By way of backing into this, it must first be confessed that August was one of those months that I was heel-kickin’ glad to see dwindle in the rear-view mirror.
Choice highlights: Food poisoning that wrung my innards of every last drop of black and yellow bile, plus a few other colors I hope to never see again. The back half of an ongoing domestic Internet outage, hair-pulling tech calls to and from India included. A long bumpy spell in the New Novel that felt rougher than a ride across cobblestones the size of prize pumpkins.
More, but you get the general flavor. August was thirty-one miles of baaaad road.
Yet throughout it all, this little, should-be-inconsequential burr lodged under the saddle and just. Kept. Chafing.
It was our own Janet Berliner’s disclosure, in the comments section of someone’s essay a couple months back, of author Michael Crichton’s opinion of characterization: that it’s an unnecessary indulgence on the part of the writer, overrated, and generally boring. (I am honor-bound to point out that Janet stresses these are her words, summarizing a lengthy discussion with Crichton, and not a direct quote.)
Snide reactions welled up in me like bubbles of swamp gas. Almost immediately: that Crichton’s scorn for characterization sounded like a man’s dismissal of something he knows he can’t do very well.
On further reflection, with armchair psychology degree clutched tight: Recalling that Crichton was once a physician, I wondered if he was the type who found it easier to relate to charts of data rather than the human patients they represented … and if so, if this carried over to his seeming refusal to relate to characters as multidimensional beings, and if his only real interest was the malady under cautionary study.
And finally: that, while I haven’t read all of Crichton’s books, those I have read have struck me as making more memorable movies than novels, because the films have the advantage of actors filling out the flatness of the books’ characters.
I don’t know why I let minutiae like this become such an irritant. Who am I to bitch, anyway? Crichton is clearly a brilliant fellow, he writes the novels he wants to, and they sell by the truckload. We should all be so hobbled.
Still, when a grain of sand lodges so firmly in my oyster brain, there’s value in trying to fathom why it’s such an irritant. It’s the surest way to come out with a pearl.
Consider, then…
In any genuinely effective — and affecting — work of fiction, a great act of subterfuge takes place before the reader’s eyes. It’s something that operates apart from any calculated misdirections of plotting. Rather, it’s that all the characters are there for one purpose or another, even engineered for some job the writer intends for them to do … they just don’t come off that way.
If characters have no functional role to play, they don’t belong in the first place, and a sharp editor will target them for makeover or assassination. But a good writer knows how to take these system requirements and disguise them. Knows how to make each character as natural a part of the landscape as the trees outside your window. How to shine light on them from different directions, at different times, so they reveal new shapes, new shadows, new details.
It’s more than just putting characters through their ordained paces, winding them up and sending them clanking off to do their duty. It means taking the time to render them as beings that come alive, until the page is no longer home to an obvious fabrication, but a portal into another reality.
And, as a reader, I believe.
I believe in the reality of the story because I believe in the reality of the characters.
The entire illusion depends on this.
When a writer fails to call down the lightning and bring his creations to life, it’s like watching slot cars zipping around an electric track. It may be diverting, but their course is still predetermined. There’s no chance of deviation. I’m too aware of their transparent artifice, can feel the writer’s thumb on the throttle.
And when the writer hasn’t made me look past the fact that, behind it all, he’s just playing with paper dolls, I feel cheated, rooked out of the potential payoff of human strife and interaction.
Oh, the novel may still tug me through to the end. I can still enjoy the experience. After finishing the book I might even say I liked it.
But if the characters aren’t alive enough to make me care, so that the book engages the head without engaging the heart, then it’s ignoring half the faculties of the person reading it.
There is one thing a book like that can never be:
Beloved.
I will never, can never, love that book. I’ll never think to read it again. It will never surface in my mind when someone asks me to list some favorites, or simply what books have gotten to me lately.
Because I’m just not into unrequited passion. If it doesn’t come through that the writer thought enough of his characters to exhale into them the breath of life, then he’s condemned it to soon diminish into the gray, faceless fog of everyday, along with the people I passed on the street last month.
Think, as a reader, of your pantheon of most beloved books. If you’re a writer, think of those works of yours that readers have told you they love, and why.
How many of them earned that designation by premise alone? By the events, rather than those to whom they happened?
Few to none is my guess.
Which is all well and good in theory. But how does a writer get there in practice?
