Storytellersunplugged

by Justine Musk

1

You get attached to your characters.

You spend a great deal of time getting to know them.

I know I ‘have’ a character – I’m writing him or her in a way that feels vivid for the reader (some readers) — when I have a sense of his or her ‘mindset’ – a perspective, a mental outfit of that character’s knowledge, beliefs and experience I can slip into as soon as I tap out that name on my computer screen.

Some mindsets I ‘get’ very quickly and others take many attempts, several drafts, to get right. Or get at all.

Sometimes, when the writing goes well and I am in the zone, I come out of it a little surprised that these people I’ve been writing about aren’t a couple of houses over, having a party, expecting my arrival. They seem to move beyond imagination and exist in a permanent absent presence. Which sounds a bit kooky – okay, it is — but when you think about it, you carry strong mental constructs of people you know who are rarely or never in your day-to-day life. You take it on faith that they’re still out there, living their lives, be it a college roommate who moved to Australia or an ex-boyfriend you’ll never speak to again. Those constructs aren’t all that different from the constructs you form of your characters – if anything, you know your characters in greater more accurate detail and spend more time thinking about them and thinking through them. The former just happen to have a flesh-and-blood counterpart in the real world (which might or might not bear strong resemblance to your inevitably biased, incomplete idea of that person) …and the latter, well, do not.

2

One of the most delightful things about writing a novel with multiple characters told from different perspectives – one of the things I honestly didn’t anticipate, although now of course it seems so obvious – is that readers would form their own private relationships with and opinions of these characters. They choose their favorites, and sometimes they tell me (and I always love it when they do). It can be an interesting reflection on my friends and family members when they tell me who they liked best.

And sometimes I’ll get defensive on someone’s behalf – I remember when a woman I have a great deal of respect for referred to a certain character as a ‘loser’. Granted, he’s not a good guy, and doesn’t start the tale at a personal high point…but I’m still irritated she would say that.

3

The first time I became familiar with the concept of Mary Sue characters was when a good and brilliant friend of mine returned the first 60 pages of the first draft of what became my first published novel BLOODANGEL and said my protagonist, Jess, was “too much a Mary Sue.”

When she saw my blank look, she explained. A Mary Sue is a character (and of course many if not most of you already know this, so bear with me) who serves as an idealized version of the author herself. It is common in fan fiction, and signals that said author is not storytelling so much as vicariously living out her fantasies of being loved and adored by a particular set of people who don’t, of course, actually exist (outside of the world of mental constructs).

Everybody likes and loves and lusts after Mary Sue. They talk about how great she is. Mary Sue has no flaws.

I was insulted.

I thought I was a better writer than that.

I also thought my friend was wrong. I had things in common with Jess, but I have things in common with all of my characters. As incomplete as her mental construct still was back then, Jess existed in my mind as very much her own person. She was both tougher and more troubled than I was; she’d been through a tragic and hellish adolescence; she was urban and streetsmart where I’d been sheltered and provincial; she was a self-educated high school dropout and runaway making her way as an artist in the big bad city. She didn’t even look like me (she would look like Jennifer Connelly, actually, if Connelly wasn’t so movie-star beautiful).

But when I reread the pages, I saw my friend’s point. I was too gentle with this character, too indulgent of her moodiness and angst; all the other characters were going out of their way to support her in a way that felt a bit like…fan fic. The world of the story seemed to revolve around her in a way it never would in real life. (In real life, at least one friend would say, “Get over yourself!” and someone else would be tempted to slap her.) I revised, and the story’s pace picked up immediately, plus all the characters felt more real as a result.

I was thinking about this as I wrote the sequel, and now again as I begin to revise it. Truth is, of all the characters in this ongoing saga of mine, Jess remains the most slippery for me to get right (write). And I think I finally realized why this is.

The characters in BLOODANGEL who came easily – who sprang up from the page more or less fully formed – were Lucas Maddox and a demon named Del. Lucas is a thirtysomething rock singer turned junkie (or was at the story’s beginning) and completely amoral, who will do anything, sacrifice anything, for music. Del is fey, dangerous, enigmatic, unpredictable, and has been magically imprisoned for roughly five hundred years. I have little in common with either of them. But I had no trouble slipping into their respective mindsets: they were fully, deeply, there, and all I had to do was let them talk.

And – judging from emails and conversations with people who have read the book – the best-liked character in the novel is Ramsey, a teenage foster kid wrestling with the consequences of a supernatural event from when he was a small child. I am fond of the guy myself, and glad he didn’t meet the fate I’d originally intended for him, but wondered why I found it easier to write from the perspective of a teenage boy – and seemed to do a better job with it –than that of a woman near my own age with similar creative ambitions living in a city we both loved.

Then, during a recent visit to Miami, a friend I hadn’t seen since before my book came out said at dinner, “Why is it that some writers – like you, for example! – write such great bad characters, but the good characters aren’t as interesting?” She loved my villain Asha and wanted to know if Jess will ever hook up with Lucas.

I said something along the lines of, “Yes, that’s true, isn’t it? It’s the villains who get the best lines, are the most fun.” But I had always taken this as a given. Maybe I should examine it more closely. Is Clarice Starling really a less interesting character than Hannibal Lector? I think not; she’s as great in her own way as he is in his, which is why the dynamic between them is so powerful.

