Another brief rant on the issue of likable female characters

As these posts attest, I've been hung up on the "likability" issue for years, even before Claire Messud brought the issue to the fore in 2013. What Messud made spectacularly clear in the now-famous interview is that readers seem to judge female characters as "good" or "bad," depending on whether one would want to be friends with them. Male authors--and their male characters--aren't subject to the same norms. Men, in fiction if not in life, just have to be interesting.

A more recent book, Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train, has a lot in common with Messud's The Woman Upstairs. And while the latter is classified as literary fiction, and the former a thriller, I think their similar titles tell us something. The main characters of these stories are "shadow women," existing in the periphery of society and of our notice. That's because they don't embody normal expectations at least for white, middle-class women: they've failed to become wives and mothers, as well as, to some degree or another, in their careers.

I would point out, however, that in both these stories, it's the first failure, to marry (or stay married) and produce children, that seems to pain both women more. Their envy of women who have achieved this status seems boundless, and produces rage and recklessness. And that's why both novels, to my mind, still subscribe to the conventional notion of the "likable" female character. Ultimately, they validate traditional notions of womanhood by showing how awful it is for women who have tried desperately, but can't manage to attain it. Ultimately I believe we're meant to pity these characters and be grateful that we've escaped their fate--assuming we either have or at least desire what they don't.

Mind you, I liked both these books quite a bit, especially Girl on the Train. But for an antidote to their conventional mores, I might recommend Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, where the female protagonist is simply ragingly selfish and vengeful--but also intelligent and anything but passive.

Or, if you don't think not craving kids and marriage automatically makes you a villain, try The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick--the real-life story of a woman who never really wanted either, and has lived quite a fulfilling life, thank you very much.




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Steal this plot: the case for the ready-made story line

I think of myself as a literary fiction writer. What does that mean? I'm becoming less and less sure over time, but it suggests my work is not so much interested in plot as in other elements--character, ideas, emotional dilemmas, history. On the other hand, I tend to gravitate toward stories in which a certain amount of external stuff happens. While I deeply admire, and in some cases love, novels like Marilynne Robinson's that create a kind of majestic stillness, a deeply rich experience of contemplation, I find I can't write them myself, and have little patience for less successful efforts in this vein.

As a reader, this simply represents a personal preference. My own life is pretty static and contemplative; when I read, I want to be taken out of myself, ergo I want a bit more action. And as a writer, even a literary one, I've found plot can be a great friend rather than a nemesis.

Fellow writers of literary fiction tell me plot grows out of character--meaning, I gather, that you start with a (ready-made?) person or group of people, and, like molecules in a chemistry experiment, they will begin to interact and create something new. I've always found this to be a rather dubious proposition. Without a more rigid context (a beaker? a test tube?) for the people to interact in, I often seem to come out with a bunch of random collisions that don't really add up to much. Or I end up forcing something to happen--so the molecules aren't just milling around pointlessly--and that makes things even worse.

Which is why I've found that starting with a plot borrowed from elsewhere--a real unsolved murder case, say, or the plot of a two-hundred-year-old novel--surprisingly freeing. Placing characters I've created within this framework allows both the people and the framework to grow and evolve together. The borrowed plot soon becomes quite different from the original--because I'm using my own characters, not borrowing them, so they naturally change the way things shake out. At the same time, I don't have to wrack my brain endlessly, wondering what the hell can and should happen next--I have at least a basic map to consider following.

Must unconventional female characters be punished?

So I just finished reading Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger. I almost didn't buy it because of this cover:


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Someday I will write a screed about literalism and book covers, but, OK, it was the 80s. And Moon Tiger won the 1987 Booker Prize, which struck me as a good sign.

Still, when reading the back cover copy, I had my doubts: if this was "the life of a strong, independent woman, with its often contentious relations with family and friends," was I in for a tale of this woman's eventual comeuppance? As Claudia Hampton "lies alone in a London hospital bed," reviewing her life, will she come to regret her choices--her aloneness, above all, showing how wrong she has been?

[SPOILER]
No. And, therefore, yay!

Claudia, a best-selling history writer, worked as a war correspondent in Egypt during World War II, where she met the love of her life and, soon enough, lost him. And while this love affair is presented as the heart of the story, and of Claudia's life, it doesn't represent Claudia's one chance to settle down and have the normal life she secretly wanted--it wasn't, and she didn't. Her loss doesn't impede her from going on to a successful career, despite the obstacles that stopped less determined--and less abrasive--women at that time. The affair ultimately is no more and no less than heartbreak, which all of us, conventional or not, will experience at some point in this life.

Claudia does have a child with another man, whom she never marries. But motherhood doesn't change her. She doesn't find it, or her daughter, Lisa, very interesting--and here's where I think Lively does an especially good job of criticizing without condemning or pitying. The story is told from multiple points of view, so we sense the daughter's pain as her mother once again brusquely dismisses her. But we are also discouraged from making easy judgments. We come to understand that these two are simply made of different stuff, and they're doing the best they can under those circumstances. Lisa craves convention as much as Claudia loathes it. Perhaps Lisa's conformity is her rebellion against her mother, much as nonconformists rebel against their straight-laced families, but no matter. As the novel unfolds, we see both of them accepting their own and each other's limitations, while not being exactly happy about them.

And in the end Claudia [SPOILER] does die alone. But this is not a punishment or comeuppance, but, as I read it, a kind of triumph. Lively suggests that aloneness can be beautiful and satisfying--at any rate, no more imperfect than "proper" family life.

This is where Moon Tiger departs from another, more recent story with a non-conforming female protagonist, Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs. This book sparked a much-needed conversation about "likable" female characters; in a now famous interview, Messud sharply pointed out that "likability" is an absurd, sexist, and shallow demand that male authors and characters don't have to contend with. Still, I read The Woman Upstairs as ultimately supporting traditional definitions of female success. Nora defies conventions for female protagonists, but not convention itself: she is angry because she hasn't been able to get married and have kids and succeed as an artist by her early forties. Lively, in contrast, allows her protagonist to suffer the downsides of defiance while still showing that defiance was worth it.

