Developing characters, before or during

I think of what kind of person they’re going to be, but it isn’t until I start writing that I fully imagine what they’re like and begin to understand who they are. A lot is giving the a voice in dialogue as I begin to imagine the way people talk and quirks of their language and then quirks of the way they’re thinking, they begin to come to me, though I might have some notes before I started to write.

--Sue Miller

This description perfectly parallels my experience. I did some character sketches for my main characters before I started drafting in earnest, but for awhile they were little more than glass-eyed dolls that I moved around to act out the crude story I had at that point. And, like Miller describes, they started to make themselves real to me through their dialogue. I was writing dialogue to serve the plot, but over time the characters voices start to get more and more distinct.

At a certain point, for example, I noticed that one character was saying almost nothing active—just responding to what was around him in the most limited way he could get away with. And in that way I learned how wary and guarded he was. Which was something that was probably latent in the original character sketch but not so conscious for me until later.

That quirk of language told me about the quirks of thinking, which told me a lot more about who they really were, which then gave the story more depth so it became less and less crude as I went along.

I think I’ve referred in other posts to a previous attempt to write a novel, and back then I took the opposite approach—I filled notebooks full of character development exercises. I suppose they might have been useful for getting unstuck but as a planning tool, they just made me feel busy while I delayed the important work of adding sentences every day to my draft.

Discouraged--basic plot problems

Ugh. Another road block. It seems like about once a week I get about 12-24 hours of feeling like I'm making progress and then run into another problem that feels catastrophic and makes me want to give up.

All these crises have passed before, and I'll have to trust this one will too if I keep at it.

I started reading Ch. 11 last night and this morning and while there is an awful lot of good work that fits within the chapter, there's an awful lot that doesn't fit in with the plot of the rest of the book. And it's not as simple as cutting that stuff out. (I don't think so anyway. It's important to take a few minutes and seriously consider that radical solutions, so I will do that.) It's more a matter of the chapter not having a point that fits with the chapters on either side.

I think what I've exposed is a critical flaw in the plot structure of Part 2. What is happening and how is the character developing? I've worked hard on these questions, I feel, but I'm still left with a series of events that don't tie together. It's like the plot works but the character development does not, so when it comes down to it the plot doesn't really work at heart either. It's a patch job. Character development is the plot, so if you spend a moment too long considering only the events (plot in the most simplistic sense) and not what they mean for the character, the formula gets unbalanced and there's a weakness in the plaster mix that makes itself more and more apparent over time. In this case in Part 2, I can always answer why a character is behaving in a given moment but only if I ignore what happened in the previous episode. How does he so quickly go from resistant to willing, for example? From allied with that character to suspicious of him? The changes are too whipsaw, so the believability of the whole book is starting crack apart at this point.

I'm afraid what all this means is some significant developing and rewriting throughout Part 2. And that's very discouraging to think about.

Outlining

Yikes. I just found this post in my "draft" folder that I thought I had posted more than a year ago.

I have an outline of my book that I use when I'm trying to get unstuck or plan what to work on next. It's a Word doc set up as a table with columns for plot and theme and with space for notes, chapter by chapter. I print it out and spread it out on the dining room table and write my new plans on it. I use that as a guide when I'm working on the rewrite until the plans don't make sense any more and then I start a fresh copy and try again. At a certain point I know the plot well enough that I could delete all that detail and now it's more focused on function--notes on what each chapter needs to accomplish or establish. More importantly, it has notes on what each chapter is promising but hasn't delivered on yet.

Finally really finished with rewrite of Part 1

I had my wife read the last two chapters of Part 1 over the weekend and spent a long time talking with her about it the way we used to do last summer when I was drafting it. That always helps. This morning, I took her notes--which were very few--and worked over a few key spots in those chapters.

And what that work, I'm calling Part 1 done. Done in the sense that I intended for my first rewrite--the material has all been gone over carefully and "developed" as best as I can for now. Every chapter deals with the thematic and plot questions of the book--with the character's desires and motivations. Every chapter complicates the quest a little bit, closing off some avenues, raising the stakes. All the chapters relate to one another so that it adds up to a story with a plot and a character who changes with the plot and vice versa.

