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DRAFT July 13, 2013, 2:35 pm 9 Comments
Tell Their Secrets
Tell Their Secrets
By SILAS HOUSE
I learned early on that reading novels could save me. Even before I heard Simon and Garfunkel sing it in “I Am a Rock,” I knew that I had my books and my poetry to protect me. But it was not so much the books themselves that I loved as the characters I found within their covers.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” would certainly have had little effect without the presence of memorable folks like Scout, Jem, Dill, Atticus and Calpurnia. “The Outsiders” wouldn’t have meant much to me without Ponyboy, Johnny, Cherry Valance and all the others. “The Color Purple” only took up housekeeping in my heart because of characters like Celie, Shug and Sofia.
Characters are what make us love fiction, what make the stories stick with us and speak to us. Yes, plot and sense of place and action and the language are hugely important. But a novel would be a boring affair indeed without those who populate it.
As writers, one of our ultimate goals must be to create flesh-and-blood characters that readers come to care about or despise — but always feel as if they know.
Unfortunately, it’s harder to create a memorable character than most people think. They usually do not appear to novelists fully formed. Despite popular opinion, writing is hard, and creating a character that will become three-dimensional to readers is a true feat.
When I work with beginning writers and instruct them to write a characterization, they produce something like this: “She was a blue-eyed blonde in a red dress.”
Right at this moment, there are probably 10 million blue-eyed, blond women wearing red dresses. So that tells me absolutely nothing. I conjure up an image based on other blue-eyed, blond women I know, but all I have is a visual.
The only thing in that pitiful characterization of any use at all is the mention of the red dress, simply because we have archetypal (and often incorrect) associations with particular colors (red is the color of evil, sensuality or rage) or items of clothing (a red dress is shorthand for the vivacious or celebratory). Of course these associations deal with stereotypes and perhaps even some gender judgment.
The point is that I didn’t come to care about Scout or Ponyboy or Celie because of how they looked. I cared about them because I knew what was going on in their minds and hearts. Readers are better informed if we give them what is in a character’s brain, not what is on her body.
Pete Gamlen
Yet people continually want to write about a character’s clothes, his height, or the color of his hair or eyes. These things rarely matter because they don’t tell us about the kind of person with whom we’re dealing. Humans are not that physically different, after all. But all of our hearts and minds are individual, stamped with our own wonderful and terrible secrets.
That’s what readers need to know to care about a character.
Shape your characters by revealing their deepest, darkest secrets. Show us what drives them, what makes them completely individual in this wide world. Tell us how they pine, how they tick.
The physical stuff can be woven in subtly, and most often, later. The best thing is to give us just a few physical hints so we can start to piece together a picture of the character, but focus more on the operations of their souls.
Here’s one of my favorite characterizations ever, from a novel by Brad Watson called “The Heaven of Mercury”: “Her heart though good was a shriveled potato, with sweet green shoots of kindness growing from it, a heart gone to seed.”
Now that’s a description of someone who is complex and holds the promise of a story. Maybe she is a blue-eyed blonde in a red dress and I’ll find that out later, in increments, but for now I am more concerned with that “heart gone to seed.” Most importantly, I feel like I’m meeting someone I’ve never known before. And I want to know more.
I should point out that this characterization is also brilliant because it’s so original. It would have never crossed my mind to characterize someone using vegetable imagery. But it works beautifully.
That’s what true writing must do: show the unexpected, the secret, the profound in a way that it has never been shown before. And it must create characters that are so interesting and endearing (whether we love them or love to hate them) that we never forget them.
I have never forgotten Scout Finch not because she is a little girl with short brown hair wearing overalls but because she refuses to wear dresses and can beat up any boy who crosses her. She is endearing to me because by the end of the book she has learned to put aside her judgment and accept people who are different from her.
I love Ponyboy because he wants to be the best person he can be in a violent world. And because he loves Robert Frost and reads “Gone With the Wind.”
I will always cherish my time with Celie because she is strong, and defiant, and has such a strong desire for learning. Because she longs for something more.
Those are the kinds of things that make a character rise up singing from the page.
To properly characterize we must think about the ways we really describe people. Yes, we sometimes zoom in on their looks, but often we go far past that. If someone asks me about a real person named Loretta, I might start off by saying, “She’s very pretty, black hair, in her 30s, has these bright green eyes. But immediately I will probably add something about her personality: “She’s smart.” And then I will get more specific: “She kind of keeps to herself, but she’s not unfriendly.”
That’s the way we talk in real life, but fiction has to be more revealing, intriguing and eloquent. So in fiction, it is pumped up a notch. That’s why Loretta, a character in my novel “Eli the Good,” is described this way: “Her eyes were green and clever, alert to everything happening around her. At the same time, there was a distance about my mother that was most noticeable in her eyes. A mystery there kept everyone — even me, especially me — from getting too close… She was only thirty-three years old that summer, and her beauty was in full bloom, a kind of peach tint that overtook her face and caused her to glow from within. People stopped talking when she dashed by on the street … She always looked as if she had somewhere important to go.”
We have to think about all the things that make people endlessly fascinating. Their quirks, their body language, their histories, their beliefs. Then we articulate all of that on the page, giving the most important parts when we first meet them, going on to weave even more fascinating facets throughout the rest of the text.
Above all, give us characters we will carry with us after meeting them. Give us people we will remember as if they were real. The books that have meant so much to us are the ones populated by characters like that, characters who resonate because they epitomize our own hopes and struggles and stories.
Silas House, the author of five novels, a work of nonfiction and three plays, teaches at Berea College and Spalding University’s M.F.A. program in creative writing.
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