I don't mean to suggest that novels should have a particular political agenda, or that Moon Tiger is "better" than The Woman Upstairs because the former is more radical. But I do think that more books like Moon Tiger would be good for us all.



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Empathy vs. justice for characters

I just finished reading Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History.* I found it almost insanely absorbing. The characters felt realistic and compellingly distinct.

Yet I did not care about them in the same way I care about, say, Ivan Karamazov or Oscar Wao. Yes, I cared what happened to them, but what I wanted to happen was comeuppance. While feeling some sympathy for their plight--which was entirely of their own making--I also wanted them to be caught or at least punished somehow. This seems rather different from the awkward situation of rooting for an anti-hero to get away with a crime, which can also be an interesting reading experience.

I'm not exactly sure how Tartt creates this sort of double-consciousness in the reader. I suspect it has to do with her precise attention to detail in every aspect of the story. We know quite clearly what the characters look like, which is often not the case in literary fiction. We understand the social milieu, its arcane hierarchies, its dangerous gray areas. We see, feel, and breathe the Vermont setting, the crushing winter and the hopeful--and then also, suddenly, crushing--advent of spring. These elements, rather than any aspect of the characters' (including the narrators') almost entirely self-serving behavior, draw us into the story. I really did feel, at every single moment, like I was there.

At the same time, I, at least, take some satisfaction in knowing--knowing--I would not fall into the particular trap the characters find themselves in. Often, fiction makes me wonder what I would do when faced with some extreme moral dilemma. Not in this case. These people are vivid and palpable, but they're really and truly not like me. Maybe it's just good old class resentment at work. I can't deny there's a certain pleasure in seeing fictional rich preppies and wannabes doing stupid, violent things to each other.

Several years ago I wrote a post about "altruistic punishment," which is the scholar William Flesch's term for a particularly satisfying plot formula. Readers, according to this theory, love seeing wrongdoers discover the error of their ways. They much prefer this outcome to virtue rewarded (sorry, Pamela). However, they also want justice meted out, well, judiciously. The punishment can't be too severe, or readers begin to feel sorry for the punishee. In fictional practice, this means "just" endings have to somehow feel a little ambiguous; a simple eye-for-an-eye won't do. I won't give away how, but Tartt mainly succeeds in striking this balance.

What's my point here? I suppose that we don't always have to empathize with characters in order to engage with them. We can stand very near them without actually stepping into their shoes. And we can care what happens to them by rooting against them rather than for them.

So this is just another permission slip to create unlikable characters. You have other, powerful mechanisms for engaging your reader.

*No, I haven't read The Goldfinch yet. I attribute this to two factors: 1) The Secret History, not The Goldfinch, was under the T's at my favorite used bookstore. 2) Frankly the plot of TSH appealed to me more than that of TG; at the time of purchase, I strongly wanted to read a story about preppie killers at a second-tier liberal arts college. In fact, I only wanted to read stories about preppie killers at second-tier liberal arts colleges. That desire more or less continues today. Any suggestions?

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Good vs. interesting characters

I've been meaning for some time to take up this discussion again. How does a writer make her readers feel empathy, or compassion (maybe the same thing, maybe not) for her characters? The question goes hand-in-hand with recent discussions of how/why/whether characters must be "likable." I'm glad that conversation is finally well underway; it feels like I've been grousing about how stupid that terminology is for years. And one thing I never really grasped till recently was how gendered the "likable" requirement is. Women characters, it seems, must be "good," while men are only required to be interesting. Let's make "interesting" our universal standard from now on, shall we?*

On Glimmer Train's website, Geoff Wyss writes: "[M]y favorite characters in literature are those mysteriously human enough to startle me into empathy. It's that word mystery that seems to be the point: The characters that most powerfully evoke my compassion are the ones who, paradoxically, most resist being known." This resistance to being known is precisely what makes the characters appear realistic, because, Wyss points out, "we don't understand people in real life, not in the sense of comprehending them and holding their keys, not even our friends, not even our husbands and wives, not even close."

I agree. Compassion and empathy arise, first and foremost, out of curiosity. You may never "like" a character or a person, much less understand them, but you can find him--or let's say, for the sake of advancing our feminist agenda, her--interesting. And, at least for fiction, that's enough. Better than enough--necessary.

Wyss further addresses another little peeve of mine, that old saw that "story begins with character" (perhaps a mistranslation of the maxim "character is plot," which Wyss restates here). What that *cannot* mean is first constructing a character outside of any context, or, in Wyss's words, "monstering characters together from a charnel pile of traits—'Let's make him bigoted but sentimental, obsessed with film noir, and hypochondriacal'—and sending them into my stories with their stitch-lines showing." I swear, in writing workshops, I've been told to do exactly this, and it does not work. For me, character and context evolve together in a close, unending dialetic. Personally I like to start with the situation and see who shows up there; then I turn the character back to face the situation and see what she does to it, what it does to her in turn, and on and on.

But I have still created monsters from time to time. In fact, early in writing my first novel, I was hell-bent on creating a female villain, who is now the story's hero. I found I'd assembled Jackie from an inorganic collection of "traits" to serve my predetermined theme, and she turned out both unbelievable and boring. So I gave her some of my own physical characteristics. And all of a sudden, I was much more concerned with how someone might come to think in these ways I totally disagreed with. I didn't like being a straw woman very much at all, and as a result, that character started insisting on her own mystery and autonomy.

*I'm talking about fiction here. All real people have to be good, according to my definition.

Why writers must become better actors

For two reasons.

One: writing is quite a bit like acting. Your characters inhabit you, of course, but you also inhabit your characters. As you write them, you see the world through their eyes, acting and reacting as they would. For this reason alone, it seems to me, learning a bit more about how actors practice their craft can only benefit writers. How do actors access and express those parts of themselves that coincide with their characters'? How can you convey emotions and concepts indirectly yet effectively through body language, voice, pacing, etc.--all of which you can convert into words?