I expect that as I think about it more while I'm working on Part 2 and certainly when I get some other readers to comment on it at some later point, I'll become aware of more development work that needs to be done. That will be the second rewrite. But nothing like that is apparent to me now.

On to Part 2. Let's say, worst case, that takes me the same relative amount of time. That would mean about 4-5 months. What I'm hoping though is that the last couple of months of work is a better model--that what I figured out after the first 4-5 months of stumbling around and finally getting my act together in February will be a useful lesson for the rest of the rewrite. In that case, 5 weeks would be a good ambitious estimate.

Officially, I'm not starting the next stage until almost ten days from now when I've gotten myself overseas and set up in my accommodations there. But I think I'll open the files and start poking around this week so that I start stewing on whatever problems are most obvious. It's a long sleepless plane ride across the Pacific, so that's a good time to chew on technical and plot problems.

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 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.

Knowing the ending when you start

Interviewer: I think academics tend to assume writers write novels the way freshmen write term papers. You have a thesis . . .

Larry McMurtry: That’s right. And you explain your thesis. But that isn’t what happens. What happens is a process of discovery in which a writer is compelled as much by curiosity as to how things will turn out and who people are as anything else. I get curious about a group of characters and I start investigating them.

I wish it was that way for me. That’s the way I would like to write, but after many years of trying to just finish something, I mostly only had mere sketches of characters I was curious about. The breakthrough for this book came when I pictured the ending and I realized I could just keep writing toward that ending and that if I kept moving toward that ending I would logically have to create a plot along the way. For me, plot has always been the weakness I had to work on most consciously.

Now, this didn’t necessarily make a good ending a good plot, but since experience told me the biggest risks were not starting and not finishing, I decided not to worry about “good” and to focus on “finished.” That insight was what it took for me, with my particular mix of talents and deficiencies, to get a complete draft written.

Also, it didn’t necessarily mean that the ending and plot, however good they might be, would still go together very well. In fact, in the last two days as I was writing down the final scenes, half of my brain was celebrating—“I’m almost done!”—and the other half was admitting how unsatisfactory the ending was.

So the ending really served as a kind of placeholder that I’m now going to have to get rid of in favor of some other ending, still to be thought of. I love what the ending did for me. It served me well. But now I have to retire it.

More on Larry McMurtry tomorrow.

Finished Chapter 7 again but with no confidence

Sunday a.m. The good news is that I got preoccupied enough with the problems of Ch. 7 that I was motivated to put in extra time on it over the weekend. Woke up early this a.m. dreaming about it, and worked on it a couple hours. And I finished it.

The bad news is that I'm leaving Ch. 7 behind with the same nagging sense that I dodged something important that bothered me through most of the rewrite work I was doing over the fall and winter. I don't know what the problem is, but I'm pretty sure there is one. I'm hoping that someone will read it and tell me it works and it's great, but my inner BS detector tells me that I'm trying to get away with doing the hard work.

Still, I think it's better to go on to Chapter 8 and see if that shakes anything loose. That will be the last chapter in part 1. It has its own climax and brings many of the plot points of part 1 to a conclusion. So we'll see how satisfying and whole it all feels when that's done and then decide about circling back to work on fixes or moving ahead to Part 2.

In any case, that transition should coincide with my departure for the long summer trip abroad. Whatever it is I'm going to be doing, I'm trying to set myself to be making some kind of fresh start by the end of May. That means finishing Ch. 8.

Understanding character

Starting fresh on Monday morning, and that sense of momentum from last week isn't there. I think Chapter 7 is going to take longer than a couple of days. It might even go very slowly. But I'm not feeling worried about it. Right now it feels similar to how slowly it was all going over most of the winter, but different in an important respect--I feel like I know what the work is and why it's going slowly. I know what I need to be working on.

Essentially--for today at least--I'm trying to imagine what the consequences are of plot developments that have been added into previous chapters. And since the really meaningful consequences are how the characters feel about it and deal with it, I have to understand the characters. Of course, I understood them before, but the bar keeps getting raised as the story gets deeper and more complex. You have to imagine them more vividly--make them more and more real in your imagination.

So today I was looking at one scene that was very superficial in the first draft and asking myself how would these people really feel about what has happened and what would they do in this scene? It's all about being as honest as possible.

