogue that they’ve created characters. They write stories about war instead of stories about men at war.

The first thing to realize when choosing a subject for fiction is this: that, really, you have no choice. You have to write about people.

4} CENSURING CHARLIE:
AUTHOR AS HANGING JUDGE & JURY

Now that we’ve decided—as we must—that our subect will be people, we must decide which people to write about.

Unless we are writing satire, the characters whose situations we choose to narrate should be characters we feel some sympathy or empathy for. At least we should try to empathize with them, and leave judgments to our readers.

One of my students writes a story about Charlie, the worst kind of womanizer. We know he’s terrible because the author tells us so:

Charlie Maxwell loved women, oh he loved them so: he loved their long legs and their firm breasts and their behinds: he especially loved their behinds, the pear-shaped kind, especially. Good ol’ Charlie: he could never get enough of a pear-shaped behind, or what the French, who know about these things, call a derriere poire. . . .

When we set out to judge—to ridicule, pillory, condemn, sneer at, or otherwise impugn our characters—we fail at our objective. Instead of making our characters look bad, we make ourselves suspect.

Now, it may well be that Charlie Maxwell loves women, and that in particular he loves their nether regions, specifically those that put him in mind of certain fleshy fruits. It’s not the content of this passage that’s judgmental, but its tone. That oh he loved them so drips sarcasm. Would Charlie himself think those five words?

You may object that it’s not Charlie saying or thinking these things about himself, but the narrator. But either the tone of the passage is that of an objective omniscient narrator (and it is anything but objective), or it expresses, via close third person (or what James Woods calls “free indirect style”), the character’s own thoughts—which, as we’ve established, isn’t credible.

That leaves one possibility: that the author has injected her own viewpoint. What we get here in place of actions is the author’s judgment of Charlie’s behavior, as conveyed by the tone of the omniscient, though hardly objective, narrator.

To test my conclusion, I asked the author to read the above passage out loud. When she did, she accented the “oh” and the “so”—the very words that convey the most irony, confirming my suspicions. After she had finished, I remarked that she didn’t seem to like Charlie very much.

“That’s just the point,” my student replied.

“You meant to get him good, did you?”

“I did,” she said, proudly.

“Well,” I said, “you may have given it to Charlie, but in the process you’ve bitten the nose off your story.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve flattened it as fiction and turned it into a polemic against such ‘types’ as Charlie Maxwell. Through your tone you say to us, ‘Look at this Charlie guy. Isn’t he a jerk?’ And we look and see a man on whom you’ve pasted a big sign saying JERK, as opposed to a man whose actions render him a jerk. We’re more aware of the sign than of the man and his actions.”

My student responded, “But that’s how I feel about this person.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t write about him.”

“Are you saying I should only write about characters that I like?”

“I’m saying you should only write about characters whose viewpoints you’re willing to try on for size, that you’re willing to understand at least to where you begin to see what motivates them. If there’s no willingness to understand, then you stand to learn nothing about this character that you don’t already think you know. And your reader isn’t bound to learn much either, other than your opinion, which is obvious within less than a paragraph.”

Though an omniscient narrator may—should, must—have feelings about the people whose situations he narrates, and though those feelings may come wrapped in irony or sarcasm, still, they should allow room for sympathy, or at least for some degree of understanding. If, on the other hand, the author (and his omniscient narrator) has already determined that a character is not only flawed but reprehensible, then we get, not a portrait, but a poster bearing the word MISOGYNIST (or BIGOT or AIRHEAD or NUTCASE) in big, fat letters.

In passing judgment on our characters, no matter how gently, subtly, or slyly, we rob the reader of the chance to form her own set of judgments. And the reader may not want to judge our characters; she may simply want to experience them as they go about their lives. And who are we, after all, to pass judgments on Emma Bovary, Don Quixote, Huck Finn, or Ahab?

Whether as writers or as readers, to encounter characters in fiction is to take a step toward understanding them, however little they remind us of ourselves.