Two: at some point in your life, you are most likely going to have to read your work in public. And by "read," I actually mean "perform." For a long time, it has been something of a mystery to me why people go to author readings. I mean, we can read the book ourselves, right? So what's the value in having something read to us, especially in the rushed, hushed, even apologetic monotone that too many authors employ? Does having the words come out of the author's mouth really add anything to the story?

It can, if the author interprets the story through her performance. Now, here come the caveats: we are writers, not actual actors. We can't be expected to put on costumes and cavort around the narrow and labyrinthine confines of, say, a bookstore. However, we can learn to read from our work to help the audience better understand and--this is no small thing--more fully enjoy our presentation. We can learn to use pace, timing, eye contact, gesture (within reason), voice modulation, and other techniques to convey not just the words but the meaning of the story as we understand it.* This is why series in which actors, not authors, read short stories--such as Word for Word in San Francisco or the New Short Fiction Series in Los Angeles--are so damn fun.

And this is also why I've signed up for some private coaching from actor and teacher Valerie Weak as I prepare to read at various venues this summer. Having experienced just a single session thus far, I can say that learning to perform one's fiction is, first of all, exhausting. The level of concentration required just about drained me, to the point where I spent the rest of the day on the couch (not the casting couch, ha, ha). However, as I worked to inhabit, not just quote, my characters, I began to discover layers of emotional nuance in them that I hadn't actually been aware of. As Valerie told me, even small physical gestures can help you unlock the voice and meaning of the words--even if the audience can't see the gestures, which a podium might obscure. These discoveries alone have amazed and even thrilled me. I can now say I'm truly looking forward to upcoming readings, rather than mildly fearing them.

So, I say, fellow writers, get your actor on!

*Which is not to say that writers own the meanings of their stories, or that public readings serve the purpose of instilling a particular interpretation in the audience's mind. We're just offering some possibly helpful or provocative insights, which the reader can then respond to at his leisure.

I do not know how to write short stories

... in case you were wondering. I have published stories, but that doesn't mean I know what I'm doing.* In fact, each time I start one, I have less of an idea of what is supposed to happen. There's supposed to be an arc, I gather. You're supposed to create interesting characters that the reader--quickly!--comes to care about. The story should create an overall experience of surprised satisfaction--the reader did not see that ending coming, but at the same time realizes no other ending could be possible. Some kind of turning point should arise; some permanent (even if seemingly minor) change should occur.

Or not. You can throw together a bunch of seemingly unrelated fragments (although I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't number them). You can take on a persona and rant in character. You can obsessively attend to the details of the story's setting, and then never actually tell the story. You can write the story all in dialog, or write no dialog at all.

I find this lack of parameters disturbing. And I do not understand how some people can just produce one story after another, one collection after another, all of them quite good. Do they have some kind of basic formula in their heads, which they alter and bend and break, but still at least start with? Because I feel like I'm starting from scratch every time. I don't trust conventional arcs, but I still want something to hang my hat on. Lots of people will say that hat-hook is character, but I don't really trust that, either. To me, character--outside of a specific setting, situation, tone, voice, structure, and purpose--doesn't mean much. I need all of it to come together, and that never happens in the same way twice. I'm not sure how to make it happen, other than to be patient and make lots of mistakes, and accept that some stories, as originally conceived, will never succeed.

Which brings me to the only other technique that sometimes helps me: smushing together two failed stories or story fragments. On their own, these stories don't suffice, but together they generate enough friction to start a fire.

*I also don't know how to write novels, although I've written two (well, 1.75). But having more room to maneuver within the novel somehow makes this not-knowing less dire. All the fumbling around eventually becomes the novel itself. Which is why the novel imitates life, right? Fumbling = living. But a story can't fumble. Or can it?

Giving your characters an inner life

This lovely piece about James Gandolfini got me thinking about literary characters and what makes them seem real to us. My former students know I've been grinding this ax a long time. But this is another way that writing fiction very much resembles acting: in both cases, you can't reveal everything there is to know about a character. Good characters (like good stories, according to Hemingway) are icebergs; much more of them exists below the surface than above. And, let's face it, that's true of actual human beings as well. That's why, in fact, fictional characters who seem to have a lot going on inside them feel more real than those whose thoughts, beliefs, and actions are always transparent and aligned.

So, keeping Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in mind as an example, here are some ways we fiction writers can make our characters more real--as opposed to, God help us, more likeable.

• Embrace contradiction. Tony was a wildly violent man who fretted over his violent tendencies, took his daughter to visit colleges, and became quite fond of a family of ducks. We all fret about certain characteristics we possess; we don't think they're quite honorable or consistent or helpful, yet we can't quite smooth ourselves out. Your characters can be the same way: an elementary school teacher who fears children, a doctor who's addicted to cocaine ... Let them be aware of these contradictions without knowing how to resolve them.
  
• Use interior monologue. The psychiatrist in The Sopranos was a device than enabled us to hear what went on inside Tony's head. In fiction, we can just write that stuff out. Where else but in fiction do we have direct access to another person's thoughts? Take advantage of that opportunity. After all, I think, therefore I am: that's how I know that I, at least, am real. Of course, you can overdo interior monologue or use it as an excuse to tell rather than show. The test is whether it reveals character, rather than explaining it.
  
• Let characters wonder what each other thinks. It's my sense (isn't it yours, too?) that we humans spend a lot of time wondering what other people think. It might be one reason why some of us read fiction--to at least have the sense that we're inside someone else's head. So a realistic fictional character would probably have this desire also--to know what her husband is really thinking about when he shrugs and says "nothing." Our common, everyday tragedy is that none of us can ever really know this for certain. In their world, your characters live this tragedy, too.
  
• Explore emotion. As Gandolfini said, let your characters really feel emotions. Those emotions can be confusing, "wrong," in conflict with one another, etc. They can explode volcanically, or the character can work hard at suppressing them, but the emotions themselves never go away.

