Cues from the Characters for the Readers

You all know how I hate tricks, so I'll work hard here to define this one in psychological terms.

Over the past few months I've been ravenously studying the works of Graham Greene and John Steinbeck.  This is for the simple reason that they are awesome.  Greene has to be among the best craftsman in history.  They told me that back as school, so I didn't believe it (I hated school) but it's actually true.  He's phenomenal.

One thing they both do is use "props" for their characters.  By this I mean methods of representing a very strong characteristic.  Each author gives the character a strong motivation, and the motivation is frequently placed into the dialogue and actions, reminding the reader almost constantly who they are.  I'd thought of doing this before, and it had seemed unnatural, but I absolutely love doing it with my characters.

In my forthcoming novel, one of my characters is an emotionally disturbed, swiftly violent anarchist punk with severe anger problems and a bad sense of humour.  He tells jokes mainly for his own benefit and thinks he's hilarious.  It's great fun to think up bad jokes and draw strong distinctions between him and the others.  This is just one example.  I've tried to do similar things with all my characters.

Another thing I've decided upon is using physical props.  Does a character have a favourite necklace?  Does it represent who they are?  Instead of having them take "a deep sigh" or some such generic thing, why not have them twiddle their necklace while they're brooding.  If it's relevant to their character, it'll represent, for the reader, who they are.

You can do the same thing with the setting.   If they're on a snow bank, use the snow.   Have the characters brush snow off of their trousers in ways that evidence their characteristics, et cetera.

A little caveat:  everything must move the narrative forwards, too.  I'm talking about characters expressing themselves in unique ways, here, not leaping out of the story for cheap opportunism.  Another thing about Greene and Steinbeck is that everything, from the character traits to the semi-colons, serves the story impeccably.

All of this seems obvious, but take a look at how Graham Greene does it in The Quiet American, and you'll start noticing how precious few authors actually even bother, let alone pull it off.  You probably do risk being cheesy if you try, but the most rewarding, strongest things you can do for a story, in my experience, are the things of highest risk.  Try it, and if you fail, read some more and try again.

Our First Fog Horn

Characters.  (See "Follow the What!?" for context, here.)

I knew a young author (now best-selling in the UK) who spoke of "what a character wants".  That's a brilliant way to move forwards, but I like to start at the bottom of the ocean.  From there, fill up with oxygen and your body floats up on its own.  It's a question of mentality and I believe it's important, especially as a distinction for beginners to understand.

Every author will have a different method.  You'll have to discover your own, but learning others' can help.  Mine is as follows:

Who is your character?

Where are they?

Why are they there?

From who they are, all else will spring.  What they want becomes an inherent function of this.  Recently, I helped someone see that Hannibal Lecture was human.  This woman was confused by the fact that Hannibal had no motivations that a reader might like.  She thought connections with a character came from liking them, in a way.  I pointed her towards understanding that, first of all, we are made to admire him, which makes us fear elements of ourselves, and second, he's human.  We feel his existence.  He's real.  Whether he acts the pure villain or the self loathing, complicated schyzophrenic, he's real.

An idiot then kept badgering me, telling me that caricatures were fine in fiction.  I'm still not sure how his comment relates to my point, but I think he offers a helpful metaphor here, so I'm glad I met him... I guess.  He said everything is fine so long as it moves the story forwards in a manner satisfying to the reader.   I agreed with him.   He kept repeating himself like a barking dog, only without the purpose of mind.  He was an idiot. 

Instead of barking, he should have looked up "caricature" in a dictionary because what he meant was "archetype".  A caricature is, by definition, a character who lacks any human motivation.  An archetype achieves singular motivation or even singular personality.  The difference is in the word "achieves".  Superman has reasons to be Superman.  Gandalf comes across as a magical archetype to the characters in Lord of the Rings and gradually we understand his complexities as they unfold for the characters we're busy following.  The reality is under the surface.  Good archetypes are people too, is the lesson I'm trying to get across here. 