Ask ten different writers and you might get twenty different answers, but to me, characters feel most alive when the writer is aware that every stinking one of us is a bundle of raging contradictions and conflicting impulses. It’s more than the shopworn tip of showing a little bad in the good guy and a little good in the bad guy … although that’s part of it. Divorced of duality, it extends to potentially everything, any and all facets of a person’s existence that aren’t necessarily inherently good or bad, but that simply are.
For starters, just look at a few of your own:
That person you love, and all the reasons you shouldn’t. Those mutually incompatible goals of family and career. The rationalizations you make for doing things you tell your kids not to do. That petty spite you keep giving into, even though you know the consequences. Your need for security versus your need for … something else.
You have dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. You know the drill, because you live it every day.
So give me characters who feel capable of slipping their leash.
Give me characters who are as fragmented yet integrated as a Picasso cubist portrait.
Give me characters who have real conversations instead of functioning as walking textbooks.
Give me characters who exude a sense of living a life beyond the page, before the beginning and after the end.
Give me that moment when a character does something I never saw coming, even though it makes perfect sense.
Above all, remember this:
“Imagination could never invent as many and varied contradictions as nature has put into each person’s heart.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
…and then give me work that knows it.
It may be an indulgence, but I guarantee you I won’t be bored.
11 Comments, Comment or Ping
Eric Wilson
I love that you take on Crichton. Even though I’ve enjoyed a lot of his books over the years, I really don’t remember his characters. And, to be honest, it always irritates me (like your pearl example) that so many successful authors seem to care so little about characterization.
Maybe the fact is that many readers are not as concerned about it as we are. As a writer, though, I can’t help but feel deeply and want to translate that to the page through my characters. If I don’t like them, why would I want to spend a whole book with them? Blah!
You’re right: my “beloved” books are the ones with unforgettable characters, characters like Picasso cubist portraits (I love that image you gave) that are disjointed, yet so intriguing and beautiful in their own ways.
Sep 9th, 2008
Janet Berliner
This is a fabulous essay. Thank you. –Janet
Sep 9th, 2008
Alma Alexander
Fantastic essay. Much that needed to be said.
Sep 9th, 2008
JodiLee
*applause* I didn’t even make it through the first two chapters of anything of his. Loved most of the movies though..
Sep 9th, 2008
Joe Iriarte
It sounds like you’re basically saying that dynamic characters should have internal conflict that readers can see.
Am I oversimplifying?
Sep 9th, 2008
Brian Hodge
Thanks for the feedback, one and all. And thanks again, Janet, for the refresher.
> characters like Picasso cubist portraits (I love that image you gave)
Ain’t it wonderful what Google will spit up in just .09 seconds?
> Am I oversimplifying?
Respectfully, yes. Just to deal with one aspect, contradictory elements in one’s personality, or in a character, don’t necessarily have to be in conflict, internally or externally. We all reconcile a number of disparities we don’t lose sleep over. It could manifest as, say, a charming inconsistency or an ugly hypocrisy, but either way, it’s not a source of conflict to the person.
But to me, the presence of stuff like that adds depth to a character, and even if it’s not a source of conflict, when judiciously chosen in the context of the work it’s a potential source of unpredictability in how that character will behave in a particular situation.
Case in point, from my own life. At the beginning of the year I took up the study & practice of Krav Maga. It’s a self-defense system, often very brutal, that’s a mainstay of the Israeli Defense Forces. Now, I’m a peaceful person. Yet I’m learning how to hurt, cripple, maim, and worse. I hope to never have to use it. But at the same time, I’m curious. Somehow, though, it all gets reconciled inside.
Sep 9th, 2008
John B. Rosenman
I agree with everything you say. I like characters who slip their leash now and then. The most important thing in art is the human heart. It’s more complex and inexhaustible than all the secrets in the universe.
QUESTION: In this high-text age of CGI, special effects, text-messaging and visual entertainment, is the traditional interest in characterization waning? I hope not.
Sep 9th, 2008
Joe Iriarte
Thanks for the reply.
I see what you mean now.
Er, maybe.
Although what you say is realistic when you talk about the contradictions in real people, if I make a character who is similarly contradictory, wouldn’t readers tend to see it as implausible, even though, as you point out, it’s not? Kind of like how “It really happened that way” is no answer for charges of “It’s not realistic?”