Ask a question and delay the answer

I've been thinking about Lee Child's column in last Sunday's New York Times. For writers who want to learn how to create suspense, he provides a simple answer: ask a question, then make the reader wait to find out the answer. Because human beings, he says, are hard-wired to seek out answers, this set-up is all but foolproof. You can't put the book down until you know.

Obviously for the thriller genre--to the extent that such a thing exists in a pure form--that's a no-brainer. Who killed X? Will the spy get out of the country or be caught? Same with romance: here, perhaps the question is not whether the lovers will get together, but how.

But does this formula work for literary fiction? Child seems to imply that it does: writers are "told they should create attractive, sympathetic characters, so that readers will care about them deeply, and then to plunge those characters into situations of continuing peril, the descent into which is the mixing and stirring, and the duration and horrors of which are the timing and temperature." The focus on character is the standard definition for what constitutes literary fiction, although genre fiction surely benefits when its characters are believable and compelling. Yet Child says the matter is much simpler: ask, delay. That's all.

I've said before that I have trouble with the idea of character as the central feature of literary fiction. More to the point, I have a lot of trouble with the advice to "start your story with character." I know that many people do this--come up with one or more vivid character first, and then see what they start doing. But I can't do this without knowing what circumstances the character exists within. What situation, what milieu? In other words, what questions are they going to respond to? How have such questions already shaped who they are? That's one reason I feel comfortable with Child's formula. I write to try to understand something--a belief system, a moral dilemma, a relationship between people or between people and place. Yet I know that I will never really understand it. Conversely, if I believe I can fully grasp the matter, I know I shouldn't write about it. Otherwise the piece will be didactic, self-righteous, and boring.

There's no doubt that literary fiction does ask questions; in fact, you might argue that this is all it does. Unlike a whodunnit, literary fiction opens out at the end, rather than closing down. You set down a work of literature feeling satisfied, but also wondering, ruminating, generating more questions of your own. This is not necessarily a more enjoyable experience, though it may be a more edifying one. (Not that we always want to be edified.)

In other words: yes, the formula does work for literary fiction, I believe. But somehow the answer you provide also has to also be a non-answer--a believable, satisfying, and fair non-answer. Not a trick. Not a deflection, and not a refusal to grapple with the issues you've laid out. The answer should not just be unexpected in content (as it should be in any kind of suspense fiction), but also, perhaps, in form. It might call the original question into question. It might raise the question, what is an answer, anyway?

Is it necessary to humiliate your characters?

So I was happily reading this new and highly acclaimed novel. And then I stopped. Because, well, I had reached my limit on watching characters get physically humiliated. I won't go into detail, largely because I am squeamish. But the fact that I decided not to read any further got me wondering. Am I just squeamish? Isn't humiliation a powerful and real experience, which deserves a place in fiction just as much as any other emotion?

I would answer yes on both counts. But I sensed something else going on here, similar to what I've suspected any number of times while watching various movies and TV shows. The writer (or director) seems somehow to be gloating--if not outright enjoying the scene, at least calling attention to his or her daring in creating the scene in the first place. In other words, the characters suffer on behalf of the writer's quest for authenticity. This seems especially egregious when live actors must actually undergo the experience, or some convincing simulacrum thereof. I can't help thinking that a power game is going on, not only in the story, but in the making of the story. And I don't like it.

Maybe that sense of sadism is a natural side effect of depicting humiliation; the author is in the odd position of both creating the humiliation and sort of standing over it, watching, unable to help (because the story demands that the humiliation occur). The reader's in that position, too, because she imagines and therefore recreates the scene. I suppose this complicity can be an informative experience.

It also seems to me that the artistic depiction of humiliation (not to mention its comic counterpart in mainstream movies) is a recent trend that is only picking up speed. A humiliation scene is the equivalent of having your characters use smartphones--it shows you're contemporary. You "get" how the world works today. It's a calling card of realism.

I'm not speaking of stories about war and torture, in which humiliation has a different valence--it's acknowledged as a tool of an oppressive regime. I'm talking about "first-world" stories, garden-variety suburban tales of alienation, where this ugliness seems like an attempt to fulfill some function that the story otherwise might not manage. It's almost an insistence on the story's significance, and on the power of the author's words to stir strong feelings. Maybe suburban life *is* humiliating in a way that can only be expressed through the exaggerating airing of intensely private experiences. Anyway, it's only happening to fictional characters, right? And authors don't owe their characters any protection.

I still don't like it.

Dr. Who vs. Star Trek

On a 1-10 scale of science-fiction geekdom, I give myself a 5. I know not to call the genre "sci-fi," for instance. I know Margaret Atwood once said something about squids in space that didn't go over well. I once read half a Vernor Vinge novel and quite liked it, until I became unspeakably tired of it.

So I now offer these thoughts, knowing that the series in question are both so monstrously popular and intellectually picked-over that I may largely be revealing my own relative newbie-ness. Nevertheless. In the past month or so I have become completely obsessed with the new version of Dr. Who. (I never watched the old version; growing up, I knew it as just some odd thing that was apparently on from midnight till morning on the PBS station.) I've gone out of sequence, starting with the first season of Matt Smith, then going back and doing the three David Tennant seasons, and then backing up all the way to the single first season of Christopher Eccleston. (This first incarnation has been rightly judged as not great, especially in comparison to the others. But it wasn't really Eccleston's fault. They were starting an old series over, and learning as they went what worked and what didn't--for example, that the Doctor should not resemble, in the show's own words, a U-boat captain.)

So here's what I've observed. If Dr. Who is as huge, or huger, in the UK as Star Trek is here, the two series seem to reveal fundamental differences in our respective national self-perceptions. While I like most of the various iterations of Star Trek just fine, I've always found them to be fundamentally dull. That's because the characters are fundamentally dull. From Next Generation on, the human characters are not allowed to be flawed in any serious way. They may have some superficial "quirks" (like blindness or, I dunno, a nagging sense that one hasn't measured up to one's father)--but any real flaws (greed, violence) are offloaded onto other races, who are then mocked and/or fought. This whole structure seems to track with the doctrine of American exceptionalism, in which we (Americans/humans) are always the good guys, whose good intentions always, in the end, produce good results. Because we're good, nothing can really go wrong.