I must emphasise that I'm not advocating fleshing a character out with a great deal of expository prose.  Good characters don't need expository prose.  In fact, the main thing our idiot missed was that good characters move the story forward by their very nature.

My method is simply to have them real in my mind.  From there, action (pure or not) can define them in the same way that you can, as one human to another, get a sense of another's sentience via observation.  Make them real to you.  Love them.  Hate them.  If they weren't inside of you, you wouldn't be trying to write them down, so let their reality flow. 

Where are they?  This one seems simple, and in an infuriatingly complicated way, it is.  You've invented something.  Now give it context.  That can mean almost anything, and so, like much good advice, it sucks.  Savour the fact that "context" is a vague word.  You've a universe to explore in fiction, here.  Where the character "is", is what story the reader is within.  That can even be purely in the character's head.  There are no rules in art.  There's a universe, just like in people.

Why are they there?  See how that's a question of motivation?  It's both your motivation for writing them down, and it's the character's motivation... for what?  What do they want?  That's one way of looking at this question.  But the answer springs from the other two (and inspires the other two, but only once the ball is rolling).  What they want springs from why they want it.  Otherwise you're letting plot stand in the way of character, when they should facilitate each other.

The deeper you go, the more real your surface will be. 

Now let's go way back to the metaphor about the bottom of the ocean.  Fill your lungs with your whole imagination!  Start as deep as you can with as much breath as you can and let your story boil and rise on its own.  Passion is the key, here.  Love or hate your character, your world, everything.  The more you feel, the more your reader will.  The more real your character is to you, the more your reader will connect.  The point is, here, that it's a wonderful process.  Writing is fun.  That's why you want to do it.  Even the agony is wonderful.  So free your imagination and let it play.

Live with zest and gusto, love and hate, joy and fulfilment.  Savour the depths of the human experience, from the good to the bad, and you just might create something worth savouring.  Now get back to work.

Follow the What!?

"The reader follows the character, not the story," wrote Scott Bradfield.

As this quote exemplifies, the thing about most good writing advice is that it sucks.

It's like a fog horn.  You're lost, drifting alone, blinded by doubts as well as hope.  You hear some distant calling.  You face the general direction.  Eventually if you persevere it becomes a distant light.  You're not sure.  It could be the moon.  Perhaps you'll just circle your lonely planet, wind up where you started.  But you persevere anyway.  Then it becomes blinding, and your eyes adjust and you can see, and then you realise this glimmer you've captured only helps make obvious further darkness, farther down the ocean.  And then you begin all over again.

When Scott said this to me I was confused, pleased, and I was certain that it had instantly raised my level of understanding.  Then I tried to write, and realised that it hadn't helped a smeg.  I'd only heard the fog horn.  It was years before I'd found the light and I'm now in every artists eternal struggle with using such knowledge:  the struggle with craft for perfection.

The ideal of a writer is to reach readers.  I'll re-iterate this point a million times (that's not a numerical promise--see End User Licence agreement 1.3:  smeg smeg bollocks et cetera).  Again, as with most advice, it seems obvious but it's vital to ponder about.  Imagine each story is a crystal ball.  Most are all cloudy and convoluted.  Ideas certainly tend to start that way.  But the reader wants a story.  They've picked up your ball and stared into it.  The clarity with which they see your magic is the quality of your story.

Now, you're going to hear many terms that separate a story into its elements, and these are important to understand, and mostly so because you don't want to lose sight of the ultimate unity of a story for incomplete understanding of what its components are for--forest for the trees and such.

I'll write a post on each element alone to discuss each in greater depth, but for now I'll make an overview to illustrate a point.  Most writers and editors will differentiate four story elements:  plot, character, setting, theme.  That's also what you'll hear a million (not an actual million, see above disclaimer) times on your way to meeting your first good writer.  Now, it's true in a sense, but the trouble is, if you think too hard about it you'll get confused because it's so infuriatingly incomplete.  The (good) writers who make this differentiation have a holistic understanding of these elements.

