Bringing Secondary Characters to Life

In the midst of trying to solve a writing problem in my fiction, I tend to “go to the literature,” to quote Joan Didion. I used to do this when I was a far less confident writer though with mixed results, since I wasn’t always certain about what I was looking for. Presently I’m looking for ways of bringing a secondary character to life in my first person point of view novel.

After reading the first three chapters of a draft of this novel, my writing group honed in on the character of my protagonist’s wife. “We need more dialogue,” they resoundingly agreed. “We need to see her.” Something in my presentation of this character made her feel unformed to them.

Of the three or four books I turned to, one example that jumped out of a first person narrative showing a secondary character with some specificity was found in Matthew Klamm’s one and only book Sam the Cat and Other Stories, which I’d forgotten, or just put into the recesses of a cobwebbed memory. Right away I recalled Klamm’s deft handling of bringing a secondary character to life, which feels somewhat sleight of hand.

Klamm’s language is frank, blunt and naked. His dialogue is even more revealing. Yet it tends toward turning the narrator, typically first person, into something of a buffoon and a lumpish failure, what was once called, I believe, a milquetoast. This seems in the service of conveying his women (yes, plural) of the type a la Esquire magazine’s self-congratulating feature “Women We Love.” As if no such woman has any flaws worth noting, or these flaws are merely charming, so enraptured are they by her beauty. These effects are often achieved with dialogue, of course. Klamm’s writing excels in an easygoing talking style, as of a good friend telling you intimate details over a pint. This style might be used to make an unsympathetic narrator more sympathetic. Does it matter that these secondary characters are rather typecast? Probably. As successful as this is, I became suspicious that Klamm’s stories appeal to a specific demographic that I might be on the outs with. This might be half the problem with my own first person narrative--my readers are not entirely in synch with the narrator.

Thus I thought, rather than merely bringing in additional characters more to life with more dialogue, I would need to do a lot more to appeal to the demographic that isn’t agreeable with my first person character. But I also began to wonder about the ready advice, “Use more dialogue.”

Why am I so willing to conclude that dialogue is an easy way--or as it’s also frequently thought of--the main way, to bring a character to life? I suspect the idea is that in first person, dialogue is an opportunity to not have your narrator endlessly talking, after pages and pages. Dialogue can seem live, and in this way it brings whatever character is talking to life. I don’t disagree with this assessment. But I believe you can fall into these soft traps of a ready made solution without figuring out if it actually works.

Yet, even after writing several pages of more dialogue centric scenes in my novel, I didn’t necessarily feel any closer to bringing the protagonist’s wife to life.

What I recognized was that I needed now to approach this in a more organic way. I begin to ask questions: what am I trying to convey exactly? The problem for the narrator is that, after returning from a mountain climb, he’s become permanently disabled; in light of this, his wife has returned to help him after a separation. That specific plot point aside, I am trying to convey multiple problems in this novel, and this is just one facet.

Certainly dialogue will carry emotion and feelings, here. Because I need to have the narrator explain some of his situation, I don’t believe it is unexpected--or really wrong--to have him offer his interpretation of events--this is the purview of first person, after all.

With a novel, it is normal to have to juggle multiple objectives. This story with the wife is only a subplot within the larger narrative. The main narrative might be summarized as a man tries to understand his life after confronting a life altering injury. I don’t think every character has to have a curriculum vitae and a diagnostic workup. In fact, with first person, it might even be expected that secondary characters get short shrift, and that they may be presented with some degree of bias. I can’t make them full fledged in the 250 pages I have for the novel. I think my approach has been to give the secondary characters enough material to function in service of the larger plot.

This is the kind of problem I expect from handing out a first draft of a novel. The reading group’s bias comes in because they are not seeing the whole picture. Granted, it’s a delicate dance between keeping the reader interested and not making them despise a potentially unsympathetic narrator. As much as I want to hold my argument up as explanation, the reality is that anyone else who reads the novel might come to a similar conclusion. I discussed this attempt to appeal to everyone in the following blog post Cheese Pizza Effect.

Beyond these issues, I believe there is more at work here: the wife is thought to be two dimensional, or flat, as they say; god forbid that I should portray such a character--such an important character--as flat. And this is when I realized: this character is the one my writing group is most predisposed to. They are reacting to my narrator as I am to Matthew Klamm’s. The chorus becomes, “Well, nobody wants to read about them,” or, “The narrator needs to be more sympathetic.” I get their point, but I also think there is a place for a narrator who is occasionally reprehensible.

One of the lessons I’ve learned over the years of writing and revising is knowing how to pick and choose advice. When the tenor of this criticism is too strong, as I feel was the case with my group, I realize I have hit a nerve. I take this advice cautiously, usually. The group is getting a firsthand impression without having read the full novel. Do I try to make it more conducive to their expectations, knowing this might be the way an agent will read it, or do I stick to my resolve and not lose sight of my goals for the narrative? I recognize why readers might be reacting so vehemently to the narrator, and I will consider their suggestions, but it’s not the secondary character’s story, after all. 

Interested in reading more about the conundrums of writing fiction? Check out an earlier post: On having to explain one's work (or that dumbing down logic).

