"A life of their own"

I got a question from a grad student yesterday regarding a paper he's writing, and I thought my answer to him would make a good blog post.  So here you go.  The question (thanks, Alex): "Writers (and I've heard this from poets, too, who are inhabiting an historical voice) claim that characters 'take on a life on their own' and act autonously, despite their ontological tether to the author himself.  The character kind of becomes an 'other.'  What's your experience of creating characters like?  Do you feel this doubleness as actor/observer?"

My off-the-cuff reply was, "Yes, characters do seem to 'take on a life of their own,' but that phrase is sentimental and overplays the role of inspiration and loss of control in the writing of fiction.  Personally, I always feel that I'm in control of my characters.  But I also feel that they are manifestations of the self (that is, the author) that draw from parts of the personality (that is, our own) that we don't ordinarily have direct access to, which must be dug for with great effort, and generally are only uncovered in a state of deep concentration.  The process of creating a character is a process of assembling emotions, memories, hypotheses, and the like, until they form a pleasing shape.  And the more material one assembles, the more dots there are to connect, the more detailed a picture emerges.

"That isn't to say a character can be anything and all things--it's more like fractals, details concealed inside details.  You might think of this process as being like formal limitation in poetry--instead of being able to look anywhere, we limit ourselves to those personalities possible within a set of initial parameters.  And it is only inside these limitations that we're able to feel that we really know something.  If the plot demands that our protagonist is going to be a fifty-year-old woman with three grown children, a two-pack-a-day smoking habit, an abiding love for the string quartets of Shostakovich, and, back in her past, a youthful stint as a game show host, then we already have somebody in mind.  YOU have somebody in mind, right now.  This woman opens her mouth and speaks: I am certain that you know what her voice sounds like.  Because human beings are made to make broad judgements about people based upon small collections of data, and predict their future behavior according to those data.

"So this thing about characters taking over the story is, ultimately, silly nonsense.  (Nabokov, for one, hated the notion.)  But it is a pleasure for the writer, and one hopes the reader, to experience the illusion of same."

The enigma of others

Last night, Rhian and I watched a really excellent movie--the new Jonathan Demme picture, Rachel Getting Married. The film is a domestic drama starring Anne Hathaway as Kym, a drug addict returning home from rehab to attend her sister Rachel's wedding. The scenes that follow sketch out the family's eccentricities and dysfunctions, including a terrible tragedy in the past, for which Kym is responsible, and which has torn the family apart.

In conception, the movie is fairly conservative--this is the stuff of conventional drama, and the kind of thing actors like to enjoy surpassing with their performances. But Rachel Getting Married isn't a normal movie at all--it is, in fact, a literary work, more literary in ambition than most of the literary novels I've read in the past year.

What do I mean by this? I mean that what the movie is really about is, as Rhian put it afterward, the Mystery of Other People. It is concerned very little with plot, save for the open secret that drives it; rather, it is interested in what people are like and, more importantly, how much of what they say and do is against their nature. Rachel, the sister (played by Rosemarie DeWitt), is a wonderful character, by turns sweet and loving, and embittered and immature, and just when you think you know how she's going to react to something, she does something different. All the characters are like this, in fact, confounding our expectations, yet gradually adding to the picture of whom they really are, until what we end up with is a complex, interlocking plot strands, tiny mysteries, that we come to understand make up the fabric of life.

There are ways in which the movie is highly implausible, filled as it is with interracial harmony and unexplained affluence and good health, and yet it feels realer than anything I've seen lately. That's because it leaves everything unexplained. All the characters remain enigmatic; even the most pointed plot question--was Kym entirely to blame, or not?--remains unanswered.

This is what I like a book to do: make sense by not entirely making sense. Too many stories force characters to stay in character, to be what the writers have declared them to be, right up to the bitter end. Real personality, on the other hand, is elusive, protean. You can never really know anyone, and that is why they are so interesting, because you convince yourself over and over that they are knowable, that even you are knowable to yourself. And yet there are always, always surprises.

Iconic Characters

Man, wouldn't you love to write a book and have the protagonist become a household name? Like, you know, Holden Caulfield, or Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom. There was a time when I thought the name was what mattered--if you came up with a memorable name, people would think the character was iconic. Rabbit Angstrom. Damn! How can you beat that? I don't even like the Rabbit books (I don't mind Updike, but I'm more of a Henry Bech man), but I keep thinking I ought to try them again, and I believe it's because of the name.

I've tried, myself. My protagonists have been named Tim Mix, Grant Person, Happy Masters. An unpublished (so far) crime novel I wrote last year features a detective named Mal Friend. But it would appear that the book has to actually be kind of good. Like, you know, King Lear. With the book I'm working on now (about 50 pages to go, I think), I decided to just forget the memorable name thing. My protagonist is named Eric Loesch--a name that is rather dull, though I used it because it's (very) obscurely allegorical. In fact, his name really ought to have been Lethem, as I was trying to refer to the river Lethe, but of course it would be incredibly lame to appear to name him after another writer.

Huh, or maybe not. Maybe I should rename the guy Cormac Lahiri, or Truman Munro, or Flannery Alghieri Steel.

Or maybe I should try writing a decent book.

Character, Character, Character

That's the writerly equivalent of the realtor's mantra--it's taken on faith that everything, in literary fiction, is subservient to character. I've never quite bought it--I like plot, and talk about it often when I teach writing classes. At a weekend seminar on novel writing at a college, I once suggested that students might want to outline the plot of their novel. I was met with stunned silence. "We're not supposed to talk about plot," someone actually said.

But you know what? It's true. Everything is subservient to character. Even in popular fiction. Especially popular ficiton. I just read the new Richard Stark, Ask The Parrot. In it, Stark/Westlake's criminal protagonist, Parker, gets involved in a heist at a racetrack, and of course everything goes wrong. At first glance, the book is all plot, delivered in the unadorned, supremely efficient Stark prose--a manhunt, a car chase, a shootout. But nothing that happens happens for no reason. It all happens because of who people are--the nosy granddaughter, the paranoid mechanic, the guilty father, the disgruntled employee. Stark's brush is broad, his characters tend to fall into types, but there is no question, they are running the show. They make things happen--specific things--because of who they are.

This is why I'll choose skillful noir over bloated lyricism any day--character beats language, hands down. I think the reason I was so jazzed up over the Zadie Smith the other day is that, like Stark, she actually notices people, and makes them act out their desires. Of course Smith's got the chops in other areas, too--all of them, really. Think of the Stark book as the best after-dinner mint you ever had.

Likeable Characters

Something I was reading the other day quoted Claire Messud as saying (and I have to paraphrase, because I don't remember where I saw this and Google is not being helpful) that she doesn't believe in making characters appealing, because real people are unappealing -- we just tend to hide our less pleasant characteristics.

That's been rolling around in my head for days now. I'm not sure I agree -- I find plenty of people appealing, even people I know pretty well -- but then again, I object to the idea that a character has to be someone you'd want for a close friend. (Similarly, I don't think a good president is necessarily someone you'd want to have a beer with.) Hans Castorp is quite a sad sack whiny pants, but that makes the ending of The Magic Mountain all the more shocking and moving.

But I do think that the writer has to like his characters -- flaws and all. (And I'm talking about main characters in literary fiction -- not thrillers!) When an author despises or looks down on his characters, it leaves pretty much no opportunity for the reader to connect with them. And a good writer, I think, ought to be able to make the most horrible characters perversely appealing.