So, plot:  The aforementioned bad teachers will define this is the "action" of your story.  They're wrong, but only because they don't know what "action" means.  It isn't a story's happenstance.  It's about what happens.  Many writers will talk about a story's "arc".  They don't mean, as how-to journals will tell you, that a story has a "hook", a "climax" and an "end".  Those terms are misleading.  Rather, something compelling happens and this is carried forward to a satisfying conclusion.  See the difference?  (We'll return to this distinction many times.  Everything in a good story is action of a type, and this is very confusing.  For now, let's just focus on the difference between these two ideologies.)  In the latter, the focus is on the reader, not the words; an ultimate goal, not component elements.  Good writing isn't decoding an idea, it's making the idea evocative for readers.  Too much focus on components and we can forget their purpose. 

Character:  Who is in your story?  Why are they there?  See how these questions apply equally to every story element?  This has been discussed in "Readers and Characters".  Some will tell you that characters are a story's people, but since not all stories have people, this must be bollocks.  Characters are a story's personalities.  It is those personalities, those human connections, through which the reader will experience the story.

Setting:  Where are we?  Sometimes where a story takes place will be more important than other times, some will tell you, but sadly, this is also bollocks.  A setting will always influence the mood of a piece and its characters (intrinsically as one).  There aren't degrees of importance in art, only quality of execution.  However, in some stories the setting will be more integral for the overall purpose, and if that's true, a setting isn't just where a story takes place.  It's the mood of your piece.  It's possible for the story's atmosphere be the chief opponent of our main character.  Just look at Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Theme:  Here's a tricky one.  When something looks simple in art, you can bet it's one of the more difficult things to understand.  Often a thing's simplicity means simply that there are no guidelines.  Theme means your story's "idea", right?  Wrong.  "Idea" can mean anything from a cat shaped door-mat that stirred your imagination to the general premise that people should be nicer to each other.  Not every story has a theme, and not every story wants one.  It isn't the "purpose", because that's to impact upon the reader.  It isn't the "moral", because some of the deepest themes don't attempt to define right and wrong.  You might ask a writer, "What's it about?" and receive for reply, "A dog/cat hybrid named Lassfield!"  Then you ask, "Okay, but what's it about?" and receive a blank stare.  A theme is a story's idea about the universe.  I avoid saying it's about "life", here, because it need not even be about that.  I must say "universe" simply to be all-encompassing, and I think that illustrates just how encompassing the notion of "theme" really is.

Now, let's go waaaaaaaaaay back to our metaphor about the crystal ball.  We've just taken the ball and smashed it on the floor.  Thankfully, I haven't mislabelled the shards, but the rest is still up to you:  figure out how to stick it all back together again.  It may seem impossible, but the list of authors who can do it is long, and it's the most definite, least luck dependent way to become successful.  I'll make a post on each element individually to discuss them in greater depth, but you should always refer back to this post.  The point here is that they're all shards of the same ball.  You should never, in creating a story, keep them separate.  Even to say they "support each other" fails to define their nature.  In essence, they are one.  As with most advice, this last bit sucks.  It doesn't mean anything right away.  But it does help.  It's a fog horn.  Keep your ears open to it, acutely as you learn.

Readers and Characters

"The reader follows the character, not the story," said Scott Bradfield.

This was scrawled in red ink at the top of my title page.  I had a billion questions and I was nervous of bombarding the man as he probably had a novel to write.  The problem was, the statement doesn't make any sense until you already understand it--the key problem with all good writing advice.

Fortunately, elaboration on such statements is what this blog is all about.

Let's break the statement down into its component elements.  We all know what "the reader" is, so let's move onto "follows"--a question of what the reader does.  We take an idea and we offer it, and this moves forward to a conclusion, right?  Talk about deceptively simple!  But keep it in mind as you learn, too.  It's something we'll return to further down the road.  You'll notice that stories swiftly inform the reader of the premise and carry that forwards.