I’d always assumed that ‘good’ characters are less interesting because they are moral and they have a conscience. Maybe not always, but generally they want and need to do the right thing, and if they don’t start out that way they become so by the end (otherwise known as a Character Arc). So wouldn’t this make them predictable in some way?

‘Bad’ characters see things differently, and if a character is a true sociopath, he has no conscience at all. He has no ability to empathize, no ability to see things from any other perspective than his own. This makes him ruthlessly self-centered in a way most people find too alien to comprehend (and which makes them all the more vulnerable to the sociopath’s manipulations). A sociopath doesn’t even believe that other people are truly ‘real’, or at least not as ‘real’ as he is. Think, for a second, about what this would do to your sense of reality. If you don’t understand how other people feel and respond to things and why they do the things they do, it rips out whole chunks of context for you, and you’re forced to fill in the gaps with your own flawed and limited reasoning. You invent things (sociopaths are pathological liars). Since you can’t quite fit yourself into reality, or want to or feel you need to, you try to bend reality around you: through scheming and fantasizing and deluding other people and yourself. And when this doesn’t work, you go and sue somebody (sociopaths love to sue people) because nothing is ever your fault. It also means you give yourself complete freedom to do or say whatever you want, unbound by any sense of moral obligation whatsoever, any concern for anyone else’s feelings or wellbeing except your own.

This makes you unpredictable and outrageous and dangerous and infuriating.

This makes you a good character.

This is what I’d assumed.

4

Except there’s something else. When it comes to fiction, I like complicated bad people – people who have unexpected flashes of things that are admirable or endearing or sympathetic about them. It’s not that I want to explain away or ‘tame’ the evil with some pat theory about how the villain was abused as a child. In fact, my Big Bad in the novel I’m revising now is genuinely, innately evil in a way that my villain in my novel BLOODANGEL was not (she was enslaved by her society and driven mad by demon magic; let’s just say the girl had issues). I like that extra dimension, that ambiguity, the sense that a ‘bad’ character might start out in one place and end up someplace else. It keeps things interesting – for me and, I think, for the reader.

Which means that when I write my bad characters, it is my reflex to reach towards something at least remotely good or sympathetic within them. This, along with all their not-so-admirable qualities – and their outrageous unpredictable behavior — gives them shading and nuance.

And I finally realized that when it comes to writing my ‘good’ characters, I should be doing exactly the inverse. I should be reaching towards what is weak and flawed and unpleasant about them. Their fears. Their sins. The things they regret… or don’t know enough about themselves to regret. I was granting my ‘bad’ characters the freedom and power to do good – not often, to be sure, but at least it was there as a faint glimmer of possibility – without granting my ‘good’ characters the ability to be absolutely horrid. While I knew in theory that no character should be completely noble – it’s not only unrealistic, it’s also very boring, could make you throw the book across the room and thump the writer on the head and possibly even accuse her of writing a Mary Sue – but I still wasn’t doing what I should have been doing. I wasn’t writing from the flaw. I could explain what Jess Shepard’s flaws were, but I shied away from presenting them honestly. I didn’t trust the reader enough, or my abilities as a writer enough, to put forward a main character who is as every bit as problematic as, say, I am myself.

Thing is, though, we don’t want perfect main characters. If we meet someone in real life who seems much too polished, we tend to distrust and resent them. We appreciate virtue… but faults and foibles intrigue us. I love to analyze the hell out of them, both in the people I know and in myself. Yes, there is pettiness involved, and ego, and the desire to feel superior in some way; but there is also, I think, a basic curiosity, a hunger to learn about human nature. And we want, in stories, to see people as flawed as we are (if still somewhat larger than life) manage to triumph regardless, overcoming their own urge to self-sabotage just as much as any external obstacle…or if they don’t, we want to understand, maybe, why and where they failed.

5

One of my favorite writers is Paul Theroux, who came out several years ago with a book called SIR VIDIA’S SHADOW: A FRIENDSHIP ACROSS FIVE CONTINENTS. It’s a memoir of the rise and fall of his friendship with the writer V.S. Naipaul. Critics slammed him for his depiction of the man; they implied, or said outright, that Theroux was casting the “cold and cantankerous eye” of the jilted friend (and inferior writer).

They might have a point. A writer as skilled and intelligent as Theroux can’t help but dissemble at least a little bit, if just in the urge to turn something like life into a thing so ordered and compelling as narrative.

And yet. I loved the book. And I remember thinking at the time how the critics seemed to be overlooking the fact that nothing Theroux could do or say, no masterful writerly strategy he could summon forth in his presentation of Naipaul and his doomed relationship with him, could undercut the fact that Theroux had dedicated an entire book — all the energy and time and thought required — to an examination of this man and his experiences with him. Of course it was filtered through Theroux’s perspective and of course it was biased accordingly (which doesn’t mean that Theroux’s criticisms of the man might not be perfectly valid)…but just the act itself seemed an incredible compliment to Naipal.

In doing it, Theroux was saying: You fascinate me. You fascinate me enough to want to think and write and tell others all about you. To attempt to see you as a real, and thus flawed, individual, and not just the subject of my own projections and fantasies – or those of others.

And so it seems to me that I owe all my characters this kind of unflinching approach. This cold and sometimes cantankerous (yet always compassionate) eye. Theroux’s character V.S. Naipaul actually existed, of course, and my own characters never have…except in my head. Which, when I’m writing, is all the existence that matters.

— Justine Musk