Elements of Fiction (54)

Element 54: Character

If any one Element of Fiction is “The Big One” Character would be it. As William Sloan so accurately pointed out, “People are not the principal subject of fiction; they are its only subject.”

If there is no character involved in your piece of writing, it is not a story. It might be an interesting essay on mollusks or quantum theory, but it’s not a story, not fiction.

A lot of very good writers agree, and have given this element a lot of thought, which, luckily, they’ve shared.

Like Ernest Hemingway, for one, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols. Remember the race is older than the economic system.”

Or John Gardner, “Every character who enters fiction needs vivid rendering.”

Mavis Gallant, the brilliant New Yorker Magazine mainstay, musing about character, observes this, “Every character comes into being with a name (which I may change), and age, a nationality, a profession, a particular voice and accent, a family background, a personal history, a destination, qualities, secrets, an attitude toward love, ambition, money, religion, and a private center of gravity.”

And how about this amazing, and in my opinion so very true, observation of Graham Greene’s, “The moment when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave him to it.”

As for E.M. Forster, “Of course, that wonderful thing, a character running away with you — which happens to everyone — that’s happened to me, I’m afraid.”

When asked how he wrote The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner replies, “I followed Caddy around and wrote down what she did.”

Here follows a battery of equally amazing quotes:

“Flawed characters are the unforgettable ones.” Susan Shaughnessy

“If they aren’t in interesting situations, characters cannot be major characters, not even if everyone else is talking about them.” P.G. Wodehouse

“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” Henry James

“A writer begins by breathing life into his characters. But if you are very lucky, they breathe life into you.” Caryl Phillips

“I’ve never taken Ideas but always characters for my starting point.” Ivan Turgenev

“If one is not going to make cardboard characters it is important to say that even people who do terrible things are not unrelievedly terrible people, or at least that they are not always terrible: there can be moments when they behave well.” Salman Rushdie

“I didn’t want just to make hate-figures, I wanted to make people.” Salman Rushdie

“Character is the kind of thing which discloses the nature of a choice.” Aristotle

“Make the people live. Make them live. But my people must be more than people. They must be an over-essence of people.” John Steinbeck

“It would be a great joke on the people in my book if I just left them high and dry, waiting for me. If they bully me and do what they choose I have them over a barrel. They can’t move until I pick up a pencil. They are frozen, turned to ice standing one foot up and with the same smile they had yesterday when I stopped.” John Steinbeck

“Character is life in action.” Ulf Wolf

“I can ease my heart inside another character’s until I feel what he or she feels and think the way he or she thinks.” Terry McMillan

“I can’t remember setting off on my travels without having some picture of a character to take with me; I mean, really as a companion.” John le Carre

“Jane Eyre is one of the most outstanding of the character novel, and that is not simply a novel in which character plays a great part — because character does that in all novels — but one in which the story is architected round a single person, and one in which, usually, such persons show power to influence their own destiny so that the story springs from them. Things happen because of what they are and what they do. In themselves they precipitate situations.” Elizabeth Bowen

“The hidden life is, by definition, hidden. The hidden life that appears in external signs is hidden no longer, has entered the realm of action. And it is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.” E.M. Forster

And here are a few from Othello Bach, ““The characters’ responses to the world around them gives the reader insight into their personalities, just as it does to anyone you see on the street. Let the sun, wind, rain, and objects in their immediate surroundings help reveal your character’s thoughts and feelings.”

“Sympathetic characters are good people who have problems, so it’s easy to have sympathy for them.”

“Believable characters respond to life in the same way that real people respond.”

“Characters who are mentally or emotionally different are unique in their responses.”

“Quirks, or peculiar traits, generally make a character more interesting. Early in a book, such differences often help the reader keep the characters straight. A small gesture, a harmless habit, can go a long way in defining a character.”

Again, from Hemingway, “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel.”

And how about this advice from Ursula K. Le Guin, “It might seem that the writer needs a gift of mimicry, like an impersonator, to achieve this variety of voices. But it isn’t that. It’s more like what a serious actor does, sinking self in character-self. It’s a willingness to be the characters, letting what they think and say rise from inside them. It’s a willingness to share control with one’s creation.”

While Flannery O’Connor weighs in with, “A story involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality. I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, ‘Well, them stories just gone and shown how some folks would do,’ and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there — showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.”

And yet again from Hemingway, “People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time.”