But for our purposes here, let's stick to our premise.  Originally I'd thought Scott was just telling me that the "character" is what the reader thought he (for the purpose of brevity, I'll just say "he" instead of "s/he" and so forth--hope I don't offend anyone) was following in the grand illusion of a story.  Looking back, I can already see the basic principle that held me from the truth:  a story is not an illusion.  Quite the opposite, a story attempts to paint truth from simplicity.

The reader is moved by character, not idea, is what Scott was saying.  The reader is trying to follow a thread of emotion, a connection with the story's events, and that connection is far beyond the story's plot, character, setting or anything else.  (Three weeks from now I'll post one called "Follow the What!?" which will be of help on this point.)  "Don't break things into component parts," Scott could have just as easily said.  "Stop thinking in terms of trying to force something down the reader's neck and just let the reader experience."

Scott wasn't even saying that the reader follows human beings.  A good story can even lack human beings altogether, but since the reader is a human being, emotion and effect will always be derived from the reader's human connection to all of your story's elements.  This means that, in effect, Scott was telling me that everything in a story is a character--everything from the setting to the actual characters, and thus everything should exist in relation to each other, because it is those relationships that the reader follows.  They won't care what happens in your story until they have some reason to connect with it, and generating that connection is what you should focus on in producing your work. 

The point?  Art is human.  Everyone from Dan Brown to Van Gogh understands/understood this.  Next time you read a story, try to see how everything relates to the reader.  This sounds self evident, but it's really quite a helpful exercise and within it lies mastery of the craft.  I'm not a master yet, but that's only because my story elements don't relate to the reader as strongly as the great masters managed.

(See "Follow the What!?" in three weeks to understand what is meant by "story elements".)

"Write Every Day"

Last week's post was on motivation, and this might seem like more of the same, but it isn't.  It's too important to find a place in our little cycle, so I must simply stick it here at the beginning:  this message pertains vitally to all three elements of writing.

On my first seminar on the MA, I sat with fellow students around three of the four large desks that made a square.  The walls were blank, everything smelled of carpet freshener, and the whiteboard was blank.  I eagerly awaited Scott Bradfield.  I'd already read his most famous novel, The History of Luminous Motion, and it blew me away, and this was the first time I'd see the man up close.

He burst into the room, seeming quite annoyed at having to take this hour away from his keyboard and his next novel. He turned his back on the class, grabbed the black pen under the whiteboard and scrawled: "Write a little every day, without hope and without despair." He turned back to us, sat and placed his wrists on the table. "I'm quoting Karen Blixen, here," he said. "If there's one piece of writing advice you need to take with you, this is it. If there's one sentence into which all writing advice boils down, this is it."

He stared at each of us in turn--that honest, emphatic stare he always gives. I was both glad and confused, because I'd been writing every day for years. So I'd been doing the right thing, but it hadn't gotten me anywhere yet.

I said, genuinely wondering regardless of how it might sound, "What if I want to write a lot every day?"

Scott turned to the whiteboard, one hand on his chin, stood up and began erasing the first half, "I've used this quote for years, but I think I'll change it. Okay." He turned back. "Write every day, without hope and without despair."

I mainly left that seminar full of beans because I'd changed the favoured paraphrase of a master of the craft. Me! I was special! Perhaps I'd make it after all! And I got back to writing every day. The reason I include this annecdote is to make clear:  write as much as you want.  It's actually a good skill to be able to write when you're fed up.  You'll probably have to from time to time if you become a professional.

To this day whenever I speak with Scott the conversation ends with him saying, "Keep on writing and reading and you'll get it."

The point? Writing is something you have to figure out for yourself. There's much good advice to help along the way (and far more terrible advice) but ultimately, you've got to figure this out. This is art, not math. There are no formulas here, only broad, human concepts.  I'll help point you in the right direction, and we'll return to this theme many times. This really is the most important writing advice you will ever hear or read.