5}LOVEABLE LOSERS:
MORT THE SCHLEMIEL

Judgments needn’t be harsh or condemnatory. Just as often, beginning writers go out of their way to depict their characters as sympathetic— or merely pathetic. They do so usually not through tone (which in amateur works typically veers toward sarcasm, as if that were the only seasoning in the tonal spice rack), but through authorial manipulation of a character’s actions, i.e., by tampering with the evidence.

Then there are those stories where the deck is stacked against a character to render him doltish, lacking common sense or sound judgment: in a word, a schlemiel.

Take Mort, a lonely geek who can’t get himself a girl—or a life, for that matter. A Professor of Behavioral Science at a large Midwestern coeducational university, Mort knows no women who are eligible and attractive, or find him so. One evening, having dined alone as always, Mort wanders the streets of the town until he drifts into a homosexual bar—not just any homosexual bar, but a notorious (author’s word) gay nightclub, where he endures one cruelly embarrassing situation after another.

This scene, so indicative of Mort’s entire existence, down to his Izod shirt with the iron-burn, has been trumped up by his creator to make us feel sorry for and laugh at him. That Mort lacks social skills I have no trouble believing. I’m even willing to buy that he goes into a gay club—not by accident, but by choice, out of loneliness. But having a “notorious gay nightclub” materialize in his path just so that he may drift into it—that’s stacking the deck.

To writers who find themselves with a Mort or two on their hands, I say, cut your character some slack.

Because novels³ are long and make substantial demands on a reader’s investment of time and attention, it’s especially important for them to offer at least one character—a hero or a heroine—that readers can identify with.

And when the deck is clearly stacked against a protagonist, when an author’s own prejudices toward his creation mar, twist, or otherwise distort our view, then as readers, unless we happen to share those prejudices and read for the pleasure of having them substantiated, we are understandably reluctant to make that investment.

6}SADISTIC LOVERS &
INNOCENT MASOCHISTS

The abusive relationship story is a staple of all Intro to Creative Writing classes. I’ve seen hundreds of them. The doe-eyed protagonist invariably obeys her charismatic abuser’s every abusive whim. She follows him everywhere. In a word, she’s spellbound. Until—too late—the spell wears off.

What the authors of such stories often fail to understand is that, for their stories to work, the reader must share at least some of the protagonist’s feelings toward the object of her obsession. Instead, her lover (we’ll call him Jack) is a transparent creep, albeit good-looking, “with a thick wrestler’s neck and sinuous back muscles, and a loop of black hair twisting rebelliously over his forehead.” But Jack’s good looks and animal magnetism can’t help us understand Jill’s staying with someone who abuses her mentally and physically.

Surely Jack must have some redeeming qualities, or at least some powers of seduction beyond his good looks. It would help, for instance, if his dialogue consisted of more than Neanderthal grunts (“Yeah,” “Huh,”) alternating with Spock-speak (“I have to hurt you; it is part of the process.”).

When we’re given no grounds whatsoever for Jill’s attraction to him, we find ourselves wondering why she’s such a masochist. What in her past might account for her pursuit of the cruel Jacks of this world? Who is Jill, and why does she hope against hope?

Perhaps—between acts of abuse and seduction—Jack teaches her the names of flowers in his wild garden, or he shows off his collection of antique egg scales.

Lacking a dimensional antagonist, the reader’s attention is drawn to question the victim. And so it pays to allow your antagonists some redeeming qualities.

7}AGAINST ARCHVILLAINS: LET OUR
CHARACTERS (AND NARRATORS) BE HUMAN

But even if they are downright villains, our characters should be human. Otherwise they come off like the Wicked Witch of the West, or high-ranking members of SMERSH, rubbing warty hands or petting fluffy cats while delivering lines like, “Well, [Dorothy, Mr. Bond], how good of you to drop in on us this way!”