In contrast, might Dr. Who represent the emotional realism of a former empire? Because in this series, the "good guys," while making us love and root for them, do not always do the right thing, for various reasons. Often the right thing to do isn't clear, or it's a choice between two or more equally troubling options. Also, because Dr. Who is focused on time travel, we can discover that what appears right at one moment turns out to cause problems far down the line--as when your apparent rescue of a civilization turns its members into TV-addicted bozos hundreds of years in the future. Your attempt not to cause someone pain causes them more pain, because it turned out you weren't thinking from their perspective at all, even though you told yourself you were. Sometimes, you are just kind of a jerk, because you are tired and stressed and lonely and jealous, like everyone else is.

Perhaps it's un-American of me to prefer this viewpoint. Perhaps it's even defeatist to think that every solution you create might also create problems. But--this is crucial--this does not imply that one shouldn't bother. Knowing better than anyone how things can go wrong, the Doctor never gives up trying to save the universe, and never gives up on humanity, either. He loves humanity. In this way the show might even be more optimistic that Star Trek, because it allows for real human flaws to play a part in the story--even to be the story--while still advocating for the good fight. It's about doing your best, even while you know that time and entropy and your own failings will undo your deeds.

Flashbacks in fiction: Do they suck?

A writing teacher once told me that you should resist including flashbacks in your fiction at all costs. If you absolutely must add a flashback, each one can be no more than three lines (or was it sentences? Lines, probably, because with sentences you could cheat, spinning out subordinate clauses for pages, sprinkling liberally with commas and semicolons).

The reason for this perhaps extreme prohibition is that flashbacks can lead to a static narrative in the story's present. The reader can almost picture the character sitting on a couch in a dim waiting room, tapping her foot as you methodically plod through all the steps that got her to this point in the story. Perhaps worse, because you know you need to get back to the present, and rescue your character from that waiting room where she's growing more sullen and uncooperative by the minute, the flashback can fall into a weird neither-nor land: not quite summary, not quite scene. Especially if the flashback seems to you to have a primarily explanatory function--how did Suzy get to be so sensitive about her appearance?--you're especially likely to fall into this mode.

I find that in my own writing process, the early stages of a novel tend to be full of flashbacks. Probably even more flashback than present narrative. What that tells me is that I've either set the story at the wrong period in the character's life, or that I need to give some of these experiences to other characters. I have to find some way to get these flashbacks into the main story. Either that or I'll have to come up with some kind of lovely, stylistic move to weave memory itself into the story, without making the story about a person being struck by random flashbacks over the course of an otherwise ordinary day, or week, or ... OK, in the right hands, I can see that being a very good story.

In this case, though, I think I'm going to hand off some of these experiences to the other characters. Because that's the other thing I find that I do in the early stages--create a bunch of characters, and then not give most of them enough to do. So instead of having the mother's experience at her school be a flashback, I'll have it be her daughter's experience in the story.

More thoughts on flashbacks: the lack of them in the Odyssey (per Auerbach), and as a function of point of view.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: More on character in mystery stories

I suppose I've been hitting this topic pretty hard lately, but I continue to be amazed at the importance of characterization in Hound.  This is my first time reading a Sherlock Holmes story, and I expected it to be formulaic, at least when it came to the rendering of people. Yet, as I discovered in the opening pages, the relationship between Watson and Holmes is complex, and not only contributes to, but in some ways drives the process of detection.

This issue is proving especially important to me at the moment, as I'm trying to write a literary mystery novel. I want plot and character to be equally important, and indeed to be bound together inexorably. Reading Conan Doyle has helped me discover that this is not only possible, but perhaps even necessary for delving into the true nature of mystery. Before attempting my novel, it seemed to me that mystery writing was primarily about plot, and by plot I mean a series of circumstances. A is in line to inherit B's money, but B has fallen in love with C and altered his will, making A the prime suspect when C is found floating in her nightgown in the lake. None of these characters is interesting, beyond their singular motives, which correlate to their functions in the plot: A is greedy (or desperate), B is blinded by love, C...well, C is a victim. D, the detective, comes in and puts the pieces together, because D, whatever her personal quirks, does her job expertly.

Now, Holmes is that quirky expert in Hound, but thus far, it's Watson whom we see doing most of the investigating. And here, he makes a mistake. Not only because the plot requires him to do so, although it does, but because of who he is.

After the conversation which I have quoted about Barrymore, Sir Henry put on his hat and prepared to go out. As a matter of course I did the same.

"What, are you coming, Watson?" he asked, looking at me in a curious way.

"That depends on whether you are going on the moor," said I.

"Yes, I am."

"Well, you know what my instructions are. I am sorry to intrude, but you heard how earnestly Holmes insisted that I should not leave you, and especially that you should not go alone upon the moor."

Sir Henry put his hand upon my shoulder with a pleasant smile.

"My dear fellow," said he, "Holmes, with all his wisdom, did not foresee some things which have happened since I have been on the moor. You understand me? I am sure that you are the last man in the world who would wish to be a spoil-sport. I must go out alone."

It put me in a most awkward position. I was at a loss what to say or what to do, and before I had made up my mind he picked up his cane and was gone.

But when I came to think the matter over my conscience reproached me bitterly for having on any pretext allowed him to go out of my sight. I imagined what my feelings would be if I had to return to you and to confess that some misfortune had occurred through my disregard for your instructions. I assure you my cheeks flushed at the very thought. It might not even now be too late to overtake him, so I set off at once in the direction of Merripit House.

I hurried along the road at the top of my speed without seeing anything of Sir Henry, until I came to the point where the moor path branches off. There, fearing that perhaps I had come in the wrong direction after all, I mounted a hill from which I could command a view—the same hill which is cut into the dark quarry. Thence I saw him at once....

