Edith Wharton on character development

The other difficulty is that of communicating the effect of the gradual passage of time in such a way that the modifying and maturing of the characters shall seem not an arbitrary sleight-of-hand but the natural result of growth in age and experience. This is the great mystery of the art of fiction. The secret seems incommunicable; one can only conjecture that it has to do with the novelist's own deep belief in his characters and what he is telling about them. He know that this and that befell them, and that in the interval between this and that the months and years have continued their slow task of erosion or accretion; and he conveys this knowledge by some subterranean process as hard to seize in action as the growth of a plant. a study of the great novelists . . . will show that ssuch changes are suggested, are arrived at, in the inconspicuous transitional pages of narrative that lead from climax to climax. One of the means by which the effect is produced is certainly that of not fearing to go slowly, to keep down the tone of the narrative, to be as colourless and quiet as life often is in the intervals between its high moments.

Another difficulty connected with this one is that of keeping so firm a hold on the main lines of one's characters that they emerge modified and yet themselves from the ripening or disintegrating years. Tolstoy had this gift to a supreme degree. . . .

. . . with what sure and patient touches their growth and decline are set forth! And how mysteriously yet unmistakably, as they reappear after each interval, the sense is conveyed that there has been an interval, not in moral experience only but in the actual lapse of the seasons! The producing of this impression is indeed the central mystery of the art. To its making go patience, meditation, concentration . . . .
--Edith Wharton

Again, I'm quoting from The Writing of Fiction. This is from the chapter on "Constructing a Novel" in which she discusses some of the central difficulties that a novelist has to grapple with. When I came to this section I started underlining like crazy, because it's a problem that I'm very conscious of in my story. The character in my book has to change--in response to the events of the plot--and at the same time has to remain himself, so that whatever action he takes at the end has to feel like it was inherent in the character that was presented at the beginning of the story. Otherwise the reader will feel gypped. Another discussion of this idea that has helped me is in L. Rust Hills book Writing In General and the Short Story in Particular. He calls it the "inevitability of retrospect," and he has a neat little drawing to illustrate the idea.

What I don't like about this passage from Wharton is she doesn't give any practical advice! Well, not much anyway--meditate, concentrate, go slowly. But overall she makes it sound like it takes an act of grace to pull it off.

Edith Wharton on digging deeper

The phrase 'economy of material' suggests another danger to which the novelist and the writer of short stories are equally exposed . . . . Economy is . . . to be advised in the multiplication of accidental happenings, minor episodes, surprises and contrarieties . . . . The reluctance to look deeply enough into a subject leads to the indolent habit of decorating its surface. . . . Again and again the novelist passes by the real meaning of a situation simply for lack of letting it reveal all its potentialities instead of dashing this way and that in quest of fresh effects. If, when once drawn to a subject, he would let it grow slowly in his mind instead of hunting about for arbitrary combinations of circumstance, his tale would havethe warm scent and flavour of ripened in the sun instead of the insipidity of one forced in a hot-house.
--Edith Wharton

This passage from The Writing of Fiction is timely for me. She is talking, I think, about the necessity of developing and digging deeper that I have been working on for the last several months. My first draft had a lot of the dashing about that she criticizes and a lot of my rewriting processed has layered on even more of it. Right now especially at the climax of Part 1, I am tempted to layer on the multiple happenings, coincidences and so on.

I've indulged that impulse, because to me that is a way of discovering the "real meaning of a situation"--a way of letting it grow in my mind. For the most part, it has been in the service of discovering all the potentialities of the situation.

The trick is to distinguish between what helps me actually develop and deepen the work and what is just a distraction to help me avoid it. In the most basic sense, a weak story will just start shooting off fireworks or affect an air of mystery as a smokescreen to hide the fact that the story isn't really complex. It's a kind of display like a fish that puffs itself up when a predator is nearby. I know in my case it's as much an effort to delude myself that the work is powerful as it is trying to slide something by the reader. Decorating the surface isn't inspired by indolence so much as fear.

My mind is on the next draft, and I can see that a lot of it will be addressing exactly this issue--looking at some of the exciting fireworks shows and being tough with myself about what is unnecessary. Not just unnecessary, and therefore needing to be cut, but if those decorations are hiding weaknesses in the work that still need to be excavated.

Edith Wharton on Plot and Character Development

There are at least two reasons why a subject should find expression in novel-form rather than as a tale; but neither is based on the number of what may be conveniently called incidents, or external happenings, which the narrative contains. There are novels of action which might be condensed into short stories without the loss of their distinguishing qualities. The marks of the subject requiring a longer development are, first, the gradual unfolding of the inner life of its characters, and secondly the need of producing in the reader's mind the sense of the lapse of time. Outward events of the most varied and exciting nature without loss of probability be crowded into a few hours, but moral dramas usually have their roots deep in the soul, their rise far back in time; and the suddenest-seeming clash in which they culminate should be led up to step by step if it is to explain and justify itself.

Wharton doesn't use the terms plot or character development in this chapter on writing short stories in her book The Writing of Fiction, but I find it helpful for thinking about plot and character development. Her distinction between "external happenings" or "outward events" and "moral dramas" or "inner life" is what interests me.

Her point is that the latter categories require a long form--the novel. I'm already committed to working on a novel (it's the name of my blog, after all!), so what helps me here is the reminder that the real story that I have to always be careful to shape and intensify is the moral drama of my characters.

In other words, character development is plot. It's another way of expressing the theme that I've touched on several times in previous posts--the necessity of integrating all the parts of fiction.

A Reader In Mind-Edith Wharton's "other self"

I read Edith Wharton's The Writing of Fiction last week and spent a lot of time underlining.

Here's something she says in the intro chapter that seemed to me to relate to the issue of writing with a particular reader in mind, which is a question I've explored in other posts.

There is no doubt that in this day of general 'speeding up,' the 'inspirational' theory is seductive even to those who care nothing for easy triumphs. No writer--especially at the beginning of his career--can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that awaits him; and the young novelist may ask of what use are experience and meditation, when his readers are so incapable of giving him either. The answer is tht he will never do his best till he ceases altogether to think of his readers (and his editor and his publisher) and begins to write, not for himself, but for that other self with whom the creative artist is always in mysterious correspondenc,e and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it.

Motivating character with the dragon

Interviewer: When you teach, you talk to your students about “the dragon” . . . . Could you please explain it?

Sue Miller: It’s an analogy for the writing of fiction lifted from Flannery O’Connor—the notion that every character in a story must struggle with something: his dragon. . . . My argument has been that if you really look at any given character, there is . . . a dragon for that character: something born of him that is the thing he ought to be confronting fictionally that you could make him confront. . . . If you look at each character, there is something that’s the pickle he needs to be in in order to make a story happen. . . . The character richly drawn struggles with something which emerges from himself that he ought to struggle with; or at least he learns that he’s going to have to struggle. In a way, what fiction does is watch people struggle.

Presumably Sue Miller isn’t talking about watching me struggle, which is what it feels like right now.

I’m looking at this explanation of hers carefully lately because it’s a really helpful metaphor for the aspect of the writing I have to work on next. In the first draft, I thought in terms of “longing.” What does this character long for? Trying to answer that was great for helping me build up tension from one scene to the next to keep the plot going.

Now that I’m working on the rewrite, I’m seeing lots of places where there still isn’t much going on with the characters--not much longing and not much struggle, places where the struggle doesn’t seem very significant or meaningful, places where their longing doesn’t connect to other places, places where they simply aren’t “richly drawn.”

So I’ve been using this dragon metaphor to guide my imagination in the rewrite. What’s the thing that is each character’s core that they need to struggle with?