Archvillains—like violence and melodrama—work better on film than on paper.⁴ Clever art direction, musical scores, close-ups, and skillful acting supply the dimensions lacking in the characters as written. We who must convey character solely with little black marks on paper can’t count on such assistance.⁵

How to make characters human?

By giving them more than one dimension. By recognizing that, except in very rare cases,⁶ there’s no such thing as pure evil or pure good.

8}WOE IS MY HERO/HEROINE:
PROTAGONIST VICTIMS

Stories about victims that ask us to sympathize and even pity them, even in the most exotic settings, tend to bore.

My standard advice is to change the focus. Focus on the character least likely to arouse the reader’s automatic sympathies, and who will therefore—if rendered with an effort at understanding— be most interesting.

This is what Flannery O’Connor does in her most famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” about a family who, while vacationing in Florida, encounter a band of escaped killers. Within the story’s final pages the author deftly shifts the focus away from the vacationing “innocent” family, to the head killer, known only as “the Misfit,” who somehow wins the reader’s sympathy even as, one by one, he brutally executes the innocent family members. In a bizarre twist, antagonist becomes protagonist: not a hero, but someone not easily labeled or defined. The reader’s assumptions—about right and wrong, about good and evil—are turned upside down, and the story resonates long after the last page is turned.

In beginner stories, though, the “heavies”—the drunken father, the abusive lover, the tyrannical spouse or boss—are seldom objects of sympathy, interest, or even curiosity. They function primarily as clubs for beating the stories’ protagonists, and are just about as interesting.

Protagonists that function primarily as punching bags are equally uninteresting.

9}SKEWERING SAINTS:
MALICIOUS NARRATORS

A special case of villainy: the malicious narrator, a character choice that almost invariably reflects an author’s agenda and precludes authenticity and understanding.

Example: In a story about a homeless drug addict named Teresa (can the allusion to Mother Teresa be unintentional?) we confront an unidentified narrator who is initially quite brutal in his judgments of Terry, whom he refers to as a “junkie whore” and “a religious fanatic.” We are thus carefully and all-too-obviously primed for the eventual reversal when the narrator discovers that she may truly be a saint.

The problem with this strategy is that, rather than presenting us with a clear lens through which to observe Teresa in her world, the narrator’s jaundiced account draws our attention away from the story’s real subject, Teresa. The narrator’s surly disposition isn’t the point of the story; the point is Teresa’s struggle—and the narrator’s catharsis, as he finally recognizes what Teresa has been through, and how a homeless woman has indeed displayed some saintly virtues.

By stacking the deck to render her narrator’s catharsis more “poignant,” the author ruined her story by rendering it inauthentic.

10} UNRELIABLE NARRATORS: PSYCHOPATHS
& OTHER MAD PROTAGONISTS

Just as actors can’t resist portraying serial killers and other psychopaths, writers can’t resist writing about them.

That’s understandable. We’re fascinated by evil, and especially by the inner workings of an evil mind. Part of the fascination reflects our inability to comprehend how such minds work. But another part lies with the fact that we can understand: If we look carefully enough, we can recognize the potential for evil and madness, however deeply suppressed, in ourselves. Every child who crushes an ant or sets a caterpillar’s nest on fire senses this potential. If we’re drawn to read and write about evil and mad characters, it may be as a way of purging our own mad and evil impulses.

But writing about mad characters has its hazards.

A writer may demonstrate great authenticity in entering into the off-kilter mind of a potentially homicidal character. But that authenticity may do the story in. Part of what makes the experience feel authentic is the sense that the mind of the character and that of the author are one, with both minds, apparently, off-kilter.

This makes for what’s called an unreliable narrator, a narrator whose grasp of the story being narrated is anything but sure. The story that he tells is substantially different from the story that we get.