One trick I have when I'm stuck--I think I wrote about this last summer--is to actually get up out of my writing chair and walk around imagining I'm in the room in that scene. I don't talk to myself exactly, but almost. I physically make the gestures I imagine them making. Try to set my hips and shoulders and eyes in the same way. And then I imagine the tone of their voices. I usually only have to do that for a couple seconds and then what they would say next comes to me and I jump back in my chair and start writing again.

Over all, I only dealt with about two pages, and I think there's going to be a lot of similar work in this chapter.

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?

One year anniversary and finished with Chapter 5 rewrite

Today is a big day for a couple of reasons.

First, it was a year ago today that I started working on the novel. For a couple weeks prior I had been sketching out various stories and episodes, including one that has become my chapter 1 in the book. For some reason that morning I couldn't sleep and woke up about 4 a.m. and sat in the living room with my journal, and while I was sitting there, the basic outline of the book came to me--a completely meatless skeleton on which I recognized I could hang just about anything and that would serve well for the kind of drifting around and false starts that were going to be necessary as I learned how to write a novel.

Another way of looking at it was that I could see clearly what kind of trouble my character was in and how the story could end and I had confidence that I could create a story that would connect the dots to that ending. I started making notes and within a few minutes I understood that I was working on a novel. Thank god for the generative power of occasional insomnia.

I looked over those notes last night, and I was proud to see how little I've drifted from the original concept. (Actually, the ending, which was what gave me the confidence to get going, is the thing that has changed the most.) I had done some freewriting on what the story was about thematically, and that still fits. I made notes on some of the techniques I would use and the technical problems I would have to deal with, and all that is still relevant.

There is one wildly inaccurate note. The journal entry begins. "Story idea. A novella." Ha! It is this point an obnoxiously long novel.

I'm also proud that on April 22 of last year I did not know that I could finish a rough draft and set out with only that initial goal, and I achieved it. Right now, I don't know that I can finish a rewrite resulting in a sensible draft, and I've been working steadily on achieving that.

The second reason today is a big day is that I finished the rewrite of Chapter 5, which has been a big stumbling block since about January 17.

To review, I started the rewrite process last fall (September?) and made slow work on Chapters 1-4 up through January 17. It was a slog and I never felt confident about the results anyway. Then I had about a one-month period where all work stopped while I concentrated on my paying jobs. When I started on the rewrite of Chapter 5, the crisis inherent in all the previous work became impossible to ignore and I floundered for a couple of weeks. Finally, on March 4 is when I had something of a breakthrough by developing my "focusing questions." Since then, I started all over again, re-rewriting Chapters 1-4 and now Chapter 5, getting past the hump of what I had been blocked on since mid January. That work has moved at a pace more like what I had imagined from the beginning--3 or 4 days for each chapter, plus some days for personal and business distractions, adding up to about a week per chapter.

I don't know what happens next. Hopefully those focusing questions continue to serve me well and my rewrite work will continue to be on point and not floundering. Even if so, I suspect the remaining chapters will need comparatively more work. Even if it's clear to me what I need to do, it will be more time consuming. My most optimistic goal is to finish the next three chapters--all of part 1--before my big summer trip begins at the end of May. And then to do all of part 2 during that trip before the end of July.

Another thing about Chapter 5 . . . If I compare the plot of the two drafts, there is really only one sentence in the climax that I added that changes the plot. It all boils down to adding that one sentence. But it's a sentence that changes the everything we understand about the character, and I had to lay the groundwork in the character to make that one sentence credible, and before that I had to understand it all well enough myself. Which I didn't before.

Here's hoping I understand it all well enough to push through other obstacles more quickly in the future.

Finished with Chapter 3 again

It's a horrible mess, but I'm done with what I planned to do on Chapter 3--layering on more plot and characterization. It's now a full 55 typed pages. That's enough for 3 chapters, so I'll have some real challenges thinking about pacing and structure later on. But I'm determined to fight that battle another day. On to Chapter 4. I'm concerned about how little time I'll have for the novel in the next few weeks. It's shaping up for a potentially big disruption in my workflow.

Focusing questions and progress

I had a brief good start today, and then I got distracted. Anyway . . .

