Craft Lesson: Characterization
And interiority in fiction
A goal-setting and info session on Zoom for monthly and annual subscribers is scheduled for this Sunday, October 6, 2 PM PT/4 PM CT. Please drop me a note for the link if you’d like to attend. Bring your literary questions, and if you’ve set them, we’ll share writing goals for the weeks ahead.
A second fall meetup will take place on Saturday, November 2 (9:30 AM PT/11:30 AM CT).
Subscriptions are currently discounted. Next week’s post will be October’s agent list. A preview of September’s is accessible here.
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Today’s post focuses on writing convincing and dynamic characters. A previous craft lesson on story openings can be found here.
In a successful story, your main character’s desire for something to happen—or not—is the engine that propels the narrative forward.
Your story is more likely to mirror some aspect of the world and the human tragicomedy if your readers have an understanding of the motives (and torments and joys) your main character experiences.
Ideally, readers become sympathetic to (or at minimum are curious about) your character’s plight, regardless of how serious or minor it ultimately proves to be.
Tools to create vivid characters:
1. Physical description (that employs sensory detail and concrete imagery)
2. Dialogue, both what a character says and what other characters say about and to them
3. Your characters’ thoughts
4. Your characters’ actions
“Everything we know about other people we know through our five senses. The outer expresses the inner. Words, actions, and things, which can be seen and heard, express and reveal character and feeling that can be neither seen nor heard. Literature…allows us a freedom that life does not, to be both inside and outside a character, to know thoughts as we can only know them in ourselves.” - Janet Burroway, Imaginative Writing
The novelist Robert Olen Butler expresses this idea similarly:
“We yearn. We are the yearning creatures of this planet…Yearning is always part of fictional character.”
This yearning determines the events that occur in your story. Desire is the key to your character’s inner life. Fiction writers strive to create, with poignancy and a sense of inevitability, their point-of-view characters’ interiority/inner lives.
Your main character also needs flaws—stories are all, on some level, about a protagonist’s encounter with self-knowledge and what it does to their sense of self and their place in the world. Necessarily, this self-knowledge must be challenging or downright unattractive. (To borrow an example from Hollywood, think about Walter White in Breaking Bad—he turned from a hapless high school chemistry teacher into a ruthless drug dealer and meth-making expert—something at the outset of the series he would never have believed himself capable of.)
If there’s no flaw, there’s very little to propel the story forward. Who wants to read more than a page or two about someone who always makes the right decisions, always choosing wisely and unselfishly? The fuel for the story comes from the tension and conflict created by the protagonist’s imperfect choices.
In some cases, there’s no clear solution or resolution by the story’s final paragraph, but there’s a sense nonetheless by the end that the protagonist’s life has changed, i.e. an epiphany has occurred in lieu of a cataclysm, a catastrophe, or an otherwise dramatic ending.
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Look at how these first two paragraphs from Tessa Hadley’s O. Henry prize-winning short story “Valentine,” which vividly introduce us both to her point-of-view character and the desire roiling beneath her schoolgirl exterior:
Madeleine and I are waiting at the bus stop at the bottom of Beech Grove in our school uniforms: green print dresses, short white socks and sandals, blazers. In the summer, we are allowed to leave off our hated green felt hats. It’s June, and summer is thick everywhere, a sleepy, viscous, sensuous emanation; hot blasts of air, opaque with pollen from the overblown suburban gardens, are ripe with smells from bins and dog mess. We are mad with summer, chafing and irritable with sex. We are fifteen, studying for our O levels; we have breasts (small in my case, luscious in Madeleine’s) and pubic hair and periods. A breeze, stirring the dust in the gutter, tickles up around our thighs, floats our dresses—we can hardly bear it.
Our talk is rococo with insincerity, drawling, lascivious. Everything seems to have an obscene double meaning, even though it’s only quarter past eight in the morning and, behind us in our homes, our mothers are still clearing the breakfast tables, scraping soggy Rice Krispies and burned toast crusts into the bin, wiping the plastic tablecloths. My mother is bending over my little brother, Philip, in his high chair, playing pat-a-cake to trick him into letting her wipe his face and hands, making his mouth spill open with delighted laughter…my attention is all thrusting forward, onward, out of there. I’ve burned my boats. I can’t go back—or rather, I do go back, dutifully, every evening after school, and do my homework at the same table in the same stale olive-green dining room, and still get the best marks in the class for everything, nearly everything. But it’s provisional, while I wait for my real life to begin. I feel like an overgrown giant in that house, bumping up against the ceiling like Alice in Wonderland after she’s found the cake labeled “Eat Me.”
Based on this searing and highly specific opening, what do you imagine Hadley’s main character wants? Put another way, what is her deep, abstract desire? And what potentially do you imagine would fulfill, at least temporarily, this desire?
Regardless of how you answer these questions, the fact you’re able to extrapolate motives and possible outcomes for this protagonist makes clear that Hadley has written a compelling character who is ostensibly as alive as anyone we might encounter out in the world.
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Lastly, I’ll share one of my favorite writing exercises:
I. Choose one of the characters below and write 7-10 interview questions for them. The first few questions should be about anything related, or loosely related, to the scenarios included for each character. The later questions might or might not be extrapolated from those that directly address the prompt.
a) A newly hired employee who works on the housekeeping staff of a Las Vegas hotel
b) An architect who moonlights as a wedding singer
c) Someone who runs an animal shelter
d) The youngest child in a family of 5 children who is by far the best student
II. Now answer the questions you’ve asked in the voice of the character you’ve chosen. Be very specific (this interview could serve as the basis of a scene, a short story, or a longer work of fiction).
CODA:
Novelist, editor, and book critic Kurt Baumeister’s new novel TWILIGHT OF THE GODS is now available for preorder from Stalking Horse Press. SHP is helmed by
, who writes here on Substack.Hardcover w/dust jacket: https://www.stalkinghorsepress.com/product/twilight-of-the-gods-hb/
Paperback: https://www.stalkinghorsepress.com/product/twilight-of-the-gods-pb/
Although TWILIGHT OF THE GODS will eventually be available for preorder through other outlets, it’s better for authors (and publishers) if you order directly from the publisher’s website.