Watson's mistake--disobeying Holmes's instructions to accompany Sir Henry everywhere--is plausible, because it fits his character: from the beginning, we've seen that he's polite, a bit meek (especially in the presence of Holmes), and even a little insecure (a hazard of working with Holmes). Thus he's easily put off by Sir Henry's entreaty not to be a "spoil-sport." But just as quickly, he feels terrible about letting Sir Henry get away, and imagines having to confess his error to Holmes--reactions that are also consistent with Watson's character. To fix his mistake, he runs off after Sir Henry, gets lost, and finds himself in a position to witness a telling interaction between Sir Henry, Miss Stapleton, and her angrily gesticulating brother.

So here's my point: a lesser writer, or at least one less concerned with character, could still have arranged for Watson to stumble upon this meeting. Watson could just decide to mosey off to a nearby hilltop of a morning, thinking Sir Henry asleep, and unexpectedly come upon the rendezvous. But this plot point is brought about, instead, by Watson's distinctive and very human nature. He falters, and then, alarmed at his failure, rushes to amend it. Yes, overall, Watson's discovery still reflects the operations of chance, which, in the case of a novel, means the author's hand. Yet we don't feel the author's hand here so strongly, because he lets Watson, or Watson's humanity, lead to the discovery.

In praise of unlikable characters: Pete Campbell

So I blew through the fourth season of Mad Men on Netflix, and made a surprising discovery: Pete Campbell is my favorite character.

This discovery interests me because I have been harping off and on about the issue of likable characters in fiction. In fact I created a class around the topic at Stanford a few years ago. To recap, it always bugged me in fiction workshops when people would say something to the effect of, "I just don't like this character," meaning...well, I wasn't sure, exactly. The story wasn't working for these people, but was it because they felt the character was immoral? Or they couldn't "relate" to the character, meaning he/she didn't evoke sympathy in the reader? Do all characters have to be someone we would want to be friends with in real life? I thought not. But characters to have to engage us, and I have been at pains over the years to figure out how.

In the first few seasons of Mad Men, Pete was the character I loved to hate. I hated his pinched expression, his sense of entitlement, and his peevishness when that sense ran up against some real-world obstacle. (Also he was a jerk to Peggy, and his wife, and all women, but that of course doesn't make him anything special in the MM world.) He was like a little boy entering the grown-up world a little too soon, and finding out that it was not at all what he'd expected.

But who can't relate to that? Who hasn't felt, after a long day at some office, that "I was led to believe there would be cake" feeling, and wanting to whine about it? Where is the damn cake? And the freedom, and the knowledge, and the power that all adults were supposed to have, all of which I was supposed to have, too, once I grew up? It's all a big ruse, this adult thing? Now what am I supposed to do?

Also in this past season, I've noticed another quality in Pete that I admire: his commitment. Even as he sees (and complains about) the Don Drapers of the world trampling on the less handsome and less lucky and (so far) getting away with it, he still puts on his suit and shows up at work and does his god-damnedest to haul in new clients. We may not think much of the value of the work he does, but he does it extremely well. Despite all the problems he sees, Pete is not yet ready to give up on his dream. He signed up to be an ad man, and that's what he's going to do.

Lots of credit, of course, must go to the actor, Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Pete without a trace of vanity. He never winks at the audience, inviting us to mock Pete or to remind us that he isn't "really" this guy. The commitment we sense in Pete is the actor's commitment.

So what does this all mean for writers trying to create interesting characters? By which I mean, characters who are complex and engaging and challenging--not simply mirrors held up to flatter readers' (and our own) moral vanity? Well, the creator of characters must understand them. I may not like or admire Pete's peevishness, but I know where it comes from; I've felt it, too. In other words, Pete feels like a creation from within. He's not a cartoon, observed and imitated from outside, but grown out of common, if embarrassing, emotions.

All of which suggests that a great character might start out as some complex twinge in the heart, rather than as an image, or a type, or a role you need played in your story. And you need to commit to that twinge, not wish it away, or wink at it.

Consciousness and character

It seems the whole consciousness thing is as tough a nut to crack as the whole what-is-the-universe-made-of thing. Over at 13.7, Alva Noë suggests a different way of approaching consciousness:

For a while now I've been arguing that we shouldn't look for consciousness in the brain. We haven't found it there, and we won't. Not because consciousness happens somewhere else, in the soul, say, or in the environment, or in the collective. But because consciousness isn't something that happens; it is something we do or make. And like everything else that we do, it depends both on the way we are constituted — on our brains and bodies — but also on the world around us.

Sidestepping the actual question of what consciousness is, I think this discussion has implications for fiction writers. (Well, everything has implications for fiction writers.)

Literature and literary characters give us more direct access to other minds than we have in everyday life. At least we seem to have access, in the form of other people's interior thoughts. On the other hand, this access is limited to what can be expressed in verbal language; and the other people are, at least to some extent, fictional.

I won't wade into the morass of how much language itself creates or forms consciousness. But we do experience a sort of merging of consciousnesses when we read. The author's words steer our minds in directions they might not otherwise go. Her language, for a time, becomes ours, though what we see and feel through that language can't be exactly what the author saw and felt when she was writing. We're drawn in by generalities, a shared language and similar broad-strokes experiences (love, loss, fear, ecstasy). But it's the edges, where the differences are negotiated, that give art life.

About character specifically: It seems to me we could think of characters as consciousnesses, by which I mean ways of seeing and being in the world, which overlap in general ways but not in specifics. I think I've too often pictured my own characters as different, atomized mixtures of my own consciousness (which I'm sloppily eliding here with personality): That one has more of my prickliness and less of my confidence; this one embodies my secret desire to become a hairdresser. But I haven't thought enough about how these guys relate to each other as consciousnesses.

In other words, just like us real people, characters should be aware that others have minds, and be equally aware that they can't quite reach them. They are as alone, and as connected, in their world as we are in ours. And moments when consciousnesses seem to touch and interact--as when an author suddenly shows us an entirely new way of seeing--should be as amazing for characters within the novel as they are for us on the "outside."