John Fowles shares his wisdom, “My characters never show the depth of my feelings and they would be wrong if they did. You have to leave space for the reader’s feelings to meet yours.” John Fowles [my italics]

He goes on to say, “For me the obligation is to present my characters realistically. They must be credible human beings even if the circumstances they are in are ‘incredible,’ as they are in The Collector. But even the story, no matter how bizarre, no matter what symbolisms are involved, has to be possible…. Believability must dominate even the most outlandish situation.”

Oakley Hall suggests, “A character introduced merely in terms of static detail may catch the reader’s eye if the detail is dramatic enough, implicative enough, but it is motion that convinces the reader that the character is alive.”

As for Madison Smartt Bell, “Many writers talk about the moment in a narrative when their characters ‘come to life’ and exercise their own decisions about what they’ll do (it’s almost a cliché of creative process).”

The brilliant John Gardner advises, “The writer’s characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that nothing they do strikes us as improbable behavior for just that character, even when the character’s action is, as sometimes happens, something that comes as a surprise to the writer himself. We must understand, and the writer before us must understand, more than we know about the character; otherwise neither the writer nor the reader after him could feel confident of the character’s behavior when the character acts freely.”

Then adds, “Dragons, like bankers and candy-store owners, must have firm and predictable characters.”

Another brilliant observation from Forster, “In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.”

This from Martin Cruz Smith, “I can only tell you that if you see a character starting to breathe, you do not shut him up, you do not sit on him, and you do not ship him out. You stay with him.”

Here’s a battery from Ayn Rand, “Characterization is the presentation of the nature of the people in a story.”

Characterization is really the presentation of motives. We understand a person if we understand what makes him act the way he does.”

“The main means of characterization are action and dialogue — just as it is only by means of their actions and words that one can observe the characters of other people in real life. There is no way to know the soul (the consciousness) of another except by means of physical manifestations: his actions and words (not his words in the sense of philosophical declarations, but his words in the context of his actions). The same applies to fiction.”

“Also, when you begin writing, write only as much as you are sure of. Do not force your characters into artificial behavior…. If you do not know what a character would do or say, you simply have to give it some more thought.”

“I have talked about the same kind of circle in relation to plot: to project an abstract theme, you must devise the concrete events from which the reader will in turn derive that theme. The same applies to characterization: to project a convincing character, you need to have an idea of the basic premises or motives which move his actions — and by means of these actions, the reader will discover what is at the root of the character.”

“I want to emphasize that a character can have enormous conflicts and contradictions — but then these have to be consistent. You must select his actions so that the reader grasps: ‘This is what’s the trouble with this character.’”

“When you draw a character, everything that you say about him acquires significance by the mere fact of being included in your story.”

“You can project your character only by means of what you say on paper; but behind every line and action, there is much more than what you put in words. No action is taken in a vacuum, and an alert reader is automatically watching for the meaning of every line and action.”

“The art (and difficulty) of Romantic characterization is to present the archetypical — that which is typical of any individualist like Roark or any second-hander like Keating — while at the same time giving enough specific detail so that the character comes across as this particular human being.”

And back to O’Connor, “The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character.”

“Rayber has been the difficulty all along. I’ll never manage to get him as alive as Tarwater and the old man but I can certainly improve on him.”

“Any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself.”

“In most good stories it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story.”

“If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don’t have to know what before you begin. In fact, it may be better if you don’t know what before you begin. You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don’t, probably nobody else will.”

“The man in the violent situation [on the verge of eternity] reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.”

“If possible we should have some indication as to why or what in his past life has made this boy such a monster. It would heighten his credibility. In fiction everything that has an explanation has to have it and the residue is Mystery with a capital M.”

And a warning from Gardner, “When characters act out of character, readers notice. They may blink the mistake and accept what the writer claims to have happened, but readers do know. If they read on, they do so for lack of something better to read.”

“Discursive thought is not fiction’s most efficient tool; the interaction of characters is everything.” John Gardner

Barnaby Conrad muses, “Making the reader like or dislike the character is generally half the battle.”

A great one from Elmore Leonard, “I have a warm feeling for all of my characters, even the bad guys, and when I finish a book I often find myself thinking about them, wondering what they’re doing, maybe sitting around like mannequins waiting for me.”

“Let’s have contrast in characters,” says Joan Oppenheimer. “I don’t want a whole bunch of near-saints or a bunch of unrelievedly evil sinners either. People are a blend of good traits and bad. Mix them up and you get a real person, a human being.”