I tried an exercise recently where I just made a list of the thematic and plot questions that my story was struggling with, overall and by section. In the first brainstormed list, I didn't try to focus the questions too much, but bt by this point I know the material well enough that they came out pretty focused anyway.

When I scratched out the questions that seemed like minor concerns, I was left with six pretty clear questions that I could say are the major points. When I studied them, I realized that they kind applied to either part 1 or part 2 or to the book overall, so I labeled them that way. And then it seemed like they each either about plot or theme and broke up pretty naturally without me forcing the issue into three strong pairs. Another way of putting it is that they cover internal and external conflict. They are all about my main character. They are things that every chapter can and should focus on (but don't necessarily yet.)

Next I re-wrote them graphically. I made a big curving line across the page for the whole book and two smaller curves underneath for Part 1 and Part 2. It looks like a wide forehead and two eyebrows. Underneath each arc, I wrote my three pairs of questions.

It felt like progress and my hope is that I have the kind of guidestar that I said I needed in yesterday's post. I feel like I can open Chapter 1 and attack a rewrite of it with a lot more confidence by shaping it to present and start answering the appropriate questions.

Update: This little drawing turned out to be a huge aid in the last year. It finally got me started on my first complete rewrite and guided me in subsequent revisions. Whenever I was dealing with a scene that seemed to go nowhere and do nothing, a glance at this (taped over my computer of course--I even took it on my long trip overseas with me last summer and taped it on the mirror in my hotel room) showed me how to develop the scene to make it work for the plot and character development.

Being true to the heart of the book

What I feel like writing about today is abstract and unclear in my mind. It's just a sensation that I've been getting, and I don't really have good examples or good vocabulary for it.

I've been doing a lot of "thinking" about the book. Sitting around with the outline in front of me and saying "what if . . ." There's lots of brainstorming of possible plot developments and then walking through each of the chapters and making notes on what would need to be added or changed.

What I'm really doing is trying to resolve the big problem that is at the heart of this project--that my character isn't very active. That's simply one of the weaknesses of my writing--that I'm more comfortable with theme, setting, character and tone than I am with plot. I can set the soldiers up in the sandbox, but I'm less effective at making them march.

So in my brainstorming I'll come up with something and additional problems will emerge. One, it' s tempting to slide back into my comfort zone--to think about the action the character takes in Chapter 1 but not sustain it and have it keep building in later chapters while I get more interested in exploring the variation on the theme that I've created.

Two, I don't have a good ear for the plot elements or, more important, making sure it's integrated with theme and character and the rest. So the stuff I'm brainstorming feels tinny--tacked on and isolated. It doesn't excite me and adding it in feels like an errand rather than a way to develop the book.

Last--and this is the thing that interests me the most right now--in concentrating on this thing that feels like a chore, it feels like I'm losing track of the heart of the book. I have to keep trying to remind myself what is interesting and powerful and unique about it. (Because the plot stuff I'm brainstorming doesn't feel powerful to me.)

And sometimes I wonder if the heart of the book is exactly the thing I'm trying to "fix"--the tendency for my character not to act. To what extent is that a lack of imagination on my part and to what extent is that the story itself, unique to this character?

Which is another way of saying, I don't really have a resolution to the essential technical problem in the book. What action is required for the book to be interesting; for it to be believable; for it to be true to its own heart and essential character?

I'm at sea a little bit. While I'm trying to figure out what I'm trying to figure out, it's hard to keep up the actual writing habit. I don't know what I'm doing.

Since the butterfly flapped its wings

About an hour of work this morning and I finished my first read through and fussing with Chapter 4 and have notes on what I need to work. It needs some thought about character and motivation and then some development based on that, but not so much I hope as in other chapters so I should get through it fairly quickly if I can devote attention to it. I'm coming to my desk in the morning squeezed on the front end by fatigue and lack of sleep and squeezed on the back end by a sense of urgency about other work and home responsibilities, so I'm not putting my best energy into this right now.

What I'm really struggling with is the pace of plot and character development and how that necessarily changes as a result of how previous chapters have been rewritten. I feel like I've done everything meaningful that Chapter 5 is currently designed to do, so I'm worried Chapter 5 is going to feel repetitive. The obvious solution is to cut it. But something is telling me that's too drastic and I need to make it work in there--that if it weren't there things would be sped up too much.