Where the real resides

From the Paris Review's interview with Ann Beattie:

The interplay between character and external world is something that realist writers always dealt with conscientiously, and it started to drop out with minimalism. Hemingway dropped it out, too, but even in his stories there tends to be a volley going on between the environment and the character. Carver won’t say what the volley is. None of us will.

I guess you might say that minimalism resides in certain omissions, in trusting, à la Beckett, that if you give the sparest sort of context—two people in a trash can, a road at night—it will be like a dreamscape for people’s projections.

This is very well said, and something I've been wondering about for quite awhile. What makes literary characters seem real to us? What forms the boundaries around character? What delineates it; what processes build it up? I've always thought the "volley" was an important component, and that squares with my being somewhat averse to minimalism. But Beattie's right; minimalists like Beckett (whom I love) trust the reader to supply the "dreamscape." To put it another way, the characters' interior depictions are strong and suggestive enough to inspire that dreamscape.

So who's to say which is a more realistic depiction of character or "the world"? We don't come across people in trash cans calmly discussing life every day, but for many readers and playgoers, that psychological reality is fully recognizable. Perhaps it's more so, because they're creating their own context to a larger degree.

Jess Row is getting at this same issue in his recent Boston Review piece. His point, well worth remembering, is that our sense of "realism" is culturally determined. In part, anyway. (There's quite a dust-up going on in the comments to this article. By God, people do care about literature.)

The new novel is napping

On Tuesday I finished the first draft of my second novel. In contrast to the first one, which took six-plus years, this one took less than a year.

One reason is that I had the voice for the new novel in my head right away. It's first person, alternating between past and present. Knowing this meant that a lot of point-of-view problems, as well as tone and mood problems, never arose. First person is quite limiting in other ways, and it didn't work for my first novel; but it seems that if you at least know who's talking and why, you can go a long way.

Another reason this one went relatively quickly is that I've learned to tolerate some remarkably egregious flaws in a first draft. These include:

• A character who, Schrodinger's cat-like, is both alive and dead throughout the first half of the story. I couldn't decide which had to be the case, so I just kept writing till it became clear.
  
  
• Another character who becomes three different people during the course of the story. When she first appeared I had one idea of the role she would play, but she evolved out of that. By the end became both the motive for the storytelling (the "narrative occasion," always an issue), and a fully worthy love interest for the narrator.
  
  
• Not knowing who the killer was until the last paragraph. Maybe still not knowing.
  
  
• The usual instances of overwriting, underwriting, and especially substituting summary for scene. God, why must there be scenes? Why can't everything be summary interspersed with occasional dialog?
  
  
• Massive doubts as to whether the story even begins to make sense on any level.

What all this means, of course, is that revising is going to be a lot of work. But before that is the required cooling-off/baking/resting period, in which I ignore the novel for approximately two months so that I can tackle revisions with a new perspective. I'm shooting for July 1.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: During the next two weeks blogging may be lighter than usual, and/or unpredictable, due to work, travel, and family issues.

The Killing, Twin Peaks, and how much we may or may not enjoy them

"The Killing," AMC's new limited-run series (too long to be a mini-, I guess) is getting rave reviews. This one from Matt Zoller Seitz delves into the new show's debt to "Twin Peaks," David Lynch's 1990-91 TV series, often referred to as "groundbreaking." It was also a "limited run," though in this case the limits were imposed by the network, which demanded that the central mystery be solved midway through the second season. Shortly thereafter, and rightly, viewers abandoned the show in droves.

By coincidence, I recently re-watched "Twin Peaks" on Hulu, up to the point where everyone stopped watching--when Laura Palmer's killer was revealed, and the series immediately disintegrated into full-on buffoonery. The show is actually a great study in characterization, presenting us with a collection of oddballs with exaggerated quirks; they don't seem quite like real people, but then again, maybe our definition of "real" in this case comes from other detective shows. What does make us think of characters on TV as real or not real? Aren't the heroic, daring detectives of TV and film mostly projections of our wishes? And don't we know some very strange people in our own lives, when we step back and think about them?

At any rate, the characters of "Twin Peaks" all fit quite naturally into the eerie Pacific Northwest setting; they are appropriate inhabitants of this place. Intriguingly, the main character, Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, is from elsewhere--yet he is perfectly suited to the town of Twin Peaks. He fits in by not fitting. I would add that some of the minor characters, included apparently for comic relief, are cartoons, not convincing either as Twin Peaks inhabitants or as people. They exist to slip on banana peels, be hit in the face with rakes, get accidentally pregnant, and have other hilarious mishaps.

This gets at the heart of what I have to say about "Twin Peaks," which is that for all its inventiveness, it contains a cruel streak that seems to go beyond the needs of the story. This is especially true in its treatment of women, who are time and again victims of sadistic violence. Now, this is also true, in many cases, in the real world. I don't believe fiction has to go out of its way to show women as always powerful and free--as moral examples, in other words. Nor should it browbeat us with the plight of victims. Instead, tell us something new, unfamiliar, intriguing, disturbing about violence and its sources.

"Twin Peaks" doesn't do that. Instead, it revels in women's victimization, serving it up as aesthetic entertainment that makes no demands on the viewers' conscience. Again, the aestheticization of violence--and its conversion into entertainment--is part of real life. I'm not saying we should excise this issue from our stories. Instead, the story can ask interesting, uncomfortable questions that do implicate the viewer or reader: Why does this interest you? What are you seeking here? How does the search for justice bleed over into prurient curiosity? What purpose does this curiosity serve? These questions seem even more pertinent when real crimes (like JonBenet Ramsay's murder and many, many others) rather quickly turn into fun for the rest of us. Good fiction could help us understand how this happens, in a relatively safe practice zone. But on such points, "Twin Peaks" has nothing to say, other than check this out, man.