Back to John Fowles, “For a time they’re just wooden tailor’s dummies with clothes on, and suddenly they start up on their own. You get it most of all when you’re writing dialogue, and they suddenly won’t take the dialogue you’re giving them. It’s very strange. They are almost present, and they’re saying, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t say lines like this.’ And you get this bizarre experience when you feel they know the line they ought to be saying, and you’re searching around in the dark to find it…. But of course in reality the writer has the final say. And on the final draft you have to let the characters know it.”

Here are some more from William Sloane, “The reader reads fiction more for its people than for any other element, whether plot, setting, or shock value. Readers associate characters in fiction with their own lives and with their own experience. They will even name their children after fictional characters…. The novel is the people that are in it.”

“One of the primary rules about characters in fiction is that all of them must contribute to the narrative motion.”

“Characters grow like people. They change for all the human reasons — hate, fear, age, health — anything. The same soldier thinks one way about battle before he is in love, and another, different way after he has fallen in love. A woman loves a man differently before she has children.”

“This business of building character is in some ways the toughest part of long fiction writing, and it is one of the points where, it seems to me, a good novel differs most markedly from a good short story. In a novel, growth and change in a character are part of the forward narrative motion of the book.”

“A character is never a whole person, but just those parts of him that fit the story or the piece of writing. So the act of selection is the writer’s first step in delineating character. From what does he select? From a whole mass of what Bernard DeVoto used to call, somewhat clinically, ‘placental material.’ He must know an enormous amount more about each of this characters than he will ever use directly — childhood, family background, religion, schooling, health, wealth, sexuality, reading, tastes, hobbies — an endless questionnaire for the writer to fill out.”

“For example, the writer knows that people speak, and therefore his characters will describe themselves indirectly when they talk. Clothing is a means of characterization. In short, each character has a style of his own in everything he does. These need not all be listed, but the writer should have a sure grasp of them. If he has, his characters will, within the book, read like people.”

“If you know everything about your characters, then you will always succeed in visualizing them for the reader in one way or another, even if you never resort to a descriptive sentence.”

“From this catalogue of personal and social facts about his characters, the writer selects those elements that build the novel and make it inevitable: cowardice or courage, passion, miserliness, sense of inferiority, or whatever, and he leaves out all the material that is not relevant to the structure and content of his fiction.”

“If the richness is there, it will show in everything the character does and says and thinks, implicitly.”

“Characterization is close to the core of the reader’s illusion. In drama the writer creates a character who is interpreted by the actor. The role is the generalization of the specific character. Hence the many Hamlets or Lears or Juliets. The possibility exists that the fiction writer also writes roles and the reader supplies the actors. The character that is rendered too meticulously often fails to convince. Too little is left for the reader to contribute out of himself.”

“General physical descriptions are usually enough; the reader will supply his own visual image and because it is his own it will be a reality for him.”

“Each character is a piece of the writer and the writer’s experience of other human beings, and also a piece of the reader and the reader’s parallel experience.”

Ed McBain quips, “When I first started writing the Cop Story, I knew only one thing about policemen: They were inhuman beasts. The problem was how to turn them into likable, sympathetic human beings. The answer was simple. Give them head colds. And first names.”

And this from Elizabeth Bown, “The people, the characters in a novel, must carry with them into the book their own kind of inevitability. We are conscious when we meet the people involved in a story that they have something within them which will probably take them towards some inevitable fate or end. If that inevitability breaks down — if the characters are compelled by the author to do what we instinctively know they would not do — then we feel that there is a flaw in the reality of the novel.”

“One thing we may be certain of — people are the novel’s concern.”

And here are a few from Stephen King, “I can’t remember many cases where I felt I had to describe what the people in a story of mine looked like — I’d rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well. If I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can’t you?”

“I don’t need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown. We all remember one or more high school losers, after all; if I describe mine, it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us.”

“The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.”

“For me, what happens to characters as a story progresses depends solely on what I discover about them as I go along — how they grow, in other words.”

“I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.”

“It’s also important to remember that no one is ‘the bad guy’ or ‘the best friend’ or ‘the whore with a heart of gold’ in real life; in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us, baby. If you can bring this attitude into your fiction, you may not find it easier to create brilliant characters, but it will be harder for you to create the sort of one-dimensional dopes that populate so much pop fiction.”

And Salman Rushdie reflects, “In order to create one character, you would theoretically have to create the universe.”

And how about this from Thomas Pynchon, “Novelists may wish to indulge the worst kind of totalitarian whims directed against the freedom of their characters. But often as not, they scheme in vain, for characters always manage to evade one’s all-seeing eye long enough to think thoughts and utter dialogue one could never have come up with if plot were all there were.”

And I think we’ll leave it at that.

Lots of food for story-teller thought here.

© Wolfstuff