I guess another way to put it is if you can imagine that a one-pound bucket of stuff needs to be established in a given chapter, since I started my rewrite about 3/4 of a pound of the stuff from Chapter 5 has been established earlier. That still leaves 1/4 pound of important stuff to justify Chapter 5, but it would be a pretty thin chapter and sound largely repetitive.

The real solution I suspect--and it's intimidating to think about--is to adjust my thinking away from "what needs to happen" to "what would happen." In other words, stop trying to make the story serve my plan for getting it done and instead focus on bringing out the fullness of the story that isn't there yet. That might mean keeping the episode in Chapter 5 as platform and rewriting it from scratch based on a new understanding of what the characters have gone through in the meantime. That is a ton of new and intense work. I don't mind doing it--I just regret how long it will take.

My pile of scrap lumber--a kind of end to Chapter 3

With very little confidence and satisfaction, I wrote an end to Chapter 3 and have it in my head that I'm done working on it for awhile. I haven't yet had my wife look at it like I did previous chapters, so we'll see. Maybe that will inspire me to work on it some more next week.

I started work on the rewrite on Dec. 7, so I'm way off of my goal of doing a chapter a week.

It's 50 pages and 16,113 words. It started out as 17 pages and 5,970 words, so you can't say I haven't been writing. At this rate, after the first rewrite I'll have a manuscript that's about 400,000 words, which is about 300,000 words too long. Chapter 3 itself ought to be closer to its original length of 17 pages, so what I really have at this point isn't a finished chapter so much as a pile of scrap lumber to sort through. It lays out a ton of different themes and minor story lines and doesn't resolve or escalate any of them very powerfully.

(Those figures aren't counting the 10 pages (3,400 words) of material that I save in a kind of dust bin. My typical process as I'm rewriting is if I ever cut out as much as a paragraph or longer, I paste it at the end of the Word doc in a section I call "leftovers" in case I change my mind and want to bring that stuff back. So my Chapter 3 document is actually 60 pages long with the "end chapter" mark coming on page 50.)

I just looked back at my blog for Dec. 5 when I finished Chapter 2. I was feeling pretty doubtful then, and I feel even less satisfied with how Chapter 3 has gone. The sense of not doing good work is starting to wear on me. So I have to remind myself . . .

. . . collecting the pile of scrap lumber is a necessary part of it. The Chapter 3 that I need will emerge from this eventually. I found my working title. I found a unifying metaphor to help keep me focused in this chapter and in the rest. I can describe my overall plot and how character and theme and setting intertwine with that better than I could a month ago.

My plan is to get my wife's feedback over the weekend, maybe make some notes on what to address the next time I come back around to this chapter and move on to Chapter 4 on Monday. We'll see.

Supernovas, Dead stars and White Dwarfs

"I want endings (not stoppings) that close like supernovas and leave you gasping.”

--Richard Ford

I first heard this oft-quoted advice from a friend and writing teacher encouraging me to be more aggressive in the ending of a short story I was working on. (You can find the original remark in an interesting long essay by Richard Ford here.) I remember that at the time I was very concerned that my endings be “earned”—that they not come to a sudden resolution that hadn’t been prepared for.

In the old days, the unearned ending would be done with deus ex machina, and most people know better than to do that know. The more common late 20^th-century mistake, which I tended toward, is to have a moody quiet character just go off the deep end and wreck any hope of reconciling the relationships. End of story—very tidy. Except that these endings are rarely earned either. An inexperienced writer doesn’t know how to set up for these endings and resorts to them because really they don't know fully what they're doing in their story earlier on.

So, trying to avoid that, I went in the other direction—endings that imitated Raymond Carver and James Joyce. Epiphanies and important realizations. Very slight gestures that indicated a change in understanding of some kind. The worst examples of this look like no ending at all—they just peter out in a way that looks to readers like self-important artsiness and deliberate obscurity.

In a way it is deliberate obscurity. Both kinds of endings are. They try to obscure—either with a lot of commotion or with an affected artsiness—that the writer isn’t command of the material. Instead of worrying about the ending, I would be better off making the characters as fully complex and honest as I could. In theory if I do that then the ending will take care of itself.