But when the narrator is a psychopath, his unreliability may extend beyond the interpretation of facts to the facts themselves. That is, we can’t trust anything he says. When directly or by implication a character/narrator tells us, in so many words, “I am not to be trusted,” the frankness is appreciated. But when, some pages later, the same narrator says, “I pulled the trigger,” we’re left with nothing to hold onto. It’s like that old Zen trick. One side of the piece of paper says, “The statement on the other side of this piece of paper is false.” We turn the paper over to read: “The statement on the other side of this piece of paper is true.” This makes for a wonderful conundrum, and it certainly qualifies as fiction. But does it make satisfying fiction?

Famous works have in fact had authors as unstable as their narrators, and vice-versa. I think of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground; the novels of Céline; Jean Genet’s hallucinatory/ masturbatory masterpiece, Our Lady of the Flowers; the narrators of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Malcolm Lowry’s swacked Consul in Under the Volcano. In each of these works, the minds portrayed are addled by confinement, drugs, or liquor.

Yes, psychotic heroes can affect us deeply. Remember Travis Bickle, the “hero” of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver? Bickle is a psychotic Dante, giving us a tour of the underworld as viewed through the steam-fogged windows of a New York City taxicab. Bickle is certainly an unreliable narrator. But in movies, the camera’s objectivity can balance the character’s paranoia and other psychic warps. And in the case of Bickle, we sense that there’s method to his madness: We are gaining true insight into the ways of a wicked world. When Travis describes the “scum” who nightly populate and pollute the back seat of his cab, we never doubt the sincerity or even the accuracy of his acutely skewed observations. We may not share Travis’s paranoia, but we do share his disgust.

Similarly, Dostoyevsky’s underground man Zverkov has more to offer us than a toothache and bile. He symbolizes our own powerlessness in confronting the weight of determinism, the philosophical theory that a person’s actions have already been mapped out for him. Zverkov’s madness has both a method and a moral.

And yet, personally, I tend to find such minds hard to invest in, to the extent that a novel requires. I tend to doubt that they have enough to teach me about life, beyond the simple fact that it has driven them mad. And can you blame readers for not wanting to spend time with people who are “just plain crazy”?

There have been and will always be exceptions, stories and novels that owe their magnificence to an author’s willingness and ability to inhabit, through a first person narrator, the mind of a character more than slightly off his rocker.

On the other hand, psychotic narrators have long been a staple of the short story, from the quivering narrator of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, to the far more self-possessed but equally unhinged protagonist of Adam Haslett’s Notes to My Biographer.⁷ But as with all exceptions, these tend to prove the rule.

11} COLORFUL ECCENTRICS

Sometimes authors rely too heavily on the eccentricities of their characters and settings.

A story about a woman living in a trailer park is rich in atmosphere, with such descriptive details as the “loose skinny dog” that sniffs around the narrator’s trailer, and the narrator’s “apricot lipstick” and “musky, sweet smell.”

But the protagonist’s eccentricities take over to the point where they no longer complicate or complement her character, but overwhelm it. Eliza burns logs in her living room; she brushes her teeth with Comet and “cures” her diabetes by mainlining Gila monster spit, and she writes letters to dead American presidents. We start to feel that she’s not just eccentric, but pathological (see Meditation # 10).

Great characters in fiction often tend to be eccentric to some degree—whether protagonists (Gatsby, Miss Jean Brodie, Gully Jimson) or antagonists (Ahab in Moby-Dick; Rochester in Jane Eyre). Thanks to their eccentricities, fictional characters act on the impulses that “normal” people typically suppress.

There’s a fine line between eccentricity and madness, between unconventional or impulsive behavior and pathology. When a central character’s actions appear to be pathological, motivated not by circumstance or character but by disease or even by author manipulation, the resulting story is bound to be less satisfying.

12} WHAT’S IN A NAME:
ANONYMOUS PROTAGONIST

When I come across an unnamed protagonist in a story, especially a first-person narrator, I become skeptical. Intuition tells me that, were I to ask the author, “What’s your character’s name?” I’d be met with a blank stare, indicating that the character doesn’t fully exist for this author.