How to Use Your Short Work to Get Your Long Work Published

The exciting Akashic Books has a regular feature on their website, Thursdaze: Original Flash Fiction Under the Influence, and they have kindly selected a piece from my novel Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas. (This novel is also forthcoming from Figureground Press in October--cover at left--more details to come as they develop.) This excerpt, "First Time, Last Time", goes live on September 11.

Also, Em: A Review of Text and Image will be generously publishing my piece, "Anger Management", in the upcoming issue, slated for the fall.

Links for all of these to follow.

Landscape Lacking Weather

Saying a piece of writing lacks emotion is about as useful as saying that a landscape painting lacks weather. It doesn’t even sound like logical criticism, and it usually is not. “You need more emotion” seems to be a default comment when people aren’t connecting with the work. Fair enough, they are not connecting with the work. Yet I’ve become suspect that “playing the emotional card” is when a reader simply does not like a piece of writing. Or, this comment is trotted out when someone does not have anything useful to say, and yet feel they need to say something. Because it cannot be pinpointed to anything concrete in the piece, it is always a general idea about emotion. This is such a safe and broad comment as to be almost useless. Emotion is always what’s not there.

Emotion is often the quality, in lieu of other qualities, that a lot of readers want to latch onto. I would say, they only think they want to latch onto it; the other qualities probably are not apparent to them, or they don’t want to acknowledge the use of language, the characters, etc. Perhaps one person’s heat seeking emotional content is another’s insurmountable distaste for the story.

What actually may be meant by putting emotion into the work?

According to several professional writer websites, the way to get emotion into the writing encompasses everything from “put yourself into you character’s shoes,” to “proper word choice,” to “showing emotion rather than telling,” (whatever that means) and to “write about things you are emotionally invested in.”

But this diversity of opinion on emotion in writing, as well as the broad based explanations for how it can be arrived at is enough to suggest that, emotion in writing might just be like pornography: You’ll know it when you see it.

I suppose I’m a reader and writer who is less interested in emotional content, and more interested in other qualities that draw me into a story: expressive prose, interesting and dynamic characters, unusual, even disorienting narrative structure, and a story outside of my own experience. A reason I’m skeptical of this insistence on emotion is that I tend to find overt displays of emotionally toned material to be manipulative, and at their worst, sentimental. It helps to know where you stand in this regard, so that you don’t fret too much over readers who demand to be moved. I may be expressing an unpopular, even a reckless, opinion, when I say, if the writing is compelling, you won’t need to strain to infuse it with emotional toll taking. But emotional quotas should hardly make or beak a piece. Taste is wildly subjective.

Writers worth reading whose work isn’t usually considered emotional, offer something else.

I consider the ending of Cormac Mc Carthy’s The Road to be exemplary of emotional writing, mostly because the story--unique among McCarthy’s oeuvre--made me cry when I read it. Much of the criticism of The Road centered on the story’s bleak setting, or the stylized prose, or the utter incomprehensibility of the scenario of a father and child wandering the post-apocalyptic wastes of the earth. With this emphasis, I would suspect many might overlook the emotional quality in McCarthy’s work. McCarthy might err on the side of manipulation, but in this case, somehow it works for me.

I find David Foster Wallace to caricature his characters. It’s as if they are all minor characters in service of some broader point. Except in a few pieces, and in particular the story “Forever Overhead” which I would call emotionally effective, I’m not sure I could even say his work otherwise lacks emotion, though emotional connection is not what I think of when I read him. Wallace has so much else going on in his work usually emotional resonance isn’t high on the list of why I read him. According to D.T. Max, in Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, even Wallace, the once great ironist, wrote ”Forever Overhead” contrary to the manner of the fiction he was producing at the time, which was typically overflowing with irony. Wallace eventually dismissed this story as sentimental. Often, where others see emotion, I see sentiment, but not in this story. There might be a case to debate the fine line between sentiment and irony.

Finally, Joan Didion might be criticized for a lack of emotion. Yet I suspect the discerning reader might come away from The Year of Magical Thinking with a sense of awe at the narrative accomplishment. Surely this memoir should be chock full of the kind of emotional cards that are regularly requested so often, and yet her style is a kind of cold-hearted, sobering prose. And yet the emotional impact of the story is so overwhelming that it has the effect of a well-composed symphony striking all the right minor chords.

So, you are not Mc Carthy, Wallace or Didion. Maybe you want to play the emotional card after all. Of the previously mentioned prescriptions, the one that might be most useful is to write about what you are emotionally invested in. This brings up the idea of sympathetic characters, as in, if you care about your characters, your readers (probably) will also. No guarantees. In the case of Wallace’s “Forever Overhead”, you almost wonder if he was talking to his younger self in that story, so carefully guiding is the second person narrator.

There’s nothing wrong with emotion--it’s just that its absence should not always be a handy default buzzword for what’s wrong with a piece of fiction, or any writing, really. Not every piece of writing needs to have the emotional quotient. In the same way that a plot can be subtly residual when it isn’t over-determined, sometimes the emotion sneaks in; I’m not going to fight it.