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Matters of Substance

To sum up Matters of Substance: It’s not enough to love our subjects. We need to weigh their suitability as subjects for fiction, and then figure out how to go about making use of them. This means understanding what truly compelling questions are raised by our material (characters and situations), and how far we should go toward answering them. As Chekhov said, “The writer’s task is not to solve the problem, but to state the problem correctly.”

Our first task, then, is to know what the problem is. And that means making the right substantive choices.

Q.HOW DO I GO ABOUT CREATING HEROES,
VILLAINS, VICTIMS?

A.Don’t. Instead of thinking in terms of gross labels, think in terms of motivations and actions. If a character wants to strangle an infant in its crib, odds are such an action or desire will plant him fairly squarely in the villain category; whereas the character who fends off such an attack will be seen as a hero, and the baby will assume the category of victim.

But these labels are judgments, to be applied by the reader, and not by you, the writer.

Q.HOW DO I MAKE CHARACTER
DESCRIPTIONS VIVID?

A. By selecting and emphasizing telling details—specific details that separate one old man or little girl from a sea of old men and little girls. “A salt-and-pepper beard” or “blonde hair and green eyes” won’t do: We’ve seen hundreds of old men with salt-and-pepper beards, ditto little girls with blonde hair and green eyes. But we haven’t seen many old men with plum-sized boils on the backs of their necks, or little girls with eyebrows so arched and fine they look painted on with a Japanese sumi brush.

Q. HOW DO I MAKE MY DIALOGUE AUTHENTIC?

A. By recording not what you think characters would or should say, but what they do say, spontaneously, almost in spite of you and even of themselves. Except under pressure, people rarely think before opening their mouths. That’s a bad thing for human affairs, but a good thing for novelists and short story writers. By what they blurt out, characters expose and reveal hidden things about themselves.

Q. HOW DO I AVOID CREATING STEREOTYPES?

A.By thinking not in terms of types or categories, but of specific and concrete actions, desires, and other qualities. The danger of stereotype is averted through specificity. If a character begins to come across as a stereotypical jock, he ceases to be one the moment we discover him reading Byron in his spare time, while stirring a Bolognese sauce.

Q. HOW DO I GIVE MY CHARACTERS DEPTH?

A.By evoking them through many or all of the following: physical description, dialogue (including what others say about her), internal dialogue (as conveyed through point of view), background information and flashbacks, and finally, most impressively, through action.

Q.HOW DO I MAKE SURE MY IDEAS ARE UNIQUE
AND NOT “STOLEN” OR “BORROWED”?

A.The easiest way is to have your ideas generated by character, and not vice versa. If you have a character, and that character is motivated—that is, if her happiness depends on either destroying some irritant that has made her unhappy, or on attaining some goal designed to win her freedom or fortune—then the rest (theme, action, plot) will emerge uniquely from these ingredients, and the result will be yours and yours alone.

Q.WHAT ABOUT CLICHÉS: WHAT IS THE BEST
WAY TO AVOID THEM?

A.Each of us has a built-in cliché detector that should be activated and exercised. The thing to remember is that clichés exist on all levels of writing, from ideas as a whole to phrases and, yes, even individual words when used under certain conditions. Sensitivity to clichés grows with training. Question what sounds familiar: It probably is. Ask yourself: Have I seen or heard that (idea/series of words) before?

Be vigilant, and clichés will avoid you, and vice versa.

Q. WHAT ABOUT MELODRAMA AND
SENTIMENTALITY? HOW DO I AVOID THEM?

A.Melodrama is action in excess of motivation or circumstance; sentimentality is emotion in excess of the same. When writers resort to melodrama or sentimentality (tears, fist-fights, operatic arias of emotion inspired by a hangnail) it’s usually because they don’t take the time to deal with the genuine, more subtle behaviors of their characters.

By slowing down and immersing ourselves more deeply and carefully in our characters’ psyches, we avoid both traps.

Q. WHAT ARE THE DRAWBACKS AND BENEFITS OF
USING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL?

A.The benefits are obvious and consist almost entirely of convenience in the forms of total, unrestricted access to information of the most intimate nature. We know ourselves and our loves better than we can ever know anyone else’s life or circumstances. So if we’re to “write about what [we] know,” what better material to work from?

But as with all things convenient the convenience comes at a price. We know too much about our own lives, with much of what we know unusable and amounting to clutter.

On the other hand, when we invent characters not based on ourselves—but based, say, on a glimpse of someone else, or a composite of glimpses—we tend to “know” only what really matters for our stories, and not much more. So our invented worlds come to us clutter free.