Sometimes authors withhold their characters’ names in a misguided attempt to imbue them with universal qualities, to make them everyman or everywoman. But the absence of a name isn’t a quality; it’s a negative space, a vacuum. And, as with all vacuums in literature, what tends to rush in to fill it? Cliché.

There is also the danger that an unnamed first-person narrator will be confused with the author—a mistake made not just by readers, but by writers, too, when they assume that their own personalities will fill in the blank.

Until a clear distinction is made between author and character, an umbilical cord remains, binding them.

The first step toward cutting that umbilical cord is to name your narrators.

13}THE DOPE ON JUNKIES: CHARACTERS IN
SENSATIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES

Since the late 1940s, when Nelson Algren broke the taboo with his National Book Award winning novel The Man With the Golden Arm, the subject of drug addiction has been treated extensively in literature and movies. Some who’ve treated it (including Algren) never used heroin themselves, but knew junkies and traveled in their circles. Others, like Alexander Trocchi (Cain’s Book) and William S. Burroughs (Junkie, Naked Lunch), were poets and junkies.

One student’s story approaches this theme from a familiar angle—the addict’s struggle to kick his habit, suffering from withdrawal, itching for a fix.

Familiarity puts a heavy burden on author and story. It demands an extra measure of poetry and authenticity to rise above previous treatments, or at least to avoid cliché.

When handling sensational material like drug addiction, authors need to be extra careful to avoid cheap shots. Inflating the drug dealer’s cruelty is a heavy-handed ploy to win sympathy for the junkie (see Meditations # 5 and 8). And anyway, it’s been done: Algren did it sixty years ago.

A kindly dealer would be less predictable and might better serve the theme: heroin’s deadly grip on one man’s life, a grip no dealer, kind or cruel, can loosen.

When dealing with characters in horrific situations we have to deal with the reality, horrific as it is. Paint it vividly, but not garishly— since the situation itself is already lurid.

14} FICTION’S LOFTIEST GOAL:
HUMANIZING HITLER

Fiction’s loftiest goal is to put us into the minds and hearts of characters who are not at all like ourselves, so that we may see that they aren’t as unlike us as we thought.

“Show me the insurance salesman who suffers!” James Jones admonished a class of writing students, who apparently didn’t think insurance men were capable of suffering. But everyone suffers, everyone with a nervous system. Even psycho- and sociopaths suffer. Hannibal Lecter suffers, his pathology the result of childhood trauma, of seeing his sister Mischa killed and cannibalized by war criminals.

To be human is to suffer. And to the extent that we suffer, we are human.

I’ve often thought the ultimate test of the novelist’s skill would be to make Hitler human: not to make him good, but simply to make him comprehensible, recognizable as one of our own species, as the history books do not.

In his novel The Castle in the Forest, Norman Mailer tried to do just that, depicting young Hitler as the bed-wetting son of a violent man who bullies his family and impregnates his own daughter. Needless to say, the book drew sharp criticism. Mailer—who once dared to write about Jesus from Jesus’ point of view—was accused of trying to “explain” away the extermination of the Jews, of trying to make the incomprehensible comprehensible.

But a superior writer should be willing to embrace humanity in all its forms, with an attempt to understand as his first, not his last, goal.

We need to understand our characters. As writers we are or ought to be driven by a desire for understanding that is stronger than our desire for love, approval, a laugh, or revenge. But the way we understand our characters isn’t to figure them out the way a doctor figures out what’s wrong with a patient, or the way a cryptographer deciphers a code. The way to understand them is to become them, to inhabit them, to walk in their shoes and eat and breathe and think with them as they think. Understanding them from without is little better than a judgment.

When we stand in judgment of our characters, we stand outside them, above and beyond them. We may judge them to be saints or sinners, or even devils. But our job as authors is not that of judge or jury, but to present the evidence. It’s for readers to judge our characters.

That said, the better we do our job of writing, the greater the likelihood of acquittal or a hung jury.