In any case, what my friend was saying in quoting Richard Ford was that if powerful emotions have been packed into the story and powerful pressures applied to the characters then something powerful is likely to result. A real person in that situation would naturally respond in some kind of way, and if they are human and singular, and if the situation is really justifiably interesting, they will probably respond in a way that is surprising.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a noisy ending—the choice isn’t between my “and then all of a sudden he started yelling” endings and my “he just shrugged and made a wry joke and walked out the door” endings. In theory, the endings of Carver’s stories and “The Dead”—subtle as they are—are supernovas. I think most readers are left gasping at the end of “The Dead.”

Supernovas vs. Dead Stars

All of this is a lot of background to what I wanted to say about the process of working on this novel.

After finishing the first draft and reading it through, I had many minor episodes that set up a dramatic situation early on, before moving setting up the primary climactic episode of the chapter, and after reading through my draft I could see that those minor episodes were missed opportunities. They didn’t have good endings to them oftentimes. They fell flat without adding anything to advance the plot. Sometimes, arguably, they developed characterization, but only in the sense that they were a character sketch, and characterization should always go hand-in-hand with advancing the plot.

I came to think of these episodes as the opposites of supernovas and in my work plan, not knowing anything about astronomy, I labeled them as “dead stars.” They have been key places in the meantime where I have worked to develop my draft. I go back to those episodes and ask myself what really interested me about that dramatic situation and what would really happen if my characters—who I have been getting to know better and better—were really in that situation, particularly in light of the experiences they’ve been having in previous episodes. Then I develop/re-write that.

Now that I think about it, that metaphor is all wrong, because if they were really dead stars the job would be to cut them out, but like I said, they were missed opportunities. My job was to turn them into supernovas. They might be more appropriately labeled white dwarf stars, but perhaps some literary-minded astronomer or physicist can suggest the more apt metaphor like black dwarf, red giant or Wolf-Rayet star.

Working on xmas

Happy holidays. I'm not working exactly, because that's impossible at the in-laws' house, but I'm taking a few minutes to scribble some notes on a move in the plot that came to me yesterday. Out for a walk between heavy holiday meals yesterday and slipped into reverie and something in the walk reminded me of something in my childhood which got me wondering how I could use it, and what I came up with was good enough that when a quiet moment came this afternoon I still remembered it well enough to type up the concept real quick and email it to myself. I'm hoping it will solve something that's been bothering me about the opening to Chapter 3.

 

 

Old journal entries posted out of order--Rethinking my plot

Before I started posting to this blog, I kept some journal entries so I would have material to work with once I got going. They were logs without the web. Some of those original pieces were never posted, and now I'm circling back to post some of interest.

Sept. 4

I’m not sure where this is coming from, but I’m having a terrific urge to layer on some plot complications. It’s a very creative feeling, but it also feels a little dangerous—like it could be destructive of what I have at the same time. It’s ironic to have this urge since plot has always been my greatest weakness.

It’s hard to describe what I mean without being specific about the details of my book, but . . . I think I’m feeling like there needs to be more going on outside the main domestic setting of the story. My friend Tim Parrish advised me to make sure that there is energy in the story outside the family, and at the time I thought I had it covered and didn’t think much about it. But now as I read through the draft I’m finding all these little loose threads—little bits of color and detail thrown in without ever following up on them—and they suggest possibilities. It’s like I’ve unconsciously foreshadowed dozens of plot strands that I never thought about and never followed up on.

One example: In my draft, I have my main character getting a little pre-adolescent erotic charge hanging out with the receptionist at his dad’s office. I put it in to tell myself what his frame of mind is like at the time, but I wasn’t really including it to move the plot and didn’t do anything with it. It didn’t contribute to the story in any way. Meanwhile, the usual tension carries on between my character and his father. It seems to me now all of that can be combined to generate some other plot complications that hadn’t occurred to me before.

This isn’t the best example, because I don’t want to give away my best example. But in any case, if I pursued that line of thought, it would take me down different paths and possibly necessitate different episodes following that point in the book and even a different conclusion.