I'm hoping that "The Killing," with its unconventional female detective, will surpass "Twin Peaks" in asking, not exploiting, these hard questions.

Collusion in the literary ghost story

The Turn of the Screw? Done! Completed! All behind us! Ah, how much we've learned about writing scary stories! Except...

Did we understand the ending?

To recap: One child, Flora, has become so traumatized by the governess's suspicions about her and the visitants that she has become physically ill. She has been whisked off to London by Mrs. Grose. That leaves the governess alone with Miles (not counting the anonymous, apparently non-interactive household staff)--and she takes the opportunity to try to pry some answers out of him at last. Specifically, she wants to know what he got him expelled from school. In the last portion of the novella, she's gone from thinking the children wholly innocent, to believing they are decidedly not. However she still loves Miles, clearly her favorite now, and her last remaining hope for understanding what has been happening. As she questions him, the specter of Peter Quint appears behind Miles in the window, and then drifts away again. And then...

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woe—the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no more, no more!" I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my visitant.

"Is she HERE?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the direction of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, with a gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury gave me back.

I seized, stupefied, his supposition—some sequel to what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window—straight before us. It's THERE—the coward horror, there for the last time!"

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's HE?"

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge him. "Whom do you mean by 'he'?"

"Peter Quint—you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication. "WHERE?"

They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own?—what will he EVER matter? I have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost you forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, THERE!" I said to Miles.

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

Wow. I didn't remember that ending at all from my previous reading, whenever it was. I really had no idea what was going to happen, but Miles's death was a surprise even so. This time through, I think I'd come to believe (with the governess) that the children were nearly as sinister as the visitants themselves. I've possibly seen too many devil-child movies, and the sudden "ugliness" of Flora's language, when she tells Mrs. Grose how much she hates the governess, gives her a certain Linda Blair aspect. Plus, there's the word "dispossessed," in the very last line, significantly set off by commas. Google tells me "dispossessed" can mean both "exorcised" (as of a demon) and "homeless." Very interesting. As if Quint is a kind of parasite (cf Alien, Aliens, Alien3, etc.) that kills its host when removed. And it seems as if the actual parasite is love, in a perhaps unspeakable form.

But it isn't exactly clear. So when I finished the story I did something I'm not proud of. I consulted the introduction to the Signet collection of James's stories I happen to have. Even in my high school days, that felt like cheating. And may I say, just in passing: Why give away the ending of the story in the introduction? Does this not announce flat-out that anyone reading this stories cannot possibly be doing so for pleasure? Why not just title the Introduction "Helpful Hints to Get You Through Another School Assignment"? Perhaps an Afterword, or notes section, would provide assistance if needed, while maintaining that old books can still be read for the same reasons we read new ones?

Anyway. R. W. B. Lewis, writing in 1983, tells us that *nobody* really understands the ending (although that was nearly 30 years ago; perhaps experiments at CERN have since settled the matter). Are the ghosts real, and responsible for Miles's death, or are they just figments of the governess's deranged imagination? Lewis writes:

Henry James's histrionic genius would never settle for an either-or account of experience, especially of the kind established by many critics of "The Turn of the Screw": it is all the ghosts' wicked responsibility, or all the governess's doing. Peter Quint and the governess collaborate, by a dreadful collision of psychic energy, in the death of young Miles.

That sounds fine to me. James is a great writer, and a great ghost story would not give us pure victimization as a spectacle. Nor would it be a mere "trick" in which the narrator wakes up at the end--possibly inside a mental ward.

So here's the lesson for fiction writers today: in the literary ghost story, the events should come about through collaboration between human and ghost. That's not to say our human hero should "really" be "bad" in some way, or even directly responsible for the bad stuff. But something about their psychology, their reactions to events and/or certain secret desires should combine with the occult to drive the outcomes. This is the way to make your story truly surprising and disturbing. The hero must invite the vampire in, and get more than he or she bargained for. One thing is clear from this ending: the governess's pride in her own strength in the face of terror have backfired. When she stands up to Quint directly, shielding Miles from him, that's when Miles dies.

But was this pride the cause? Not really, or not only. We think we know what we're doing, and we don't. That is scary.

Calling West Coast short fiction writers

So last weekend the New Short Fiction Series performed a selection of my short stories at the Barnsdall Art Park in LA. They chose four stories (two of which were excerpted) and a different actor performed each one. The actors were Buckley Sampson, Jesse Holcomb, Kate Heller, and Sally Shore (the series director), and all were terrific.

If the words I wrote are a score, then those performances were music. As the writer, I've never been more aware of what good actors can do with the printed word. Even with minimal costuming and gesture--in this series the actors stay seated and read the story from pages, rather than memorizing--they bring the story into a different dimension altogether. Their tools are voice, with all its varied tones and dynamics; rhythm--speeding up, slowing down, pausing; facial expression; gesture; and the ability to engage an audience. This last is a process I don't fully understand. But rather than simply accepting the audience's presence, as a sort of worrisome fuzz in one's field of vision, they bring the audience into the space of the story. You are not being talked at. You are with the characters in a shared fictional world.

The actors found and expressed nuances of emotion in my stories that I wasn't fully aware of. The stories were mostly comic, and they knew how to bring out the laughs, but they also guided the audience into sudden, but fully earned, moments of sadness. It was a great honor to have my stories given such careful attention.

It was also brought home to me, in no uncertain terms, that performance is crucial in literary readings. I am seriously considering hiring actors for those (still rare) occasions when I am invited to read in public. (I could hide under the table, and...oh, that's been done?) If that isn't feasible, I am really going to have to work on my acting skills. I know, I became a writer so I could *hide* behind words. Full-on acting isn't in me. But I have now seen the difference between a droning "reading" of a story and a performance. The former is something the audience politely sits through. The second is entertainment in the best sense.

All of this is by way of mentioning that the New Short Fiction Series is looking for more material by West Coast short fiction writers. If you fit that definition, write to submissions@newshortfictionseries.com for submission guidelines. That's how I got the gig. You won't regret it, I promise.