Is the way to avoid that to have some character call attention to the contradiction, just to make it plain that it’s deliberate?
Could you (or anybody else) throw out an example of a character in pop culture with some contradictions where those contradictions are *not* in conflict, internal or otherwise?
Please don’t think I’m trying to argue with you. I’m not–I’m trying to learn from you. I just suspect that my understanding is less than complete, and I’m trying to probe that.
Thanks.
Sep 9th, 2008
Brian Hodge
John and Joe: I’m later in responding than I might ordinarily have been. Had a 2.5-hour Krav session tonight (prepping for a belt test), and I’m beat and sore, and my brain is tired, so take that as a disclaimer for whatever inane blather follows.
> In this high-text age of CGI, special effects, text-messaging and visual entertainment, is the traditional interest in characterization waning? I hope not.
I dunno… but then, has it ever really been an expressed demand?
The main thing readers want is a compelling story. When they feel satisfied that they’ve gotten one, a lot of factors have contributed to it, although I’d say that the characters often shoulder the biggest portion of the burden in making it compelling.
But I’m of a mind that our characterization trick bags work best when they don’t call attention to themselves, and the composite emerges naturally. So it’s not like the reader is consciously aware of everything we’re doing to build this person in front of them.
I just think of it this way: If you can tell a good story with flat, monochrome characters, or you can tell it with more textured, Technicolor characters, why not do the extra work and go for the latter? That can’t help but sweeten the experience.
However, because of the attention-shorteners you cite, I suspect it would probably behoove most writers to learn to be more succinct about characterization than they might’ve been, say, 10 years ago.
And Joe:
> Please don’t think I’m trying to argue with you.
No worries. Never crossed my mind.
> if I make a character who is similarly contradictory, wouldn’t readers tend to see it as implausible, even though, as you point out, it’s not?
Not if you make it seem perfectly natural for that character, they won’t. This is where auctorial skill comes in! Deftness and subtlety and nuance with characterization … these are things that develop gradually. It takes time to recognize the opportunities to put that unexpected new brush struck on a character, and blend it with the whole.
> Is the way to avoid that to have some character call attention to the contradiction, just to make it plain that it’s deliberate?
Ehh, I try to stay away from absolute thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots. What works in one instance may not work in another. Try it, if it feels right. You always have the Delete key if it doesn’t work.
> Could you (or anybody else) throw out an example of a character in pop culture with some contradictions where those contradictions are *not* in conflict, internal or otherwise?
What pops into my mushy head right now: This weekend I finished watching Season 1 of MILLENNIUM on DVD — I’d not seen that series since it was new — and I’d say that the main character of Frank Black qualifies. As a private sector criminal behavior profiler, he’s got this affinity for deeply understanding the most heinous human acts and deviant pathologies imaginable, to the point that he can get inside the murderer’s head and vividly experience the savagery after the fact.
One way of developing a character like that would be to depict him as habitually haunted and tortured, to show his personal relationships in wreckage, his difficulties in controlling his fascination with the macabre.
Instead, even though actor Lance Henrikson looks like the face of doom, with a voice to match, Frank Black is a remarkably well-adjusted man of immense decency, with this lovely little family. Professionally he lives in one hideously dark world after another; personally he lives in this bright yellow house. Bumps may arise and outer threats may impinge, but fundamentally his two halves aren’t in conflict. He keeps them well walled off from each other … even though he works out of this crude office in his basement. Some of my favorite subtle moments are when he’s studying crime scene or forensics photos, and his wife or little girl approaches, and he very smoothly turns the photos over or switches off the monitor, and effortlessly transitions from the outer world of darkness to his own world of light. It’s beautifully underplayed.
Another time, something else might’ve come to mind, but by virtue of timing, that’s what sent up the flare tonight.
Sep 10th, 2008
Dave Wilson
I think you may have something on Crichton’s movie characters vs his written characters. I love his plots…and the stories are great…but looking back, I have a hard time pulling specific characters out that I remember… the movies are the opposite…the characters are what I remember most…
Sep 10th, 2008
Joe Iriarte
Thank you for explaining it further. I really appreciate it.
I will definitely keep this in mind.
Sep 10th, 2008
Reply to “I Don’t Care If He Is 6’9,” I Think I Can Take Him”