On the one hand, I really don’t like the idea that my story would need so much basic structural work. On the other hand, I’m getting a little thrill from a seeming breakthrough in my ability generate more plot complications.

Toni Morrison on Point of View II

Picking up on my last post about looking at things from the bad guy’s P.O.V., the example of the that clearest to me is the Cholly chapter in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and that whole book, along with Beloved, are what I turned to for technical models for my narrative P.O.V.

I started out knowing that I wanted my narration to be in the third person. Partly I didn’t want to limit myself to the P.O.V. of my main character all the way through. Especially since it’s a coming of age story, so my youthful character would not be very sophisticated or a mature judge of his circumstances. I wanted to be able to say more than the character could.

Also, I didn’t want to invite comparison with other coming-of-age stories with strong first-person narrators like Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird and Huck Finn. Any story about youth told in the first person always gets summarized by some readers as either a modern Holden Caulfield or Scout or Huck Finn and I didn’t want to have that hanging over my head as I drafted.

As for second person narration, I’ve always thought that felt gimmicky and unnatural. It puts up a stylistic barrier between the story and the listener. In theory, it's a more immersive experience for the reader, but in reality I think it has the opposite effect, forcing the reader to translate through the technique.

So when I first started, I went looking for examples of coming-of-age novels in the third-person, and they are actually pretty hard to find. (If you can suggest any, let me know.) My wife suggested The Bluest Eye, but if you start reading it from the first chapter, you’ll see that her memory was technically mistaken. It starts in first person, but from the P.O.V. of someone other than the main character of Pecola. It’s sort of how Nick Carraway reports on Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby—the on-the-scene observer who is not himself central to the action. (Except that he actually is when it comes to the thematic conflict vs. the exterior conflict—I’ll parse that another day.)

But I nevertheless re-read The Bluest Eye all the way through and saw that the P.O.V. jumps around. It’s in first person a lot of the time, though with different narrators, and it's in third person omniscient a couple times and third person limited sometimes, especially in the Cholly chapter. That turned out to be a chapter that inspired me quite a lot. If you look over the Cholly chapter, you’ll see that it gets in so close to looking through his eyes and limiting the information to what he knows and how he feels about it, that it almost feels like first person, but it’s third-person limited.

That was also instructive because I knew I was going to have a technical problem similar to the one that chapter was dealing with—a character who does monstrous things but who if I presented as monstrous would come off as flat and unrealistic and incredible. With Cholly, Morrison "causes readers some dismay" (to use her own analysis--see yesterday's post) by making him understandable and comprehensible. She treats him as human, which is necessary to the art if he isn’t going to be just a tool to move the plot along. It certainly is dismaying and raises the stakes for the reader of all the conflict that follow. (That's key probably to any great narrative art and part of what I admire in Morrison's novels--when not only can the reader see something at stake for the characters but can feel something at stake for themselves.)

In the case of my own book, it would certainly be more comfortable for me to treat my monstrous character as simply a monster but the credibility of the tale would break down there, and the Cholly chapter showed me a way to create what I needed to.

But where Morrison used the third person limited in that select spot, I felt her way of getting in so close that it felt like the first person would be good for my entire story. Instead of shifting the P.O.V. and the technique, I would stick with that technique and switch from one character to another as needed in different sections or chapters.

Just about decided on that, I turned to Beloved to study how she handled P.O.V. there. I looked at the scene where the full detail of how Beloved dies is revealed to the reader—the family working the yard, the horses coming up the lane, the mad dash to the shed. If you look at that scene, you’ll see that same technique of third person narration getting in real close on the shoulder of the characters so that it feels like first person.

Except in this case, instead of it changing from chapter to chapter, the P.O.V. changes from paragraph to paragraph. We spend a few frames on Stamp Paid’s shoulder, then on Baby Suggs’, then on the slave masters, then on the nephew’s, then the white man coming up from town in his carriage and so on. In each paragraph we only see it from the perspective and limited understanding of each character and in that way get the whole story. It’s masterful. It’s the most impactful and complex—and dismaying—presentation of horror that I know of in a novel.

I've imitated that style a lot at the most emotionally intense points in my draft and overall the P.O.V. would be described as third-person limited, mostly from the perspective of the main character and occasionally, for the duration of a chapter, switching to other key characters.